When the Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro
Oct 16th, 2009 by Dan
So I have been remiss in updating this for a few days with some time sucking projects at my day job. During this time I have been giving my fledgling business much thought. As I sat ruminating on how to keep plugging away at growing this business I realized 2 things. Those are that in order to succeed you need to do 2 things: visualize yourself as a success and then stop thinking and ACT! Continue Reading »
Oct 8th, 2009 by Dan
So for us newbies, it can be daunting to slap down yoru credit card to run 100′s of dollars of charges when starting up affiliate marketing campaigns. I mean for the established players they have had the time and experience to build an established playbook on how to best apply their resources. Not to mention they have already made all the failures us new folks get to look forward to. That said, as I experiment with different offers and ads I have been looking for any deals I can find to lower my risk and keep costs at a minimum. As such I’ve compiled a list of coupon codes to use on Yahoo Search Marketing to run some adds with no risk. (Disclaimer, yes I worked for this group a long time and no, I did not get these from my old pals at YSM so don’t be hitting me up for special insider deals.) I am posting these as someone once told me that the best way to help yourself is to help someone else. So here you go folks, payin it forward! (Disclaimer 2: all these require an initial deposit of 30 dollars but c’mon 30 to get 125 back? Thats an ROI).
Oct 5th, 2009 by Dan
The IAB released today a report done in conjunction with PWC on the state of online advertising. The analysis shows a 5.8% decline in money spent on digital advertising comaparing the first 5 months of 2009 to the same period in 2008. Clearly this is not a big surprise seeing as how we are in the midst of one of the worst economic climates of all time. However what the headlines do not show nor is the media speaking about is the details associated with the numbers. So the data:
In the first 6 months of 08 digital ad revenues were 11.51B dollars. In 2009 10.9 or a 5.3% decline. However look at the details: Continue Reading »
Oct 2nd, 2009 by Dan
So I get pinged by recruiters from time to time. I am always amazed at how poorly the engine to connect companies/recruiters to candidates is. I mean seriously, I have been contacted 3 times in the last 6 months for positions at Microsoft. I work there for christ’s sake.
How is it we can get targeted performance based advertising to connect advertsiers and consumers with relative ease but when it comes to filling open positions (something you would think would be more critical) the whole process breaks down?
Resumes/candidates should work like search listings. Your skills and abilities get indexed by spiders who crawl available people who are then searched on by employers. You could set up “no follow” tags on certain job opportunities like friggin Farmers Insurance who seems to think I would be a great candidate to open my own insurance selling business. You then optimize your resume to draw attention to the right employers. All would be managed via algorithm which could get you banned for spamming the engine. There has to be a better way.
Sep 30th, 2009 by Dan
So the first campaign I decided to run is on Facebook. I have been having a rough time getting it launched in that Facebook tends to be very vague with their guidelines and why an ad was rejected. Being a guy who has spent his life working in search and online media one may ask why I chose Facebook to start running campaigns. First off, it seems tons of other people are having much sucess with Facebook. Check out Jonathan Volk’s post here on Shoemoney. Seriously 100K running on Facebook? Somehow I am not surprised in that it seems Facebook is killing its numbers and went profitable a year ahead of schedule.
But honestly there are distinct reasons to run display ads on Facebook. For one: TARGETING! We are talking about a huge pool of people and you can target down to the city, age, gender, you name it. The trick is finding an offer that converts to a certain population and scaling out your campaigns. Also, talk about easy. Its a matter of creating a title and description, uploading an image and simply inputing your landing page or affiliate link. Its that easy!
The other key here is whether to go CPC or CPM. I recommend CPM all the way for 2 reasons. One, it is in Facebook’s best interest to post and display your CPM based ad vs. CPC. Reason is that a lot of these ads never get clicked so to run them and get no clicks means Faceobook faces an opportunity cost to display your ad risking making nothing off of it. From the advertsier side, a CPM deal one, ensures you can get viewed and two, if your ad is coverting well you end up paying much less. Think about it, say you pay .20 CPM and get a 1% CTR. That equates to 10 clicks for $2.00 or a .2 CPC. On the CPC side an ad costing .20CPM would likely need a .5 CPC to get listed and thus for 10 clicks you are looking at $5.00. Easy math.
One caution however, do not put all your eggs in this basket. I ran an ad for 5 days which was doing fine only to have it taken down post approval. Seems someone at Facebook changed their mind. I think at this point I have it down and will see how this converts once it passes inspection. Stay tuned for more….
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When the Going Gets Weird, The Weird Turn Pro
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