Getting Clicks

Getting clicks on advertisements can be really tricky sometimes.

But there is one method I've found that works just about everytime.

Use the Google Customer Search Engine through AdWords.

Of the fifty some odd impressions I get on one of my sites, I get 3-4 clicks a day.

Which doesn't sound like a lot till you think about the ration, 50/3 is a really large number when it comes to that.

My belief is that advertisers are catching on that spamming search terms with sponsored links doesn't work and to make it more relevant to your customers.

Then the customers are more likely to click.

Which means that I make more money. :)

This wasn't super informative or insightful. But hopefully it helps me get back into the swing of things.

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I didn't die I promise.

For all six people who end up on this site on purpose... I really did not die. I'm still here.

I have been busy with going back to school, work, trying to lose weight, etc., etc. All excuses.

I plan on making it a point to have something up for here every Tuesday from here on out... and hopefully for it to be semi-useful as well.

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Watching Waiting The Excitement Is Building!

Well... I'm clearing out all my domains and reformatting all of them... the unfortunate part is that the almighty lord Google will not be happy with this as when their bot crawls my sites it will see all the old pages are gone. So I'm going to see how much of an impact this has, I have set up .htaccess files on all of them to redirect any 404's to the index pages of these sites... hopefully that will help at least with people who will still be coming through via Google results.

I've already noticed just in two days a drop in over 60% of my traffic. :/ Lets see how long it takes to build that back up.

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Clicking Ads.

So I've noticed more and more... I don't notice advertisements on web pages, sure I know they are there, but I don't really full on notice them and more importantly click on them. Its like the more I'm surfing the web the less and less that I see them and am able to filter them out more and more.

I've seen the ones that try to fool people by pretending like they link to further content on the site, the little mini-games... but I was wondering...how often does that work? I mean on the sites with ads that get the highest click throughs I think its only like 11%... but is there a way to up that to 15%? 20%? That would be a big boost.

Just thinking aloud I guess... not certain on this one... its kind of tricky cause it brings into light that big question that I try to keep tucked away into the dark recesses of my mind... Should the Internet even be monetized?? ...Truly I believe it shouldn't... and yet here I am constantly trying to find ways to make money from it.

In a perfect world the Internet would be run by some gigantic not for profit or better yet a consortium of not for profits. It already kind of is, but I'm talking on a much larger scale, like information would be freely transferred from one person to another, advertising would be non-existent and your connection would be free...

But maybe because that's a pipe dream that I'm not afraid to go out and try to be my money grubbing self.... honestly that is what it boils down to... I don't go out of my way on my other sites to provide content I think others might find interesting... its because I want to make money off of their visits... even more deeply I think its about the challenge of getting their views and maybe almost some sort of God complex in finding ways to drive them to my sites... and the way that I meter just how close I've come to God is by how much money I make and my CTR.

Wow... it sounds kind of exaggerated ... but I think its the truth.

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YouTube Music

I catch myself finding a lot of remixes that I find of songs on YouTube something that I would want to have something in my music library... however there was really no way for me to download the music itself, there were a lot of programs, sites, browser plugins, that would download the vids, but I just wanted the music. I finally found ListenToYouTube.com.

Basically what it seems they do is you use the form on the front of the page to submit the URL of the page that hosts the YouTube vid with the audio you want. They copy it to their servers and strip the audio from it and store it. So even if say its removed from YouTube due to copywrite violations or what have you, you may luck out and find that they still have a copy of the audio if you still have the link to the page.

Hope my slowly growing audience enjoys this as much as I did.

I'll leave you with my favorite remix that I couldn't find for download anywhere else.


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Follow up: B2B Affiliate Programs

So shortly after writing my last post B2B Affiliate Programs I put all the pieces together and started my store and what have you. Everything was great... except then I realized something... I had accounted for shipping, now hear me out this sounds really weird right... but Shopify's shipping system and the fact that MegaGoods didn't offer a set way of determining how much shipping was going to cost.... caused it to be pretty difficult to accurately predict costs when it came to charging customers for shipping. So I shut it down... I guess I'm too impatient for a solution that doesn't work out of the box. I think Shopify is still the best hosted e-commerce solution out there, even better than the system from Yahoo, and MegaGoods is probably great for people who ship from E-Bay. But for me to merge the two into a system that would have required minimal work on my end was just not worth the time to just try and prove whether or not it would even work.

So now back to the drawing board.

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B2B Affiliate Programs

So today I got in my mind that I wanted to build me up a web store...

Now this is a whole new experience for me. So first thing I went about doing was looking for hosting. Back in the day I had remembered reading somewhere about Shopify, they provide a full front to back system for keeping track of literally everything.

My next thought was... where do I get product from?... Very good question and the next most important question being just what the hell would I sell? I've had some experience working for a company that manufactured products and also in retail and knew that stores go through distributors for products. So I set out in search of a distributor.

A few things I wanted to find in a distributor, cheap application and membership fees if any at all. No minimums on sales yearly, quarterly, or what have you. Most importantly though I wanted someone that could do the warehousing and shipping for me.... a little bit of Googling and I found there was a whole industry that had sprung up around the fact that EBayers wanted the same thing. I finally found one that fit all of my requirements. Megagoods, they had everything I was really looking for in a service and a wide range of products so I can actually set up a few niche sites and to sell from.

But what I saw there that I thought was a great idea is that they have a separate site that they will basically set up for you that does the exact same thing as Megagoods, but you get a cut. The site is called StoreB2B. I did some searches and this seems to be the only real program of its kind. The best part is, a little advertising and marketing and you can get in on a piece of that pie with very little cash involved $30 a month. Which I plan on using for shipping through my own store I'm setting up through Shopify! So go for it, I am. I'll probably post an update a little later with how well it all goes.

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