Hey guys, I wanted to do a post on what I am up to for those who are curious and also for myself to get refocused/organized because I am doing a lot of different things at the same time… To start off with, after many months of going downhill adsense in January went back to the $3k+/month mark without any of my involvement in prior months. I pretty much have been very lazy with these and was simply focusing my time on other things such as hobbies and iPhone app PPC promotion. However, I did switch some of my higher risk sites to a new adsense account (you can have 2, one under your name and the other under a company). I also had a few sites that started getting 100+ people a day so I decided to just add those to my new account. While I more or less care about adsense currently, it’s definitely cool to see it come back to a good income level. Passive income is quite nice 🙂 Here are the 2 screenshots of my adsense accounts.
Total of $3,249 off adsense :).
I’m not abandoning adsense… I decided to start redoing the sites that got sandboxed during September as I mention in that month’s income report. They were after all making $10-20/day with minimal effort. Some of the keywords are already back to page 1-2 on the new sites :). For testing purposes I’ll retry all the current services I use but give them each different sets of keywords, see if they are all still as effective as they use to be ;). I mean, ya adsense can be unstable but it’s definitely a good source of passive income when I consider how little work I’ve done to these sites since around the end of September.
Facebook, PPC, Ads = Fun times
I did a lot of work on Facebook recently, adding like boxes and building custom fan tabs with iframes which contain a sales video. A really cool thing about fanpages for me is that you can make them appear in french if the user’s Facebook settings are french (English by default obviously!). It was a HUGE hassle to find someone to code this for me. I was trying to learn it myself because people were asking for $150+ when I knew if I could find someone who had done the code I could get it done for way less… Eventually I found someone who indeed had done it before and he gave me it for $50 :). This was on Odesk (which I always use for outsourcing but was highly tempted to try other websites after a few days…). This is kinda of a big deal in Canada because the french Canadians (like me) usually make a big deal about stuff being in french (I don’t care). So to have the french “intro” page appear when they go to my fanpage is really cool, especially since I am doing Facebook ads in English to both English and French users but at least when they reach my fanpage it fully converts to what they use.
Next up is starting Google PPC and Facebook. I have been doing a lot of Adwords right now, Google is being really lame though with my ads for the search networks… Giving me low quality scores and putting me at the BOTTOM of the page. I’m trying uncompetitive keywords that cost $0.20-0.40 per click and I expected to be at the top of the page but either because I’m one of the only advertisers OR because of my low quality score I’m put at the bottom of the page so I get a measly 0.5% CTR or less… I did a separate campaign for the display network and something very interesting that I found out is my header banner (leaderboard, 728*60) gets a ton of impressions (600+/day) yet so far gets 0-2 clicks while the 160*600 add on my sidebar gets 1/4 the impressions but gets a 5-7% CTR. The sidebar one is really lowering my CPC :D. From $1.5 it seems to have averaged out to 0.20 cents.
<3 Bing
For those trying PPC, I HIGHLY recommend trying bing’s adcenter out. Yes the traffic is way lower but they are MUCH better to deal with then Google. I am getting 4 cent clicks off the search network and unlike Google they aren’t annoying me with poor quality scores. In fact, because Google does not always show my adds due to poor quality scores, I get about as many impressions on both networks (yet Bing is often giving me clicks at 1/4 the cost or less). You can get a $25 coupon for Bing off your hostgator account (I got mine there). I used to hate Bing for SEO because for some reason they almost never give me #1 ranks but for PPC they are awesome :).
Also, since Bing/MSN is kinda of the default search engine for people using windows, you tend to get people who are less “add blind” such as older folks so it helps with CTR and I would assume conversions if you were trying to sell a product.
I’m testing a lot of different advertisement logos and text and I’ll probably be able to share some of these with you guys in a month or so. Right now, it’s time to learn a lot about conversions, eventually I will be bringing this knowledge back to my current sites and start doing email lists (once I have the time to write an auto responder series…). After that I will sell products/affiliate offers to them. A big mistake I have been making is not focusing enough on conversions at this point, I will try to remedy that in 2012. I think I could make a lot more out off the 50-80k monthly page views I get on my adsense sites.
And finally, I have been wanting to do an ezarticle link review on this website. Long term readers might remember I actually recommended it to the email list many months ago and for the blog post on this website I wanted to show some of the great results I still have been getting with this service and the rank tracking software that I use has started working again with the latest update so I will be able to finish it with some screenshots :).
That awesome PPC rocks you can make way more money there
I think PPC is better to scale with if you want to go from 5k a month to like 50k. Having a consistent 3-5k/month income off SEO makes it easier to test things in PPC while not being afraid to lose your house ;).
Nice to see the linkback isn’t dead, keep it updated 🙂
great to hear from you Alex! would be great to hear about the process of you creating app, and to see your point of view for those things…
btw what’s the deal with you and Becker, why he’s working on a different blog at the same time?
anyway keep your updates us here! love your stuff!
He has different goals for both blogs :).
Hey man nice to see what you’ve been doing, btw is SEO Hybrid coming out in the near future? 🙂
Ya Becker is doing the finishing touches, it should be out in January 🙂
Hey Alex,
Glad to see you back and that you have not kicked Adsense. I would like to know more on how you set up that new account with a new company name. Also what rank tracking service are you using, since MS rank tracker no longer works.
I give a big + to ezarticlelink for ranking sites. I got all my sites on the first page with that service. Of course, you need to diversify but that is a huge help.
Thanks!
Actually I was using MS and it seems to work again as of yesterday :D. Luckily because I would not be able to show the ranking progress for my sites if I added them on a new service… As for setting up with a company name it’s nothing too special instead of name you use the registered company name 😛
check out seo rank tracker wordpress plugin, i just found out about it it’s pretty good, you used it before?
if you just install it and let it go a couple days it will even list what kw you should track, or you can manually add the kw, you can also track other websites
Hi Alex, is it you or Becker that runs college flirt? Reason I am asking, is I want to know how you/he made the banner clickable to go to another part of the website. Also, when you click that link it takes you to the essential series, was just wondering how you set that up. Thanks in advance. Btw I saw your site a few weeks ago, and have been trying blog blueprint, works a treat so far, was using 1 way links by jonathan leger before, but his constant denials of my posts were far too annoying
It’s Becker so hopefully he can comment on this.
how much article uniqueness should you shoot for with TBS?
Not that important to track.. but I was shooting for 60-80% or so.
For blog blueprint how can you link it to ezinearticles , I tried and it said not a valid url when I tried linking it to my ezine article that links to my site.
Nevermind figured it out ^^^
hey Alex,
I remember you once talked about you buying some high pr aged sites
can you tell me how you do it?
basically you used godaddy auction? how you check the site age, and how you check the PR to see if its not fake, i would love to hear how you did it…
thanks a lot!
Tons of services out there for doing it. You can try http://www.dropday.com/. You can use something like http://www.rankchecker.com/pagerank-checker/ to check the PR
I’m also doing PPC with Adcenter.
It seems that PPC requires some SEO optimisation? Because so far it seems that I get 1/10 quality score on my landing pages LOL.
And there goes my creative copywriting… guess I will have to stuff some keywords to get some quality score.
Not asking for anything, just wanted to share : ).
Started with 7search. (Bad traffic. Need to weed out lot of junk, but I still haven’t put my hands on it)
I bet 3 months in, I will see some results.
Keep up the posts ;).
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