Week In Review – August 17-23

Welcome to the 2nd edition of my weekly review posts. I started this series to basically give an overview of what is going on with my experiences in affiliate marketing throughout the week. I hope to be able to look back on these posts one day and see how far I have come. This week has been somewhat interesting as I have once again begun to take a different path.

No More FaceBook Advertising

Yep it’s true! Well somewhat, I haven’t fully stopped advertising on FaceBook but because of the new direction I am headed I am actually using it to promote one of my own sites. So why did I stop with everything else? It just wasn’t working for me. I was losing money even though I was getting clicks and although it isn’t a whole lot of money, I can better utilize the money in my current endeavor rather then waste it.

On August 20th I received a disturbing email from MarketLeverage……

Jarret,

This offer is being discontinued by MarketLeverage.  Please stop all
traffic to this offer.
Residuals will continue to track through midnight, Friday, August 22nd,
EDT.

Login to your account today to check out our other high converting offers.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact your affiliate
manager.

Damnit! Well that definitely was one of the reasons as to why I decided to quit advertising. The offer that was discontinued was the one that I was really doing good with. Ok I was still losing money with it, but I was in the process of making money from it. I got in contact with my affiliate manager and asked whats up. She said that the advertiser had made the decision to pull the offer…..oh well.

In total I ended up spending close to almost $40 on FaceBook and have made about $8 from it. I didn’t expect to make money within the first couple of weeks but with the new path I have taken, my money needs to be put elsewhere. I may end up later on trying out FaceBook advertising again in the future.

A New Direction

I’ve had a domain name that has been sitting around for close to 9 months now just collecting dust. I had purchased the domain name because I had plans to turn it into a web hosting review site but at the time I just didn’t have the dedication to keep going with it. But now that things are going well for me I have decided to revamp the site with a new layout and really start busting my ass to get it setup. I have a really great domain name for it making it easy to market and should provide some nice keyword rich anchor text links once I start promoting it.

I am still working on the site, adding some new content, adding new web hosts and just yesterday I wrote up my first article for EZineArticles.com. So I am now waiting for that to get approved and hopefully people will find it and use it. I need to get some backlinks to the site as of right now the only links I have pointing to it are forum signature links. I have been using Google Alerts to find other posts and such about people’s experiences with the web hosts I have listed on my site and contacting them and asking if they would like to leave a review. I have gotten a few bites but not a whole lot.

I have been looking into an email auto responder as well to setup a mailing list for the site. Building up an email list would be a great way to let people know of new hosts that I add to the site or a new web hosting coupon that I may have found. Hopefully they will decide to purchase through one of my links and I could make a sale. The web hosting market is extremely saturated because of the huge payouts that web hosts pay but I think I stand a chance. My site is basing web hosts off of what real web hosting customers think of the web host, not whatever web host pays me the highest commission. Which nowadays is how many “web hosting review” sites operate.

Social Networking Is A Joke

I am a very quiet person by nature so being social and meeting new people is just not my thing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind talking to people, but I am never usually the one to start the conversation. To be honest, unless you are making huge amounts of money, social networking won’t do you much good. Recently Garry Conn has decided to give up on it. He wrote a great post titled, Social Networks Steal Your Search Engine Traffic and I have to say that I really enjoyed reading his post. I agree 100% with him and can see the truth in every single fact that he pointed out.

Social networking has done nothing for him other then waste his time and crash his servers. When his servers crash, his sites crash and when they go down he loses money, which is bad. I am going to have to agree with Garry and give up on all forms of social networking.

What is this blog’s future?

Nothing has changed with the blog or my plans with it. I will still continue to post my experience in affiliate marketing whether it is positive or negative. At the same time I will continue to write up posts about things that I find interesting or make your life a little bit easier to keep in order. I would eventually hope that people find my blog through the search engines or by word of mouth and find some of my postings helpful. I don’t plan to promote this blog as a make money online blog because there are too many of those and they all talk about the same bullshit topics. The only things that are different are the order of the words, the basics of their posts are the same thing every other MMO blog is talking about.

Garry Conn recently decided to pay $5 to have a banner up on my blog. To be honest I feel bad about it because I am obviously not sending him any traffic, but I know that he purchased the banner to help me out. A big shout out goes to Garry for his generosity and I really appreciate him trying to help me out. You may have noticed that I have linked to a few of his posts and talked about him. These are all unsolicited and Garry doesn’t even know about it, he has helped me and given me some great tips so far so I have to return the favor somehow. If anything, he gets some link love from my blog and while my blog is nothing special, every little bit counts.