Ass Out Cash

In part 1 of Free Web Tools I talked about some of the free tools I use to help with my online research.  I have located a few more very handy tools.  The tools I will list have limited free usage, but offer paid subscriptions.  I have not subscribed to any of these yet, but as soon as I start making money I probably will.

1. SpyFu
   • This site is unbeatable!  The competitive edge you can get from the information on this site is huge.  SpyFu enables customers to “spy” on their competitor’s online marketing campaigns, see which terms they advertise on, which terms they optimize their site for, how much they spend, and so much more. This tool is a must have before jumping into a PPC campaign.
2. ShareaSale.com
   • ShareaSale.com is a site for affiliate marketers.  Think Commission Junction or Link Share only better.  There are some tools I have fallen in love with like the “Make a page”, and the Deals database.  I will be talking about ShareaSale alot more in the future.
3. SEO Book
   • I can’t say enough about this site and the tools available.  SEO (search engine optimization) is a science now a days.  It seems you would need a PHD to get on the first page of Google.  Well not anymore SEO Book makes getting ranked easier.
   • Some of the tools I use the most from SEO Book are the
     • SEO Toolbar – I have installed this in Firefox and use it all the time.  It gives me insight to others and my own SEO.
     • SEO Keyword Density Tool – This is a handy tool to look at keyword frequency or to give ides for keywords from existing content.
     • Keyword tools – There are tons of keyword tools here.  Another one that I use on occassion is the misspelled keyword generator.  You input your keyword, and it spits out variations of common mis-spellings.
   • The amount of free tools on this site is ubelievable.  Almost as unbeleiveable as what they can do for your Page Rank.
4. Copy Scape
   • Original content will always be unique.  But you never know when you might find an article you will want to reprint on your own site.  CopyScape can tell you how many other locations on the web this same article is posted.  This can also be a handy tool to see if someone is “borrowing” content you worked hard creating.

There are tons of free tools available for affiliate online research. There are a few I am currently using.  Below I will tell you what I am using and how I am using it. If you have more tools, and know better ways to use the tools I am using please post it up in a comment.

1. Google Analytics
   • This tracking service is very handy.  You place the code snippet in your site, and it will report back, traffic, what page visitors land on, what page visitors exit from, how much time they spend on your site, and where they navigate to within your site.   It will also show what geographic location visitors come from, how they found you, either which search engine, or where the direct link came from, and what browser they are using and a lot more.
2. Google AdSense
   • If you have made it this far you should already know what Google AdSense is.  This is a program to advertise on your website without hassle.  You just paste a few lines of code into your site and sit back and watch the money come in (well sort of).  Google uses a PPC program (Pay per click).  Every time someone clicks on one of the ads on your site you earn a commission, a few cents to maybe  50 cents.  The ads are automatically tailored around ketywords found on your site.  The impressions, clicks, CTR and eCPM are tracked for you, and you can setup custom channels so you can determine which ad placements, or ads from different sites are making money.
3. Google Adwords
   • I am new to Google Adwords.  And advertising costs money.  So what I want to stress here is the tools sections in adwords.  There are a few things I use.
   • The keyword tool.  This free tool can analyze your site and suggest keywords, or you can type in key words.  It will the display how much search traffic these keywords generate, and the competition for these keywords.  I use the competitive information to determine if I will be able to display a good assortment of high paying ads on my site (PPC ads from AdSense).
   • Insight or Search – This is another handy research tool.  You input keywords, and it shows you where the searches are coming from and the volume over time.
4. Google Webmaster
   • This is basically a portal for submitting your site for the Google bat to crawl.  Alot of people think this is an inefficient way to get ranked, but I still determine is necessary.  There are tools to help find bad internal and external links, and  any meta data issues.  This tool will also analyze or generate a robots.txt file.
5. XML-Sitemaps.com
   • This handy tool is great for creating an XML sitemap for you. It supports up to 500 pages, which is enough for most, (definitely enough for me), and offers outputs for download in XML, compressed or uncompressed, html, text, and more. Just run the script and then upload to google. Whammo, you have a sitemap for your site.

Update:  part 2 is here.

Last I posted I was driving traffic to my newly set up cooking games site.  That was almost a week ago, and a lot has happened since then.

I turned off my Google Adsense ad today after my budget ran out.  Below is the continuation of the results.

Day 4:  Adwords sent   71 clicks (still a $5.00 / day budget) to http://www.games.cheesymeat.com Of those page hits I got one (1) AdSense click for a daily total of $0.82.  I received 4 referrals to Big Fish Games, but no sales.  So another losing day.

Day 5:  I reduced my budget to $2.00 per day and lowered my bids on all of my keywords.  My budget went down by more than half, but I still got 40 clicks to my site with a better CTR.  My Adsense received 1 click for $0.20 (WOOHOO!!)  Big fish got 2 more referrals.

