Disaster Strikes - I’m Striking Back
Last week disaster struck. I wanted to learn how to install vBulletin and try to teach myself about the software a little more in-depth. I bought another lifetime license and began plugging away to install it to a new domain. Through the mistakes and troubleshooting I tried, I managed to install the domain overtop of my existing forum! This is the forum I paid about $1,000 for and neither myself or my developer had any backups to restore it!
I paid my designer to get the forum back up and used this time to put marketing into place. One of these methods involved buying AdderRobot to do some MySpace marketing. I went to iStockPhoto and bought a profile picture, spent a ton of time on the profile and put the AdderRobot to work. The following day I was banned from MySpace. Son Of A Gun! Things just have not been going right.
In my frustration, I told my designer I wanted to pay him outright for the 2nd forum skin and pay him to install that and another forum that I wouldn’t have skinned. Then I realized I hadn’t paid my rent/car/insurance for the month and had to dip into my savings account. (Ugh) At least I have a few sites working out and I’m making like 10 bucks a day, right?
I then read about how Google altered their Adwords algorhythym to include something they call a “Quality Score”. Basically, Google judges the content of the landing page you send visitors to through Adwords. If it is poor (hello arbitrage) then they increase the minimum bid you must make in order to have your ads shown. This effected me in two main ways:
1) My ads were shown much less because the quality score issue pushed the minimum bid needed above my maximum bid limit for certain keywords.
2) When users did click, the average CPC went up, meaning more expenses and less profit per click.Â
The result? All-time lows in revenue and profits. For example, today I had revenues of 75 CENTS! That’s right… cents. I don’t even want to check adwords because I’m sure my expenses exceeded this. It’s really dissappointing.
But, as the title shows, I’m fighting back. I’ve got my forum up and running and am starting to build membership. I’ve got another sports related site up, a sports related forum on the way and another forum that I have fully skinned that will be coming within a few weeks. These should be “communities” that aren’t so reliant on driving traffic with adwords and hopefully they will sustain and grow traffic.
I’ve also got a HUGE partnership in the works that could turn out being a tremendous success. Wherein arbitrage you drive lowcost traffic to a website for the sole purpose of getting them to click an ad, I’m going to be promoting affiliate arbitrage where the sole idea is to drive traffic to make sales or PPA (pay per action). We’ll be looking at over automating over 50,000 niches which, according to our plans, won’t be too difficult to put together. The difficult part is creating adwords campaigns for each of these niches. Is there a way to auto-generate keyword lists and automate the creation of the campaigns in adwords? If you know of a way to do this and can share, that would be amazing!
I’ve now spent a decent amount of money on several sites and I doubt I’ll see any measurable results for at least a month while I build membership/traffic. I’m getting antsy and I’m dissappointed in the roadblocks I’m facing. But, I’m still working hard and I have a positive outlook on how this is all turning out. I think I’m going to stay away from the arbitrage BS sites because Google is actively attempting to ban/diminish their presence. A single google update could leave you in the dust. However, by building a useful resource that people link to and keep coming back to, you’re helping to anchor your position as a valuable tool instead of just a home for ads (which google frowns upon).
Ton of hard work ahead of me. Keep your fingers crossed I have some goodluck streaks because this bad luck is pissing me off. But oh yeah, at church the other day I heard a poem which stuck in my head. I was irately frustrated and it actually helped calm me down and put things in perspective:
God grant me the serenity,
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And the wisdom to know the difference.
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Its better to be learning to deal with “distasters” at this level than further up the ladder! Keep up the good fight!
I recently lost a domain and its contents, glad it wasn’t launched yet!Am plugging along redoing it. It sucks, but valuable lessons learned when things like this happen.