Another newb's money making journal

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TylerL

TylerL

read less, get paid
Feb 27, 2007
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Canada
www.roboturner.com
Hey kiddies.

I thought that the best way to get in to/learn about this whole making money online thing was to make a thread and write about my ventures over the next long while. No, I'm not another one of those fuckers that's going to stop writing 3 days in, expect this to be updated anywhere from daily to every few days for the next few months, and longer if it really proves beneficial.

I got started in making money online as a web design, and that's where all my knowledge is. I've been designing for 6 or 7 years. I recently decided to try my hand at affiliate marketting, arbi, and all that jazz, after designing for Jon (I made those cool little "Moderator" and "Guide" buttons, go me) and being introduced to WickedFire. I've since been lurking around, reading threads (shitloads of good info here, I love this place), posting once in a while, etc; Anyways, after enough reading I decided it was about time to have some fun and (hopefully) make some money.

Anyways, this thread should be fun and I hope you're entertained by the huge fuck-ups I'll probably make!

Hope you guys enjoy the thread, I'll be updating frequently.

TylerL
 


May 7, 2007 - My first attempt

My first ever attempt at making money online was in the past few days. I tried my hand at arbi using an old domain I had, GreatCooking. I was going to send traffic with Adwords and try to make some money by placing Adsense on my site and hope for clicks.

First thing I did was set up the site. It was going to be a recipe directory in the form of a blog (Wordpress). I chose a theme called K2. Uploaded Wordpress, uploaded the theme, activated it. Then, I made a nice custom header and changed the background to give the site a clean and natural feeling. Great, the design work is done!

So now I moved on to writing content. After putting two recipes up, I got sick of doing it and hired someone (actually, I traded a 468x60 banner design for 20 submissions) to submit them for me. He ended up disappearing, hired another person to do it, he disappeared as well, but only after submitting a few recipes, and I figured that having 6 recipes would be enough to start.

After the recipes were up, I started placing ads. Google had crawled my site a long time ago when I put up a few recipes on the site a few months ago, so Adsense was displaying relevant ads from the get-go. Here's the setup I used for the first trial:

greatcookingsetup1yo7.gif


So everything was ready to begin sending traffic (unless I was missing something? Oh well)

I pre-paid $40 on my Adwords account and that's what I was and will be using to test out different keywords, ads, ad placements, etc. I began the campaign with one keyword:

free recipes (maximum CPC of $0.15)

At this Max CPC, my ad wasn't showing, so I upped it on cent at a time until they started displaying at $0.19.

My ad read:

Free Recipes
Easy, fast and delicious recipes,
anyone can make them!
http://www.greatcooking.info/

I set my maximum daily spendings to $5 and activated the keyword. What I saw was that I was spending an average of $0.13 per click I received. In total, I received 35 clicks, costing me $4.88. On the Adsense side, there was only 7 clicks on my ads, and I made $0.37. I lost $4.51, but that's not exactly big money, so who gives a shit =)

This is as far as I've gotten. What I noticed on Adsense was that the ad in the footer was receiving the most clicks (6), the 468x60 ad near the header received no clicks, the links received no clicks and the sidebar ad space received one click.

I've since removed the 468x60 ad space from the header, and changed the links to a horizontal link set and created a faux navigation with them:

greatcookingpreview1iw8.gif


That's all for now, post away =]
 
I really like what you've done with the design, the header especially looks great.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the faux navigation converts. Another thing you might try is putting a 468x60 or a square actually in your posts or between the first 2. Just a thought...

Looking forward to day2

EDIT: I'm guessing you've only been using search and not the content network? Content network may be worth checking in to.
 
your website looks great and actually does provide value. Do you have the content network on?

Also (and this may be obvious to non-newbies), why not expand your keywords. Type in the keyword you use now. Then, record the links of the two websites that show up as the top sponsored link and the top search link. Go to google's keyword search option. Click on "site related" option. Put the urls in. When you search, you'll find the keywords that those websites use. That will give you some ideas of the keywords that work. Try bidding really low like $.01-$.10 on the content netowrk to see if it get's you more traffic.

