I think that it is good practice to sometimes look back at your work and see where you can improve. Be reviewing and revising, you can often find various opportunities to significantly improve your work, which will in turn make you better at whatever it is that you do.

It is in the spirit of reviewing and revising that I came up with the idea for this post. I hope that you can find some insight to help you make your blog better. The better your blog is, the higher the likelyhood that you’ll be successful.  The focus of this post is on domain names.
Domain Names

Back in October of last year, I did a series on this blog called “Internet Marketing 101″. The second part of the series was all about domain names. Domain names are very important for your business and if you don’t yet have one, I recommend that you go to GoDaddy.com right now and purchase one. Domain mames, in short, are important for 3 reasons:

1. Professional. If you plan on making money from your website or blog, you should definitely plan on buying a domain name. When you buy a domain name, it lets your visitors know that you’re serious about blogging. It shows other bloggers that you mean business and it also adds credibility to your site. Often times when I surf the web for content and ideas, I’ll find something meaningful on other people’s blogs. However, I hardly ever pay too much attention to those blogs hosted on sites like Blogspot or other freebies. These sites are nice for communicating with your friends, but in all honestly, they’re not good for business.
2. Personal. When you buy a domain name, you have a lot of room to be creative. You can express your interests and even brand your blog by its domain. Take this blog, for example. This site is about learning to make money online, so my domain name is “LearnHow2Earn.com”. I think that this address is professional and personal. In addition to adding credibility and creativity to my site, it makes it easier for others to remember (which is my point #3).
3. Memorable. Probably one of the most important reasons to buy a domain name is so that others can remember where and how to find you. With a site name that resides on another domain, there are too many dots and slashes to remember, and most people won’t. When you have your own professional, personal domain name, people will remember you more easily.

So, sit down with some paper and a pencil for about 20 minutes and think about as many domain names as you can.  Write them all down, and go do something else for 10 minutes.  Come back to your list and start eliminating those you don’t think are very good anymore.  Take another quick breather and repeat until you have 10 domain names left.  At this point, rank your choices 1-10 and head on over to GoDaddy.com to see which ones are available.  Start with your #1 choice and work your way down the list.  If you’re unfortunate enough to have none of your top 10 choices still available, rinse and repeat.  Try some variations, like using dashes or periods in the domain name.  Good luck and get down to business!

It is now 5 days since my last update on the search engine marketing campaign that I’m running with my friend Davey Z, and I have another brief update. We’ve doubled our sales since then and have made over $220 after an initial investment of only $30. We found out yesterday that we made 4 more sales during last week, and we are anxiously anticipating the results of our weekend campaign.

Since Davey Z is a numbers guy, we decided to ramp up the campaign by raising our bids on our 4 main keywords. This moved us up quite a bit in the search results and therefore increased our click through rate significantly. Since we don’t yet have the results from the weekend, we have lowered our bids once again and are craving data to analyze and inspect. If things worked well this weekend, we will double our efforts and try to make even more money next weekend.

While running this SEM campaign has been a successful experiment, we are not yet done learning and still have quite a ways to go in understanding more about how the whole process works. In the meanwhile, I have learned a few things that I would like to share.

• SEM is Not Easy. Whlie Davey Z and I have been able to succeed with this campaign and we have learned a lot in these last 2 weeks, we still have a lot more to learn. Secondly, SEM is not something that you can “set and forget”. Sure, you can do that for 3 or 4 days at a time but in the long run you will not make any money if you think that this is the kind of thing you can do once and forget about. Although the “set it and forget it” attitude is working (little by little) with my eBay websites, the approach just won’t work for too long in SEM. SEM is very dynamic; competition changes, prices change, trends change, and consumers change from one minute to the next. You need to be on your toes if you want to be successful.
• SEM Requires Patience. In case you haven’t read about my frustrations with affiliate programs and their reporting delay, SEM requires patience. Although you’ll generate a lot of traffic rather quickly, it takes a few days (3-5) for you to see the results of your efforts. This can be a costly period or a period that wasn’t as profitable as could have been if you had real time data available. Also, you need to stick with SEM for it to work in the long run. If you fail, try again! Don’t give up. If you’re determined and have your facts straight, you’ll succeed.
• SEM is Not Rocket Science. As I mentioned above, SEM is not easy. However, it’s also not “rocket science”. I now believe that anyone can make some money from SEM. Even though I have not yet achieved my goals, I feel as though I am now armed with some valuable information that will go a long way to helping me reach them. No offense to the super affiliates. Although they are making much more money than me, they are not all that brilliant. Sure, they can run campaigns that have been working very well and they have fine tuned their SEM machine, but I think that anyone with the time and knowledge can make it happen.

