Archive for August, 2006

My ringtone conversions doubled since Azoogle implemented the content changes Friday.  Keep on changing!

In some other news,  I am running some ads on a sports forum now.  The ads have been up for about two weeks. I have been very underwhelmed by the click rates from the site but the few ads that have converted have been pretty valuable.  My strategy for running the ads is to devote a lot of personal attention to the site I am advertising for.  I frequent the forums so I get a good feel of what the posters there may be interested in buying.  I am really trying to target the ads instead of just throwing up a buch of crap.  I am hoping to make the ad experience a cool one by offering products the forum members might be excited to see.

I have cracked the super secret Adcenter and Adwords algorithms and I now know how they determine which ads to approve and which ones they reject. Are you ready for this? Do you have a pen and paper ready?

They have a blind monkey throwing shit at dart board. If the shit hits an even number you are approved, odd number you are rejected, even and odd number you are rejected.

Talk about short notice.  This is dumped on everyone at the last minute on a Friday afternoon.  I wonder why the sudden urgency? Here is the information from the Azoogle site.

• 08/25/2006 – URGENT: Mobile NEWS

Anyone using search engines to promote ANY Ringtone Offer, be aware that effective TODAY EOD 12AM EST. All text ads shall not be allowed to include the words: free, zero cost, no charge, no fee and all synonyms. The only accepted promotions are 10 bonus tones, 10 complimentary tones. At 12AM EST today, tests of all main search engines with the keywords free ringtones, free wallpapers, free SMS, free tones, etc will be conducted. If you feel you can’t edit the text ads by that deadline, stop the campaign.

Pretty cut an dry.  If you are an affiliate marketer and have free in your keyword searches for Ringtones, stop it now or we shut you off.

We just got back in town tonight.  My Wife and I had to go back to her hometown for a funeral today.  It was very sad and stressful, but it was also a pretty amazing sight.  Standing room only all the way out to the street.  He was a good who loved family, life, and those around him.  I didn’t know him very well, but I can tell you one thing.  I certainly admire him.  RIP Mr. Hurt.

I obviously haven’t done much with the sites this weekend.  I did come in tonight and change one of my landing pages. The site was getting tons of clicks for one specific artist so I changed to a site that had the artists listed on it.  I think that will be a great move, but we shall see.

I found the mendoza line for Adcenter today. I lowered the bulk of my minimum keyword bids a mere .05 cents and traffic stopped like it was driving through Atlanta. That nickel made a good difference when it comes to clicks. It definitely shows me more proof that you have to play around with your minimum bids. It is one thing to read that and hear Shoemoney talk about it on his radio show at Webmaster Radio it is completely different to see it and feel it in action. The difference between paying out .05 or .10 cent may not seem like much now, but the difference between paying $500,000 and $1,000,000 is a nice beach house.

Edit: As a slight clarification, my bids are more than the 5 or 10 cent example I used. I picked those numbers to keep it simple.

Azoogle is still converting. I won’t blame my other main affiliate company but I will say the offers I am targeting at the moment are better at Azoogle. I would say click the Azoogle link and check them out, but maybe you could wait and let me make a little more money before you saturate the market.

As some of you in the affiliate marketing world know, Google has decided recently to increase your minimum bid for keywords if they determine your site has a low quality score. Well, they finally got around to looking at my current ringtone landing page last night and jacked all of my keywords minimum bids up to $5.00 or $10.00 a click. So, since we will go broke quick paying 5 or 10 bucks per click we aren’t getting any Google traffic at the moment. The only Arbitrage traffic is coming from Adcenter and a sudden spike in clicks from Adbrite. I have changed the landing page for the Adbrite clicks to better get an idea what is happening there. I was sending the traffic straight to the Affiliate but now I am sending to one of my landing pages.

Tonight I will be working on adding some content to my ringtones landing page to try and improve my quality scores. My anger at Google was certainly tempered since I started adding Google Analytics to all my sites this week. I have been getting some very interesting data that way.

Today is a day of celebration at jasonpoteet.com. I made my first $26 dollars from Affiliate Marketing today. Thank you Commission Junction and
Azoogle Ads

The Azoogle Ads page converted in the first 24 hours. I am really fired up. I got the landing page up last night and by 11 this morning I had my first commission. I have also been playing around with my traffic purchases. I was trying to go to cheap and not working hard enough on my ads. I was trying to get all those nickle clicks from Adbrite and having no luck at all. I am now concentrating on sending traffic from Adwords and Adcenter. I am still using Adbrite because you can do some awesome testing for very little money but I am concentrating on the Adcenter and Adwords for the traffic I am really willing to pay for.

I know, I am a few days late.  I have been absolutely slammed this week. I had a wonderful time floating around in a lake and then came back to full on IT hell.  That was like cold water in the face.  Anyway, I am back and kicking.  I have been working on three different online projects since we last talked.

One of them is a landing page for a product.  I was searching for most searched keywords and came across a phrase that gets some good traffic and was available so I bought it up.  I put up a content add so let’s see if anything happens with it.

The second project is running an ad campaign on someone else’s forums.  I am really excited about this if it ever gets going.  I have been waiting over a week for a small script to be placed on the website and it hasn’t happened yet.  I am not spending any more time on this at this point.

Project three is a secret at this point because I think I actually may be ahead of the game on this one.  Got a couple of really good domain names and am working on a site and forums.  I hope you will be hearing a lot about this one in the future.

I am off to a cabin on the lake and will not be back until Tuesday.  Then the posts will be flowing.