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Where have you been?

October 29, 2009 By Jeff Leave a Comment

Well I guess I am not much of a blogger, so I think I will start calling this my, “place where I try to organize my thoughts”.

I have tried using twitter to do this, but I have found that most of the time I can’t clear my head of what I  am trying to get out in 140 character increments.

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The Scene

Let me set the scene for you, my reader, for where I am at and what I am doing.  As you can probably recall from previous posts, I seem to spend some time every couple of months re-grouping.  Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, the problem is that typically I have a good run then something major happens and I never reached that critical mass.

The latest event that has really hurt is the change that ebay made to their payment scheme.  They have gone from a percentage model to a CPC model.  Basically they are going to pay you per click what they feel your clicks are worth. 

I have read a lot of talk of marketers getting hit hard by this, but they also mention that they were making the majority of their income from ACRUs.  I on the other hand had been making almost all of my income from sales.  The difference was that you get paid a set amount for every new member that you get to sign up to Ebay, the other is that you get a percentage of the fees that are generated when someone that you send to the site makes a purchase.  This was my bread and butter, and because of this I foolishly thought that I would get a decent EPC for the traffic that I was sending.

However that was not the case.  From about February till September my effective EPC was about $0.45, now it is $0.15 and lower if someone happens to come to my site, click an ad not like what they see, hit back and then click another.

 

Where Now?

Needless to say this was one in a line of huge hiccups in my trek. I haven’t given up however, I am flaying around a bit at the moment, but I am starting to dabble in some direct linking with some promising affiliate offers.  If any of them are a hit I will then build a site around it and get serious.  My plan is to go after a bunch, if I spend $50 and not get anywhere I move on, if I see promise I will tweak and let it go for another $100.  From there is when I make the decision whether or not to go for the site.

I will let you know how it goes.

Filed Under Making Money, Marketing, Me Rambling Tagged With , , ,

Regrouping After a Bad Month

May 24, 2009 By Jeff 1 Comment

It has been a long time since I updated this site, and for the readers that I have left…Sorry.

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Where to Start?

The long and the short of it is that I have been working hard on my Ebay sites and developing a network of sites for the past 3 months  I am building the sites within the same overall horizontal niche so that I can easily interlink them.  This allowed me to develop a following on one site and gain visitors to a new site by “Guest Blogging”.

That was going great until something on the Ebay end changed at the start of this month.  The month of April was amazing for me, I had an ROI of over 300% with no one site earning a huge majority.  I felt that was great news and I continued to plug away.  Then something happened, my ROI dropped hugely at the start of May with my earning no Ebay commissions for the first 4 days while changing nothing on the traffic generation end.  In other words something over at EPN (Ebay Partners Network) changed.  It got to the point that yesterday I turned off all of my PPC Campaigns to my EPN sites to re-group.  I was losing money in buckets and at this rate I would have lost all of the gains that I made last month.

 

Regrouping

Today I started the re-grouping.  Last week I started a WordpressMU site on a domain that I had been hanging onto for a long time.  With this I plan on starting my own little blogging network, with my own sites, that I will be able to drive traffic to using different types of offers.  At the core it will be a review site with me reviewing a different niche on every sub-domain.  I will be sure to review everything that I have an affiliate account with, and the ones that I don’t I will review only if there is not enough competition.

I have also started dabbling in ZIP offers from AzoogleAds and have been promoting them on Facebook.  I haven’t had much luck there yet since FacebookAds seem to like not approving the ads.  I have even tried re-writing ads for offers that are very similar to what I have researched as already accepted and still no luck.  The fact that they take so long to review the ads is not helping.

 

Blogging

I am also starting to do more writing and after following ProBlogger.net’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog I have a lot of good ideas.  I have already started on some of them and will be doing the entire series on this blog in the next month.

I feel that this is the site that has the most potential and I will be spending more time developing articles that will help you not make the same mistakes that I am, and hopefully there will be nuggets of information that will help you be more successful with what ever you are doing.

One of the things that am going to start doing is reviews of particular tools and Wordpress Plugins that I use when I develop a site.  Some of these cost money and some are free, but all are very useful.  I will also start updating on what Networks I am using for my PPC Campaigns and Affiliate Marketing.

Filed Under Making Money, Me Rambling Tagged With , , , , ,

Save Money with Online Meetings

April 28, 2009 By Jeff Leave a Comment

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There has been a lot of talk lately about how this current downturn that the worldwide economy is in is not going to be going anywhere in the near term.  The Western big business philosophy is to recoil and wait for people to start buying again.  The Eastern and entrepreneur philosophy is that this is the time to buy good business cheap and manoeuvre yourself into an incredibly profitable position.

Online Meeting Software

One of the methods that I have been using lately to limit my travel both for personal work and with my day-job is running online meetings using Go-To-Meeting.  I chose Go-To-Meeting by default since it was the program that the company that I work for was using.  I got to play with the software before getting it myself to use for my own meetings, it isn’t that my side projects are to the point that I do a lot of travel meetings, none actually, but it did add a very advanced communications channel.

I don’t just use the software because it is what I started with, but don’t take my word for it there is a decent go-to-meeting review here. One of the tools that I have used a lot when working with designers is the ability to take over the others mouse and keyboard to better explain what I am looking for.  This is almost impossible to do over the phone, and it is very slow when you try it by email.  Using a messenger service is faster, but it is still much slower than using GoToMeeting.

Try out GoToMeeting for 30 days free and if you click here you will also get $10 off when you order. 

You have to CLICK HERE, to be sure that you don’t miss out.


Filed Under Blogging, Making Money, Reviews Tagged With , ,
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