Wiredniko's Journal - Adventures of the Newbie

I am back bitches.

I have been hustling in silence for a couple of weeks.

I spend a lot of my time working on my day job and thinking about AM stuff.

Based on my analysis it appears that having an actual site with good content and a way to monetize it is the way to go. That does not mean I am giving up on PPC, there is money there for sure...but hear me out.

Normal PPC campaign the pie is split like this:
Product owner -> CPA Network -> PPC platform -> $

All the people before you get a piece of the pie.

We all know that the more middle men the less money you make. Not to mention you lose control....like wouldn't it be nice if the network gave you the higher payout from the start? What if you have the ability to test the product owners page?

Now with SEO, you eliminate the PPC platform.
Product owner -> CPA Network -> SEO (you) -> $

But what if you had your own product....and used SEO.

Product owner (you) -> SEO (you) -> $

There is a trap here though, being a product owner brings in a bunch of responsibilities. An easier way is something along the lines of

Product owner (you) -> Clickbank or something similar -> SEO (you) -> $

Now hear me out.

Lets say you get 1,000,000 clicks a month with PPC, even if you are paying $0.05 (heh, yeah right)
1,000,000 x $0.05 = $50,000

Then a new month rolls in, guess what, another $50,000 has to be spent....this goes on every month.

With a real website, building a following, you can get 1,000,000 visit a month free. The crazy thing is once you site hits that...guess what it will keep going month after month....sure it might take a while to get there but the beauty of a real website is that everything you keep building on things.

With PPC its like building a sand castle, every day you have to rebuild it.

Not to mention that if you make a quality website at some point you might get others to spend money to get on your site.

Think Google, MySpace, Facebook, fucking Plenty of Fish, the list goes on.

Bring something of quality and then people, others will do the work for you.

But we got to think big right?

So here is what I am thinking.

I create a website, something of quality that interests me. I build it to provide value. In the meantime I also have a product, in reality I already know with my plan that I will have two products a membership and an ebook.

There is another key to this, you want an environment where people, users create content for you (think Facebook, Digg, all the Web 2.0 sites). Why? Think about it, if you where alone could you produce as much content as lets say this forum....like for example right now I am typing words such as SEO, PPC....I am keyword stuffing this forum by posting my thoughts. Jon just has to sit back and his forum does the work for him.

which brings us to the project I am starting to work on.

  • Site with user generated content (SEOs for me)
  • Site also has a blog for further SEO drive. This will be useful for the beginning stages
  • Forum (SEOs for me, builds community)
  • Ebook relating to the sites content ($)
  • Private forum that requires membership ($)
  • Affiliates pushing my ebook ($ + more people I can up sell to like private forum membership)
  • Build a mailing list ($)

Do you see it?

I am building an empire.

Amusingly this is not the mega project I had in mind....I consider this a stepping stone towards my mega project.

Will it succeed? Well it means I need to get better at SEO. Actually create the ebook I want....probably also fake users in the beginning to get things started, since no one wants to join an empty forum with 1 user.

This is not a get rich tomorrow scheme....this is building my empire brick by fucking brick.

At the same time I still want to work on PPC, for two reasons
1. Pigeon holing myself only on one project is dangerous
2. PPC will translate well when I am selling my ebook and acquiring affiliates myself. I have to know how they see things

And no, I am not making a "how to make money" fucking ebook.

I said quality.

Anyway....time to get to work yo.
 


Heh, pretty funny to post that after our chat earlier when I was helping you with paid traffic. Some parts of your post are correct, in the sense that you can build an empire with "free" traffic. But I personally can't compare paid traffic and free traffic side by side.

I've been paying for traffic since day one and have never gotten a single visitor to my offers for free; and I'm doing quite well for myself. If you have the adequate experience, you can churn out profitable campaigns with paid traffic pretty fast. It's great to not have to pay for traffic and all, but you're waiting to make that money.

Commonly, a new offer appears on a network hasn't been touched yet, and I push it. I can get it do $1,000+ a day profit within a couple days if it's a good offer. Try generating that much revenue a day organically. You're talking about possibily waiting over one year and more to get a site to that level. Obviously the advantage comes in that you'll probably end up keeping that profit margin going longer than I would, but it's still up in the air.

I personally always like to choose the path of making money RIGHT NOW. When it comes to pushing affiliate products everything is short term so it makes more sense to me to make money fast, than choose the slow and steady path.

