Ass Out Cash

It has been a while since I have posted.  I haven’t given up the affiliate challenge.  I am still working on a few different things.  One of my original goals was to bring my AdSense earnings to $1 per day.  For the month of February I averaged $0.40 per day.  I had quite a few days over $1, but just as many at $0.  Most of my traffic has come from Google Organically.  My sites have really just started getting indexed this month, so hopefully things pick up.  One thing I have not worked on is link exchanging.  I have read many a SEO tips that say this is the key.    At first I wasn’t keen on the idea of emailing a bunch of sites to see if they wanted to share links, but at this point it can’t hurt.  That will be one of my goals this coming month.

As most already know content is king.  Unique content is the king of kings.  I decided I should start some legit unique content sites, (beside this one) to see what can come of it.  I have expanded my Cheesy Meat Games site, to be a full cooking site.  It includes a blog, an amazon affiliate store, the big fish games site, and a recipe management section powered by OpenEats. The blog has been useful for generating traffic, as well as being able to feature product from my everyday life linked through the amazon affiliate.

I have also started Bad Luck Blog.  This blog is open for anyone to post a story about how crappy their day was, or to complain about whatever is on their chest.  The idea is to get unique content through a community of people.   This site is only a few days old now, and needs some work still, and will need a lot of promotion.  If this takes off I will need to look into a better way to keep the spam and garbage at bay beside manual review.

My next post will be on an affiliate software package I recently tried out …

Stay tuned for results.

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………

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

This post is going to bring the story up to date.  So I put up some domains like www.financialflattery.com strictly hoping for ad revenue.  To date I have 14 of my domains with different themes hosted.  As of today December, 14 2008.  About 2 weeks into my venture I have made exactly$.11.  Yep that’s right eleven cents.  This is the reason I started really brainstorming and hitting the research.  I guess it won’t be quite as easy as I originally thought.  On top of this, after alot of work, I see Google released Ad Sense for Domains.  Basically a domain parking setup similar to Sedo.  Is it any better I doubt it, but maybe will atleast list it in their search engine since they are taking a cut of the revenue.  I parked 2 of my domains with Google just to check it out.  Over 5 days I have had 6 views no clicks on theses 2 domains.  If you want to see what the Google pages look like, click here.  www.turbocobalt.com

So I have a few ideas I will be trying .

1. Keyword selection.  My existing sites are very broad.  Like www.cheesymeat.com is about cooking, any and all types of cooking.  I really need to break these things down into a niche.  I need to take one of my keywords and expand from there to get better rankings and a specialized crowd.  I should limit it to say Baking chocolate cakes. Then my keywords will be related to that.  Much less broad.
2. Content.  I don’t think the blog and news search results on my sites are unique enough content to get caught by Google, or yahoo.  I have looked at some of the content article generating software packages like Instant Article Wizard, or a program like Simply PLR.  HyperVRE is another program that caught my eye.  They offer a free and paid service, and seems like the real deal.  I signed up for the free service but haven’t done anything with it yet.  Here is a Case Study E-Book (right click – save as) about a guy who made piles of cash with this program.  Hopefully by next week I can talk more in depth about it.   There are alot of these out there.  Before I spend any more money I want to make some.  So for now I will be researching my content articles and writing them myself.
3. Search engine submission.  I don’t think submissions really work.  So I need back links to my site.  Back links are basically links to my site from other sites.  I am currently unsure how I am going to attack this.  I have a link from every site to my generic link page on a different site www.autoilluminate.com/list This just creates a there and back link.  I don’t think this is enough to make a difference.

I am sure there is much more, but this is where I am going to start.  My current goal.  No more money going out until there is money coming in.  How much, well anything above the .11 in 2 weeks I have so far is good.  My first goal as of today is $1.00 a day from Ad Sense.  We will consider the others bonus.

Next – I will optimize one of my domains to the above guidelines.

I did a lot of research on Monday, and had to take last night off to think about it all.  Before we get into all of that let me finish my story to get caught up to today.  Last I posted I got signed up at several affiliate sites, I had a site script I wanted to use and was ready to go.

I started posting up sites.  I didn’t really like the default layout of the DomainZaar software.  I have some php skills so I went to work modifying it to my liking.  I do like this script package because it creates links and searches based on keywords.  The search engines should see this one active page having a large number of links to other pages, and some content.  Those pages don’t really exist, but when the links are clicked, the index.php  is refreshed with the new keyword.  I am no master of Search engine optimization ( SEO ), but this site shouldn’t get immediately overlooked by Google.  There is also a news and blog search which returns some content for the page.

I am probably doing a terrible job describing this so just have a look.

www.cheesymeat.com and www.300kmph.com are 2 examples.

As you can see I have Google ads inserted, and I also have a area where I put ads I choose from Click Bank or Commission Junction.

At first this seemed like a good way to go, today I am not so sure.  More on that later.  As I mentioned before I have around 40 domains I wanted to setup.  When I had around 12 of them done, I accidentally overwrote some key files that I hadn’t backed up recently.  It never fails, I can screw up just about anything.  So I had to basically start over at the first site.  Note: BACKUP EVERYTHING AND OFTEN.

As of today I have 14 sites hosted this way.  Before I go any further, I wanted to do more research and thinking to determine if this was the most effective use of time and for returns.

