Praying to the WF gods for guidance

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alexb

alexb

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Dec 6, 2007
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Indiana
Oh great and powerful Wickedfire gods, I come before you beaten and broken.

I have tried PPC...and failed.
I have tried making landing pages...and failed.
I have tried picking good niches for sites...and failed.
I have tried to find affiliate offers that aren't already saturated...and failed.
I have tried some shitty blackhat technique involving passworded files and Limewire...and failed.
I have tried creating a vidya game site to appeal to the drooling masses...and failed.
I have read lots of ebooks (paid for none of them) and tried to apply their knowledge...and failed.
I have tried creating auto-updated sites in small numbers...and haven't yet recouped the cost of domain registrations.

In fact, the only thing I've had any success with is that email/zip submit poll page technique...and I haven't come up with a good one in over a month.

So, great and powerful WF gods, where do I go from here?
 


Instead of saying you failed why not say you figured out some ways not to do the above things and try again.

Or you could just continue to wallow...

Best advice I can give is to try again... and again... and again.

Until you get it!
 
alexb said:
Already have one. At it right now actually. Care to contribute anything helpful?
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*raises his hand*
Well, take a look at each one of those. Why weren't you successful at them? Then fix it.
I know it sounds simple, and I know it's not.

If you're having trouble with niches, try finding standalone aff programs(call the store owner first to make sure he even knows he has affiliate stuff installed on his shopping card) or try some of the bigger places like shareasale. There's a damn ungodly amount of niches.

If you're still having problems, just take a big topic and break it down.
Like dating can break into asian/black/married/adult dating. Or even dating for people with STDs(that one surprised me for some reason). Just keep breaking it down till it seems manageable.
Or just look around the room till you see something you feel wont have stiff competition.


I'm far from the best person here to be giving advice, but that's what I got.
 
alexb said:
So, great and powerful WF gods, where do I go from here?
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You keep trying until you make something work. SlightlyShady's advice about breaking down niches is a great place to start.
 
In your head, go through every failure you've had.
Write down as many lessons as you can remember from each failure.
Go through the lessons and work out what you'll do differently next time.
Realise that you're that many lessons closer to actually making it work.
Resolve to make this work and get on with it.
 
amateursurgeon said:
In your head, go through every failure you've had.
Write down as many lessons as you can remember from each failure.
Go through the lessons and work out what you'll do differently next time.
Realise that you're that many lessons closer to actually making it work.
Resolve to make this work and get on with it.
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No avatar...not many posts...and yet real content..GOOD LORD
 
How much time did you spend "failing" in each thing? I'm going to guess, not long enough.

Fail until you succeed. If you are having a hard time picking niches and building landing pages, then keep doing it until you have a successful one. Don't worry about saturation. There is a reason why certain niches are saturated: they make money.

For example:
  • Ringtones
  • Real Estate
  • Cash Advance
  • Poker
  • Forex
  • Porn
All saturated, but you can still make money in all of them. Dig deeper for longtails that you can dominate. Think outside the box. Don't read ebooks. Test Adsense and CPA offers. Test different layouts. Don't give up, for fuck's sake.

I'm sorry, but your post makes you sound like a bitch. Man up, and do something. Don't make a single layout, make 10. Don't pick one niche, pick 10. Don't stop after 1 failure, don't stop after 10, learn from your failures, find the common problem and eliminate it.

Need keyword ideas:
  • Wordtracker
  • Wordze
  • Keyword Discovery
  • Overture (may not be available anymore)
  • Niche Taxi
Need niche ideas:
  • Wikipedia front page
  • Digg
  • CNN / Fox News
  • Television commercials
  • Your affiliate manager
Having problems converting a CPA offer? Talk to your affiliate manager. It's their job to help you make money.

Need help with Adsense:
  • Adsense blog
  • Google Groups
If you need a personal opinion / help with specific sites / niches: PM me.
 
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alexb said:
Oh great and powerful Wickedfire gods, I come before you beaten and broken.

I have tried PPC...and failed.
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Dude, I am researching PPC for myself right now and I can tell you this, if you've spent any less than one month full time with your efforts in PPC, you are quiting WAY too early.

+rep to Mike for that pointed post.
 
I can say I understand what you're talking about.

For about 1 year, there's only been one niche/small affiliate network that I've been making money from.

