Renewed Arbi Faith
23 impressions
14 clicks
$8.46 revenue
$1.55 expense
—————
$6.91 profit
You do the math… I spend $.07 cents a click and make $.60 cents a click.
This was today’s earning on ONE arbitrage page that sent 7search traffic to an adsensed arbitrage page. The one problem? The site has been up for a week and today is the first day it made a profit. In fact, every other day it earned about $.15 cents a click and that means you need at least a 50% CTR to break even.
So what changed between yesterday and today? Well, for one, I think that more relevant ads… and more ads in general… were being selected for the page. This increased CTR and EPC at the same time. When I woke up and saw the page had already made about $5 from 6 clicks I was extremely happy. It made me realize, YES, arbitrage can work. It’s about selecting a ton of niches and keeping the ones that work til you have a nice little portfolio of money makers. I guess it just took me a wee bit longer to find a decent niche.
Fortunately, I’ve teamed up with a friend from HS and we’ve starting a 50/50 partnership. His responsibilities are coding/scripting while mine are marketing/research/tracking. It’s nice because we both kind of fill gaps in the other persons repertoire. He’s nearly done an automation script and we’ll be getting together on Saturday to fine tune it and get it live. Hopefully, after working with it for awhile, we’ll update it and possibly incorporate 7search/Adsense tracking… if it’s possible. He’s pretty good with the PHP/MySQL so we’ll see. Anyway you look at it I’m comfortable giving him 50% because I think we both bring some great things to the table. Do you think this is a fair set up financially and project responsibility wise?
In other news, I’m still struggling with my designer on the sites I paid to have designed. I’m absolutely dreading doing a End Of Year evaluation because I remember making some HEFTY goals for myself to fulfill by January 2007 and I think I’m a LONG ways off. It’s actually pretty upsetting. I’ve got to work a lot harder and, perhaps more importantly, a lot smarter.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions will be to update this blog a lot more often, for two reasons: you and me! I hope you all like reading Eureka Diary and hopefully get some good ideas, insight, motivations or perhaps just a nice break from logging on. For me, it helps to remind me to focus in on what I need to do to accomplish my goals. I’m expecting big things in 2007 but I’ve got a lot of catching up to do so I better run.
Here goes nothing…
10 Cool Wordpress Plugins
Sorry for the long delay… been so busy! Today I was searching through Wordpress Plugins and I found some very cool ones you might like to explore. I haven’t tried all of them but here are some that sound great (feel free to comment & add more that YOU like):
Lightbox
AWESOME flash picture plugin which overlays images on your page when clicked. Similar to what happens when you click the new area headings at wickedfire.com! Check out the demo, you’ll LOVE it! (SEE PLUGIN FIX AT BOTTOM OF POST)
Amazon Plug-In
Allows easy search and input of amazon affiliate links WHILE you are writing your posts/pages with tremendous ease!
reBlog
Select your favorite posts from OTHER blogs and have them auto-posted on your blog! Perhaps you have a website about eating healthy. Why not create a blog about eating healthy with mostly content from other blogs using this easy method? Then, every once and awhile, drop yourself a healthy one way link!
WP Notable
Mentioned many places before. Allow readers to easily suggest your site for social networking communities like Digg.
Google Sitemap
Don’t be a dummy… Get indexed.
PodPress (Mighty Mouse)
Include podcasts with a lean flash mp3 player and links to download.
Sidebar Widget
Drag and drop to change the look and feel of your sidebar! For newbs and time savers! No HTML knowledge needed.
Related Entries
At the bottom of your posts, 5 of your “most related” entries are shown. If someone read through your entire post, keep them on your site by showing them very related stuff! The 5 posts are auto-picked based on keywords and such.
Adsense Deluxe
Tons of options and features to automatically embed your adsense ads in your blog! Colors, Ad Sizes, Locations… you name it… and it keeps the # of ad units to a max of 3 to comply with Google TOS.
Star Rating System
Have users rate Posts, Movies, Products, Sexy Women…. Whatever! Same type of system used by Amazon… very neat and offers user participation. Always great to make the visitor “part” of the experience.
LIGHTBOX FIX: Use the following files (lightbox.css and lightbox.js) to replace files with the same name in your lightbox plugin folder. Then, place the following code at the top of your header.php file in the folder housing your default template. (essentially this just tells the plugin where your lightbox plugin folder is!)
