Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Some Results to Share

Well, I have been busy on the Google Adwords site fine-tuning the ads and keywords in the manner of the Project X book and the Adwords Miracle book.

This stuff actually works! I have finally got a CTR (Click Through Rate) for some keywords that is over 1% (some as high as 3%) for the first time ever. Now I have had several attempts at Google Adwords over a period of 2-3 years and never exceeded 1% CTR. This truly represents a break through and a 300% improvement. Thanks Chris.

But...my conversions are really low because the actual traffic is really low. This is all based on averages and percentages. The facts are - for 1 sale at an average conversion rate of 2% requires 50 visitors to the sales page. If the CTR is 2% then it will take 2500 impressions (the number of times Google shows your ad) to get the 50 visitors.

If 1 sale makes you $20 then your cost to get that one sale must be less than $20 or you'll go broke i.e. your 50 visitors must cost you less than $0.40 per click. Check your campaign to see the cost of each click.

So what can you do about that? Fortunately Google have a brilliant algorithm for calculating your position on the page that is based on CTR as much as bid price and they only charge you $0.01 more than the next lowest bidder to be above that position. Improving your CTR will actually reduce your cost. How do you do that? I lashed out and bought Perry Marshall's book to find out and WOW!

I downloaded the book last night, read part of it and started making changes. It is still a bit early to know if there has been a significant change but I can see on the tracking software that there has been 3 hits to the landing page even though Google indicates that there have been no ads shown yet. It is true that you can get traffic instantly.

I also had a look at "Instant Internet Empires", no, not the old Frank Kern rubbish but a new (to me) package from Frank Lord. It is just the old Traffic Hurricane scripts with the usual "get it free, get instant traffic free" guff. Yes you'll get traffic, for a while, and then Google will ban your site forever.

This rubbish creates hundreds of keyword specific pages with lots of links to sites that all land back on your main site. Google hates this stuff because the pages have no content at all, they are purely designed to generate traffic and clicks on the Google ads. They pervert the search results and clog up servers and the internet.

But, you won't get any benefit from this at all, the traffic is all very low quality and they perpetrators who promote this rubbish are the ones who get the Google Adsense money. They win, you lose. Of course it is free, to them, it'll possibly cost you your domain name and or your host. Don't Do It!

Have a nice day, good luck with your legitimate endeavors.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Google shut down some of my ads :(

Yup, they did. One of the reasons was fine and easily altered. I had $$'s in the headline and they specifically prevent multiple symbols so I changed it to $'s and they are happy.

The other one is much harder to fix as I really don't know why it happens like that. My URL points to this blog using http://marketingtruths.blogger.com just like that, no target="_blank" added or anything.

The problem for Google is that they don't like any landing page which doesn't allow the user to click the back link on the browser to go back to the original ad page and this site doesn't allow that. Why I don't know. In addition, all my current ads send traffic to this blog and only one ad group has the problem (apparently). Anyone got any clues as to why?

It isn't a problem for that particular ad group as they had only one click through anyway and I was about to change it all but, as I said, all the other ads use the same URL so there is potential for this problem to recur and I don't want that.

Anyway, back to the marketing. I have been running with the information from ProjectX and Adwords Miracle to identify good products and keywords to use.

I have a couple of new campaigns in the wind which will include my Travellers Portal site. Now, please understand that I am in the process of moving the whole site to another host (should be complete by the end of the weekend) and then I can point the domain name www.thetravellersportal.com to it and the URL will look more professional.

Once that is all migrated fully and tested (so it works ;) ), I can begin running the campaign. The idea is to use adwords to drive traffic to some affiliate products via a review page which has links to and from the rest of the site. This should help get rankings in the search engines, build traffic and generate some income all at the same time.

I am also experimenting with some link cloaking and click tracking software. I can't tell you much about it yet because I found a problem with it. I have fixed some of the problems but some of it I cannot fix. I have asked the developer to make some changes, we'll see what happens.

Cheers for now.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Some Clicks and Some Not

Unfortunately I didn't get much time over the weekend to work on optimising the campaign.

When I did have a look at the results so far it is quite disappointing but probably typical of most of you. I had a few clicks (14) but no sales resulting. This of course is actually quite normal. An average conversion rate is just that, an average, so if it is 50% then you'll get possibly 50 sales per 100 visitors.

On average this means that 14 visitors should have generated 7 sales but they might have been all from the other group (those who don't buy) so the next 14 might all buy.

Hmmm... don't place the order for the new car just yet. The click through rate is pretty poor as well so the first place to go is to work on the CTR. To that end I have rewritten some of the ads and started a more focussed ad group with new ads.

Interesting bit of stats I saw today, on a sales page promoting Keyword Elite there is a image of his Google stats page for a number of keywords.

