Google Pagerank update is currently in progress and Digital Point Forum members have been quite hysterical over it albeit the many who said that they didn’t find any changes yet and probably have to wait for a few more days. Mong of DP suggested to keep an eye on 72.14.20x.x usng DigPageRank and it seems that XenKatana is on PR 4 from PR 0 on some data centres (shown below). I didn’t find any changes for my other sites though.

I have no qualms in admitting that I’m an AdWords noob but hey everyone start out as a beginner. When I joined the AdWords bandwagon I thought how hard could this get since basically it is all about bidding keywords and outbidding your competitors. Well it didn’t turn out that way and I would like to share the mistakes that I went through for this first phase.

Below are the campaigns that I had bid on and the statistics shows that my CTR was doing pretty good.

Being a gamer myself, it wasn’t surprising that the first product I came up with was selling game consoles since they fetch such high commissions. Yap, I started my campaign on the X-Box 360 console on Amazon at a price of $399.99.

This is how my ad looks like on Google’s search network (Don’t enable content network, they don’t convert too well).

Ok, it had all the good things that a converting ad should have

- Price shown on the ad enables visitors to see it before they click
- Amazon is a brand name which most people would trust

so why was I making a loss? Well time to list the major mistakes that I have learned from this phase

1. Marketing the wrong product(s) and not enough beforehand analysis
The rules to a good campaign is to study whether the product is profitable in the first place. Study and see whether the ads by other competitors are still there after a week or so. If it is still there, it means that it is profitable but then I was too impatient to wait. Rushing in and bid for the product would only get you burned unless you are really sure that the product will sell very well. Also from my own analysis, less people are more likely to buy if the price of the product is too high (Ideal would probably be around $100+ but then that’s just my guess). The commissions are lower but then that is offset by the people who are more willing to buy when it is at a reasonable price.

2. Running the campaign for too long and not doing my Maths
At the end I did sell two Xbox consoles and 1 wireless controller which netted me a total commission of (2 (6% x 399.99) ) + (6%+39.99) = $50.4. My total spent was $106.67 making a lost of $56.27. The biggest mistake I have made here was letting the campaign run again and again until I realized that I was making a loss big time. The reason was simple, I was hoping for some dude who would buy an Xbox 360 and buying two or more would have offset my loss since 2 x $24 would give me around $48 commission. It would never be a profitable campaign even if I had some luck. Next time I will be doing my Maths before letting a campaign run into the red.

An average converting campaign would be at a CTR of 3-5% meaning for around 20 visitors(clicks) you would at least make one sale. Let the campaign run for about 60-80 clicks and then you can evaluate whether to continue the campaign or not. If it is not profitable or just on par, do not hesitate to move on to other products.

3. Using Amazon as an affiliate landing page

Ok, the reason is that I am lazy and therefore I just used the Amazon landing page as an affiliate link. Problem is, Amazon affiliates has too much competition and click fraud would be at a high level since everyone wants the easy way to earn money by clicking and checking on other people’s Amazon link. The best way to get conversions would be to create a landing page that reviews the product and then link to several merchants so that the visitors can choose the best one. Also, you don’t have to compete with merchant ads and not worry about other competitors outbidding you.

Well, that’s all that I want to share and I’m definitely not done with AdWords yet. In Phase 2, I will be trying out a lot of nifty stuffs that I have learned from the mistakes so stay tuned for my post (either how to make profitable campaigns or another mistakes list to avoid).

In case you guys were wondering what happened to me this two weeks, my internet line was down and finally I can get back to blogging. I took the chance to get a good rest away from blogging and I must say I do miss it. Well enough curses with the telecom and will try to post an update soon (probably after some updates across my other sites). Thanks for those who still came to visit this site!

There is no secret to this and most of the people would know this already - Copy the success factor of the expert and improve on their weaknesses. I was first lured to the online making money scene by a friend who introduced me to some of the top bloggers from Malaysia - www.liewcf.com and www.kahsoon.com.

What’s more astounding was that when I heard how much they were roughly earning, I couldn’t believe my ears. I was more or less dumb struck then since they look like any ordinary blogs and they were earning in the thousands!? The mere mention of the $$ enticed me so much that I started on my own blog. Well its no secret that I have been studying the success factor from these guys. I even started out as a comment whore just to try to get more traffic on my blog. Looking back, those were the times when I was really trying hard to learn step by step and by trial and error how these people actually succeed.

Its a different ball of game for different niches and in my pursuit of getting more traffic for XenKatana, I was mesmerized by web traffic evangelist John Chow who managed to increase his blog rankings and earnings in such a short time. Then there was Gaman from Sabahan who fed me with a lot of knowledge which I was really thankful of.

To summarize everything, keep on trial and error and make clever deductions from the steps that you have made. The experts are adept at something which you can easily learn this knowledge and use it to improve your own. In terms of blogging, these knowledge could be associated with how to build links, content, writing style, high traffic keywords, useful Wordpress plugin and so on. Knowledge is aplenty and it just depends on how you extract it.

March was a month of major slacking for me and I believed every blogger has gone through that stage before. Well I’m back with a more serious attitude for blogging and some of you would have probably seen quite a number of updates on my sites lately. Well there is the change of banner as well if you guys have noticed I’m using a Toyota Supra for my banner and this will be my main motivation - I want a Toyota Supra!!

Moving on to that, I would also like to share my losing experience with Adwords where you guys might like to know and not make the same mistakes (if you are also into Adwords) in the upcoming posts so do stay tuned.

Let’s start with the earnings for February first.

Adsense Earnings - $1346.25
Daily average - $48.08

Sadly to say earnings for March are down (due to the major slacking) as well as a decrease in the cost per click. This time it’s time to get aggressive and I’m definitely fully motivated this time. Its those times when you have to kick and tell yourself to move forward.