As you mentioned, creating your own product, and then building traffic organically is the smartest way to tackle it.

Anyhow, just my small comment on this, since you seemed to have taken a small stab at paid traffic. Especially the mentioned part of paying 5c a click; when in our chat I told you I that's my avg cpc in my niche. In the last 2.5 years; I've had a VERY stable income, and it's quite high also; and it's soley of paid traffic. I may not have an empire behind my back, but I'm still feeling good.
 
Wise path would be just test converting keywords with PPC, then slowly SEO them, and after you get #1 in SEO probably stop even paying for them.
 
wiredniko said:
Kind of lost ;(

It sucks not having a mentor.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more.. I have so many questions that I don't feel comfortable asking on a public forum as they're closely associated with my offers. What’s more challenging for myself is that Australia has very limited AM Publishers so it’s virtually impossible to connect with someone who is happy to help.

I have looked into PPC coach but I don't require someone to hold my hand just provide a tip here and there and maybe provide some of their feedback on the next logical step..

Sorry to steal your thread Niko :food-smiley-010:
 
Cainer, you can always AIM or PM dude.

Obviously I am no expert but sometimes having a second set of eyes looking at your page can help tremendously.
 
mGrunin said:
I personally always like to choose the path of making money RIGHT NOW. When it comes to pushing affiliate products everything is short term so it makes more sense to me to make money fast, than choose the slow and steady path.
Click to expand...

I hear you.

One of my fears is that due to being a newbie I will follow the wrong path because of ignorance. Which is another reason why I want to tackle both.

The way I see it, once an SEO site is setup then its a matter of updating it. Since I have chosen a topic of great interest I figure it would be relatively easy (minus the linking part).

Then I will focus the rest of my time on running offers.
 
Its Sunday, which means its grind day.

First thing first, enough with the stupid baby hostgator account.

I decided to start using ZenSix hosting ZenSix Hosting - $10 VPS Hosting :: $9/year Shared Hosting :: Cost, Quality, Speed - Pick Three seriously $10 for a VPS....like how can I say no to that. All the tutorials are here: #zenssh [The Art of SSH - A beginner's guide to Linux] so that's pretty much everything that I will need.

Plus I like that the main guy is around WF.

Hostgator cancellation ticket sent.

Created two new domains with namecheap. One for my prosper account and one for my SEO project.

Configured my VPS, updated it and created a backup.

As always figuring out names in namecheap takes me hours :(

Configured my databases and added wordpress.

My DNS has still not renewed. Not sure if I did something wrong or its taking a little bit to propagate. I am calling it a day for now.
 
Ah step in the right direction with taking a VPS! What you should be made aware of is quite often the prices are cheap due to overloading the nodes which can lead to poor load times especially with php/mysql driven pages. You did mention that the owner is on WF so I'm sure that wont happen :xmas-smiley-010:

What control panel are you using? Cpanel is probably the more popular addition, I myself utilise Virtualmin as it doesn't require the $10 a month license.

Now your DNS issue, can you provide more information, the process should be as simple as;

Create primary and secondary nameservers on your domain host pointing to your IP addresses associated with your host(namecheap)

Configure your domain in dns and specific your nameservers. I find intoDNS: checks DNS and mail servers health a great resource when trying to problem solve DNS issues.
 
oooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhh

here we go

I am trying a new time management today. I am timing myself 10 minutes of work 2 minutes of rest....I don't know I can concentrate for hours, but I wonder how this will make me perform.

First thing first, I did fuck up my DNS so I need to configure that.

Well I am a dummy. I could PM the owner here but for now I will use the namecheap ticket system. I am convinced this is something dumb. My server knowledge is not very high.

Nevertheless I can still work on shit while that is getting resolved.



Installed prosper202, but cannot configure it yet...since I my name server is down...I even tried using the IP address and it still does not work. I feel like a dummy.

Oh well, when the ticket resolves I should be all good.

Time to choose an offer. I am going with gaming in FB, Australia to be a bit less competitive. I am not really sure if that's the right thing to do but whatever. I will spend about $25 and keep it or drop it.

So its an experiment.

....oh what the fuck...my old campaign changed its LP to something so much better.....oh crap

Hmm

Fuck...what a crazy way to throw a wrench. Alright, change of plans. Enabling my old dating campaign since the LP is that much better.

