You have probably seen me playing around with the design of this blog.  I am working on a new look so don’t be surprised when you see the mess.  The funny thing is I no longer need a designer or a coder, it just seems like I need a blogger.

Well, that was a pretty painless upgrade. I went from 2.0 – 2.2.

The site is looking pretty bare at the moment and I am working on some inspiration for a re-design.  Hopefully I will get some time to redo this place soon.  I am over the current look.

I got an email the other day from one of my favorite affiliate marketing products telling me they were changing their terms of service.  It is no longer permissible to bid on search engine traffic using their name, variations of their name or the names of their products.  I was pretty disappointed to read this and didn’t think it was a smart move on their part.  I did however comply with their instructions.

I changed the Adcenter, YAHOO, and Adwords campaigns I had running to send all that traffic to a landing page with their competitors ads on it.  I am in full terms compliance.  That was a smart move on their part.  Their PPC bills should drop next to nothing now that noone other than them will bid on their keywords.

Great movie. Not 100% factual, but it was very well done.

I decided at the first of the year to get a better handle of my arbitrage by figuring out which traffic was converting best for me.  The easiest way for a non programmer like me to do this was to buy a new domain and put up the same landing page on it.  So I have Domain A and Domain B and they both have the same content.  Domain A traffic comes from Microsoft Adcenter and Domain B traffic comes from one of the two remaining big three.

The results are in and they are staggering.

Microsoft Domain A – Clicks = 564 Imps = 973 CTR = 57.97% CPM = 385 EPC = $66.49

Other      Domain B – Clicks = 690 Imps = 2426 CTR = 28.44% CPM = 61.83 EPC = $21.74

For  this specific page and product, Microsoft Adcenter owned the competition.

My wife and I generally spend at least an hour a day in driving to and back home. We would listen crappy FM radio drive shows to pass the time, but they are all the same old tired act. I decided I was gonna start making my commute time more productive so I got me a subscription to audible.com. Not only does it make the once wasted hour in the car more productive, it makes the trip go by much faster.

My wife and I have the luxury of riding to work together so I started downloading my books to my Pocket PC. I started with some marketing books by Seth Godin and some investing books by Jim Cramer. These were books I wanted to read, but didn’t have the extra time and I am definitely ADD when it comes to sitting down and reading. I listened to a few books like this with my headphones when my wife decided she would like to listen to try listening to some books as well. I decided at this point to move away from my educational/informative books and get some mysteries and horror books. What a great decision this has been. We have really been enjoying books and it actually makes the commutes enjoyable.

If you haven’t already done so, try out some audio books during your commute. They are so much better than the mindless crap you will find on the radio.