My Original Plan for You to Review
Yes it’s been a while… a lot has been going on emotionally yet not much business wise.
My original PPC plan fell due to bad luck and bad habits on my part.
Here is the story - even though it is not a happy story for me, I’m sure many
here can learn from it:
A few months ago I started “spying” on web hosting advertisers on adwords, checking the ads from time to time just to see which sites are still there.
The possibility of making 100$ from 1 referral was too tempting.
Logic told me that if people are still there advertising they must be making money… and all I had to do was just copy what they are doing and make it a little better.
But before entering into their arena I wanted to check if I can step in:
I put up ads for 2 keyphrases “web host” and “web hosting provider” and then bad luck stoke…
It appears the same day I put my ads up, google was under attack for these keywords.
When a “black hat” advertiser wants to clear the floor for his arrival, he’ll sometimes bombard google with searches for that phrase, what this will do is lower the other ad’s Click Through Rate because of the many searches and no clicks. Ads with low CTR are either slowed down to “on trial” or disabled completely or… just have to increase their bids just to stay in the same position.
If this means nothing to you I’ll just say that the Google attack accidently cleared the room for me and I was able to win 30 clicks for less than 10 cents each.
I thought I found a goldmine…
and I spent sometime spying on the competition and thinking how can I improve on their offer.
Well… it seems the other ads had no offer at all… these were just “web hosting reviews” sites which offered links for affiliate commissions or “review sites” which offered links to their own company. You can just tell from the type of the link if a company is just “reviewing” itself.
So… I started thinking… what if… I offered the same reviews but added a little Internet Marketing touch to it.
I decided to buy a reseller account from Site5.com and offer my future visitors a simple 1+1 deal… when you buy a site from one of these companies…
I’ll give you 1 extra free site for a year…
I signed up for an autoresponder account with Aweber and put my offer up on… surprise surprise… websitedays.com
Everything was ready for the big day when I put my site up and waited for my visitors…
I hoped to pay less than $1 for a visit and have at least 1% conversion. This would get me started on the right foot.
Setting up my adwords campaign I was sadly surprised. The cost had “some how” risen to more than $3-5 a click for those who want to be on page 1 of Google’s results.
This was a complete new game for me.
I still believed the campaign was possible and that the idea was good.
But I had no intention or means of spending the thousands of $$$ needed to make this
web hosting campaign profitable.
This type of campaign needs the money to tweak and play until you reach your long term goals… tweak your google ads get higher CTR etc.
I could not afford $100 for just 20 users.
At the time I did not know of the Google attack which led me to believe that buying click for less than 10 cents was possible.
So what did I learn:
1. Never waste so much time from idea to implementation. It would have been better to fail in a week than spend 2 months dreaming about this project.
2. Always let your test PPC ads run for several days before starting to evaluate the options.
3. If you’re not a shark (yet) don’t start swimming with them.
4. I am not the kind of person who enjoys “buying” traffic for his sites… Knowing I’d have to spend $100 a day for traffic made me nervous and I don’t think I can do major league PPC-ing long term.
What had happened since:
I had a few very very rough days thinking about my whole Internet Marketing career and goals.
I want to think that I’ve learned my lesson.
I really enjoyed building my small content site (which makes me about 50 cents a day) in the first part of this challenge.
So the plan will have to change again (I came to terms with the fact that I might not be able to make the $100 /day original plan):
I don’t want to jump the gun one more time and lay out my plan here to let it change every 3 days but let me just say this - the main sentence that ran through my mind the past week was…
Why pay $100/day just to make an extra 1 time $100 from PPC?
I want to pay $100 and have them earning me money non stop…
How can I do that?
1. Content sites…
2. Turn to the other side: Build my own products… have other people fighting the SEO and PPC wars to win the commission from my products.
I know these kind of posts are not the inspirational kind… but I thought it was important for the many others like me who have to fall a few times before they can fly.
NEVER EVER GIVE UP.
YOU’RE NOT ALONE.
Not everyone starts making $40000 monthly just 3 days after building their site.
So we’re the regular people trying to figure this business out and how we can fit in.
Tomorrow I’ll be writing about my inner struggle between the dark site and the good side of the Internet marketing FORCE and how GoogSpy.com has something to do with it.
If you have some words of encouragements or other tips feel free to comment.
Nadav
P.S.
For those of you who realy want mutiple sites hosted Site5.com has launched a great new service.
PPS.
Feel free to visit websitedays.com and comment about my original strategy. I’m here to learn.
May 10th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Don’t give up Nadav. I think you have the determination to follow this through and make it to $100 a day. I too am on the same path as you and am trying to find the winning formula. There are no easy pickings out there any more, at least none I have seen, it just requires lots of hard work. My advice is learn from what you are doing. Use this learning experience. Maybe you could write a book about this later to share your experiences.
May 10th, 2005 at 10:08 pm
Allan,
Thank you for your kind words.
I’m not giving up on my $100/day goal.
I know every step I take here just moves me to the right direction, the right path for me.
It took me 4 days to recover and think about things…
but I’m already working on new projects…
so we’ll see what happens next.
May 12th, 2005 at 9:23 am
Nadav, I am VERY inretested in the dark side of goog spy.
I have hear about it but coulnt figure out exactly what use it might be, so I gae up on it….then whne I read your post, something clicked and I did some research of somethign I had on my backburner and…..wow. I cant wait till I set up a campaign to see if what I think I thought will work.
Would love to hear your experience.
Dhira
May 12th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Nadav,
I have been following your $100/day challenge with great interest. Your candor is refreshing in the often hype-filled world of internet marketing. It is inspiring to hear about the progress you and others make, but then can be so frustrating when I don’t make progress myself! My first site has been up for a year, and gets just over 1000 visits per month, and if I’m lucky, will average $1.50 a day in AdSense and affiliate sales. I spend countless hours trying to promote it, as I KNOW it can be a profitable niche! But I consider the time and effort well spent, because this site has allowed me to actually implement things that I learn each and every day.
So, Nadav, keep up the great work! I know you’ll be successful as you work to find your own path to success.
–Mindy
May 20th, 2005 at 2:05 am
Nadev, I found your post VERY inspirational. I have not played much with Adwords yet, and your outline of what you learned, and what you’ve decided based on what you learned has given me a lot of food for thought.
$100/day is difficult. I think it’s the first big hurdle. Trying to do it in three months is definitely a challenge, but I think the best thing about this challenge, for me at least, has been the motivation itself.
I am nowhere near $100/day with my challenge sites. But I am far far richer in other ways simply because I joined your great $100/day challenge. And I also know that the sites I’ve put up, or worked more diligently on, because of the challenge, will start paying for themselves in the long run. (Well, okay, maybe not my fun site
)
Anyway, keep up the good work! You’re a great inspiration.
BJ
June 24th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
Nadav, I have now been 100 days into the $100 a day challenge, and I’m making about $5 a day on average from my new websites ($1 a day each). They will develop into solid content sites given time and tweaking, and should all earn in the vicinity of $15 a day each as they mature.
My original goal was $100 a day from Adsense… but Yahoo put the brakes on that high goal.
However, I did end up making in exess of $100 a day — in fact it’s up to about $200 a day at the moment, and rising — but not from building websites… it’s from a program I found while looking for Affiliate programs, something I did not expect or plan for.