Added more funds to my old campaign. Re-started my 50 picture ad test and my main campaign.

The links are still working so it was just a 5 minute deal.

Well shit, I guess if that is done I cant start working on my SEO site.

Designing my site especially how each thing links to everything else. (I attached it for anyone that cares, I also included traffic sources, and what I will focus on SEO wise)

Now that I have a design I am brainstorming the main page and its flow, previous user input display, which will also determine how my user form will look like. (see my diagram to make sense of this)

Brainstorm went pretty well. Got some good ideas from a friend of mine. Its nice to have non technical but creative people around. Its a good way to use your chick friends, ask them questions and at times they come up with awesome ideas.

...in terms of timing myself, working for 10 minutes and doing whatever for 2. Well I feel like a robot. One of the things I hate is being bound by time, which is why I do not even wear a watch, I haven't for maybe 10 years now.

Having said that though I worked like a maniac. In a funny way I think this could be useful for doing things you don't feel like doing. Affiliate marketing for me has become my hobby so I don't need to push myself that much.

But for my day job, this could rock. Do it for four hours straight and I will produce more than people do in two days.

i will continue the experiment and see where it takes me. Namecheap answered my ticket, I updated my site's DNS. My page still does not come up. Might be something stupid I did with my actual site. I guess I will have to talk to the zensix guy after all.
 

Attachments

  • site.jpg
    site.jpg
    35.4 KB · Views: 94
Based on my last post I was not sure what I felt about the 10 mins of work / 2 mins of rest. This morning I tried what's called the Pomodoro technique, its basically 25 minutes of work with 5 mins of rest.

Using Pomodoro for timing, Getting Things Done for organizing everything, and Eat That Frog to choose what project I should do first made me blast through my work day. I finished 11 projects in one days. The other 58 remaining projects I sent an email or got an update for every single on of them.

I literary did more this morning that I did at work last week.

So of course I am using this here as well. All you need for Pomodoro is Chromodoro is you have Google Chrome. That thing is awesome, its on your browser, very lightweight and easy to use.

Alright, now actual work things. I need to give mad props to Cainer for going out of his way to help me out. Mad respect. I think I can now fix my DNS issue.

I guess not...this is being such a bitch. It does not help that DNS takes a while to start working out, so its work, wait, work....hope for the best.

Fuck it, PMing the guy that owns it. Actually I will be legit and make a ticket. Ticket made.

Checking on my PoF campaign...well crap $9.54 spent, $0 made.

Today is still in progress...$15.77 spent, $10 made...god damn it. This is the same shit as last time.

Then there is the other thing, my 50 test images that I am slowly eliminating...since last time I run this still have not had 10,000 impressions...I guess 50 x 10,000 that's fucking 500,000 impressions....note to self next time upload 5 at a time, make things kind of faster. Granted it will take me 10 days to test all of them, but at least I have some images to play with.

My actual campaign I eliminated all pictures except for one. Its CTR is 0.111% much better than the 0.030% I was getting but still so far from 0.3%

In any case, one more day and if it still under performs I am killing it like I did last time. I understand this is primarily my issue...but I don't know how to fix it at this point...or more like I don't have enough money to fix it.

Well...I am done with my campaign...for my DNS I am waiting for tickets...my prosper is installed but I cannot configure it since my links are broken...same thing applies for my wordpress for my SEO site.

I guess might as well go back to designing my SEO site. Last thing I was doing was figuring out what kind of information I want my site to display. Doing Database Design research.

Done, I now have a pretty good idea of how I want my DB to look like.

Sweet, my ticket got an answer, it seems like I was close but was messing things up in terms of what is pointing where. Did some changes, I am going to wait and see if my change too effect.

I also had to change my apache config but we are up and running yo!

Bang, bang!

Configuring my blog for my SEO site. Done.

Configuring my Prosper202 on my 2nd domain. Well that ended up being kind of hard. For some reason when I go to my webpage I get no output. Install.php is there but nothing comes up. Not sure what is causing that. I literary get an empty screen, not even a 404. Looking at the source there is no code....checked my PHP version that is legit. Creating a dummy index.html or index.php runs.

Deleted and re-ftped prosper still no luck. Hmm I am kind of lost, don't know why that's happening. Well its time to call it a night.
 
