Wake Up Call

My friend was fired today. He was new and had been having a rough time producing at the same levels as some of the other people that came on when he did. The wake up call came in how he was treated by my bosses. They essentially pulled the rug out from under him and forced him to either resign or be fired. This type of thing had happened to another guy that worked here but he deserved it. He didn't care about the job and it reflected in his behavior. My friend on the otherhand worked really hard but just wasn't able to make it. My bosses treated my friend the same way they treated the lazy guy. That's not right.

Do not forget the big picture, people.

This game is chess, not checkers. We should be planning and executing moves toward independence not window offices and fancy titles. Remember that your focus should be to get out of the job game as soon as possible and to rely on the job less and less until that is achieved. A job is a band-aid. It is a temporary solution to help pay your bills. Don't get caught up in career ladders, raises, and working for the Man. The more you depend on the paycheck the more likely it is that someone will to come to pull the rug out from under you. Always keep this in the forefront. Job is nothing, independence is everything.

Working Toward Goals

Ehh. Nothing really exciting in my area these days. I did get two leads, one usable, this weekend. I spent most of the weekend and today working on the form and trying to get it ready for next month. I have pretty much given up on April. There were a few highlights here and there but overall it has been bad for the biz. I haven't run the numbers lately but I don't even think I'm in the black anymore for the month.

As for the form, I asked someone who is also an affiliate for this merchant to take a look at the site. He gave me some tips on things I should do so I have been trying to get those changes made. Looking at the form, the changes he suggested have made the form much smaller in appearance. Hopefully that will equate to higher conversions.

Anyway, I'm headed back to work.

Bad Month

I was looking at the numbers for the month so far and they are bad. In fact, Adsense is at half the level it was last month at this time. Hopefully my programs will start to pick up now that Easter is over.

I spent today updating bids for Overture. I believe all of the errors on the form have been taken care of. I did not get any leads today but we will see how tomorrow goes. I'm tired, I'm going to read some of The Republic and go to bed. Night.

Here's to Hoping

Had a friend look at my form over the weekend and he found some errors in my validation script. I worked on that this weekend and have hopefully ironed out the problems. I hope, and this is a big hope, that these errors were the problem and now that they are fixed that PPC2 will start converting again.

While I was working on PPC2, I decided to do some cosmetic work to the form. I did some rearranging to make things validate in the right order. I also did some extra work to get the fields to line up more accurately. I think the form looks better than it did before. Maybe people will think so to and fill it out=)

Working on the Form

In my attempt to increase conversions, I started work on the form for PPC2. I am debating whether I should create a completely new look or just make adjustments to the current form. While I decide on that, I will attempt to make the form appear to be smaller than it is. I know that a shorter form is more appealing so that is the first change I am making. It's not as easy as I thought it would be since you have to consider that text that is too small can turn some prospects away.

I have heard that the Easter holiday may have something to do with the slow traffic but that doesn't explain why everything stopped last month.

To Jean-Rene: I found my writer on Rent-a-Coder.

Nothing Too Exciting

I made a few changes to one of my campaigns. The one that I was doing the A/B split test on racked up 2 sales for direct-to-merchant and none from my landing page. I spent the night making the changes so that all of my click traffic would be routed directly to the merchant. Like I said, nothing too exciting.

The month has been very, very slow all around. Only 2 sales, one of which was canceled, and one medium-sized lead from PPC2. I plan to spend tonight and tomorrow working on PPC2's landing page. There has to be something I can do to make it convert the traffic I am already getting even at the current low levels.

Tedium

In order to get quick keywords, I have been using the Overture Bid Tool. The problem lies in the fact that for some inexplicable reason, the words come in random order. This is fine for putting words into Overture because their system doesn't care, but Adwords it matters. So I found myself putting lists of hundreds of keywords in order so that I could put them into Adwords. I should be paying someone to do that mindless stuff.

Maybe one of you know the answer to this. I decided to do a search in Google for one of my keywords and my ad wasn't appearing. It wasn't a new ad, in fact its been in the campaign for months. It isn't a direct to merchant ad so it doesn't have to share with other affiliates. The adgroup and campaign are both set to active and have been on for a couple days. The ad just didn't show up. Any clues?

PPC2 did generate a lead today but it was unusable by the standards set by the merchant. At least it was something=) Hopefully tomorrow will bring some leads that I can submit.

Resuscitate

That's what I'm going for with PPC2. I made a simple change to the page so we will see what happens tomorrow, hopefully it will improve my conversion rate. The second portion of the strategy is to get more traffic. I have done all that I can think to do in Overture, so I am moving into Adwords again. I added a few keywords and changed some adcopy. It is a bit difficult to get used to the limited space Google gives you compared to Yahoo. The difference is night and day. Hopefully the combination of the two will bring in the traffic necessary to make the conversions. I have $1k of ad money I am willing to spend this month if the ROI is right.

Not much else to say. I'm back in the flow of working again so I'm happy about that=)

March - The Numbers

Here they are:

Adsense
Income: $88.07
Down from the previous month but that's alright. It will be nice when I start to get a check every month from Google though.

PPCs
Gross: $850.47
Expenses: $317.59
Net: $532.88
ROI: 167.79%

Mostly the work of PPC2 even though PPC3 did contribute $34.40=) Massive improvement over last month despite the craziness with PPC2. I have not been able to resolve the situation with that site yet so who knows what this month will bring. My goal was to gross $1k by March and I was off by only $61.46. Not bad. The ROI is definitely in the right direction. In February it wasn't even out of the teens to my recollection.

March's Profit Total: $620.95
$100/Day Challenge (less Adsense): $17.19/day

New Month, New Start

I will post this month's numbers tomorrow. Despite the nonsense PPC2, they were decent.

I started work on my attempt to diversify my revenue streams today. I created an ad campaign with Adwords and will be doing a decent A/B split test. This will be between one of my landing pages and direct-to-merchant to see which performs better for this product.

Over the weekend, I attempted to buy a domain for one of the infoproducts I am attempting to sell. I will try again tomorrow to see if it goes through.

Looked at houses this weekend. With the amount of money I am qualified for and the neighborhoods they are in, it doesn't look like I will be able to get a duplex. I will talk to the loan officer tomorrow and see if there is anything I can finagle. The duplexes in bad neighborhoods would be fine to own, I just wouldn't want to live in those areas.