Campaign Redo is Coming Together

The campaign is coming together.  The squeeze pages are finished; the thank you page is complete with tracking; the autoresponder messages are loaded.  Now I need to make the banners and find sites for the placements.

I'm going to take my time on the banners.  I have some research on the demographic and will be using it to the best of my ability.  I will also use Ca$hvertising and The Ultimate Salesletter to help.  The next concern is cashflow.  The adnetwork I'm using has minimum funding set to $500 and I'm on my last $100.  I've run into trouble in the past when I have been impatient and charged too much on a single month's credit card statement.  This month's statement doesn't end until March 8th so it's going to be awhile before I can fund the account again.

In the meantime, I'm going to add more autoresponder messages to the sequence.  There are currently 4 in the rotation at the moment.

That's all for now.

8 Years Yesterday

Yep, eight years of being in this game as of yesterday.  As it turns out, yesterday was pretty fitting.  I made some conclusions about my strategy and decided to make some adjustments.  This Renaissance for my business is all about employing the fundamentals and I was ignoring one of the biggest...

List building!

Initially, I want to test to see if a traffic source would convert before putting in the work to make an autoresponder, squeeze page, giveaway, etc.  But that was a flawed approach.  The list is everything and after this long, I know it.  The problem is that I have to temper my desire to move fast.  The desire for speed leads to taking shortcuts and there's nothing short about eight years of shortcuts, believe me!

So, on the eighth anniversary of starting this business I created an autoresponder sequence, some killer presell banners for my content pages, and a squeeze page.  I need to get the squeeze pages finished, make the thank you pages, incorporate tracking, and develop the banner campaign.

Let's do this right.

Fought Through

It was probably pretty obvious from my last post that the denial of my campaign was pretty discouraging.  However, I woke up this morning with renewed vigor.  Even though I had to wait until after work, I was able to develop 3 campaigns today.  Of those campaigns, one is already starting to get traffic.

Banner advertising/media buying is a different animal.  There is so much that can go into determining how high your CTR is.  With the campaign that is getting traffic, I noticed that the banners that looked like part of the site received more clicks than the others.

That's all for now.

First Setback

The campaign was finally reviewed today... Reviewed and rejected!

Apparently, the niche is a no-no for this ad network even though I do not recall seeing anything that gave a warning.  I'm pretty disappointed because I worked pretty hard on the banners.

Oh well.

I did put together 2 other campaigns and they have both been approved (different markets than the first).  Let's see how it goes.

Nearly a Year Has Past...

Nearly a year has past since the last time I wrote here.  Actually, in four days it will be eight years since I started this journey.  Eight years...

Out of those eight years, there have been some highs and a ton of lows.  However, in all of that time I would have to say that 2012 was the hardest.  By nearly all factors, it should have been the best.  My girlfriend and I were finally reunited after two years apart; she and I got engaged; I had FINALLY stopped working at the job that I hated; and I was FINALLY working full time for myself.  Everything seemed like it should be great but for the business, it wasn't.

Despite all of the lessons of the previous years, I still fell into the trap of relying on a certain traffic source that starts with G.  I had finally (or so I thought) figured out the SEO game and was getting top rankings on both my main craft site and my relationship site.  Things were especially good for the relationship site where $200 days were pretty common and conversions were as high as 5 or 6%.  However, that's when Panda or polar bear or whatever the name of the algorithm update was hit.  Literally overnight the business dropped to $0 income.

Nevermind that I was following "all of the rules".  Nevermind that the sites were built on unique content.  None of that mattered because I broke the most important rule of all...

"Never rely on G for sh*t!"

Every single time my business has hit a rough spot, it was because I forgot that rule.

This time it cost me dearly.  After we moved back to Austin, I had to start working again.  Beyond that, I had to essentially layoff two of my workers.  That was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do.  While I'm thankful for the job, the sense of failure and disappointment was overwhelming.  So much so that I essentially stopped working on the business.  I would do a little work here and there but not enough to really see results.  The new job is way across town (something I said I would never do) so I have a 30 minute commute in the morning and a 45-90 minute commute in the afternoon.  After doing the work I was doing, dealing with the stress the job, and fighting the Austin traffic mob that seems determined to keep me from getting home, I rarely have the energy to come home and work on the business.

Then a couple months ago, something happened.  There was an incident at work that absolutely infuriated me to the point that I started looking for another job.  But something about that fury sparked what seemed like long dormant ambitions.  It wasn't long before I realized that the desire to get back into the game was building.  Slowly but surely, I started to work my way back.

I started doing broadcasts regularly for my craft site again.

I started planning expenses to determine exactly how much profit I would need to get back into working the Business full time again.

And I started plotting my exit strategy!

But to do that, I would need traffic.  I started going to the Internet Marketing Party here in Austin and met a few people who were good at traffic generation.  However, nothing really panned out.  I dabbled here and there with different traffic sources without much success.  One thing that I did come to realize is that media buying is going to be my specialty.  It has all of the qualities necessary for success.

1. It's not G.
2. It's not search.
3. It's extremely scalable.
4. It's paid so results happen fast.
5. There are millions of sites (literally) available to get traffic from.

After doing a little searching, I found a strategy that is viable for making this work.  On Friday, I made a campaign based on the strategy and I'm waiting for the network to approve it.  For now, I will focus on just that one campaign - killing it if it doesn't produce or optimizing it to profit if it shows potential.  I will do this again and again until I can quit the job and go fulltime again.

If relying on G has been the biggest mistake with my business, the second biggest mistake has been a lack of focus.  Ironically, stepping away for as long as I have has helped to get that under control.  Yes, I have projects I would like to pursue but succeeding with media buying is everything right now and will continue to be until I hit my goal.

Goal:  $4,100 Profit/Month

To help with the inspiration, one of the members of the forum followed the strategy that the OP gave and reached a gross of over $4k in about a month=)

To success in 2013!