Journey to $300/Day - Day ?

I would count what day this is but I think you'll be ok not knowing in this post. I basically took most of last week off for Thanksgiving. I guess everyone else did too because my earnings plummeted=(

Yesterday and today was all about the landing pages and building new campaigns. I took an old dating offer and retooled it for a new offer that was recommended by my AM. I also set up a campaign in the "big dog" finance niche. Another AM recommendation.

Journey to $300/Day - Weekend Recap

This weekend I worked almost exclusively on CPA offers.

One dating offer in particular, I was hoping to have up and running for testing by the weekend but that didn’t happen. I made a mistake with the set up and when it came time from the ad network to approve the landing pages, things weren’t working properly. Hopefully I will get approval today.

The main offer that seemed to have the most promise seems to have died. I’m not completely sure but I’m not getting nearly as many conversions from it has I had in the past. I’ve copied that campaign to a new ad network so we will see how things go there. The new ad network has far less traffic so I don’t expect to see a huge volume. Even so, a couple dollars profit per day one of several monthly expenses.

I also spent time testing two offers that had converted for me in the past. We will see how they go. If they do well, then I may consider testing them out on BING to scale a little more.

This weekend, I put together a campaign for an offer that has converted at least once before. It is another dating offer but it pays out at $6. That’s much nicer than the $3 dating offers=)
Today, I plan on working on 3 more campaigns - 2 of which have made conversions in the past. I want to create two landing page versions with two headlines each and let them run. If I work fast and with a purpose, I may be able to get all 3 complete tonight.

One thing that I know for certain - a good landing page makes a huge difference! For the last few campaigns, I’ve bought and modified existing landing pages that were for sale rather than trying to create my own from scratch. I’ve had much better results with this method.

Something else that has proven to be a good idea is testing as many offers as I can allow budgetwise. This weekend was proof. When one offer was falling down on the job, another was there to pick up the slack.

Journey to $300/Day - Day 24

Wow...

Yesterday was bad because I had no motivation. Today was bad because I had too much motivation and couldn't decide on what to do next. Idol hands are the devil's workshop and my budget today is proof.

However, the good news is that my calculated risk of implementing numerous (12+) campaigns for a handful of offers that have converted in the past paid off. I wasn't in profit for the day but I was pretty close. Plus ALL of my active offers converted at least once and I also made a sale of my own product today.

Even though I spent much of the night obsessed with refreshing my stats and unsuccessfully trying to communicate with my affiliate manager, it was not a total waste. I found out, accidentally mind you, that the two landing pages I worked so hard to create weren't even in the rotation! I had completely forgotten to update the rotator script, so for the past 2 days I've been sending traffic to landing pages that I know barely convert. I'm actually amazed I had a conversion today before fixing the issue. The lesson, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. If you rush to launch a campaign, it will cost you. Luckily, this didn't cost me too much.

Oh, I did add an audio call to action this morning for the dating offer that is converting the most. It's still not profitable yet though. I'll just have to keep optimizing and maybe the affiliate network has some day parting info that can help things...

Finally, one of the campaigns I created last night did not get approved. It seems that the landing pages weren't working when it was time for the review. Hopefully they can get approved tomorrow.

Journey to $300/Day - Day 23

I came home today and DID NOT want to work...

Between headaches and frustration at only pulling in $6.40 all day, I just wanted to take the night off. But I didn't...

I launched two modified campaigns for offers that have converted for me in the past. This brings the total of "proven-to-convert" campaigns up to 4. I'm a bit concerned about the spending that's going to go along with optimizing these 4 simultaneously but the hope is that the cumulative gross from the 4 will be profitable where one or two would not be by themselves.

That's about it. NOW, I'm going to take the rest of the night off.

Sitting at exactly $60 gross from Clickbank and CPA offers for the day. Hopefully that will increase by morning.

Journey to $300/Day - Day 21 Recap

Optimization is not as easy as I thought it would be=)

I burned through another $40 testing the dating offer yesterday and grossed ~$22. This morning, I looked at my stats and started day parting based on when the most conversions took place and when the most profitable times of the day have been during the past week.

Yesterday, I created an MSN/Yahoo campaign for my relationship product. I've had 3 clicks so far so we will see how that goes.

I also created 2 new landing pages for an offer that I know converts. I've made conversions on it and others in a forum I frequent also mentioned doing well with it. The payout is in the double digits so I'm ready to jump in again. The question is whether I should wait for the current dating campaign to start being profitable on a daily basis or if I should go ahead and launch the new campaign. These are the questions...

Yesterday, I also had a slap in the face about how important it is to keep track of EVERY cost and all revenue on a daily basis. Over the past few months, I've been down because it seemed like I wasn't making any progress. Well, yesterday I *finally* sat down and did all of the numbers for last month and this month.

Incredibly, last month (which I thought was a bad month) I actually made $42 profit/day! Seriously, I thought I was in the negative! Now this does not count operating expenses like web hosting, private forum memberships, monthly software subscriptions, etc. With those, it would probably be about half that number.