I feel like I am spending too much time socializing this week.

So this week I spent $97, made $46.90 in the hole yet again.

My ad CTR is killing me. I now have a 0.202% CTR ad out there, but the rest of my tests are dragging everything down.

Not to mention today I got 22 clicks, 0 conversions.

I think there is another issue with my newbie ass. I am following what everyone else is doing PPC wise. Dating ads on PoF like who doesn't know about it.

...

Looking for an offer I can push with PPV for now I am giving up on PoF. I have spent about $600 on it, made about $350 or so.
 
Paused my PoF campaign so I can stop getting the annoying your campaign has no funds.

Started an account with LeadImpact. Minimum deposit of $200, but that is not bad since I can spend $400 a month and take the loss if need be.

Exploring LeadImpact for a bit to get familiar with their site. Its pretty straight forward.

I still need to figure out why the hell prosper202 does not work right. Its just a white page, no source code is even available, but if I make my own .html or .php index page it works just fine.
 
Put this snippet right on the start of the index.php

ini_set('error_reporting', E_ALL);

This will tell your server to report any and all errors and should help you get the insight you need.

::emp::
 
wiredniko said:
Paused my PoF campaign so I can stop getting the annoying your campaign has no funds.

Started an account with LeadImpact. Minimum deposit of $200, but that is not bad since I can spend $400 a month and take the loss if need be.

Exploring LeadImpact for a bit to get familiar with their site. Its pretty straight forward.

I still need to figure out why the hell prosper202 does not work right. Its just a white page, no source code is even available, but if I make my own .html or .php index page it works just fine.
Click to expand...

Is that directly after you input your details (DB, Username, Password etc) ?
 
I have only been working 10 hours lately, which primarily affects my AM side of things.

Today I am putting a good 12 hours.

Prosper202 is still being a bitch. It all comes down to $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] pointing to the wrong place. Took me a freaking while to track this down. Now I need to figure out a way to fix it only for this to not fuck up my other domain.

50 minutes later I still have not fixed this. God damn it.

Made a ticket, even though I am concerned that they will count it as installing a file and bounce it back.

I must say one thing about zensix. There ticket response rate is phenomenal. I think I got a reply in two minutes after posting my question. not just a "hey we got it" but a resolution.

Well yeah, now Prosper202 is up.

Alright....I can finally do AM stuff now....

Found a dating offer I want to promote on PPV. I also have a BizOp kind of offer but I need to be approved first, so while I am waiting...

Dating it is.

Did some, hopefully creative searches for my niche dating offer. I have 68 urls....that does not seem like enough.

Made it 69 urls for good luck and stuff.

Weird I can sense fear while I am doing this. I wonder why? Maybe because PPV seems kind of dorky? I don't know.

Well no matter what I am going to continue on.

I have decided to implement something that was mentioned in this journal by EMP a while ago, make my landing page match the offer page. I am pretty much using the same CSS and images. Instead of having a form I am creating reasons why people should join.

By the way, the best place to make buttons is: Da Button Factory - Create pretty buttons online, quickly! for graphics dummies like me they are great.

Played around with my CSS a bit. Added relevant images, a pretty strong call to action, city geolocation so it looks personalized, and finally a countdown timer.

I originally made it a php page but ended up using no PHP so its converted to html instead. Pretty quick loading as well.

Setting up prosper to track this beast. All setup. Surprisingly tracking PPV stuff with Prosper does not seem that bad.

Oops forgot to bid on my URLs. Got top bids, highest bid was like 4 cents. PPV is funny that way. Lets see if it actually does anything.

Well now I am waiting for approval.

From what I understand it takes a while. Well no fear I got other things I want to work on.

I still feel angst for some reason. Might be because its 9:48pm and still have not had dinner.

I think its time to eat. As always when I work on stuff I develop another 234324532 projects in my head.
 
cainer said:
Is that directly after you input your details (DB, Username, Password etc) ?
Click to expand...

$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] was pointing to the wrong place....or the right place but not for a VPS. Well I reassigned it in my apache config to the proper place and restarted apache and it all worked.
 
Back to work.

I have been thinking about AM all day today.

I decided that 69 words is way too low. Updated to 219 thanks to some scrapers.