I liked your page layout, so I figured I'd throw my $.02 in. What I learned from the past 10 days of this forum is that what really seems to separate the money makers is "action". Alot of people don't want to share so they don't give way any "secret" but the reality is that most people won't act on them, so it makes no sense not to share knowlege.

Thanks for your layout suggestions :bigear:
 
pfgannon said:
I really like what you've done with the design, the header especially looks great.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the faux navigation converts. Another thing you might try is putting a 468x60 or a square actually in your posts or between the first 2. Just a thought...

Looking forward to day2

EDIT: I'm guessing you've only been using search and not the content network? Content network may be worth checking in to.
Click to expand...

I have Content Network enabled under my Campaign settings if that's what you mean.
 
are you sure you are in the right niche? With those stats even if you got 100% CTR you would be losing money, or is this page not for arbi?
 
ok, well, aswell as trying to get traffic from PPC, try other methods. of the top of my head... posting on cooking forums ^^. Just try and build up some sticky traffic. Also i would change the way the posts are presented on the homepage. Maybe just have the title (linking to the post) with a description of whatever is being made, possibly with the prep times and completion times etc. Just to get people clicking, you can also then craftily place some adsense blocks within posts
 
illkity said:
Always run search and content in different campaigns.
Click to expand...
He means run the search network and the content network ads in different campaigns.

TylerL said:
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you explain?




It is for arbi, it's more of a learning experience than anything.
Click to expand...

Well, the CPC your going to get for the ads in the recipe niche are going to be quite low. Try lowering your adwords CPC to 5 cents to help your profits.
Your going to need to get batter CTR so add a large rectantle above the title of the first recipe.
 
TylerL said:
I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you explain?
Click to expand...

In Adwords, generally speaking, don't run search traffic and content traffic in the same campaign. You should get better pricing if you separate them. You should be paying much, much less per click on the content network than on the search network.
 
illkity said:
In Adwords, generally speaking, don't run search traffic and content traffic in the same campaign. You should get better pricing if you separate them. You should be paying much, much less per click on the content network than on the search network.
Click to expand...

Ok, how can I seperate the two? I'm having trouble seeing the different between the search network and content network, is the content network ads that show on other people's sites and not on Google search?
 
TylerL said:
Ok, how can I seperate the two? I'm having trouble seeing the different between the search network and content network, is the content network ads that show on other people's sites and not on Google search?
Click to expand...

You are right. The Content network shows up on publishers sites. The adsense ads showing on your Arb cooking page are from the content network. The search network is what shows up as sponsored results when you use google.com.

To separate them you will have to edit your current campaign and check the content network box for one and deselect the rest. Then make a new campaign with all the same info but you will just select the search network box and deselect the rest.
 
I think you can make one campaign for both but change max CPC between the two.
 
May 8, 2007 - Updates

 Good news (kind of)! Since reworking my ad placements, I've gone from a close to 1:10 ROI to about 1:3. Since the last update I've spent $4.22 in Adwords and made back $1.31! Much better than last time, but tons of room for improvement.

Anyways, a few things to note:
  • The guy I hired has promised to put up the rest of the 100 recipes agreed upon, we'll see how that goes later tonight.
  • I disabled Content Network on the current campaign and I'm working to recreate the campaign just for the Content Network.
  • I'm working on a new way to display recipes on the main page!
That's all for now.

Regards,
Tyler
 
Most people that visit your site, will just be there for the free recipes, that's the only negative thing about having good content. They find what they were looking for and need nothing else.

So what I would do is find some cooking products on cj.com or another network and try working some of your affiliate links into your site to increase the money making potential.

As stated before, try optimizing for organic traffic as well. There's tons of threads on how to optimize wordpress for SEO, check them out and go optimizing. Drop your links on other blogs about cooking, start visiting the forums and drop your links, etc..
 
I have a similar recipe site and I find that a banner across the top of the content does ok as well as a banner in the middle of the content. Add the banner in right in the middle before the comments and all that junk but after the actual content. Having ads at the absolute bottom hasn't done anything for me.

My biggest problem so far is getting google to index the whole site, I've got over 6,000 recipes on there.
 
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