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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.

589-org

 

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 , , ,

Patience with Affiliate Marketing

January 26, 2009 By Jeff 6 Comments
I'm a TigerI have been dabbling in Affiliate Marketing for about 6 months now, however it has really been sporatic until recently.  One of my New Year’s resolutions was to increase my personal income dramatically by mid-year.  I believed that the best way to do this with long term thoughts was to increase my exposure with affiliate marketing.

So starting January 1, I made my self more involved with the Ebay Partner Network and started researching niches that I have some knowledge in on Tearpeak.  With this information in hand I started building Wordpress blogs with a few articles and a lot of Ebay ads using PHP-Pro.  I decided to use PHPBay-Pro versus BANS (Build a Niche Store) because of all of the headaches that a few friends of mine were having getting delisted from Google faster and faster.

Here are the steps that I have been taking to get my sites online and making money:

  1. Find a broad niche with Terapeak
  2. Use the Google Adwords Tool to find the “diamonds in the rough” and Terapeak to match what people are looking for and selling
  3. Buy an .info domain for cheap
  4. Outsource a minimum of 5 articles that are related to the niche.
  5. Build a store with a lot of different items that are related to the niche.
  6. Pick one item that has lots of cheap, relevant keywords and popularity on Terapeak, and write a short article with Ebay Ads embeded.
  7. Develop an Adwords campaign to drive traffic
  8. Profit!

That was the plan going in, and that is still the plan in broad strokes, however I am having HUGE problems with that last step.  I am not making any profit at the moment, currently my ROI is very poor, negative poor.  My mutual funds are doing better.  Now I am not losing a lot of money since I am only spending very little and still am testing the waters, but that doesn’t make it feel any better.  I expected by now to be at least coming close to breaking even.

How am I going to fix it?

Right now I am taking a step back to analyze where I am at.  I am not sure what I have to change, or what I have to tweak to bring in the people that want to buy what I am selling, but I have to figure it out before the end of February.  That is the date that I have given myself to show a profit or jump ship.  I do have patience, and I know that I am late getting into the game, but I need to be making money and not losing it to reach my goals.  I could be freelancing my various skills, but I feel that I am better served finding revenue streams that will have longer term gains when I stop putting the same level of effort into them.

I will update everyone at the beginning of Feb with a spreadsheet of my endeavours.

Filed Under Making Money, Marketing Tagged With , , ,

2009 is going to be exciting

January 7, 2009 By Jeff Leave a Comment

I have some goals for 2009 that I am going to reach.

500 Posts

The first one is to achieve 500 posts on this blog.  Bluenoser.net has been online for years, but I have only around 300 posts and some of those are useless ones that I put up at the beginning just to have content.

MORE PROFIT

In 2009 I have a goal to quadruple my online profits.  This is not an overly ambitious goal, and I think that by the end of January I will be making it a TEN fold increase.  Tim of 4HWW and some of has followers have said that making high goals actually increases your likely hood for success.

More Time

I am in 2009 going to increase my productivity to the point that I can spend more time doing what I want to be doing.  That includes travelling and reading.  This is the first year that I have read less than 10 GOOD books in a year.  I miss reading and increasing my knowledge.

Professional Equity

Along with my various online endeavours I am going to start working on building “professional equity”.  I am not sure if this term has been coined before, if not here is my definition.  Anything that increases your worth to your profession and company which in turn increases the demand in your services.  I have started doing this by achieving my LEED AP designation, and in the first of the year I will be gaining my P.Eng (once I finish my diaries).  There are two more on my list one is to get my FE in April and follow with my PE in Maryland, or another state in the US.

The other BIG thing is staying tight to my chest, but hear is a hint,  it is going to be a teaching program for a tight niche in my industry that I have expertise in, and believe that there is a lack of information available to fellow engineers and industry in general.  I hope for this to be my muse(read 4HWW if you don’t know what this is)

Filed Under Blogging, Marketing, Me Rambling Tagged With , ,
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