Big things happening!

So its been a couple days since I last posted, but I have been super busy with online money making. I have been trying a variety of different things, none of which have really paid of yet, but iv learned a whole lot. I have also been reading the “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss, which is a fantastic read. It gives a front row seat to the life and mind of a successful entrepreneur. I would highly recommend buying this book, it will change your whole outlook on business and life!

Started with Microsoft AdCenter

This is something I have been avoiding up to this point. There is no real reason for it, Iv just been trying to focus my attention on mastering AdWords, which seems to be a life long process. I decided it was time to expand my horizons, so i signed up to AdCenter with a $100.00 click voucher. This would allow me to really practice PPC without loosing any money. Good deal.

The first thing I did with Microsoft AdCenter is copy over my Superbowl Campaign to see how it compared to Adwords. I made a bunch of changes to the landing page, which you can see here:

Vote for your team in Superbowl XLII.

Major changes to the landing page include adding some graphics above the fold, converting the page to PHP from HTML to track keywords and track the actual voting results (using MySQL), and added a pie chart using the Google Chart API to display the results to the voters. I also changed the offer banners from three horizontal leaderboards to two side by side square banners. We’ll see how it goes.

Changes in the PPC campaign were pretty big. I reduced my keyword list from around 25 to three. (Superbowl, Superbowl XLII, and Superbowl 42), which actually increased my quality a little bit, and hence gave me more impressions. Sometimes less is more! (This was on adwords)

My first impression of Microsoft AdCenter is a little divided. On one hand, the traffic converts very well compared to Adwords, however the volume of traffic is close to non-existent unless you bid like a rock star. I also noticed that AdCenter is extremely sleezy! They love to trick you into taking your money, here is why:

1. I signed up with a $100.00 voucher, and when I started getting clicks, they were charging my account anyway! I will have to call them and find out why I haven’t received my $100 voucher yet.

2. They have something called “incremental bids”. Maybe I was just to retarded to understand it, or I was not paying close enough attention, but they really screwed me over here. Incremental bids work like this: You set your ordinary bid for the search and content network, but you can bid up to 100% more (2X) based on demographic. For example, in my superbowl campaign I might want to spend twice as much for males between 18 and 50 than i want to spend on 50+ year old females. Its great that AdCenter allows you to do this, but It would be nice if they could explain it a little better. When I first saw this, I was convinced that when I was bidding 100% on 18 year old males, I was bidding 100% of my standard bid, and not 100% MORE than my standard bid. This really made me loose big time.

Once I figured out that I was bidding twice as much as I originally thought, I quickly disabled the incremental bid option, which in turn quickly brought my impressions to zero…literally. Bummer.

This was a bummer because had I been bidding what I thought I was bidding, I would have actually made some PPC money! Unfortunately, most advertising costs far outweighed my conversions, and I was back in the red. Let this be a lesson to you.

Out of these 40 clicks, I got around 9 conversions at an average of an dollar each. Thats a 17.5% conversion rate, not to shabby!

Another pet peve I have with AdCenter is that it is a pain in the ass to use. Its slow, and half the time the pages time out and I have to redo everything Iv done already. I found that this was only an issue with Firefox. I switched over to IE as an experiment, and everything ran smoothly. I wouldn’t doubt that Microsoft does this on purpose.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Since I was starting with AdCenter, I figured I might as well start with Yahoo Search Marketing, which I also had a $100.00 voucher for. I really don’t have any statistics to measure the performance of Yahoo, but I do like their interface a lot better than AdCenter.

The downside is that I have had the same superbowl campaign running for over 24 hours and I haven’t got a single impression, never mind a click. I’m not sure why, but I’m going to let it run for a few more days before I make any real judgments.

Other stuff in the works

I’ve decided that this “find a campaign, throw some keywords together with a direct link and hope for the best” thing is getting old, so its time to take some real decisions. My new approach is to take approach PPC from a high level Niche standpoint, and drill it down from there. For example, im starting with “online dating”. Today I registered Online Dating services (little SEO link building going on right there), which I plan on promoting the 40+ Dating offers available on NeverBlueAds. I am going to spend the next month or so developing blog content, and getting it indexed naturally before I create my first PPC campaign. This is going to be a real deal, hardcore campaign. I plan on making targeting posts about Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Interracial Dating, etc etc. We’ll see how this works!

More on that tomorrow, I have to get to bed so I can start School again at 8:00am!