Race to $200+/Day - A Little Work Last Night

Last night I was able to launch a test campaign for one of the 3-4 markets that I will be focusing on for the next 2 months. With this, I am just looking for the ability to convert not necessarily profitability. That comes later.

When doing these tests, I expect to spent anywhere from $50 to $100 on the campaign. If it doesn't convert within that budget, I consider it a dud and move on. While the offer/product may not actually be a dud with more work, it doesn't make sense to me to put in that much effort for something that doesn't convert well during the test.

I was also able to launch the test landing page campaign for the main market I am in right now. The hope is that having the landing page will improve my conversions there. I also spent far more time working on developing small adgroups and very targeted ads for those groups. I'm hoping this will improve my CTR compared to the less targeted method I had been using.

This morning I was able to send out a broadcast for my product site. What I would like to do from now on is create my articles and broadcasts in the beginning of the month and just have them scheduled to be sent automatically. This way I can focus on my other markets.

Breakdown:
Product Site - Complete, need more articles/broadcasts
Offer #1 - New landing page being tested
Offer #2 - Testing campaign

Race to $200+/Day - I'm in the Hole

But not by much! While I would normally be distraught by the loss of funds, considering how badly everything crashed this month, I'm really not that bad off monetarily. In fact, two days like some of the big ones I had in June would put me back in the black.

For whatever reason, today I was filled with uncharacteristic optimism (at least uncharacteristic for July 2008). I spent the night diligently working on one of my focus campaigns and I think that it will do well. Looking at my data from my biggest campaign, nearly all of the adgroups that have not been culled are currently sitting at 2% or above. My task now is to send 100-200+ visitors to each of those adgroups per day. Some of them will be able to pull that kind of traffic, some won't. The result though should be double digit leads/sales for this one campaign per day. That alone should be able to get me over the $200/day hump.

I have also bought the domain name and started work preliminary work on another focus campaign. This one has not been tested yet so this will be the test stage to see if it is a viable niche and who's (meaning which network's) offer has the best conversion rate.

The Race is still on! My friend Roger suggested that I get a widescreen monitor as a prize rather than the Oakleys. I think I may have to considering all of the spreadsheets I use now with this PPC stuff=)

Race to $200+/Day - Starting Over

That's basically what I have to do. This time around I have set a goal of getting 3 solid campaigns up by September 19 and those plus my product should be sufficient to get me over the $200/day mark.

I'm hoping that focusing on the campaigns in this manner will allow me to build something more solid than what I had before. This will let me build on my work rather than starting from scratch all of the time. Also, having them written out and not allowing myself to look at other potential campaigns should keep me on track. Finally, I'm not working on the "I'll do such and such this month" mentality. I set a specific date and I will work toward achieving the goal by the deadline.

Today I was able to finish up my work on some landing pages and get a campaign started. Nothing flashy.

Race to $200+/Day - Sigh

(Before you read any further, this post is going to be me complaining and getting stuff off my chest. You've been warned.)

This sucks. Things were going great. I fought through May's losses and grossed more with June than I ever had before. Things were headed in the right direction and "retirement" from the day job was within sight.

Then came the Great Crash.

Every single campaign, with the exception of my product, fell apart. Even my campaign that was generating $100+/day gross died on me. Now I'm back to square one and the chance of being able to exit the job in August has evaporated.

Now I'm stuck with a dilemma. I know I had said everything was going to be "launch, launch, launch" but that hasn't been working out too well. I haven't been able to get anything off the ground using that approach. Instead, I'm going to shift gears and try to get each individual campaign up to $100/day profit before moving to the next offer. The problem with that is the time it takes and the lack of diversity. A single crash could wipe out a campaign. Then again a single crash took out 5 campaigns this month.

I don't know.

See This Now

Take Action Now!

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/07/07/what-every-american-needs-to-know-and-do-about-fisa-before-tuesday/

Race to $200+/Day - June Numbers

And the final results are in for June. That month went in like a lion, mosied around like a lamb, and had a pretty good showing on the final day. I'm not going to break things down as much as I did last month but here's the story by numbers.

Gross Income (Affiliate Sales, Product Sales, & Adsense Combined):
$3,573.07

Expenses:
$2,813.26

Profit:
$759.81

ROI:
26.5%

How do I feel about this? Mixed but overall pretty good. I fell way short of my $3,000 profit goal but I grossed nearly twice as much as I ever have from the business in one month! That's good stuff.

The bad part is that my ROI and Profit are low. I'm always shooting for 100% ROI but I am falling way short. This is due to some poor structuring of the Clickbank product campaign. The way I set it up does not lend itself to proper tracking. Not only that, but it started losing money badly toward the end of the month. By the end, it was a little over $100 in the hole. Even one of my more consistent offers started to slump toward the end of the month leading me to concede that there may actually be truth to the summer slump mythos.

So, what did I do right:

1. Multiple Campaigns - I didn't rely on only one campaign and this provided fairly consistent income. By the end of the month, I believe there was only one or two days where I did not gross more than $10.

2. Watched the Patterns - I noticed that my biggest grossing campaign would plummet routinely on Saturdays. Instead of letting that happen, I have set things up to turn off the ads on that day.

3. Made Adjustments Midgame - By looking at my tracking, I could tell what adjustments needed to be made with the campaigns.


What did I do wrong:

1. Not Enough Campaigns - I should have been launching more campaigns rather than tweaking the ones I had.

2. Messing With What Works - I lowered the bid price on my largest grossing adgroup because I was relying on stats without enough data. That move probably cost me $500+ in lost revenue.

3. Poorly Structured Campaigns - I already mentioned this earlier.

4. Laziness - I should have put in more work but this goes back to #1.

5. Not Relying on the Affiliate Manager - Rather than testing new campaigns on my own (each one failed by the way) I should have stuck to using on the the offers/products my AMs recommended.

The goal for June is to find 8 campaigns that generate as much, if not more, money than my biggest campaign does currently. I'm going to try to split those 8 campaigns up amongst 2 affiliate networks so that I can get on the weekly direct deposit schedule.