"Big Dirty" Update, Overture/MSN/Google, Text Link Ads, New Traffic Records and More

It's been a long time since I did a general business update, so here you go.

1. "Big Dirty" Update. If you don't know what the "Big Dirty" is, I talked about it here. Last month was a bit of a breakthrough month for us, as we had our first solidly profitable month generating leads. After a bunch of trial and error (ok, tons of trial and error), we finally started to get a grasp on how to make money generating leads. We tweaked everything; our landing pages, our keywords, the prices of our bids, the sites that we advertised on, we split tested our ads.. in my opinion, we have one of the best converting landing pages in the industry, and all we need to do now is increase the number of clicks that we purchase (which is easier said than done). We ended up generating 10 valid leads (we get paid about $260 Canadian per lead) and ended up with a 170.3% Return on Investment.

Considering that the top guys in this industry will do between 10-50 leads per DAY, we certainly have a lot of work to do. My goal for the rest of June would be to generate one lead per day, and maintain a return on investment of over 100%. Only way to do that is by continuing to tweak and add keywords. Regardless, a good start, as we booked a profit of $1658.82 in May.

2. Overture vs. MSN Adcenter vs. Google Adwords. I've talked about this before, but I am definitely coming to some conclusions regarding the traffic that these three PPC sites provide -

a) Overture. Good for long-tail keywords. Easy bidding process. Terrible for highly-searched keywords, as there are so many fraudulent "partner sites" out there sending traffic. If Overture had an opt-out for partner traffic, ROI there would shoot through the roof. So I am disabling our higher traffic keywords there, and focusing on company names and long-tail keywords. By doing this, our ROI will be sky high there, in my opinion.

b) MSN. Great quality of traffic, hard to get keywords accepted (which I like) but the volume is extremely low. MSN has a great product if they can just get more traffic to their MSN search sites. By far the highest return on investment of the three for us.

c) Google. Great return on investment, however, slogging your way to a decent quality score and decent traffic can be slow going. However when you make it with Google, you have MADE it, and can just let your campaigns run.

The secret I think? Overture for long-tail, Google and MSN for your highly searched keywords. Google has an opt-out for partner traffic, which I love.

3. Text Link Ads. Who doesn't like free money? We recently put up Text Link Ads on Digicam King and Lenzine.com, and just sold our first link. We are going to be particular about which sites have Text Link Ads, as we really don't want penis enlargement ads on some of our bigger sites. So far I've been very impressed with the Text Link Ads operation.

4. Poker traffic records. A little less than three months ago, we set out on the task of reinvigorating our poker sites. Well, traffic is way up as of late. Poker King, which on March 9th had just 93 visitors in one day, posted an eye-popping 2674 visitors on June 5th. Combined with Texas Holdem King and Poker King Blog, our poker network had 3724 visitors (mostly uniques) on June 5th. Quite the turnaround, and we want to keep it going. The goal for our entire gambling network is 100k uniques in a month. This will put us up there with some of the biggest networks around.

So far in June, after 6 full days, we have a grand total of 12,480 uniques across our gambling network. This works out to an average of about 2,080 per day so far. Our goal would be 3,333 per day, so we are a ways off, but getting there.

The trick to getting there? Good, unique content.

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing - google - adwords - overture

Filed under: Making Money Online




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