So I hit a brick wall...

[Xrproto]

I recently hit a huge rut with my arbitrage campaigns for the past 2 ½ weeks and I’m going to try and explain how I got there and what I did to get out of it.

When I started towards the middle of October I had great success from the beginning all the way through the end of November then my funds ran out ending with an overall 4:1 return across all my sites.

I had about two weeks before I was able to put more money back into my campaign so I took the time to build, build, and build. With in that time I made a lot of changes ranging from templates to adding keywords and adjusting bids. In my over bearing confidence I changed just about everything I had done at the beginning which gave me the great success and return that I had. While neglecting the thought of setting it and forgetting it when it’s making a good return.

The results of these changes were devastating and put most of my sites in the red for the last two weeks while barely breaking even. With in that time I’ve made tons of small changes with no prevail and ending in pure frustration.

Then it hit me after trying to seek outside advice. Why did I change what I was doing from the beginning? Well simple, I got greedy.

I spent the last 48 hrs reverting back to what I had set up in the beginning which in turn has proved to be the wise decision and everything is back to normal.

Moral of the story is “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.”

 

[Xrproto]

I would also like to advise making only small changes at a time and then test it. If you have a ton of ideas you want to try, make a list. Then go through it one at a time.

I've learned more getting through this rut then I did at the beginning when I was doing great.

Like they say you learn more from the fights you loose than the ones you win.

 

[Mike]

Have you tried any sort of split testing? Instead of completely changing the site. If so, what scripts did you use? If not, then...nevermind

 

[Reefer420]

How did you change your layout? I'm tempted to make mine a little more 'professional' looking, but I've been having good success with a stupid basic layout - one pic under a ad block to the left of some text.

Worried about the same thing though - might just start making duplicate campaigns and doing some testing soon...

 

[Atomm]

I went with a more professional looking template on a few new sites. I have yet to get enough traffic to know if it is working or not.

 

[ImagesAndWords]

To me it seems that CTR is more niche related than template related. I have tested several templates with one niche that just won't convert. (Or with 0% - 16% CTR). With another niche, I get 80% - 100% CTR regardless of template.

It also depends on the keywords and ad copy of course but overall I get the feeling that certain niches have "dumber" clickers.
Lesson learned: Understand and cater to your target demographic!

 

[Xrproto]

When I was driving traffic to my sites I was testing one thing at a time but I had that 2 weeks of no traffic in which I should have not even touched the sites...but I did and I made a lot of changes. I even added tons of other sites with these changes (most not being good).

The templates made the sites actually look good...I've went back to the bad looking ones. On top of that a bad job of keyword selection for traffic that was untested when I went live again.

The whole time I was thinking "Yeah this will help raise my ROI to 6:1!" Gotta learn the hard way I guess.

 

[Xrproto]

To me it seems that CTR is more niche related than template related. I have tested several templates with one niche that just won't convert. (Or with 0% - 16% CTR). With another niche, I get 80% - 100% CTR regardless of template.

It also depends on the keywords and ad copy of course but overall I get the feeling that certain niches have "dumber" clickers.
Lesson learned: Understand and cater to your target demographic!

I've come across that also. I have a handfull of niches I test every so often trying to find the hook to get a decent CTR.

One of my bigger earners start out like that and after tons of testing I found the right hook.

 

[DavidR]

I always try different ways of creating sites. My first arbitrage sites were hand-made with content that was copied from other sources. They did pretty well, so I wrote a program to crawl websites and scrape their content, and then the program created a page based on my template. Using this technique I could easily create 500 arbitrage pages in a matter of minutes.

My current project crawled a major shopping site's RSS feeds using another program I wrote. This site is going to be more "professional" looking rather than just another crappy content page. I may or may not add a search box to this site. The content here is in a database but it's all static, meaning I probably won't add new content to this site.

My next project is going to be completely driven by user searches. Any time a user searches for something, I will query the appropriate places and store the data in a database. This will keep me from crawling sites more than once.

I've had better success with each iteration of my arbitrage network. I have other techniques in the works, but I can't give away all my secrets ;-)

One thing that some people might want to be careful about is growing too big too fast. I'm experiencing that right now, but I'm hoping it won't be a big problem. I've basically been rolling all of my profits into pushing more traffic.