Woo Hoo first profit day

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spazdr8cr

spazdr8cr

$1.34/day
Apr 5, 2007
68
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West Coast, USA
Hey after 2 months of this crap I've finally had a day of profit, $1.74 ... I've been lurking not posting but wanted to say thanks for this site, everybody.

I'm posting just to offer encouragement to the frustrated, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

I've been very conservative, maybe that's why it's taken me so long but I don't want to lose too much money. So in the process of learning my total adwords spend in two months has been only $36.40, and my total adsense income is $14.59.

Yesterday I spent $1.21 on adsense and made $2.95.

Of course that is probably a fluke but I've definitely been closer to breaking even the last week or so and the trend is definitely toward being in the black.

The big change I think that made the difference was a few careful forum postings I made, which I hadn't done before, I had been just trying to make adwords work by itself. But the forum postings worked bigtime.

The campaign that's working is a single page, semi-decent content, sort of an arbi page but decent enough that i don't feel bad about linking to it in a forum. I have a few other pages too that I should probably forget about.

I have been about to give up on this over the past few weeks, but now I'm back in the game, hehe.

By the way i still have almost the whole $25 in my 7search account, that has not been very helpful to me, can't seem to make that work anywhere near as well as adwords. For me, it has sucked.
 


$1.74 is hardly light at the end of the tunnel, more like a morlock in the middle of the tunnel holding a lantern, telling you to head on back as the end of the tunnel is to great of a journey
 
This is good news man. Glad to hear it. Don't worry about it only being a buck and change, profit is profit.

When you are doing something on your own and you put a lot of time and effort into it, regardless of how long it takes you and how much cash you spend on making something work correctly, it feels great when you see yourself in the black for the first time instead of the red. Just keep plugging away at it, you're definitely heading on the right track.

To make money online requires work and dedication. When I say things are easy or simple, I usually compare that to physical labor or something tougher. But that's also based on years and years of testing and trying things that either no one else has done before or trying to come up with my own spin on it from advice or ideas from others.

Just don't give up, you are going to get there soon enough, and make sure you log/write down everything that works for ya, so you can keep applying it instead of forgetting and just running around in circles all over again. Figuring shit out on your own is the most rewarding feeling ever.

Keep us updated on your progress, and remember, when you are at the point where you are making cash and doing things nicely, come back here and pay it forward by dropping advice or answering questions so some newbie guy can do the same thing you did and keep the community learning.
 
Fucking great post Jon.

*No, I'm not one of the asskissers.

OP, If you get discouraged from arbi and need a break, I would recommend putting up at least one good content site on a topic that you enjoy. You can make some great streams of income while you learn about SEO, marketing, ad placement, etc.
 
Thanks for the support and advice guys. Especially cool to get a kickass reply from Jon. I found this site through Jon's "Enough Bullshit!" post on his blog and it's been a huge blast getting into this.

I think it's only a few more weeks until I'm consistently making a few bucks a day. Just need the time to work on it, hehe. I'll be glad to share once I have some level of competence.

Chris one of my pages that isn't doing too well as an arbi page, but on a subject I enjoy, is going to be turned into an affiliate site, and with some quality content. So we'll see how that goes. I think I need better content on that page, cuz the subject matter is for smarter people. the page making money is aimed at stupider people.
 
Dunno, with that low of a budget, it is very difficult in any PPC especially when going Google -> Middleman -> Google.

With adwords, you've got to spend a lot initially to bring down your bids and increase the quality score to finally profit. Right? Well, $30 aint gonna do it.

With that low of a budget, I would take yoink*gasp*'s awesome offer of free content, do a blog, keep it up to date, and go for affiliate product sales.

Just a suggestion.
 
Right, I don't really understand about how the quality score works, how to bring it up, or whatever. I thought i did some searches here on it and didn't come up with much.

One thing i started doing just recently was making sure all my bad performing keywords are in their own group, and the good ones are in their own group. Not sure if that helps though. I guess I'll work on searching more about quality score.

Any way, you are right it has been really difficult to go adwords to adsense and make anything. Obviously that would be a big flaw in google's plan if it were that easy. I guess that's why i hit upon trying to get free traffic with the forum posts. hard to lose then.

but if you want to give me the 25 cent explanation right here of why i need a bigger budget to swing with, you can bet i'm listening.

And I certainly will take yoink*gasp*'s offer ... I'll be pm'ing you soon thanks for the offer man!
 
i did want to make the point though that it is possible to learn a lot initially, even with a tiny budget. right now i've spent a net of $20 to learn a hell of a lot. i could have lost $100 or $200 and probably would have learned the same things.

being as green as i am now, i have a hard time believing i'd be any more profitable right now if i had spent more money. i just would have lost more and had to give up the whole game (my wife would have killed me hehe.)

but again, part of the reason i made this thread was kind of hoping some people like you Scott would point out exactly why and how i don't have a clue how to do this. so, "you're not spending enough" is a good start ... i just don't understand the reason behind it yet.
 