Day 6:  I added a second ad variant to see if I could improve the already good CTR.  I also bumped the budget back to $5.00 after tweaking my keywords a bit.  results?  A total of 80 clicks, split pretty evenly between the 2 ads.  From Adsense, 5 clicks, $1.33.  1 more big fish referral.

Day 7:  Same campaign as above, 2 ads got 42 clicks each, total of 82.  AdSense totaled up at 9 clicks and $3.97.  My best day yet, but still not enough to recuperate what I am paying for advertising.

Day 8:  I drastically altered my campaign, I hacked out any keywords that weren’t performing and once again adjusted my bids.  I lowered my budget back to $2.00.  only 18 clicks today but a very nice CTR (my best yet).  AdSense got 1 click $.24 (ouch!)

Day 9: Final day of experiment.  Budget back to $5.00 (although I only let it run up to about $4.00) 37 clicks, At Adsense, 3 clicks for $1.55.

Sum it up:  This has been an extremely educational experiment.  Definitely not immediately profitable for me, but has potential for paying customers later at Big Fish.  Total cost of AdWords campaign was $42.67.  Remember I was given this from Signing up with StartLogic.  So I really made $11.21 from AdSense, but if I had paid for the advertising I LOST. Not really what we are after here.  On a side note according to Google analytics, my site saw over 500 unique visitors in these 9 days, with a bounce rate of 39%.  I am pleased with these numbers if nothing else.

See you soon with my next experiment, which is already in the works………

Time for an update on http://www.games.cheesymeat.com.  When I last posted this was just started, it is still very young only being online for 4 days, but has grown up a bit already.  When I posted last on this I mentioned a form of Arbitrage.  Well it really isn’t arbitrage at all, lets just call it an  advertisement experiment.  I utilized my $50 Google AdWords credit I got from StartLogic to advertise for this site, so no money was spent out of pocket.  I started with a $6 a day budget and an 18 cent per click bid, placements on search only (no content page placements).  My ad was very simple, focusing on my keywords.    My landing page has keyword focused content from my affiliate network with Big Fish Games, and 2 ad placements from Google AdSense, a banner from Commission Junction, and I placed some text links to some Click Bank Products.  Some results are below, but due to Google TOS (terms of service) I will leave some specifics out.

Day 1:    I received 51 clicks on my AdWords ad for the $6.00 daily  max that I set.  My AdSense ads got 2 clicks, netting $0.83.  No action at Big Fish.  At this point I did not have commission junction or Click Bank ads active.

Day2:  I received 60 clicks from the AdWords ad.  My AdSense ads got 4 clicks at a total of $.047.  Still no action at Big Fish Games.  Morning of day 2 I moved the location of the Google AdSense ad, I moved it up to be above the fold.   I also added The Click Bank text link ads, and the Commission Junction banner.  Both still focused on the keywords.  At the end of the day no action on either.

Day 3:  Today is not over, but here are the results so far.  Adwords has sent 75 visitors, with Adsense paying $2.08 on 2 clicks.  No action on ClickBank, Commission Junction, or Big Fish.  This morning, I altered the ad layout a bit.  I basically just moved the navigation sidebar from the right side to the left side.  The left side is supposedly more of a hot zone for clicks?  I also changed my Adwords max bid.  My average bids were around .12 and I was still getting top results.  So I lowered my bid to .10 to see if I can get more traffic for the same amount of cash.

To sum it up, so far this hasn’t been a profitable venture for me. Luckily I am not using my money.   My CTR on Adwords has been what I consider good, my CTR  from Adsense is garbage.  I am going to let the Adwords campaign run for a couple more days without changing anything to see what happens.  The ad has driven a decent amount of traffic to my site, but I haven’t been able to convert.   Not 100% sure why,  any input?  Additionally, I was really hoping the Big Fish Network would pay off, so far it seems people don’t like to pay for games, or maybe this one takes a little time to set in.

Will update again in a few days.  Hopefully with some better results.

Link to Part 2 here

The research is still going on.  In my what seems to be never ending quest for the right solution I came across this site.  I honestly am not sure of the actual commissions they give, but these guys make it easy to put up a content rich video game site.

Big Fish Games has a spectacular set of tools for affiliates. I signed up, downloaded the SGS (Satellite Game System), made some changes for my niche, added some ads, and was ready to go. I am not sure how effective this will be, or how popular my niche choice is, but it was too easy not to. Since by now you are all asking, Well what is the site so we can check it out? I have nothing to hide, so I set it up at http://www.games.cheesymeat.com and the niche is cooking games.

On top of this I tried my own twist on Google AdSense Arbitrage.  Well it really isn’t, but as I mentioned in a previous article, my web site host (StartLogic) gave me $50 Google AdWords credit when I signed up.  So I figured I might as well try it out on this.

Next time – my Adword campaign for www.games.cheesymeat.com success or failure and the details