What I Have Learned Monday, September 7th Uncategorized

So it’s been a week into the race now, and as you can see we aren’t doing very well. It’s not something you should really admit on a blog that is trying to make money, but this is just showing how hard this is. A lot of options that would normally be available simply aren’t open to us at the minute as we are starting out with such small starting capital, so until we can increase that significantly it’s going to be quite hard to get off the starting blocks. With that in mind, let’s look at what I have done over the past week…

So as I stated in my last post, my idea was to try and make some initial capital using Facebook advertising. With the free $100 in advertising that I had, I thought that it should be simple enough – put up a lot of adverts and hope that I get at least one sale; makes sense right? Well, obviously not enough as I didn’t make a single sale whatsoever.

I started off with a link from Commission Junction advertising weight loss cookies – which I thought was interesting enough for people to click on. Then I entered the ad and my own sales pitch into Facebook adverts. The good thing about Facebook Ads is that you can target people by their likes – so on entering a product about weight loss, you can target people who like ‘weight loss’ or ‘losing weight’ and well as people who like ‘cookies’. Obviously the keywords you pick are very important, yet some might say ‘why not advertise to absolutley everyone, you’ll get more visits this way?’ – as valid a point this might seem, unfortunately its not that simple.

You see, if we were to advertise these cookies to absolutely everyone, we would get a hell of a lot of clicks and visits, but mostly from people who don’t want the product; meaning they will click to have a look, and then leave. This will increase your CPC, and definitely increase CPM (or cost per impression). Yet if we target people who fit around that group, we are more likely to make a sale and therefore make more profit; seeing as our CPC and CPM costs are lower.

So with that in mind I set up the advert, and it was set to target around 700,000 people on Facebook – which is quite a lot. I decided on CPM as the rates were lower, and I believed I might get a decent average CPC. After the first couple of days I had a lot of clicks, but each one was averaging out at 0.30 a click, and I hadn’t made a single sale. With a big dent in the initial $100, I decided to change my tactics – and my advertiser.

I decided to start advertising Clickbank products, as these gave better returns on my referrals. Clickbank is a site that deals in digital content, eBooks and the like. It is a great place to advertise your own products for sale also, but we’ll go into that in more detail another day. So I went through and selected a number of products to advertise; I chose a couple of ‘Forex marketing robots’ and advertised to people on Facebook who were fans of Forex; which resulted in under 5000 people I seem to recall, which meant CPM was probably the way to go. At the time of writing this, I had only 2 clicks, but my CPC was only $0.02, so it was a very worthwhile strategy. I also took some in weight loss, dating and various ‘random’ adverts – all of which I chose CPM for, as it was the cheaper option. I increased my daily spending limit from $20 to $50 and let them run overnight.

I came back in the morning to find the whole $50 spent, along with around 400 clicks over my various adverts. Yet over half of my adverts were costing me over $0.30 a click, and there had still been no sales. The exercise wasn’t pointless though, as I managed to discover a number of adverts that worked very well; one of which acquired over 200 clicks at 0.05 a click. These are potentially adverts that I will consider again, but maybe with different Clickbank products, as those didn’t seem to convert very well.

You may have noticed that my starting amount has decreased as well – well, I decided on Friday that I would join the Keyword Crash Course to try and improve my knowledge regarding the online mmo industry. At a dollar for the first month, it was an absolute steal. I’m half way through the online core videos and have learnt quite a bit; the information given is actually very useful. My only criticism is that I was never sure ‘exactly’ what I was going to learn. This could be because they couldn’t reveal exactly what they were going to show you as you might be able to work part of it out for yourself (not to the extent they have I wouldn’t have though), or it’s just that I didn’t understand properly. I won’t post what it is they teach just in case of that, but if they let me maybe I will follow-up this post with a brief explanation of what it is.

I had planned on doing more over the weekend, but unfortunately my laptop crashed and died, and my wireless network card in my PC started playing up, so I spent most of the weekend attempting to fix both of these issues, which has left me seriously behind – especially in the long term website I am developing. No cost on that atm btw, as I am hosting it locally and it isn’t costing me anything.

Well that’s my current status – my Facebook ads credit is out so I need to get another sap friend to sign up to get me another free coupon so I can explore fully the potential of these niches (which I will share in the future, after fully testing them out). I have also thought of another way of making money online at a ‘low cost’, which I might attempt sometime this week as well. That, and get back to the gym regularly; all this computer work has played havoc with my eating

Much Love

Dan