Tired of noob journals yet?
I need to start this journal because I have a huge problem with not sticking to something until it becomes profitable. I first heard of "make teh internet moneys" almost exactly a year ago when I stumbled across Partner With LOL and was an inch away from making $30 for an affiliate. Did some research, found it was a scam, and got curious about working online. Since then, I've tried all of the following: Mini-niche sites + adsense; article marketing; SEO + listbuilding; SEO + ebook; blackhat video marketing; Adwords, MSN, Yahoo, and Facebook PPC; and PPV (Adon + Media Traffic). I'm disgusted by how much money I wasted on ebooks. In my estimations, I would say that I've spent about $2,000 on all of my efforts (mostly ebooks), and have made MAYBE $500 so far. I'm a cheapskate, so I refunded as many ebooks as I could that didn't make me money (read: all of them), and from that I got maybe $600 back.
Now I know what you're thinking: There's a million bucks in almost all of those traffic sources, right? I'm aware of this, but to restate the first sentence above, I invariably lose focus and move on to something else when I lose interest and/or money. That, combined with another bad habit of reading too much and doing too little, has resulted in me becoming stagnant. I think I've read the mantra "Master one traffic source and THEN move on" enough times now that it's finally gotten through my head. If nothing else, I know enough to not buy another ebook as long as I live.
I'm a full-time college student. I left my telemarketing job in mid-March because I thought I had a project in place that would take off. Of course, it didn't, and two months later I'm getting along by the skin of my teeth: a couple weeks ago, I had $5 to my name. Thankfully I've gotten some money in, and that's allowed me to pay the bills. This whole experience has persuaded me that I NEED to get into free methods before I bankrupt myself, and I do plan on getting into SEO and site-flipping in the summer after final exams.
For now, I'm back on PPV with Media Traffic. I chose MT because it's the traffic source that I had the most success with: in October, I was only $30-40 short of breaking even on my deposit. I had no idea what I was doing then, and was pushing rebills and health insurance by targeting "get health insurance" and "acai berry" URLs. How I almost broke even, I still don't know. But I figure that since I now know what to promote on PPV and how to promote it (for the most part), I can get a profitable campaign going. I'm running with EWA, and their campaign tips are a HUGE help, not to mention all the help my AM has been giving.
Here's how it stands now: I've got about $185 left, and there's basically no competition whatsoever in my niche, so CPVs are between $0.01-$0.02. I'm running three offers and haven't gotten a single conversion yet, and I think it's because my targeting is wrong. I got about 700 views to an offer spread between 5-7 URLs, and no leads. I've paused the campaign for now so I can refine it and get better targets.
For the second offer, I'm going to use Quantcast to find sites with a high concentration of my target demo and load those up. For this offer, I'm told that it's better to do broad demographic targeting instead of keyword-based URLs. The third offer is keyword-focused and has tons of room for diversification, so I'm going to scrape some URLs for that later on.
If everything fails and I don't turn a profit on anything, I'm going to get a refund when my balance falls to $25 and move to Adon Network. They allow download offers (MT doesn't), and those would be easier to convert than what I'm trying now.
tl;dr - Watch me try and make monies on PPV.
Proverbs 12:15 says, "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise." So if anyone has any tips or suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.
I'll try to keep this updated often for motivation, and so you can yell at me for being lazy.
I need to start this journal because I have a huge problem with not sticking to something until it becomes profitable. I first heard of "make teh internet moneys" almost exactly a year ago when I stumbled across Partner With LOL and was an inch away from making $30 for an affiliate. Did some research, found it was a scam, and got curious about working online. Since then, I've tried all of the following: Mini-niche sites + adsense; article marketing; SEO + listbuilding; SEO + ebook; blackhat video marketing; Adwords, MSN, Yahoo, and Facebook PPC; and PPV (Adon + Media Traffic). I'm disgusted by how much money I wasted on ebooks. In my estimations, I would say that I've spent about $2,000 on all of my efforts (mostly ebooks), and have made MAYBE $500 so far. I'm a cheapskate, so I refunded as many ebooks as I could that didn't make me money (read: all of them), and from that I got maybe $600 back.
Now I know what you're thinking: There's a million bucks in almost all of those traffic sources, right? I'm aware of this, but to restate the first sentence above, I invariably lose focus and move on to something else when I lose interest and/or money. That, combined with another bad habit of reading too much and doing too little, has resulted in me becoming stagnant. I think I've read the mantra "Master one traffic source and THEN move on" enough times now that it's finally gotten through my head. If nothing else, I know enough to not buy another ebook as long as I live.
I'm a full-time college student. I left my telemarketing job in mid-March because I thought I had a project in place that would take off. Of course, it didn't, and two months later I'm getting along by the skin of my teeth: a couple weeks ago, I had $5 to my name. Thankfully I've gotten some money in, and that's allowed me to pay the bills. This whole experience has persuaded me that I NEED to get into free methods before I bankrupt myself, and I do plan on getting into SEO and site-flipping in the summer after final exams.
For now, I'm back on PPV with Media Traffic. I chose MT because it's the traffic source that I had the most success with: in October, I was only $30-40 short of breaking even on my deposit. I had no idea what I was doing then, and was pushing rebills and health insurance by targeting "get health insurance" and "acai berry" URLs. How I almost broke even, I still don't know. But I figure that since I now know what to promote on PPV and how to promote it (for the most part), I can get a profitable campaign going. I'm running with EWA, and their campaign tips are a HUGE help, not to mention all the help my AM has been giving.
Here's how it stands now: I've got about $185 left, and there's basically no competition whatsoever in my niche, so CPVs are between $0.01-$0.02. I'm running three offers and haven't gotten a single conversion yet, and I think it's because my targeting is wrong. I got about 700 views to an offer spread between 5-7 URLs, and no leads. I've paused the campaign for now so I can refine it and get better targets.
For the second offer, I'm going to use Quantcast to find sites with a high concentration of my target demo and load those up. For this offer, I'm told that it's better to do broad demographic targeting instead of keyword-based URLs. The third offer is keyword-focused and has tons of room for diversification, so I'm going to scrape some URLs for that later on.
If everything fails and I don't turn a profit on anything, I'm going to get a refund when my balance falls to $25 and move to Adon Network. They allow download offers (MT doesn't), and those would be easier to convert than what I'm trying now.
tl;dr - Watch me try and make monies on PPV.
Proverbs 12:15 says, "The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise." So if anyone has any tips or suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.
I'll try to keep this updated often for motivation, and so you can yell at me for being lazy.
