My credit card has expired and due to my location I have been able to get another one. This has lead to my Adwords account getting suspended.
Does anyone know of a way around this? Any tips, other ways to pay?
Cheers.
Last month was pretty good bringing in around £600 (mainly thanks to one sale that bagged me £100) but April has been back to normal seeing me earn around £470 from affiliate marketing after I deducted my £40 AdWords spend.
This is a nice amount for little effort but its a bit depressing that I haven’t made any real progress in the past 9-10 months or so.
I have made new sites that make sales but as they get stronger my other sites don’t perform as well. My big site is yet to rank for any keywords that people are searching for but I will keep on keeping on with it.
Ideally I’d like to triple my incone in the next 7 months or so but I can’t see where the breakthrough will come.
Any suggestions?
I spent the first two weeks of April down at the beaches and last weekend I was out of the country so after my day job I have had little time to spend on affiliate marketing. Although the sales have still been coming in I guess I have lost a month’s worth of productivity which might of paid off later.
This weekend I haven’t got much on so am planning to spend some quality time with the laptop looking at my existing sites and seeing what I can do to improve them.
Some of my summer sites are starting to pick up quite nicely. Some are getting quite good hit counts but not making as much sales as I’d like so I will be having a look at that.
Also my big site needs more work so that will get some time spent on it.
Fingers crossed that the final days of April will bring in a bumper harvest to help me equal last month’s total.
This is the conclusion to my short test to compare the Google Keyword Tool records against Adwords advert impressions to see if they match up.
I believe the results of the Google Keyword Tool to be wildly overoptimistic but I wanted to findout by how much. I setup an Ad for a keyword one of my sites is ranked number two for in Google.
For March 2010 the GKWT says there were 12,100 exact searches for my keyword.
My ad, when it was on page one in Google got around 200 impressions per day.
The ad only ran for two weeks but the impressions stayed around the 200 per day mark during this time.
200 per day x 31 days = 6,200 searches.
So it looks like the GKWT is reporting 100% more searches than the number of impressions the advert received.
Also during my site was only get about 3-6 unique hits per day (nearly all from organic SERPS) which is a click through rate of about 3% for being number two in Google which sucks big time!
It would be interesting to see if other people got the same results but at the end of the day its probably not worth the effort.
March was a good month, my second best after December 2009. I spent about £65 on AdWords and managed to bring in just over £600 profit. Most of that came from SEO and not the £65 I spent on PPC traffic obviously.
I made one very large sale which probably accounted for the rise in profits and I doubt I will repeat such a large sale again so for April I expect I will be back down to previous monthly earnings.
My ‘big site’ I started has still to get any organic traffic which is a shame. I started in the same way I do my other sites but it has not ranked for the keyword I am going for. The only difference is that it does not have a keyword domain – I guess this makes more difference than I thought.
I am going to buy a WordPress theme for this site but am not sure which one to get. It is a shame you can’t try them out and have a look under the bonnet before buying them. I think I will get a Studio Press one unless anyone else knows of any other people selling good ones?
Still trying to get my older sites to number on in Google so I can hopefully start getting a few quid in from the sites I’d neglecting in the past. Managed to get one website to number one for a keyword that got 27,100 exact searches last month according to the Google Keyword Tool (although I expect it is much less than that in reality). That site is now getting about 25 unique hits per day so hopefully it should make 1 or 2 sales a week.
Goals of earning £800 by September 2010 and £2000 a month by September 2011 looking a long way off still!
Just a quick update about this topic. According to AdWords, yesterday my campaign got 197 impressions. Bear in mind this wasn’t campaign wasn’t running a whole day but during that period my site got five hits.
So five as a percentage of 197 is 2.5%. Now I know my site is only at number two but that is a pretty poor showing. Needless to say no one has clicked on my ad.
I will wait and see what the stats are like for the next few days and report back.
My regular readers will know I often like to grumble about the lack of accuracy of the Google Keywoord Tool.
Getting a site to number one in Google usually gives me about 2-4% of the number given by the Google Keyword Tool for exact search in hits per month i.e. Google Keyword Tool says 14,000 exact matches for my sites main keyword but my site will only get about 500 hits per month making it completely unprofitable. Either no one is clicking through or the Google Keyword Tool is well out.
So to find out I have just setup an AdWords campaign for one of my sites main keyword. The Keyword Tool said there were 12,100 exact searches for this keyword last month but my site at number two in Google only got 140 hits in that month (1%).
Lets see how many impressions my ad gets (and lets hope it doesn’t cost me too much!).
It’s not going to make you rich but could be a good start for a newbie just to get stuck in with: multi tool / org / uk.
Competition doesn’t look too stiff with amazon in number three – should be easy to get top three without too much effort.
If you believe the Google Keyword Tool multi tool gets 14k exact matches and multiool gets 6k exact so if you ranked for both you would be getting a few hits a day.
Items sell for around 25 quid which should bring in about 1 pound per sale. Its a good item to sell online as you don’t really need to see it in the flesh in a shop to decide if you want one plus you won’t have to look like a deviant buying a knife in shop either!
I would take it myself but my days of buying domains are over for now. At least until the backlog has cleared.
Let us know if you take it and if it does anything for you.
I was just looking through my list of sites and I have around 40 sites that are up and running. Some are more up and running than others but all of them are in a position to make a sale at some point. After seeing this it occurred to me that if they were all making £1 day I’d be bringing in around £1000 a month which is pretty much my main goal in affiliate marketing (and life!).
Most of my sties promote low cost items so for the majority of them they would need to make around 1.5 sales a day to get £1 in commission (I learnt my lesson and no longer promote such low cost items). Some of my sites however can make around £20 a sale so that would even things out a bit.
But alas I am way off this target and am nowhere near £1000 per month.
But is £1 per day per site too to ask? It doesn’t sound like it but it obviously is.
Today I’ve been mostly wasting my time reading affiliate marketing blogs as I thought work would be closed tomorrow due to the red shirts but our boss knows better so we are back in work tomorrow so no Internet marketing for me.
I’ve tried signing up with a few but due to my location I never get past the final stage for reasons related to my location.
Feel free to post affiliate links to your recommendations.
Cheers.