PPC kicked my ass in a week!

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Advertise your site at black forums for FREE! This is a very hot topic at African American message boards. Just put your web address in your Sig file and you will get big hits. And if you give away something in exchange for an email address on your opt in page then you will build a responsive list very fast.
 


Paid for Landing Page

Okay guys. I ponied up for a landing page. It will be done by Jan 20. So I have suspended my campaign b/c:

#1- My LP sucks
#2- My CTR is around 0.5%
#3- I'm throwing money at the wall
#4- Wicked Fire does not give shit for advice.

So thanks WP. I'm still learning. It was said that it took a year for a new webmaster to become decent at arbi. So 1 months to go! lol
 
Tony

Don't get frustrated. You have gotten some good advice on this post. Getting a new landing page is a great idea and should drive conversions.
 
Your right about that. I just got a peek at a new landing page and it looks a hell of a lot better than what I was trying to do. Someone on WF said to get a landing page done professionally even if conversions are high b/c one could make even more money. I'll post the link after the new landing page is up so ya'll can critique it. Now on to my other project.
 
like others have said, get a professional landing page. Then find a better place to get traffic than google.

Google is going to kick your ass in this niche, you're going to find yourself competing against against two types of competitors. At the top of the list are going to be the actual dating sites, which have branding budgets and will outbid you any day. Second, you're going to be fighting against professional affiliates who have better data and research and deeper pockets. You wont stand a chance.

Stay off the top tier, check out other ways to get traffic, go to tgp's and ebony toplists. Use behavior based advertising (client side adware) if your sponsors will allow it.

Lastly, get some tracking on that page. There is nothing worse than flying blind. If you dont know what keywords are generating your sales, you'll never be able to do any concrete keyword ROI and you'll only lose money.
 
I have a few thoughts and questions. Is it really a "good" time to get into dating, with the pre-Valentines's day "Surge"? The big dating sites and the 2 or 3 independent affiliates I see all the time dominate the ad placements with high bids (I'm new so I'm not sure if bids have been rising, but I would guess so). The search volume increase has been negated by the big boys having big pockets and low cpc. The market for dating affiliates is not any better than pre xmas if you are not big already.

you traffic ideas were good micker, maybe I should look into cpm or content networks

BTW, can anyone tell me if CTR .50-1% is bad for 5-8 position on adcenter for general and moderately targeted dating keywords? I'm might have to briefly test copying a "good ad" from a competitor to see if my ad writing is really that bad.
 
Okay guys. The landing page is done and I'm up and running on (gasp) google. Yes, although google did kick my ass the first week I did learn how to set keyword searches and track which keywords performed better than the others. (Thank you Jeremy Palmer for that keyword tip). Now although CTR is a good metric to use, I prefer to use cashflow. So I should be able to catch some of the crumbs that fall off the table (see post #17). Even if it's noob luck, I'll take it. I'm going to wait a week and see what happens with the new landing page. ebonydatingsites.com

I'm really leaning away from tgp and toplists b/c porn has a peculiar smell that I do not like. Although many make lots of money from it...I'm not to sure if I want my kids surfing one of my porn sites. Maybe next year micker.

And Ffperson, as for the big independent companies-- check out my sig below!
 
tony115 said:
Okay guys. The landing page is done and I'm up and running on (gasp) google. Yes, although google did kick my ass the first week I did learn how to set keyword searches and track which keywords performed better than the others. (Thank you Jeremy Palmer for that keyword tip). Now although CTR is a good metric to use, I prefer to use cashflow. So I should be able to catch some of the crumbs that fall off the table (see post #17). Even if it's noob luck, I'll take it. I'm going to wait a week and see what happens with the new landing page. ebonydatingsites.com

I'm really leaning away from tgp and toplists b/c porn has a peculiar smell that I do not like. Although many make lots of money from it...I'm not to sure if I want my kids surfing one of my porn sites. Maybe next year micker.

And Ffperson, as for the big independent companies-- check out my sig below!
Click to expand...

Hey good job man and good luck, just remember, if your just starting with ppc always be prepared to lose money for a while, it took me 3 years before i REALLY got rolling
 
$100 Yahoo voucher ftw

Demonez666 said:
but I can tell you this: since you are just starting out, go grab adwords/YSM voucher and make a test campaign. If the campaign is profitable move it into your real PPC account.
Click to expand...

I signed up for a couple yahoo accounts to start testing. Definitely take his advice and do that. User all the free money you can get. There are $100 dollar yahoo coupons floating around with a minimum $30 deposit. It's is almost impossible not to make your $30 back. If you are low on cash you may want to send an email to yahoo and have them turn off the feature that automatically bills your credit card when you account goes below a certain amount.
 
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Being a noob is fun because you can try a bunch of stuff and if it doesn't work...base it on being new. So that is what I am doing. Starting out using a dating niche was a total noob move yet I will continue b/c the payout is really great. I did what was recommended and used long-tail keywords. I came across this list by subscribing to a keyword service for 1 month. Then I ran a low cpc campaign. Max $0.05. This allowed me to get impressions and see which keywords were ranking in the top ten. Any keyword that ranked lower than fifteen I paused and/or deleted those keywords. Also from reading different post and articles here and elsewhere, the locations were increased. Previously the campaign only targeted the United States and Canada. So with these new changes in place we get these stats:
Campaign 1 (today)
clicks:19 Impressions:138 CTR%:13.76 Avg CPC: $0.03 Cost:$0.66

Campaign 2 (yesterday b/c today clicks=0 and impressions=10)
clicks:1 Impressions:3 CTR%:33.33 Avg CPC: $0.04 Cost:$0.04

These stat are a lot better from when this post was started. Whether these clicks will convert into sales will tell the real story. By the way. Campaign #1 is doing well with a particular keyword which will be expanded upon with its own landing page. Getting a professional landing page is still the best investment for PPC. So this is the last post for this thread. Thank you to smoosh, Jdog, trademark, and demonez for their insight. Also a big thank you to Jon because there were a lot of good tips in his previous posts/threads.
 
Start by cutting the useless clicks with negative keywords in your ads.
Continue by aiming at the people who will more likely buy from you. If they are not in —say, Thailand— then turn your ads off when Thais are working and your target people are sleeping.

That should help.
 
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