5 Bucks a Day

I participated in a very interesting discussion today on the forum about the importance of CTR (click through rate) on AdWords campaigns.

A member had a very high CTR and was happy about that, because it meant Google gave him a better quality score, and possibly lower bids to earn a high position. But he wasn’t getting any sales.

He was doing one of my favorite techniques, which is campaign blasting, which teaches to quickly launch campaigns with the goal to determine winners and losers. After a predefined amount of time or clicks, an assessment is made as to which category the campaign fits into. If it’s determined to be a loser, it’s axed, if it’s a winner, it continues and/or is expanded to more keywords, more landing pages, etc.

My thought was that if the person was getting a good CTR, and a lot of clicks, but no sales, the visitors were interested in the topic, but maybe not targeted to the landing page itself. In other words, once they got there, they weren’t interested, so they clicked away without buying. And maybe he should put wording in his ad to scare away some visitors (like prices), or at least have negative keywords so that people looking for something the landing page didn’t cater to wouldn’t see his ad.

The person said he wasn’t worried about wasting his money on clicks because they were fairly cheap, all he wanted to do was find out whether the niche was a winner or loser.

Ah, therein lies the problem. He thought he wasn’t wasting a lot of money because after he spent 20 or 30 dollars, if he had no sales, he’d delete the campaign, and that’s all he would lose.

Or would he, I asked?

Suppose he really had stumbled onto a good niche that had the possibility of making a lot of profit. And suppose that if he targeted his ad better, perhaps even to the point where if his CTR was relatively bad, the ones who clicked through were in buying mode. Let’s say that he only got a 1% CTR, but out of maybe 300 clicks he got 3 or 4 or more sales.

And suppose, doing it the way he was doing it, he had a 10% CTR, but out of 300 clicks he got no sales. Which is very possible because 9 out of 10 of the clickers should have been excluded anyway, as they had no interest in what they found.

In the 2nd scenario, he would determine the niche to be a loser after buying 300 clicks. In the first scenario, he would have found a winner.

And that campaign would have profited him, potentially for month after month, year after year.

See how important it is to do it right? If you aren’t going to give a campaign blast your best shot, don’t bother doing it at all. That’s one reason why my friend Matt Levenhagen’s Campaign Blast Guide is one of the most important books you can have in your library if you’re going to spend money on AdWords. It’s the difference between investing and wasting, it really is.

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I thought you’d be interested in this post from the Google AdWords blog:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/10/common-misconception-revisited.html

It used to drive me nuts when I used to think that if there were fewer than 8 ads showing for a search phrase, that it was clear sailing. I’d build a page of good quality (in my opinion) content, upload it to my server, write an ad, bid 5 cents, and launch my ad.

Sure enough I’d be in first or second position. Then after a while my ad would be disabled and Google would be asking for 10 cents. Why? The page wasn’t filled. Didn’t they want to fill it?

I was remembering back to the good old days when minimum bids were .05 and if there weren’t 8 ads on a page, all the bidders were paying the same (I think). Then Google changed things, implemented the quality score, and actually allowed bids lower than .05 for advertisers that had super excellent (not an official nomenclature, by the way) quality scores.

The minimum bid suddenly did not correspond to how many bidders there were, it had everything to do with the quality score. And some keywords were more expensive to bid on than others, regardless of the quality score. Or so it seemed.

It made sense. If I could make $100 for every click that was sent to my site, obviously that must be a valuable keyword, and the ad space valuable real estate, why shouldn’t Google make more also?

But it took me a while to figure that out. Today Google explains it very well in their blog for all to learn in 2 minutes what it took me weeks of trial and error and pulling out hair to determine why I couldn’t get 5 cent bids if there were only 2 bidders.

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I just finished reading a very interesting new eBook yesterday. It was actually written by a gentlemen from the UK named Latif that had purchased my “5 Bucks a Day” eBook in 2006, and he said it did give him some inspiration, so I’m happy about that.

