Jon Leger sent me another exciting email with tips on how to earn my dollar a day ( or a buck a night ).
He sent some horrible, horrible untargeted traffic to a landing page and made over an 8.85% conversion rate. He made over 300 dollars from this one idea. The program is easy to convert and very popular. Want to know more? Check out this link!
He’s selling the idea for one dollar. I spend more than that on coffee, even if I don’t go to Starbucks!
The “Adsense Deluxe” Plugin doesn’t have to be just adsense.
You can use it to substitute other ads in ( or probably whatever; an image, a header, whatever ) into your text. So I’m currently using it on Tila Tequila Fan Site to present an allposters ad. Because in the template I’m using, other sites on that domain are also using the same one; so I can just swap in different all posters ads for different fan sites.
Seven day earnings have dipped a little; a few days in a row, I made absolutely no money. However, I’ve applied to a new affiliate program and have started up two new websites that are aimed at making some good money.
First, I’ve got some blogs going on over at Portal Lane, which is a domain I originally purchased thinking I would write a portal framework but I’m actually using a multi-user wordpress installation. Second, I have a more active hand in the blog happening at justiceleagueamericamovie.com, which is a love of mine ( superhero movies, even the bad ones like the Hulk ). Third, I got roped into buying “your shitty site.com” which will be an aff site for … website tips. So we’re hanging in there and moving along.
I scrapped the Ebay RSS site for a couple of reasons.
First and foremost, I’ve been uncomfortable with just taking the ebay output and sticking it onto the blog. Secondly, it just wasn’t earning enough money. And third, it’s kind of “black hattish,” and I don’t want to threaten my adsense account.
So it’s down, and I’ll come up with something else. On the plus side, I’ve learned that the subdomain is considered as important as the main domain name in the search engines.
I made forty cents at commission junction ( my first ever commission junction commission, I might add ) and managed to hit over sixty cents in adsense!
I’m jazzed. One night, One buck.
Ok, now my new goal is Ten Dollars in Seven Days. I’m on track, more or less, for that, because I have just over five dollars in the last seven days on Adsense. So I’ll need to keep that momentum and also double it somehow. Awesome.
Here’s some simple math to help you determine how much you should cap the payment for links.
First, you’ll need to just let your campaign run for a few days to determine a conversion factor. Conversion factors depend on a lot of things, and are beyond the scope of this post. But for this math, you just need to know “100 people came to my site and 3 people bought my product.” That’s a three percent conversion. Just take the number of people that bought, divide by the number of people who came, and multiply by 100. So if 75 people come through and 25 people bought it, ( 25/75 )x100 = about 33 percent conversion (that’s excellent, most average around 4 to 8, more or less.
This means that if your adwords CPC says you’ll be paying $1.00 per click, divide 100 by the amount you’ll be made per sale. That’s the conversion rate you;ll need to aim at. 100/25=4, great! 100/4=25; you’ll need an amazing conversion rate.
So let’s say 4 people bought your affiliate’s product. For each sale, you earn 12 dollars. You can think that you had 48 dollars worth of income for 100 people ( 4×12). On the other hand, you’ll want to check your CPC (cost per click). If your CPC is $0.23, then those 100 people cost you $23. 48-23=25; you’re 25 in the black. Great! If your CPC is $1.02, that $48 bucks cost $102; you;re 54 bucks in the red. Too bad. Try again; you need to either get your conversion rates up or your CPC down. Unless you like losing money.
So basically, your conversion percentage multiplied by your income per sale needs to be more than the cost for 100 clicks. I find it easier to consider without that pesky decimal place, so I just do the math in pennies.
We have a couple of affiliate sites that are also not making any money. A buck a night? Never seen one. Looking at the sites, they both have zero pagerank on all the pages. And if I try to pay for some link loving through google adwords, then the links come in at about a dollar apiece.
Obviously the quality score isn’t good enough.
Something will trigger though, something will happen. I’m sure of it. I think I need to work on the “landing pages” – the pages that encourage the reader to go buy the affiliate product, and I need to cloak the links somehow. We’ll get the QS up there.
I also paid someone for 100 links per site; that’ll get me a little more traffic / pagerank. More than one would be nice. Not paying for the links directly but paying for 100 directory submissions, which should be worth something.
Maybe I misunderstood something. I’ve gone back through the blackhole seo stuff (below) and I think I’m getting a better idea for it. I’m using my 1and1 account, which is a throwaway account, for this creation.
Instead of using the weblogs.com shortChanges.xml file, I’m trying a search on a blog aggregator ( uh, like google blog search, but that’s not the one I’m using ) in order to get the titles.
Apparently titles are not copyrighted but the post bodies are. How convenient.
Taking those, inserting the titles and the keywords I used to generate the list into a database table (titles; basically one column for id, one column for title, one column for keywords). This script is running about every half hour and is getting one or two new titles an hour. I guess it’s a small niche.
I wrote a new rss output file that takes those titles and makes an rss feed that has just the followed by the
( my site ) followed by the description. It’s kind of half-assed at the moment, really ugly.
When that rss output file is run it pings pingomatic.com with the file info.
Don’t know how well it’ll do but we’ll see.
Also signed up at wickedfire for an account to peruse their forums.
Tried writing ad copy for a page here that would push some ebook thing but got discouraged because why would I encourage you to read ebooks when I don’t spend my hard earned money on them. Maybe someday when I’m rich.
The Collectible Figurines rss blog has been alive for about a week and I’m (say it with me) still buckless. I’ve reworked it to cover “Department 56 collectibles, which is a subset that I’ve actually seen and might recognise in the store. So we’re not yet giving up on it. And we’re working on scavenging up some keyword realestate, and generating some links.
This part is rough though and I’m trying to figure out a way I can, if not automate it (my preference) or just do it with my brain turned off; some dumb list… myspace, et cetera.
Over the past two days I’ve made a few fundemental changes to the back-end processing of the Collectible Figurines site. First, I slashed the number of feeds I’m syndicating from approximately 25 to three. I’ve axed all the “sub keywords” and am just focusing on “collectible figurines.”
I’m running a version of wordpress (2.4-bleeding) that may be incompatible with feedwordpress. So I’m trying to figure out what the issue there is; I’m getting “empty queries” when updating the tables.
And I blush when I say this, but I had the perma-links for each of the syndicated posts to go to the valuedfigurine site, but that doesn’t result in any ebay sales. So I went back and changed that so I “might” actually forward searchers on to ebay, and make my dollar a night.