The point is that I AM making progress. I just didn't know it because I was too lazy and scared to know the truth about how the Business was doing. Don't stick your head in the sand is the lesson from that!

Journey to $300/Day - Day 20

I've been in Florida for the last few days so I really have not done much other than working on optimization for the dating offer. So far I've burned through a lot of money but have made back enough to show that this offer can be optimized to profitability.

After running the offer for a week, I have more than enough data to eliminate bad targets and pick a landing page variation that converts best. Today, I spent a little time creating new variations on the landing page for testing and finding more traffic sources for the offer. For the testing, I'm changing the color of the headline to see if red will perform better or not. We will see. I do know that I probably ran with the original landing page test a little too long. I could have probably made more if I had killed the non-performers earlier.

Lesson learned=)

Journey to $300/Day - Day 15 Recap

Last night, I created a total of 8 landing pages for a particular dating offer that was recommended by my affiliate manager. I just submitted the campaigns for approval so we will see how it goes.

That was essentially it. I'm reassessing my attempt at email marketing in the dating niche because the results so far have been abyssmal in terms of opt ins. I'm about to turn off the optin pages and see how things go for today.

Journey to $300/Day - Day 14

Happy Birthday to me!

Journey to $300/Day - Day 13 Recap

Yesterday I worked pretty much most of the day on building the email marketing for the 2 dating offers. I created 2 video squeeze pages, 2 lead magnets, and a total of 10 messages. I did have 3 sign ups once it was complete but none of the confirmed their opt-in.

I also blew through another $50 the day before without coming close to breaking even. I need a different strategy for the optimization portion of the campaign building. I can find offers that convert, but I need a more systematic way of getting them to profitability. I'm thinking that I will have to have phases in which I turn all of the campaigns off with the exception of the one I'm trying to optimize in order to save capital.

Yesterday grossed a decent amount, but I still need to go back and check on how much the net was later tonight. I'm debating whether not to post the numbers here. We will see.

Journey to $300/Day - Day 12

This week has been crazy. Between work and my personal life, I have not spent as much time working as I need to. One of the campaigns that was consistently grossing money has been cut off. It was an email submit and I was spending way too much time trying to optimize it - especially considering the lifespan of most zip/email submits.

There are 2 dating related offers that are converting on a semi-regular basis. I worked on the opt-in page and autoresponder sequence for one of them. They are both a bit similar so I will be recycling the autoresponder for the second dating offer so that I can build a list there too.

Earlier this week, the offer with the best ROI for me was shut down. I'm testing a similar offer now but it doesn't look like the landing page for that one is nearly as strong.

I also had my first sale of one of the new products I created this year. $51=)

I also created a new landing page for another offer that converted once before. The previous landing pages I had created were fairly weak. Hopefully this will help things because I think this offer has decent potential.

I have not developed a profitable CPA campaign yet but I just have to keep working at it.

Journey to $300/Day - Day 8

Thinking about today, I'm not sure if there is really anything exciting. I mostly worked on refining my current campaigns that have made conversions. I call them my "potentials". Most of the time tonight was spent on trying to filter out non-converters and adding new things to bid on and test.

No new campaigns today.

I did find that one version of a landing page I created for an email submit had TWICE the conversions of the other version. The difference - the higher converter had a yellow border and the other one had a red one. You never know until you test!

That same email submit has brought in a trickle of money over the past couple days. Hopefully the changes I made to the campaign will help to generate more before the offer gets pulled or scrubbed.

Normally, I would not want to do this but I'm going to bed. It's been weeks since I've been able to get to bed early on a week night and I don't sleep very well. Around 3:30AM is when I start to come out of the deep sleep and by 4:30, I'm just pretending/hoping to get a little more rest.

I don't have anything else pressing tonight so I'm out!

Journey to $300/Day - Day 7

Well, that was the fastest $50 in ad spend that I've ever burned through. Two hours is all that it took. Maybe having 15 campaigns set at $10/day on a high traffic ad network is not the best idea in the world...

Or maybe it is.

I was able to generate 3 conversions in that period of time. Does it make up for the $50 spent - no. But it did provide something that may be more valuable than money at this juncture; and that is data. I need data in order to optimize these campaigns and I think this new ad network is going to give it to me in spades. I just need to make sure that I can control the dragon and not let it run amok on my budget.

To do that, I'm debating using a strategy of testing offers on a low traffic network just to see if the offer converts. Once I get conversions, then I develop landing pages and put it on the high traffic network to really start the optimization process.

Tonight, I was able to launch a few new campaigns and I also found one that may be a potential winner. I will have to do more testing to find out. It is another one of those CPA offers that I would never have tested in a million years.

Also, the high traffic network finally approved my campaigns (obviously) after over a week of waiting. I need to find a contact there that can get my stuff approved more rapidly. I also launched a campaign for my newest product on to that network but didn't get it up in time for it to be reviewed with the rest of the bunch. Hopefully it won't be another week.

That's about it for tonight.