Where have I been?

Ok, so I haven’t posted much of anything of value on here recently. Been busy working on a PPC campaign that I have setup in Yahoo!. On a good note, I actually made my first sale ever online on July 1st! Like most with their first sale I was very excited and have been eagerly awaiting another sale to pop up the past 2 days.

However, nothing has shown up just yet. I recently redid my campaign and even though I don’t have near the amount of impressions that I had on the old one, I am already outperforming the old campaign in terms of clicks. I think I am going to work on tweaking the ad text just a bit or adding another ad set into the group to get a broader range of data to work with. And once I hopefully find something that works I can really start to hammer down on that produce some profit.

I know that to be successful in affiliate marketing you need to test and then re-test and then test again and again. Typically there is always something that you could do to milk that last penny out of your campaign. I have all my keyword tracking setup and have setup dynamic keyword insertion in my landing pages. I have one main keyword that is getting most of the impressions in my campaign, however I haven’t had much of anything in terms of visitor interest in actually purchasing the product.

So I think I am going to be looking at either totally re-doing my current landing page or making a new one and split testing them to find out which works better. Or maybe I am just getting too far ahead of myself considering I have not received that many clicks, although my hopes would have been that I would have made at least one sale. Still, I will definitely be working on another landing page to split test in the hopes of finding the right combination. The thought has crossed my mind that maybe I am in the wrong niche and that people that click through aren’t really interested in buying anything. Though I highly doubt that as I have a friend who has a similar site up and running and he makes a good amount of money on it.

Which leads me to believe that there is a good amount of money to be made in the niche that I am promoting.

I am currently using RegNow as the affiliate company, although I have been seriously considering finding another company to work with. They don’t have the greatest setup at all, plus when people order the product, they add on an “Extended Service Download” automatically without asking to add it. Which I think might be a big turnoff to potential buyers as they are given something they did not ask for, did not want, nor did they know that the product would be automatically added to their cart. I also tried setting up a custom order form with RegNow to be displayed on my site in the hopes of a better conversion rate, however, after following the exact instructions, the form was not showing up on my site. The default order form isn’t that bad but I think people would be a lot more confident if they were not taken to another domain to buy the product.

I emailed RegNow about the problem with the order form earlier today although I have not heard back from them. I received an auto-responder email that due to the upcoming holiday, things might take longer then normal, go figure. I may just end up framing the order page somehow onto my site if RegNow can’t come through in the email. Even still, if nothing can be done, I will be looking at a different affiliate company as I would really like to have complete control over the order form to make it match my site exactly.

I acquired $33.98 from my first sale, which isn’t a whole lot of money, but it is a lot better then $1.50 from an email/zip submit. Hopefully, whoever bought the product doesn’t decide to return it. I should be breaking about even with the $33.98 meaning I haven’t really lost a whole lot if anything but I haven’t necessarily made a huge profit. Which is fine with me, I would rather break even then be behind. Though I have read in other blogs that it is ok to be slightly behind in the first month or so as you are still figuring out things that work and what doesnt.

Ok, so as far as PPC goes, that is what has been happening for about the past week and a half. As far as my blog goes, well I recently got the new theme done. I like it, duh, considering I designed it ;) The only problems I had with it are that it is messed up in IE6 and a small problem in Opera; not too worried about Opera as that browser has a very small percentage of users anyways. IE6 could pose a problem, although if you are using it, you should probably upgrade to IE7 as you are exposing yourself to a lot of exploits and hacks that IE7 has fixes for.

I have gone around and updated all my profiles in the social networks listed in the sidebar on my blog. So if you want to see what I am up to on the net, add me as a friend!

What is the blog’s future? I have big plans for this blog. I am going to use it to document my adventures in affiliate marketing and to really work on helping others with problems and solutions. A lot of the make money online/affiliate blogs have some good content on them, but they seem to fall short in catering to the new affiliate and assume that you have a lot of money to spend.

I have a few ideas floating around in my head such as writing an e-book relating to either blogging/web design/affiliate marketing to build up some authority with my blog. Also, something to do with landing pages and giving them away maybe once a week or more. I was thinking of contacting some of my affiliate managers on the networks that I am on, finding out some good performing offers and design landing pages for that. Of course, it wouldn’t be much use if I just gave away one landing page that didn’t work well so I plan to include at least 2 in the giveaway, maybe more depending on how my schedule permits.

Ok, I could keep going on and on about things, but this post is quite long already and I should save up some content/ideas for future posts ;) If you have any questions or any ideas for me, be sure to either contact me or leave me a message in the comments.

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