The name of the book is Google Snatch. It’s a very comprehensive discussion of how to obtain free clicks to your web sites. Rather than pay several dollars per AdWords click in very competitive markets, Latif has figured out how to get visitors for free, going head to head with large corporations for high value keyword phrases.

Some of the book is about basic site structure, some is about writing unique content, some is pure theory and motivation, but the best part is a blueprint as to how you can put together your sites to give your visitors what they’re searching for, and of course at the same time keeping Google, MSN, and Yahoo happy, since what they want is for their searchers to find what they’re looking for.

Google Snatch was just recently released, but even so it’s at the top of the Clickbank Marketplace in rankings. I think that has a lot to do with the latest “slap”, webmasters are trying to find ways to make their sites conform to the increasingly challenging quality guidelines.

So, Latif, perhaps coincidentally, has released his report at the perfect time. I highly recommend it. It’s a solid 125 pages, with over 100 being pure meat and potatoes, the back 20 is a comprehensive list of article and site directories to help you get your sites listed in the various search engines and article directories. This is a very complete guide, and I like the step by step approach Latif follows.

Get it here: ==> Google Snatch

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I wrote in 5 Bucks a Day about my first successful campaign that I was using to test out the strategy. I give details about exactly what I did back then (mid November 2005 through late December 2006) to clear $38,000 profit in around 6 weeks.

Neat as that was, I did better than that last holiday season.

And in both years I could have done much, much better if I had been a bit brighter about it. This year, hopefully I’ll take my own hint, but being a perpetual procrastinator makes it tough.

You see, the last 2 years, I’ve identified niches that were tailor made for profits, niches that I would have a hard time losing with, and bought traffic from Google AdWords.

If I would have identified those niches about 6 to 8 weeks earlier, then I could have done things to get to the top of the search engines for important keywords, and gotten free traffic in addition to the traffic I paid for. By doing so, I could have probably at least tripled my profits.

It would have been extra work, but doesn’t it seem like it would be worth it? Even to pay a SEO expert to do the work for me (it would have to be someone I really trust, though, because in that kind of do or die atmosphere, if the “expert” would fail, or worse yet, if he would steal my niche ideas by blabbing to friends, it would have been a disaster).

Anyway, now is about the time (maybe even a week or two past the time) when you need to identify those holiday niches, put up your pages, and find ways to get traffic coming to them. If you can get free traffic early you can determine how much each visitor to your site is worth, and thereby determine how much you can afford to pay to buy more visitors. Or you can just take the free traffic.

Personally, I keep saying, and I’ll say it once more, I’m not greedy. If I can get $10 bills for free, that’s cool. But if I can buy them for $6 each, I have no problem doing that as well.

Don’t procrastinate any longer, get your holiday sites ready NOW.

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Try to say that 5 times quickly …

During past quality score purges, advertisers have often speculated about what Google is looking for in assigning a good or bad quality score.  Many guessed, nobody knew for sure.

Now there has been some written clarification on the subject, which is good reading and can be found on Google’s blog post here:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2007/09/websites-that-may-merit-low-landing.html

Some guesses were pretty much on the money, other sites which are considered low quality by the algorithm are news to me.

Then again, I don’t try to speculate or stress out about what I can “get away with” all that much.  On my sites that I advertise with AdWords for, I try to give good visitor value.  In fact, just the other day, one of my sites was having a problem accessing the eBay API, and people were calling me and emailing me wondering what was going on because they had bookmarked the site and missed the ability to access data in the type of organizational manner that we provide.

Does Google thing my sites are “quality”?  I don’t know, they don’t fall into the types of sites that are listed as low quality, in my opinion.  All I know and all I care about is that my visitors give me excellent feedback, that’s good enough for me.

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When I first set up Earn1KaDay.com which is a membership site which helps Internet marketers increase their income, the first business model I concentrated on was what I call Mini Money Sites.