If you look at the bottom of the page you'll see that there are several keywords for which there are no clicks and no sales. And this is from someone who has one of the best products available to optimise your keyword results. Other keywords on the same stats page show CTR's of 10%.

The message here is that even with the best products to help sometimes the results are still crappy. I am hoping that I can improve my CTR so at least some of them hit whole percentage numbers (like 1% and above) that can only help speed up getting to the 50% who buy products.

Luck with yours...

Thursday, October 12, 2006

It's Slower than I would like

But it probably is more typical for most of you than the "I made $1,273.25 in 17.63 hours" hype that you mostly seem to read online.

As Chris says in the Project X manual or his sales page ( can't find it now so I don't know exactly where it is) for all the Gurus who claim these big instant sales days, all of them have spent years building a loyal following in a subscriber list that they sent this new offer to.

If you were to do this from scratch, like you and me, the results will be slower. As of today I have had 550 impressions on Google with 2 clicks, a 0.36% CTR (Click Through Rate), which is crappy. Worse, only one of my ads had any clicks. Time to rewrite some ads.

OK, I made some changes and I have more to do but I noticed that almost all the other Affiliates who are promoting this package are using the same technique which surely will pall with the searcher. I am doing some other things in the background at the moment to try to leverage the buzz into different markets which might not be flooded with competition.

I have found some but some isn't enough. After reading the Adwords Miracle ebook I have decided that I need to re-arrange my campaigns, more night work by the look of it.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Update on Project X

You wouldn't believe it but...this ProjectX package is missing something that is really important.

A lot of the information is pretty good, I learnt a few new things to put into practice but it is very weak in the one thing that will really make the difference.

How the hell do you get your Adwords ad clicked on???

I have played around with adwords for a while, I know that Google will block any ad they don't like or that is getting what they think is poor results. Fair enough, they are running a business and poor ads just don't make money for them. Not that I think they are short of cash flow but they still want to maximise their profitability and they are allowed to.

It is really hard to write and ad that fits their rules, gets your message across enought to get the click and remains profitable for you.

Fortunately there is a solution and the free adwords packages just don't cut it. I have read them and tried out their solutions, they seem to be just telling you enough to get you frustrated enought to get you to buy their "advanced" package.

If you are offering a free solution you really should give me enough information to make at least enough money to be able to pay for the upgrade package you turkey...

Anyway, as I said, there is a solution an adwords product which does tell you exactly how to get the click and how to learn how to get the click for less money and more profit. Have a look at this page (click here) and see what you think. At the moment there is a special offer for Afilliates who also own this program, an almost free website to help you with your sales. Why almost free? You pay for the domain name and hosting but all the rest of the codeing etc is done for you.

A pretty good deal I think. Unfortunately there are limited spaces so be quick. I'll post my link when I have it done.

Is this more recycled crap or not?

I know that there has been almost no activity on this site for some time but I plead guilty to being busy.

I was setting up a Travel site which I used a as a Beta test while I traveled in Europe for the month of September 2006. This took me about 8 months to get how I wanted it and now I have to move it to another host before I can release it to the world.

Anyway, this project has stopped me in lots of other things I was doing, including writing about how to make money online. Or exposing the scams. There are "lots" of scams out there.

I personally refuse to entertain the idea of paying more than around $200 for any product online. My reasoning is that if I buy a digital product the actual cost for the product is probably less than $500 total regardless of how many are sold.

So, if they are asking $1,000 for a product based on how much you'll make (probably not) or the sum of all the products in the package (yeah, right) or some other made up number I don't give a sh#@#$ and I won't pay. Do I miss out? Maybe, maybe not. I sure as hell don't lose money on those deals.

I also refuse to join any membership site which costs me money every month, I just don't see the value in them for me. I do for the "guru", permanent income stream, lovely.

Back to the purpose of this post. I just bought the ProjectX package and I did this because I want to add Affiliate marketing into my new site and I want it to work properly. By properly I mean make money.

My financial goals are actually pretty simple, I want a passive income of $60,000 per year. I want to retire from full time work and have my partner also be able to be with me. I want to be able to do more of that travel that we just completed 'cause it was fantastic (see the blog on my site for the adventure) and I don't want to be tied down to any particular place when I want to work. Is that too much to ask? I don't think so and I am sure that there are many of you who would like a similar lifestyle.

On initial reading I am pretty impressed with the information as presented but as always the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in this case in the cash flow. This site is the reporting site, not the sales site. Yes, I did put a link to the sales site here but if you can't see what I am talking about this won't make any sense to you at all will it?

Now I am not going to leak the contents of the package to you because that wouldn't be fair to the other people who actually buy the package or to Chris who wrote it.

I have several other Affiliate "How to" ebooks in my eLibrary which I have actually read and attempted to put into action with little result and much frustration so I wasn't initially interested in buying another but this looked different enough to be of major interest.

So, more report later when some results are in.

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