First off, are you using the content network for arbi? Don't use the search network, at least initially. If you are getting adword clicks and not making enough adsense there are a couple things wrong. First Your adsense CTR should be somewhere between 10% - 30% at least. If not you need a better layout. If your adsense CTR is OK then, you are not getting paid enough per click. Move on to another niche. If you are paying more that .05 a click in AdWords then that is a problem too.

And as everyone says, while starting out stay away from popular competitive niches like loans, debt, cancer, etc.

I'm not expert for sure but it's not too difficult to make good money awords --> adsense. You can do it too.
 
illkity, i have been using search lately because the clicks i was getting on the content network didn't seem to be converting. but i will give it another try, i'll create a separate group and page and test it some more.

my ctr is on the low end of the range you sugget but it is ok, and getting better as i tweak. although some days it is zero, and other days really high. since i am doing low volume, it takes a while to figure out the overall ctr.

also i've been paying an average .09 a click lately on this one campaign that seems to be decent. i guess i need to work on paring that down.

i'm figuring that the better CTR you get on a page, you will get higher paying ads? or is it more of a matter of how well your clicks covert for the advertiser?
 
ok here's a question about low budget & how it effects my success. right now i have a budget of $4 per day on a set of keywords, my average bid is coming out to .09 but yesterday for example i only ended up spending a little over $2 -- google didn't give me enough impressions to use up my budget.

and if i lowered my bid to .05 like illkitty says then i would have even fewer clicks it seems ...

so are you saying that if my daily budget was like $20 then google would try harder to give me clicks and get my money even though the bid is only .05? so i would end up with more impressions and more clicks and spending less?

it does seem that i have done better since i raised from $2 a day to $4 so maybe that's the case. i'll try it but somebody let me know if it's wrong please.
 
How many click per day are you getting? You can make a profit at .09 a click in the right niche but you adsense CTR better be high. The higher you set your budget the more traffic they will send you. I don't do the search network, but there should also be an option for you to click that basically says give me all the traffic at one. Checking that should get you more traffic also. Otherwise they will try to spread it out through the day.

For the clicks you are getting what is the average payout per click?

On one page over the last 7 days I'm getting ~.37 per adsense click and paying about .04 per adwords click. Since I'm running almost 30% adsense CTR I could pay up to .12 per adwords click. But that probably wouldn't make me much money unless there was huge volume. The key is to ramp slowly. I'm looking to raise my adwords clicks to around .06 and see If I can get a traffic boost.

If you niche is only profitable with low cost click and hence low traffic then just set it so it's making $1 a day or whatever, and move on to your next niche.

I'm getting all my traffic from the content network. About 25% is keyword targeted and the rest site targeted.
 
the numbers aren't that bad, but they all work out so that i am either just over or under break even ... which sucks, but is a whole lot better than where i was a couple weeks ago spending 3 to get 1.

what is funny (or more like annoying as hell) is the days i've had (relatively) high adsense income, the big money clicks have come early in the day, before noon, putting me way ahead, and then the rest of the day i pay for clicks that go nowhere until i am back at break even or a bit in the red.

like today I had made around a couple bucks on a spend of about 60 cents by 10 am, and i'm ending the day with closer to 3 bucks in adsense but just a few cents in the red from clicks to nowhere. this can't be accidental can it?

what i need do i guess is get better at figuring out which adwords groups are giving me good clicks and which ones are lame.

illkity i haven't even thought about doing site targeted, that's a big thing i've overlooked i guess ... thanks

for testing, do people basically set up different pages for different ad groups or is there a fancier way to do it. i haven't gotten to installing a tracking plugin yet, it's on my list of things to do but until then i might just put up a half dozen or so identical pages with different keyword groups (plus my forum spamming) pointing to the different ones. then i could tell which source has the best ctr and kill the bad ones.
 
spazdr8cr said:
the numbers aren't that bad, but they all work out so that i am either just over or under break even ... which sucks, but is a whole lot better than where i was a couple weeks ago spending 3 to get 1.

what is funny (or more like annoying as hell) is the days i've had (relatively) high adsense income, the big money clicks have come early in the day, before noon, putting me way ahead, and then the rest of the day i pay for clicks that go nowhere until i am back at break even or a bit in the red.
Click to expand...

Anything can happen. Especially with low traffic. That said I have noticed that clicks at night SEEM to be lower more often than not. Nothing you can really do about it, short of tracking and blacklisting low paying ads.

You need to look at the big picture if you are breaking even or barely ahead, the numbers are not good. You either have to bring up your adsense CTR or pay less from clicks, bottom line. I would choose pay less for clicks first, make a profit, then try to btring up the CTR with a better template.
 
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