I won’t lie, this is extremely off topic. However I found this very amusing to watch, I hope you do too!
I’ve never been too fond of Google AdSense, nor have I ever used it as a primary (or any) source or type of income nor have I ever really tried to optimize any sites for it. With that being said you may find it as odd as I do – I’m very close to receiving my first AdSense check.
My current AdSense earnings are at a whopping $89.02. When I first started throwing AdSense on some of my sites, it just never took off, people just never clicked on the ads.
So I did what everyone else would do, and got my friends to start clicking on them……. just kidding.
So when creating a new site I often play with the idea of throwing AdSense on it, if it looks like it goes with the site I will normally do it, if not – I wont. You’ll notice there is no Adsense on this site – that’s because I am confident anyone visiting this site doesn’t really care about those ads and knows if they need to find something to just use Google directly. In other words I have respect for you guys and think you are an intelligent bunch.
So what happened? One of my sites which I had no idea would do any good with AdSense started to bring in consistent money. Not a lot, but some and it was consistent. So I just let it ride. I don’t want to go into too much detail of this site, but it’s not a blog nor is it a site full of rich content. I still can’t figure out why this site of all of them has the most consistent Adsense earnings. It definitely is an interesting beast.
Going forward I’m thinking of trying Google Adsense on more sites just to test out and if it doesn’t work out well, just yank it. Maybe it’s time you tried it too! Don’t be affraid to try it on any type of site either, you never know what will work.
It’s that time of year, everyone is doing their year end posts.
I’m not going to bother with that, I’m just going to wish everyone a safe and Happy New Year.
Chris
Well the month (and year) are almost over. One thing that I found kind of odd, December 2008 was my highest earning month for EPN (Ebay Partner Network) to date!
I just started promoting EPN products June this year. It was a test at a low budget project to see how much I could earn with spending the bare minimum. I created several sites and did not promote them PPC or any paid advertising, I just tried to promote them with SEO.
The costs were very simple and relatively small – domain name(s), phpbay and webhosting. Since those were so low, ROI was very high. However it’s very difficult to scale. I found the best way was to whip out many sites, once they looked good and were working leave it and start another.
For anyone looking to break out into the affiliate marketing industry should considering start off with EPN sites. It’s very cheap and easy to do.
One thing to keep in mind – if you are strictly using SEO to promote your sites, it will can some time (a few months) to start seeing significant traffic, so patience is required.
Hope everyone else had a good month!
So, Christmas has come and gone, I hope everyone had a good one. I was very fortunate enough to get some nice new office goodies that I’m going to share with you guys. Well share pictures at least.
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Acer 22″ Monitor
Damn this was a HUGE setup from my crappy 19″. It’s not only the size but the picture quality is tremendously better. Just after 1 day of use my eyes feel better and it just makes it easier to work and multitask. No longer am I stuck having to alt-tab between windows – it just makes it easier editing html/php files, then refreshing the browsers to see how the change went. Originally I was thinking of going dual screen, but after seeing how nice this one is, it just wouldn’t be fair to put them up side by side. |
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Leather Office Chair
Another kick-ass addition to the office. Before I was using a 5 year old chair, while it was alright, the comfort level just wasn’t there, this one has much better back support and just feels much nicer. |
From all of us at chrisdot.com, we would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
Stay Safe!
Chris
I for one am a firm believer in keeping business lives and personal lives separate. Unfortunately I found that very hard for the past few weeks. I got sick, really sick. Sick to the point where some days I couldn’t get out of bed.
Now how do you run a business when you’re the boss, employee and everything else? You gotta prioritize and just do what you can do. Now I don’t get sick often and normally if and when I do get sick it isn’t too bad, however this time was different.
With limited time and energy you really need to focus that much harder on what needs to be done. I personally started out by working on stuff I knew that needed to be done, eg – making sure all the bills were paid, while that doesn’t seem too big, it can be if your running multiple hosts and domains. The last thing you need is your campaigns/sites going down due to lack of payment or a late payment. So for me this was one of my biggest priorities.
Next would be watching current campaigns to make sure they the offers were still active on the networks and still turning profit. There would be no point in sending a bunch of traffic to a campaign that was no longer converting.
Unfortunately that was about all I could do for the past few weeks, I did however manage to tweak some campaigns, but not to the amount I would have liked to, however now that I’m getting better again I am glad that I was at least able to monitor a few campaigns and make sure all payments were made to keep the incoming coming in!
Stay healthy!
When working with PPC or any advertising your looking for the ultimate ROI and Profit. Normally you try to achieve this by keeping your cost per click down (for PPC advertising). BUT… Sometimes a lower CPC is not always better.
Affiliate Marketing isn’t that simple. Cheaper isn’t always better, nor is it always best to have your ads in the number 1 position. Like everything else in this industry, it’s all about testing.
Recently with one of my successful campaigns I had my clicks so damn low I didn’t think it could get any better. One day I was thinking, how can I squeeze more out of this campaign? I raised my bit by quite a bit (in comparison to what it was at). A day later, my profits had doubled.
My ROI had gone down a little, which is to be expected, but for the extra profit for this campaign it was worth it. Sometimes you need to spend a little more to get A LOT more back.
Sorry guys, with my move and a few other things I haven’t been putting the time and effort into this site like I need to be. The move alone took so much out of me and beleive it or not I am still unpacking. On the upside traffic has been up recently. Thanks for the support! I’ll be pumping some stuff out soon!
Too often new affiliates get blown away with the whole Super Affiliate mindset thinking they need to become huge and become huge right away.
When starting off – focus on the little things, start small and make reasonable goals.
Ok, so you’re starting off – you see tons of people making (or at least claiming to be making) thousands a month on affiliate marketing. It’s easy to get your hopes up and think that you’ll be making that right away as well. Anyone that is making a living by Affiliate Marketing is doing so because they have put in the time, effort and money. It doesn’t happen by accident, nor does it happy over night.
Remember – we all started somewhere.
So $100 a day seem like a lot? How about $10 a day? Or even $5 a day? Why not focus on getting 1 campaign to $10 profit a day. Then after that instead of trying to massively scale that, start another one and get that to $10 a day. Now do that over and over again. Soon enough you’ll be at $100 a day, then $200 a day, $500 a day and so on. And — in the unfortunate event that your campaign is taken offline you will have several others up and you’ll barely notice it as you will have several others still making a reasonable amount.
