Dec 20
Ooh I’ve been slacking work the past month. Just been so caught up with the Christmas spirit that I hardly spent any time on my business. Am gonna give myself a break till next year and then its full steam ahead. Another reason why I’ve been slacking off is because I’ve finally plucked up the courage to delegate all ad group creation work to my virtual employee. It took me awhile to make that decision as I was really worried about privacy issues. I mean think about - they have full access to all your profitable keywords and landing pages etc. All they have to do is duplicate what you’re doing! How did I get around that?
In Yahoo I created a sub account and isolated developing campaigns from mature ones so that my virtual employee only has access to campaigns that he’s working on. I still haven’t figured out if this can be done on Google Adwords but will certainly find out soon. Don’t you just love outsourcing? I feel almost like I’ve cloned myself…my business is also really beginning to flourish and grow exponentially thanks to my dedicated virtual employee.
Back to the title of this post - the 80/20 rule. I’ve done some analysis on my PPC affiliate marketing business and have found that it stays true to the universal 80/20 rule. 80% of my profits come from 20% of my campaigns and similarly 20% of my keywords bring in 80% of my profits (for any specific campaign). I’ve also been given the opportunity to peek into the business (legitimately of course) of super affiliates who make USD1million over a year and I’ve found this rule to be true there as well. I just find it so amazing how Pareto stumbled across it. Kudos to the Pareto!
Dec 02
Ok its been awhile since I last posted on my blog. Reason? Believe it or not I’ve been getting carried away with Facebook. I never understood the hype surrounding all these social network sites but now I can’t seem to stop checking my Facebook newsfeed. I’ve been able to contact my long lost classmates, friends, colleagues, family members…you name it. Its truly amazing and now I see what all the hype is about. I’ve been bombarded with super pokes, hugs, hatching eggs, vampire bites and even vodka. Its good fun! Now to pull myself away and back into work.
Last night I attended the Live n Loud KL to watch Shaggy & Whitney Houston perform. Wow…I must say I was truly impressed. The stage setup and audio was excellent. Shaggy & Whitney gave excellent performances and well above what I expected. Great stuff! The energy that nite was amazing. I’ll definitely do it again. Today I also ordered a Blackberry Curve on eBay. Can’t wait till it gets here. I’ve been avoiding getting one cuz I figured I didn’t want to be checking emails 24/7 but then I realized that I had been missing important emails (mostly ones with PPC billing issues) that were costing me sales. Sorry Tim Ferris but the 4 hour work week will have to be put on the back burner for now.
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Nov 12
I just got back from a holiday in Bangkok to find that 5 campaigns had been blasted with the dreaded $5-$10 min bids. Looks like Google’s done another landing page algorithm update. I still have 1 campaign going strong so compared those landing pages to the ones that got slapped. The main differences were that on the Great QS landing pages I cloaked all my affiliate links and it was a very non-competitive market. All the other campaigns that got slapped were for products in super competitive markets and had no masked affiliate links. One more important difference that I forgot to mention is that the Great QS landing pages had unique content. I used the PPC Riches software on the slapped landing pages and PPC Riches basically scrapes together related content from ezine articles.
I spent all of today rebuilding my landing pages and hopefully these will stand the test of time. I made sure content was unique and I had at least 5-6 internal links with the usual recommended pages such as Privacy Policy, Contact Us and Disclaimer. Software such as PPC Riches and LPGen that build loads and loads of pages with ezine article (duplicate) content work well initially until the Google spider detects duplicate content. Can’t say for sure if this duplicate content issue resulted in high min bids but from my previous experience with my failed blog project Google does take duplicate content quite seriously. Am gonna stick to building landing pages with unique content.
Oct 30
I’d just thought I’d share with you a little case study about my failed blog project. About 2 months ago I decided to give Adsense a try and creating a blog seemed to be most practical as I had setup a blog before and the learning curve would have been bearable as compared to full on SEO. I knew that all I needed to profit from Adsense was TRAFFIC. And lots of it! I didn’t want to pay for traffic so the logical choice would have to be SEO.
Based on the my prior experience with blogs I knew that as long as I had constantly updated content I’d get at least some traffic from the search engines. I wasn’t looking to make it profit big time but more to test out the idea and decide if it was a stream I wanted to pursue. I registered a domain name and installed Word Press on my server. I then plugged in content from various ezine directories and submitted the blog URL to various web directories. I worked on this at a constant pace and posted at least 2x articles a day. Within a month my site was indexed in the search engines and I was getting up to 700 visitors a day with about half of that being unique visitors. I had Adsense ads planted through out the blog and was making a good $3/day. Not bad for a months work..
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Oct 26
I’ve been having endless problems with my Dell Inspiron laptop ever since I bought it a couple of months ago. Somehow Microsoft Frontpage doesn’t play well Windows (this happens only on my Dell) and every other time I use Frontpage I’m hit with the dreaded Blue Screen of Death. Everything I was working on went poof into a black hole and I had to start my web page designing from scratch. You can imagine my frustration. To top it all off my old Acer laptop decided to doom PC’s for ever and also started blue screening on me with a hardware malfunction error. Had hardware checked out and no problems there. Last thing I wanted to do was reformat my Acer so it was then that I decided to make the switch. The lovely new imacs didn’t make it difficult either.
Anyway…last week I decided to get myself a new 20inch imac. Headed down to Mid Valley and Bangsar Village looking for stock but alas there was a 2 week backlog. Did some calling around and EpiCenter in Pavilion had stock so I reserved it and bought it almost immediately. I brought it home, assembled it and spent the rest of the hours just admiring its beauty (yea yea corny i know). You must admit that it is one beautiful machine. Check out the pic of my new imac on my study table.
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