Updated LeadImpact with my new keywords. I also decided that my dating campaign that had an age limit was not going to work very well since LeadImpact does not provide an age specification. So instead I chose a different offer still in the same dating niche and update my links + prosper to reflect the new change. It was from the same site so my lander is the same, well minus a color difference.

Making PPV LPs from scratch is taking some time. I can't wait till have I have four templates that I can just modify and use.

Wasted about 1 hour playing around with linux editors. I like nano but some things are missing from it. Trying VIM, I hope it does not drive me crazy :)

I want to build four templates I can use for all my LPs. That way I can create anything I need. I do not want to waste my time so I pretty much making my templates as I am building my LPs.

....time to go to bed again. I worked on a lot of stuff...but this entry makes it seem like I was slacking :D
 
wiredniko said:
Wasted about 1 hour playing around with linux editors. I like nano but some things are missing from it. Trying VIM, I hope it does not drive me crazy :)
Click to expand...
Komodo Edit. You can thank me later :p

Just want to add that it's a bad idea to switch to Linux if you're really dedicating yourself to this (or anything). It's not that Linux is bad, but you will waste a LOT of time figuring things out that you would just reflexively do in your native OS. For example, I was going to recommend you use Eclipse (and in Windows I definitely recommend you use Eclipse), but when I first installed it in Ubuntu it took me at least 4 hours just to get things set up right. 4 hours for you right now is a lot of split testing, ad writing and LP designing.

Keep messing around with Linux, it's awesome, but I'd recommend you do it in your spare time.

2cents,
Fawkes
 
Nice, LeadImpact approved my LP. Takes them a while, almost two days, but the nice thing is they send you an email when they approved you so you are not kept in the dark.

So according to prosper I got 418 hits right now. 4.78% CTR (seems good)...of course $0 conversions.

Damn them. The numbers are still low, so who knows.

The only problem with changing from PPC to PPV is I do not know what to drop and what to keep. I need to do some research on that.

Alright so 4.78% CTR is low, I need to hit 8-11% CTR...I think. God damn it....there are 23432532 affiliate marketing gurus no one talks about CTRs to aim for. Useless...

Well in any case....based on the users ending on the offer page I am paying $1.25 per user....so I need to convert 1/4 to make profit....FML

So if I doubled my CTR, I would need 1/8 to make profit...

Ok.

Did I just launch a total fail campaign....

I need to get better at researching things like this, but what did I miss?

I guess if my CTR was 15% then I could make a profit, but that does not sound like a realistic achievement...

I am a bit frustrated by this. Made a thread in the AM section, http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate-marketing/107799-ctrs-aim.html#post1063804 I figured I should ask for FB and regular search engine PPC since at some point I will have to deal with them.

I learned one thing today, testing with only one lander is plain dumb. Right now I have no way of knowing if the issue is my LP or my targets.

At least I have the tracking part down now, compared to my previous attempts.

Anyway one of my pages has 180 hits on my LP and 0 conversions, its also my highest bid so I am killing it.

I am almost done with my $25 daily budget.

Hmm...I am thinking hard about this situation. I keep telling myself I need to get off the well traveled path and go big.

Otherwise I am playing in the same playground as everyone else...

Paused my campaign. I need to make 4 LPs total for proper testing.

I have one, three more to go.

Talked to one of my AMs, the offer I was promoting apparently sucks...and my CTR is fine, 1-5% is what is the average so at 4.78% I am pretty much rocking it....oh man I feel so much better.

Anyway I still want to test more LPs, cause its silly not.

I got the new offer I am supposed to run (thanks to Alex from EWA) updating prosper. Since I am logged in I created my 4 LPs tracking sections. All that remains is the actual links, but I will do that once my 3 more LPs are done.

I am building my LPs keeping in mind they will be templates for future use in various niches. This way I can avoid building the same thing over and over again.

Now that I think about it...hmm, I can just build two LPs, then also split test the text, and have four. That way this does not get delayed for too long. I like that a bit more.

Ok so I have one LP already, I can change the text / title for testing.

And then use two more.

Back to work.

My 2nd distinct template is at about 50%, most of the CSS is done and the general HTML structure.

Oh I totally forgot to mention I had an AM dream today. I was in a warehouse and it had a bunch of boxes, stacked in columns going up as far as I can see. Apparently each box was a website and I was trying to move them all at the same time...but couldn't. I also kept waking up with PPV thoughts in my head.

Pretty crazy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back