January 2008
You are currently browsing the articles from A Buck A Night written in the month of January 2008.
Saturday morning I woke and realized I had three long days stretched out before me, with no direct work plan. I decided that I’d get off my butt and try to earn $1000 that weekend; I could fall short, sure, but it would be worth the attempt. It doesn’t hurt that the mortgage is due.
So here’s a list of things i could do for $1000.
- Some PPC program
- Drive traffic to some AFF program
- Find someone who would pay me $1000 for a project
- Find two someones who would pay me $500 for a project
- Since the “finding” part is non-billable, and I wanted the task completed by Monday, I didn’t go to “find ten people who want $100 projects” but I went to “find or write something I can sell 10 times for $100 each.”
- Find or write something I can sell 50 times for $20 each
- Find or write something I can sell 200 times for $5 each
Well, ok, PPC, out- have you seen my record with PPC? I’m running at about PPC 120, Me, 0. It’s like my High School Homecoming football game where we lost 56 to 0. Obviously I’m still trying to figure out the whole “traffic” thing, so I don’t have a good way to “drive traffic to an aff program.” A grand for one project? Not likely; a $1000 project will take much longer than a weekend to put together. Same with two $500 projects. Besides, I can’t stand rentacoder’s 15% cut. But I could possibly get together a $100 package; I’d only have to sell 10 of them.
One thing I keep seeing pop up in some forums is “how do I cloak an affiliate link.” Noobies looking to make their big break have been looking for this. Every time it’s the same thing; either do a php redirect, a meta refresh or a javascript location change. What if I had a script that would do that for the newbies? What would I want in such a script? What would I expect if I were going to pay $100?
And then, of course, who would I sell it to?
At this point, I realized I could put together a very basic redirection tool, with no frills, just “go here, using this method” in about an hour ( which is almost always two hours because of development time). So I spent the morning assembling that little script, and released “Low Redir.” I priced it at $5.00 at e-Junkie and went over to that forum to post a sales page. And then headed over to some other forums too.
My grand total for the weekend? Zilch. Talking wiht a guru showed me the problem.
[17:21] yeah you didn’t sell it
[17:21] see something like that is all sales
[17:21] not code
[17:21] code is simple
[17:21] tell a story about how not redirecting through a bounce server cost you x and how this helped you
[17:21] for only 5$ I saved myself 500$
[17:22] you need a small sales page and a admin section to adjust redirects
[17:22] and maybe a simple counter
[17:22] people would buy that for 5 bux
Well, shit. He’s right, of course. And not only because he’s a guru. I mean, Jonathan Ledger would do the same thing; in fact, he does. And while I tend to think of myself as “not a salesman” in a good way ( I don’t practice my oily smile to get people to buy cars they don’t need ), it’s actually in a bad way. I don’t even think of what the guru tells me there.
So I suppose my next couple of days will be putting together what the guru tells me. And then I’ll go and blag more about it on the forums.
Written by russ on January 23rd, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Current Methods and ppc campaign.
Today is a red letter day. A gold star day. A day that will go down in the annals of history.
Today marks the first time I had a conversion on NeverBlue ads. I’ve been an affiliate at NeverBlue for several months. At first I was trying to succeed with “pay per click” campaigns but I really didn’t do so very well with those. So I pretty much scrapped them and have been using the neverblue ads on various site-attempts.
You know, three years ago I would have said that a site was hard to put up. But no, a basic site with some CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and some text and ads is pretty easy.
Anyhow, I’ve made about $1.20 today. Laugh all you want; it’s more than I made yesterday.
Written by russ on January 21st, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on affiliate and ppc campaign.
Here’s a couple of scripts to help you with your redirection problems.
I keep seeing people asking how to set up their redirects to mask affiliate programs. This is a little package to help with that.
It contains, basically, two scripts. One, the index page, contains a form where you insert the redirections you want to use. The other is where the redirection happens. This script will just redirect the input to the output. Very basic usage.
After you have updated the redirects in the admin page, you’ll be given the opportunity to test your redirect with a link on that same page, to the right of the insertion section. Just update the information if it’s wrong.
The admin page is passworded. Open the “login.php” file and at the top change the user and password from “admin” and “admin”. Failure to do that will lead to people playing with your toys. And you don’t want that, do you?
Buy It Now for 5 Bucks!
Written by russ on January 16th, 2008 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on affiliate and Current Methods and ppc campaign and tips.
Well now, that was interesting…
I have made over 12 dollars via google’s adsense this month ( today’s the twelfth ); that’s a buck a night. And when I score a sale through ebay, I’m making another dollar or two. Which implies to me that my methods are good but my targets are small. Hmm… What sells for a pile of money on ebay…
So I’m bumping my goal from one dollar each for seven days to seven days, fifteen dollars (total). That’ll bump my yearly extended goal from $366 (it’s a leap year) to $780. Not a bad chunk of change ( but my end goal is higher than that. ). I’d like to see several days of 5 bucks in there but my weekly goal will be $15 whether or not I peak into five dollar days.
Mmm, donuts, I mean, five dollar days: that’s over $1500 in a year, that’s enough to pay off a bill or two. Five dollar days then fifty dollar weeks? Interesting plan of attack.
What’ll that take?
Well, first, let’s stop dicking around with twenty dollar sales, or one sale a month and let’s start looking for some more frequently searched categories that sell for a few hundred dollars a pop. Something that I know … something that I can have fun researching…
That’ll be interesting, won’t it?
It’s also occurred to me that scaling would be an easy way to bring that dollar amount up; if I currently have ten “eBay RSS Blogs” and I’m making a buck a night, then if I had a hundred of them, then I should make ten bucks a night, right? And with a hundred sites, a fluctuation of a few topics now and then wouldn’t give me palpitations in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately, as I said below, Repitation is Boring.
Written by russ on January 12th, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on adsense and affiliate and Current Methods and Ebay RSS Blog.