Next — the incoming cash flow

I left off last needing ads for my new site.  The package I am using comes ready for Ad Sense.  How do I sign up for that you ask?  Well either go to google.com/adsense or my preferred method, HubPages.  HubPages is a not only an easy way to get your Google affiliate account set up, but an excellent place to find and deliver information and articles for exactly what we are trying to do here.  Affiliate marketing. I am still exploring HubPages, and find it more intriguing the more involved I get with it.

Google limits the amount of ads allowed per page, and you tend to get repeating ads if you have a very specific niche anyway.  So I need a different outlet for affiliate ads.  Now what do I do?  Well I did what most web savy do.  Searched Google.  I came up with 3 affiliate sites I am content with for now, and some I may sign up to in the future.

First ClickBank.  At first I was confused as hell at what ClickBank was trying to do.  I was baffled by their website.  I was green and couldn’t fully grasp affiliate marketing yet.  Once I understood what I was doing and where to get it, I was un-impressed by the product offerings.  Just check out some of the sales pitch pages.  Some of this stuff is garbage (to you and I, maybe not to Mr. XYZ), and some of this stuff sells itself.  I even found things that I have been interested in buying in the past.

Next Commission Junction.  Commission Junction makes it kind of hard to get where you want to be.  To CJ you and I are Publishers.  We are publishing the ads and the adveritisers are the people who want their products sold.  Once you fill out an application for a publisher you are set.

I also signed up at Paydotcom.com.  This site is similar to ClickBank, and I have not used it much as of today.

There are tons of sites for affiliate marketing, Ebay has one (they rejected my application), LinkShare, LinkConnector, and alot more.  You can find a pretty solid list with reviews here http://www.affiliatetips.com/online-channels-affiliate-program.html, and several pages worth at http://www.affiliateseeking.com/netwo/23000002/1.html (I am not “affiliated” with these sites)

Next time — what do I do with all these ads?

I keep asking myself this same thing.  Now what do I do?  I have been in this game for all of 2 weeks so far, and can’t learn and read fast enough.  Well below I will document the continuation of my quest..

So I want to be an affilliate marketer.  Last time I told you I purchased some php scripts for content generation, set up a host at StartLogic.com, and was ready to get started. My next step was to start pointing my domain names in the right direction.  I own 45 domains in total.  A couple are dedicated to my other business startup, and some are just for personal / family use.  While I was at GoDaddy.com I went ahead and bought a few more names.  I have a pretty specific niche of names, and wanted to open my self up to a few more areas of the internet.  I mentioned in an earlier blog I am a repeat customer if service is good.  GoDaddy‘s names might cost a bit more than the cheapest places on the web, but the management utilities and other features are top notch.  I went ahead and pointed the name servers of the sites I wanted to utilize to StartLogic.

Now I have my domains, my hosting and some php scripts.  I began playing with the DomainZaar script package, initially I was impressed and happy with the default layout.  This package comes with Ad Sense ready to go, but seemed to be missing something.  I began tweaking the layout to suit my needs.  I added another ad, expanded a search box, added Google Ads for search, and just generally moved things around.  I prefer the way it looks now, but the real question is is the ad placement good?  I have no idea, that is on my list of things to research.

Next time – I need more ads…….

About 2 weeks ago (early December, 2008) I was surfing around the net, and stopped at Sedo to check my parked domains.  My account was up to a whopping $12.XX after 15 months on 40 domains.  I thought to myself, this is ridiculous, I can do better than this by myself.  So it began.  Did I begin the right way.  No, I didn’t do much research I just jumped and started treading water.  So if you follow me along my affiliate learning path (it may be rather rocky) maybe together we can make a few extra bucks.  I am not trying to make millions, just make some extra cash to pay off the bills.  If we find a way to get rich, well, so be it!

Before I detail how the first 2 weeks went some background on myself.  I am a 31 year old Mechanical Design Engineer.  I don’t necessarily like my job, but it is a semi-reliable paycheck.  After all I have to feed my wife and 2 (soon to be 3) kids and dog.  I am pretty technical, I have done web design in the past, and have some limited skills in HTML, PHP, and image manipulation.  Over the last year I have been starting up my own company focused on LED lighting and technology.  Unfortunately the stock market crash put a huge delay on my startup.  Only thing missing right now is capital.

Back to the affiliate marketing.  The first thing I did was look for a script that would compile as many pages as possible in the least amount of time.  After a minimal amount of searching I purchased DomainZaar for $99. DomainZaar is capable of setting up multiple domain names with different keywords on one hosting platform.  This was a great feature for me, as I own a lot of domains and did not want to host them all individually.  I will expand on this product later.

Now I needed a place to host my sites.  My business site is hosted at StartLogic and they have treated me well for several years now.  They support PHP , MySQL, and CGI, everything I needed for my application.  They also have services included that will do automatic installation of WordPress Blog software (what you are reading right now), and OSCommerce, a very effective (and free) e-commerce solution, and more.  When I signed up there was a special running for unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited storage for $5.95 per month, they also threw in $50.00 worth of Adwords credits.  Seems like a good deal to me, and I tend to be a loyal repeat customer when treated right.

Next episode we will discuss setting up accounts with Google Adsense, ClickBank, and Commission Junction.  Plus forwarding of GoDaddy domains.