In the following few weeks, I will be posting more about what I’ve learned about search engine marketing. I believe that it’s an area ripe for the picking and am doing my best to reach out there and grab some of the money hanging from the search engine trees. Although it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do, I believe that anyone can do it. Want to learn more? Sign up for my RSS feed and stay tuned!

Man, I’m excited. Davey Z and I found out last night that we made a cool $100 over the weekend! How cool is that? 4 sales, more than $100. A spend of less than $20.  After a long and arduous waiting period to see if our targeted strategy worked, we were rewarded by seeing 4 conversions.  Big deal, you say?  It is for us!  That was our proof of concept.  The concept worked, so now we’re in business!

A few days ago I talked about how frustrating it was to wait up to 4 days to receive notice of sales and conversions. While the frustration still holds true and the wait is more like 4 or 5 days, I’m now excited to see that our targeted low volume high quality advertising on search engines is indeed working! We are now re-invigorated and have talked about expanding by trying out new campaigns and figuring out how to scale our current campaign to get more targeted volume.  Since this proved to work, we’ll use our low volume strategy on other programs that pay out big.  We’ve got our gloves on and are ready to fight for our chance at some SEM bucks.

As for yesterday’s campaign, at first I didn’t really know what was going on because we had 0 impressions since setting it up yesterday morning. Although the Yahoo! estimate was about 120 clicks per day, we weren’t even seeing a single impression. After a little digging, I found out that our ad was still under review.  I’m not sure why they have this process but at the same time I can see that it’s a good precaution to cut down on SPAM. Even though we’re happy with Yahoo for now, I just know that with Google we’d have many more clicks and I think we’ll try out Adwords in the near future. There’s no stopping us now!

So, Davey Z and I are going to have a board meeting tonight and decide where we’ll go with our newfound $100. We’ll reinvest it and hope to multiply it. We will go through a lot of different offers and programs, then decide on something that we hope will give us good return on our investment. Davey Z has come up with a totally sweet Excel spreadsheet that gives us break even costs, profit projections, and other things that I don’t understand yet. Good thing he likes data. We’ll be crunching numbers, making sense of data, and looking forward to learning more SEM. Right now we feel like we can conquer the world. We’re both excited and ready to scale things up. Our proof of concept worked and our business plan is solid. Stay tuned and we’ll teach you how to make money online!

For the last two weeks, I have been working with my friend Davey Z on learning how to make money online with Search Engine Marketing (SEM).  After reading the blogs of successful SEM’ers, we decided that we’re smart enough to give this thing a shot.  We started out with $130 in Yahoo! search marketing 2 weeks ago and so far have racked up 3 sales of what we think is a low-conversion item.  Our 3 conversions have earned us $54, but so far we have spent $75.  One of our rookie mistake was not checking out all of the available affiliate programs.  The first 2 conversions we made paid out only $8 through Linkshare but it pays out roughly $24 through Azoogle.  Had we started out promoting Azoogle’s offer from the get go, we would have broken even, or there abouts.

Quality versus Quantity

We have done several things since starting out on our original campaign.  At first, we had some really big, over arching keywords that were cosing us substantially more than other targeted keywords.  We decided to stop “bleeding” from those keywords and as a result saw our clicks go down dramatically.  Our hope was to exchange quantity for quality of clicks.  So far, we have not seen any conversions but with Azoogle’s 4 day delay, I’m not sure if we have a complete picture yet.

