Friday, September 19, 2008

They've done it again, perhaps

While checking my Adsense account recently I discovered that the value of the clicks had gradually climbed from the $0.003 that I was being "rewarded" with to $1.30. OK the traffic to the site was low and the clicks were correspondingly very low but the value of each click, as you can see, was high.

Good plan I think, lets send some of the traffic from the second tier sites to these pages and see how it converts. Now I wasn't expecting the high CTR I was getting from the organic traffic but I figured somewhere around 1-2% and calculated that that could be profitable.

So I set up two campaigns on two different sites and turned them on last night. Almost instant traffic, not high quality but the CTR was in the ball park (I just checked) but the value per click has dropped like a stone to $0.007. Because I know from past experience that Google don't report instantly it is distinctly possible that the click value could rise significantly in the next 24hours so I'm not killing this campaign just yet.

It is possible that the value I am seeing right now is for only a small percentage of the clicks or just a holding value while their software/people check my site out for quality score.

I think that it has value, I read their guide lines manual and know that they do the "take off the ads - is there anything of value left" test and there are only 2 ads per page, not 2 blocks, just 2 ads. The rest of the content is original, I wrote it and it isn't highly optimised so should be rated as natural.

You can check out the landing page I am using for this campaign here core secret to wealth.

One thing I have done is change the domain name. I decided it was time that this site had it's own domain name so I registered www.your-personal-wealth.com and will now be driving traffic to that. I probably should have done this years ago but I've been slack. The old URL was a subdomain of my main site even though this has been the main part of the site since about 2000. The old URl was http://personalwealth.kentberry.com.au so you can see why I changed it.

Bottom line is this (crap, that sounds like KRudd) because it is a new domain name for Google that may explain why the clck value is low, I might try another campaign to the old URL to test that. Maybe I need to set up a 301 redirection to the new domain name. I don't know yet. In any case, the traffic to the old URL was so low that a new domain probably won't lose too much except the age value.

Good Luck

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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

And it seems they were vidicated

After an investigation by Clickbank, who were extremely professional, they determined that there wasn't a problem with the link. I also checked the link and it was working correctly so it seems that the problem may well have been one of a mistake reather than malicious.

I am happy thet I dealt with it in the manner I did. No-one should be condemmed for making a mistake, particularly if they take steps to correct it. Clickbank were, as I said, very professional. They dealt with my email promptly and neither criticised me or the publisher. Just checked the complaint and that I was using a correct link.

I might just begin promoting the product again and find out if I can get a few more conversions.

OK, new program. I have been using the second tier search engines to drive some traffic and, while I can get a lot of traffic, none of it seems to convert particularly well. It is cheap but not very useful.

I have also been writing articles and that has actually been working, a bit. I sure as hell haven't been making a retirement income but I have been making some sales. Interesting though, not every article makes money and I didn't put tracking on every article so I don't really know which ones made the sales and which ones didn't.

Big tip folks, tag every article differently for each directory as well as each article so you know where the sales come from. This will make it much easier to repeat the successes and ignore those which don't work. Working being defined not as clicks or being added to ezines but as sales.

There is another benefit of writing and submitting articles and that is the back-links you generate. It appears that the real secret to SEO success and getting a good position on the search engine results is the number of back links you have from many different sources. The keywords in the link i.e. making up with your ex is the keyword you get listed for but the site which gives you the link isn't particularly relevant.

Put links on article directories, forums and comment on blogs, even this one, I know that you won't get any traffic from this 'cause there is no traffic to get but I also know that the links count because Yahoo tells me so.

My current focus is to grow my search engine positions through back links. I am having another attempt with the second tier search engines but I think that their conversion rate just isn't good enough even at the very low cost per click.

Good Luck


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Monday, September 08, 2008

And now I have reported this person to Clickbank.

Yep I have. See what happened is that I was still sending traffic and still not getting any sales. I had a very close look at the landing page. What I was planning was to take the entire page, chop out the offending sign-up page and run it on my website as the landing page.

When I went to change the "buy it now" links I found that the links went through a tracking script not direct to clickbank. No real problem with that except when I followed that link after using my affiliate link and found that the affiliate credited with the traffic was not me but "none".

Now this is possibly a problem with with the tracking script but since the product is all about how to use Clickbank and get around the tricks the Guru's use to steal your commissions I have me doubts about this being accidental.

So this amounts to blatant theft of affiliate commissions and I reported this fact to Clickbank today. This is a breach of their conditions and allows them to block all this publishers income and suspend his account and prevent delivery of his landing page. There just might be a very loud scream.

So why am I not revealing the name of this publisher or the product? Well I believe that Clickbank should take action and, if this is proved to be accidental, no-one should be burned at the stake for an error.

However, if Clickbank fail to act and/or they determine that this was deliberate I will post the name and product details here. Not that anyone will see it but I will be the first person on the internet to really pick a crook and publicise it.

I will then generate as much traffic as I can to this page and I will also detail exactly what was being done so you can see if the product you are promoting is doing the same thing. I think that this is an isolated case but it should not be allowed to continue.

Good Luck.

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