July 23, 2009
Okay, I am back in the saddle! I had to take a few weeks off in order to deal with some other projects, customers and issues. During that time, I shutdown my campaigns because I knew that I needed to re-write my landing pages and I wasn’t going to get the time. So, now I have the time.
I have re-written my landing page or provide more information and less sales “stuff” and I can see where that goes. I started by turning on one Ad Group (DIYSolarPanels) and determining that the ads were still drawing impressions and clicks and they were. However, I made a big booboo. I have code in my landing page that tracks where the click came from and where they went. In that code, I have a flag that sets the code to either production or test mode. Unfortunately, I had a very sickening feeling yesterday when I found that the code was set to test mode. I know that this flag was set since I turned things back on but I am wondering how long the flag had been set prior to turning it off. This would definitely tell me why I wasn’t getting any hops to the sales page. Oh well, it’s a mistake that would be easy to make and there isn’t anything that I can do about it. Just have to move on but learn the lesson to check things before releasing them for operation.
One other note is that the process of testing things is really slow when you are only committing $10 per day to the operation. At this rate, it takes about 4 days to tell whether or not there is a potential buyer out there. Obviously, if the hop & conversion rates were higher, it wouldn’t be a problem. However, I think I am running in the right area so its a matter of waiting around to see what happens.
One thing that I have learned is that Google plays games with their bids (CPC). I am not sure how their algorithm works but it obviously changes the “Estimated First Page Bid” based on my performance. I have been told before that you can get lower rates as you show performance (and that does work) but I wouldn’t ahve thought that the “Estimated First Page Bid” would change that quickly. Oh well, part of the learning process.
That’s it for now. Going to keep plugging away. I will be upping my budget tomorrow because I am starting a new Ad Group (MakeSolarPanels) and I want to see how that one does. Will let you know.
June 13, 2009
I am sitting here, attending the DaVinci Institute “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp“, listening to Anita Edge (www.BaseCampWebVentures.com), Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and Dush Ramachandran from ClickBank (www.ClickBank.com) about Affiliate Marketing and wanted to throw out this little nugget of knowledge that is critical for newbie Affiliate Marketer (like me).
What you have to understand is that the whole arena of Affiliate Marketing is (1) directed at the situation where the purchase of the product or service is a one-to-one transaction and (2) there are a large number of combinations of the different mechanisms to implement your marketing approach.
On the first point, the Affiliate Marketing concept does not work well when there are multiple people involved in the purchase. This is why “Corporate Sales” are not typically handled through this mechanism. The whole idea is that the person who is making the search (or finding your blog or whatever) is the person that will be making the purchasing decision. This point is also why the Landing Page is most effective when it is based on personal reviews and/or testimonials because these sorts of purchases are typically going to have a significant emotional component.
In attempting to understand the world of Affiliate Marketing, it is important to understand that there are large number of approaches to Affiliate Marketing. However, it can be distilled down to a four step process (when looked at from 50,000 feet). (1) Find a niche and product that you want to market, (2) generate traffic to your Landing Page (LP), (3) provide some information about the product that will provide more incentive for the potential customer to want to learn more about the product and finally (4) generate a sale. The Affiliate Marketer is the one that does steps 1, 2 and 3 with the 4th step being the responsibility of the Merchant.
One other piece of advice that I learned and came up again during this Boot Camp was that when you are starting, you need to figure out which method of generating traffic (#2 above) you are going to use and stay focused on that approach. If you choose to do SEO, then put all of your energy into getting your organic rankings up and thereby increasing your traffic. Don’t worry about PPC or blogs or articles to start with. Once you get good at whichever approach you want to use (and more importantly are making money) then you can branch out if that is really critical to you and your self-esteem. You will hear lots of “mentors / coaches” telling you that you need to do articles, blogs, email lists and PPC. However, all that this will do is to bury you in possibilities and you won’t be good at any of them. Start simple and straight-forward and then expand in whatever direction you want to go.
Those are two little nuggets that you can keep in mind while considering your next move in Affiliate Marketing. I know that the second point is one that I struggled with for
June 9, 2009
After fighting with my “Art Jobs” campaign, I realized that I was struggling with a couple of different issues. The first is that there are a huge number of variables all of which need to be aligned. The second was that I was building a separate landing page for each AdGroup. Plus, I didn’t have a good means to manage all of that. At the same time, my landing page was really bad so creating more versions of it weren’t going to produce any additional results.
With all of this plus a low budget, lack of experience, and without the tools, I was struggling to get anywhere with the campaign. At the same time, I have been working with Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and he has a great new product in the solar energy niche which was of great interest to me. I was also working on a method of tracking the clicks, where they came from, how they got there and where they went. It’s not super difficult but works pretty well.
So, all of this together, I shut down the ArtJobs campaign and generated the newest EnergyAtHome.biz landing page. My landing page is a lot better than the ArtJobs campaign landing pages. At the same time, I am able to track how things are working.
One thing that I found, when I started this new EnergyAtHome.biz campaign, is that the cost for the keywords that I chose are quite a bit higher than what I was expecting. When I started seeing this, I was a little concerned that it wasn’t going to be a profitable venture. However, given the alignment with Byron and the fact that I will be attending his “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp” through the DaVinci Institute, I decided that I wanted to work with the program and see where I come to. We will just have to see how things go.
Finally, the other thing that I decided to do was to sign up with Microsoft Advertising Center. I did this in order to get access to their keyword / pricing information. In order to try out the service, I got signed up and created a campaign there. There were some interesting insights there that I will talk about later. But suffice it to say, I think there might be some opportunities here. Again, we have to wait and see.
June 4, 2009
In the software development world, the term “Waterfall” has the same connotation as “green, oozing slime”. Unfortunately, there is good reason for this.
Having come out of the Engineering/Manufacturing world, I am fully versed in executing projects in the classic, pre-planned environment. There are any number of reasons why projects need to be done in this way (the subject for another discussion at a later date) and it is difficult to do software development in this environment. However, with good planning and management, it can be done (I have proven that). Part of the reason that we can be successful in developing software in this environment is that the requirements are well thought out and documented at the beginning because the customer environment is well understood and definable. At the same time, the hardware aspect of the projects are typically larger than the software and much less subject to change. This gives the entire project a different flavor than software only projects. This is the same issue that is presented when you have a project where there is a significant hardware component (typically seen in embedded applications).
But, getting back to my original thought, I think that one thing that we need to understand is that that classic, pre-planned approach to projects (i.e., Waterfall) is not a requirement, merely the most common approach to Project Management. At the same time, we it is completely feasible to take the concepts of Project Management and, if we understand them, apply them to Agile Project Management. It’s all the same thing, just a different set of priorities and processes.
Take for example the fact that every project has requirements (functional specs, user stories, use cases, whatever) and costs and schedules / deadlines. The only significant difference between classic and agile projects is that these are prioritized differently. The processes in the agile world are designed to deal with a highly volatile set of requirements. The classic world assumes that the requirements are significantly less volatile while adherence to cost and schedule are critical.
For a great, in-depth look at this issue and to learn more about the relationships between the classic and agile Project Management worlds, see Michele Sliger’s book “The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility” (you will find it at Michele’s website: Sliger Consulting. I highly recommend it.
June 4, 2009
I just found a great little resource to learn some of the basics of SEO. Its from a company called “SEO Traffic Spider“. I don’t know anything about their services but they have a great website and lots of useful information. I am not using SEO to a great extent but it does relate to Affiliate Marketing as well. Use it in good health.
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