For an entire year, I've tried so many different things, I've started so many PPC campaigns. Last year I ended up losing more in reinvesting my money back into the business to make more money, than I actually made in profit. This small niche has been making me about $1500 in profit a month after taxes. You would think if somebody could make this much from 1 niche, why can't he scale or duplicate it these efforts onto other campaigns? I'm not exagerating from June 2007, I found this niche and it's been my only CONSISTENT income. I've had some temp jobs since then and I don't have a life, I just work at this when I'm not wasting time being lazy, wanking or browsing forums. I make all the notes, I know who all the people here are that know what they are talking about. You can only do so much by the book and then you have to rely on your creativity which is where I've failed my entire life.

The advice about finding one niche and sticking to it is what seems is the way I need to go now. Just "dabbling" here and there doesn't seem to work. Just throwing things against the wall isn't working. Sure I've made a couple bucks here and there but, it's not enough to make a living from.

If you don't have skills such as good content writing, designing landing pages/websites, or can't do link building for whatever reason, it does end up costing to outsource everything just to see if your idea is going to work. Luckily you have a day job so you can invest some money into it. That's what I would suggest. Find a niche and stick to it. Make sure to research your competitors, find keywords that you want to rank in or keywords that you want to bid on. Research your competitors pay attention to exactly what they are doing and try to do it better.

Personally, I'm looking into some blackhat software that's for noobs such as SSEC. I figure creativity and "thinking outside the box" isn't something that I can learn but, blackhat is more technical and actually something you can learn. Although, you never know I might not be able to get this to work either.
 
ScottDaMan said:
Dude, I am researching PPC for myself right now and I can tell you this, if you've spent any less than one month full time with your efforts in PPC, you are quiting WAY too early.

+rep to Mike for that pointed post.
Click to expand...

Four months. Mike is right though, I'm not doing enough campaigns to really get the feel for things. My budget is pretty limited at the moment.
 
I'll give you one to try. I found this by accident one day but think it could a real gem. I didn't do all that well with it but never really did anything other than throw it up there. As you can see I didn't even bother to turn off the content network.

You can see though the CPC is Low. It actually started out at $0.04 a click but my content was severely lacking. Just a couple of text links... my site is a coupon codes site so I have a million different things going on there.

adwords.jpg


This ad only ran for 8 days BTW, so those numbers are for a week. All my PPC campaigns are on hold right now as I had to kill my credit card b/c someone was slamming me with charges.

Anyway, with a good LP and a little content I think this could be a good one. Cheap, little competition and as you can see, a lot of impressions.

If you're interested, IM me and I'll send you the name my Top keywords and everything. You'll have to figure it out from there though. Will probably never be a 10k per month campaign but it may be a start.

edit: yes the screen shot was edited for posting purposes.
 
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you're just trying to many things. jack of all trades, master of none.

stick with one thing that you think you will like. whether its seo, ppc, or spam, it dont matter. you just gotta stick with it. for instance... you probably built a couple sites around a product, build links for a month, and then got pissed off when you werent making any money. well seo is an ongoing process, and it takes a lot of time to see the reward. build a site. build links. add more content. build more links. and so on.

PPC is the same way. Takes a lot of time to find a good offer that will convert, and the only way youre going to know is by build a shitton of campaigns and slowly but surely finding the ones that convert.

if you want to make some money quickly .... one easy way is to spam the shit out of yahoo answers (with legitimate answers of course) find a niche that people ask about a lot, throw in your article linkswith some shifty affiliate links thrown in and there you go.
 
alexb said:
PM sent. You don't have any IM details listed in your profile.
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I don't have an IM account. Probably the only person on earth but I don't like people randomly bugging me.

Anyway, for those who bother to read past my last post. All the info has been sent to alexb and is no longer available. Giving it out to a million people would kind of defeat the purpose.

If he decides not to use it, he's welcome to give it out to whoever he wants.
Good luck alex!
 
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clownstep said:
Personally, I'm looking into some blackhat software that's for noobs such as SSEC. I figure creativity and "thinking outside the box" isn't something that I can learn but, blackhat is more technical and actually something you can learn. Although, you never know I might not be able to get this to work either.
Click to expand...

I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick there. While blackhat methods usually involve programming and technical skill, the ability to "think outside the box" is a lot more useful and not something you can really outsource. I've heard some good stuff about SSEC, but I'm not sure if it could be considered particularly noob-friendly.

PPC might be a better way to go at present, you'll certainly get a faster return and if you had success with the polls then I'm sure you can apply what you've learnt to other campaigns. As others have said, whatever you decide to focus on don't give up at the first hurdle. There really is some great advice in this thread.

Good luck
 
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