Our hope is that, although we are sending only very few hits to our program every day, most of those hits would convert.  It makes sense in theory, but it may not work like that in real life.  To better illustrate our goal, look at this simple graph:

Our aim is to increase quality if we are able to increase quantity.  We don’t necessarily want 10,000 clicks per day if those clicks aren’t contextual or relevant or lead to any conversions.  What we want to do is hit people when they’re ready to buy, and because of this strategy, the quantity of our clicks is very low.

So Now What?

Our attitude of quality clicks hasn’t really paid off at all yet.  I agree with the strategy but also agree with the law of large numbers.  I would rather see a more action than less, so we’ve decided to try out another campaign.  This new campaign is supposed to convert better, but it is also a campaign whose payout is significantly lower.  Paying less than $1.50 per action, we hope to be able to find cheap keywords that give us a lot of traffic in return.

We started this campaign today with the bare bones bidding price of 10 cents per keyword.  We estimate that at the end of the day, between 30-50 people will have clicked on our ads and seen the intended page for them to take action.  If 20% of those 50 people take action (that’s  10 people), we would have made roughly $15 while spending only $5.  That’s a 3:1 ratio of income to expense.  Even if only 10% of clickers convert, we still see a profit, albeit a much smaller one.  However, profit is profit, right?

So, with a new campaign active as of this morning, we will monitor clicks and trends for the next 4 days as  Azoogle receivs the data back from the programs.  Our expectations, I feel, are quite humble and I hope to report good news in the next few days!

My friend Davey Z and I took on search engine marketing about 2 weeks ago. We started out by putting in $30 to open an account on Yahoo! and getting a free $100 bonus from Yahoo! for opening up the account. So far we have burned up about half of our $130 and have made back about $52. We still think that we’re down roughly $20 and need to correct our actions before we loose too much more money.
I know that $20 isn’t a whole lot to lose, but since we’re starting out with such a targeted and focused campaign, we didn’t want to blow our initial capital within 2 days and have nothing to show for it. Our strategy is to show really targeted ads and try our best to convert on the clicks we do get. As you can probably imagine, we’re not getting a whole lot of clicks; $35 per week in advertising is very minimal especially for the SEM industry. I imagine that after we get the hang of things we’ll be spending more than $35 per hour if things go as planned.

One of the biggest hurdles that we are dealing with right now is delayed reporting from Azoogle. Our campaign manager says that it takes about 4 days for programs to report their earning to Azoogle. 4 days in Internet time is an eternity! I wonder why it takes so long with Azoogle? It seems to me that Commission Junction does a much better job at reporting things nearly real time. If not real time, then at least it seems like they report daily on my activities and commissions.

The thing about having to wait 4 days to see a report is that we don’t really know what is working and what isn’t until we get data to interpret. When we are forced to wait for 4 days, if something isn’t working then it means that we’re losing money and don’t even know it. This is a huge problem and I wish there was a way for the affiliate program to provide more up-to-date information for their publishers…especially newbies like us. Veterans don’t necessarily benefit from same-day reporting as much as those starting out do because they already have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. I believe that we would have a much better chance of success with quicker access to our conversion data.

Learning how to deal with this delay has been somewhat nerve wracking…and somewhat discouraging. Since we’re doing such low volume targeted advertising to get the most for our bucks, we see the click counter updated rather quickly but the money meter always stays still, or so it seems. I know that in the grand scheme of things “traffic is the new gold” and the more traffic we send to the affiliate programs the more money we stand to make. I think about adding a few more targeted keywords and see what kind of difference that makes…in 4 days.

I will keep you posted as we struggle through these challenges. I believe that tomorrow we will start seeing results from our last batch of changes. Regardless of tomorrow’s outcome, I hope that a solution is presented soon to address these reporting delays. After all, if we make money it means that Azoogle or other affiliate programs are making money.