With the MMS approach, we build small clusters of pages for a specific small niche using special software and a framework which the members have access to, and typically set up a site to drive traffic to eBay using affiliate links.

There’s more to it than that, but it’s an easy thing to do once you have the tools and go through the videos inside the site.

When I was getting ready to shoot the videos, I asked the members for a suggested niche, and I suggested 8 or 10 possibilities. The one that was voted on was a guitars site.

As part of shooting the videos, I actually did all the steps that I teach, and even though the site didn’t do all that well in the beginning I’ve been tweaking it a little here and there to see if I could get it to make some money.

Normally on a site like this if it loses money in the beginning I just ditch it, but I had some pride invested in this one because it was so public, so I kept it running.

The software we provide uses cookie cutter methods to build the site, but I tell my students to do things like replace generic parts with unique articles, maybe add a blog to drive traffic, that kind of thing, to make it a real site. Nothing that will take a lot of time, and in fact I suggest they spend very little time on a site like this until it proves to be a “winner”.

One thing I did with the sample guitars site was have some articles written and plugged them in. Time to do this for me was maybe half an hour since I had them written for me, at a cost of around $100.

Last night I took a closer look at the profits from this site, and so far in August, through the 18th, I had a profit of $46.00. Not a lot, but so far I’ve gotten most of my traffic by paying for it with AdWords. So, for an investment of $59, I made a profit of $46, even Warren Buffett would be impressed.

What I could do now is start doing things to get free traffic. I could use some of the articles I bought and submit them to article directories. I could, like I mentioned above, set up a blog and write some content that way, and using the standard built in pinging ability of WordPress, get some traffic that way. I could put up a lens or two on Squidoo about the topic.

All these things would take time, but would have long term positive effects for my site.

The other thing I could do soon, if the income continues, is sell the site. Actually it’s a bit early to do that, because the income has been increasing. In July I only made $30, so far in August I’ve made $46 in 18 days, so maybe we’ll double July’s profits. Ideally I’d like to get the profits up to around $150 for the month.

At that point I would have a decision to make. Should I invest more time to keep the profits increasing? Or should I sell the site?

Selling sites, or “site flipping” is another business model we talk about at Earn1KaDay.com Typically an income producing site will sell for 6 to 10 times monthly income, but if the income is increasing at a good clip, you’ll get on the high end or more for it.

So, if income goes from $30 to $60 to $100 to $150 to $200 over the period of 5 months, you have a pretty attractive site to offer. That kind of history could easily get you $2000 to $2500 cash.

Would you sell a site with increasing income like that? Many would. It took me a couple hours to build the site. And an hour or so to add the articles that I bought, I did have the $100 investment in the articles. And to get it from where it is now to where it’s earning $200 a month might take a few more hours of submitting articles to directories, and maybe a few more hours to set up a blog and write some posts.

But that’s all it would take. Let’s say at the most I would spend 20 hours in developing and tweaking the site. With that, an investment of $100 turns into maybe $2000.

If you can build 2 or 3 sites like this a week, you can start building a nice asset base. I mentioned yesterday that one of our members built 20 of these sites in a week. That was just the initial building, he would need to spend more time tweaking them if his goal was to resell, but that shows what can be done.

If you know how, and if you have the tools, and if you have the motivation.

It is so easy to make money through Internet marketing, it can make your head spin.

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Google is giving the ability for most U.S. AdWords advertisers to have ads shown in many major newspapers, as this Google Print Ads announcement indicates.

Several years ago I bought the hype on the late night infomercials where Don Lapre sold his system to place “tiny little ads” in thousands of newspapers nationwide, each one making tiny little profits adding up to big bucks.

I bought the program but never did anything with it.  It sounded good when you were staring at late night TV half asleep, but it ended up being too much work to implement in the light of day.

This one seems like it’s very doable, I think I’ll give it a try.

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