Ass Out Cash

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

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