Switching Gears
Alright, so it’s time to regroup, devise a strategy and attack this from a different angle. Obviously, pure arbitrage has gone down the tubes for me. My arbitrage sites weren’t THAT great to begin with. Below, see an example of one of my pitiful arbitrage sites. It took me less than 5 minutes to make and made me 5 dollars a day:
All that’s there? Title on the top, adsense skyscraper in the black area, a stupid narration about the site and a huge picture. Wow - no wonder google pimp slapped me so hard! The site has absolutely NO redeeming features. Now, I can’t get traffic to the site and when I do, my earnings per click has plummeted.
Out with the old, in with the new!
This is the SAME domain, but I have spiced up the design completely. It has taken me longer to build, but, this site should stand on it’s own when done and actually be of use to visitors. Obviously, it has the header at the top. Then, in the upper left is a listing of “Most Popular Articles” - which I will write myself. The upper right hand portion is an ‘introduction’ to the page with a single adsense ad next to a picture. The bottom left is “sponsored links” - or adsense ads next to pictures. Finally, in the lower right, you have a “directory” - each it’s own separate page focusing on a sub-niche within the overall niche.
I think this approach will fare much better for me and I’m eager to complete the site. Right now it is just a shell template and I’ve still got to fill in all the information and write the articles. But, it gives you the look and feel of a real, official site with the ads nicely blended in. At the same time, I wouldn’t mind getting the site some backlinks and repeat visitors. That being said, I guess I want to move away from arbitrage and more towards creating mini-sites. I think it’s best for my long term interest.
While the pure arbitragers are making a total killing, they have a lot of their setup automated and I’m not able to do that. Instead, I’m going to apply this new template to some of my old arbitrage sites and, hopefully, this will work.
I’ll let you know… here goes nothing!
November Earnings Report (Ugh… $#@!%&^*)
Google’s smartpricing and quality score updates pretty much ruined my parade of $20 revenue days. Minimum bids increased drastically meaning two things: 1) profit margin shrunk dramatically and, 2) this lower profit margin was applied to a significantly smaller amount of traffic. Couple this with the Grand Opening advertising campaign of my forum and what do you have? A net loss.
Revenue
$206.06 (adsense)
$10.50 (azoogle - 1 Dada Mobile ringtone lead)
Expenses
$370.27 (adwords)
Profit
NEGATIVE $153.71 (OUCH)
Explanation
This loss comes from 2 major blunders. Of these expenses, $130 was spent on a new sports related site for which the adsense code was missing! That meant I had no chance to recover these expenses. Another $100 was spent on driving membership for my new forum… I yielded only 40 members… that’s paying $2.50/member. That’s pricey. In addition to this, I wasn’t faced with the new google terms until mid way through the month… things could have been a LOT worse and I’m hoping they aren’t that way in December.
I lowered my maximum bid on many of my campaigns and as a result have seen much lower traffic, but I’m trying to keep things in perspective. Driving cheap traffic is pretty much the bottom line of everything. I’ve tried 7search and searchfeed, neither of which get ANY traffic for me. I’ve got about 1000 keywords in there and 25 bucks waiting to be spent, but the clicks are never used. It’s a mystery. I’m thinking about signing up for MSN and Yahoo just for this reason - at least I know they’ll drive SOME traffic.
I’m also working on getting quality backlinks to my new forum, which has been somewhat of a challenge. I’m doing it whitehat style, for obvious reasons.
On top of this, I’ve shelled out nearly another $1000 to have a couple more sites put up any my designer is MIA with the money in his bank. I’m getting a little worried. My plan to have a few dozen sites up by the end of December is looking bleak. I’ve been facing bad luck, seeing black cats and standing in thunderstorms with no umbrella. Where is my breath of fresh air?!?!
I have some great ideas but can’t execute because I have a lack of funds. In addition, these are more “long-term” projects and I need to see some immediate return. I’m going to be putting together a few arbitrage 2.0 projects over the coming week. That means more content and some outgoing links but not quite “mini-sites”. My existing network of about 40 related arbitrage pages brought in a decent amount so I’ll be updating these for ‘arbitrage 2.0′ if you will.
In any case, I need some goodluck and fortune this month, so cross your fingers and say a prayer that some light shines on me in December! Thanks, I’ll need it!
Here goes nothing…
PS - my birthday is very very soon!
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