I’m here tweaking graphics for The Man… The Man owns my most basic rights: Health. Try getting good healthcare outside the corporate world – welcome to the world of pre-existing conditions and shitty/unaffordable plans.
Updates from March, 2010 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
-
NegBox
-
NegBox
When reality meets religion, crazy shit happens: “Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article7067989.ece
-
NegBox
The near-midnight question… Do I stay up catching up to the other Rats in the Rat Race, in fear that I might get smacked for falling behind? Or do I keep trying to get out of the maze?
-
NegBox
Bleeding green. I’m subscribed to so much shit and so many services I’m bleeding over $500 a month. Whopdee-do… I’ve got PPC Bully and the Shoemoney System, hosting. Now I’m thinking of bleeding a bit faster by signing up to PPC-Coach. Do I do it?
-
NegBox
I’m seeing an interesting opportunity out there… But Damn.. I need to stay focused on the particular niche I’m in right now or I’m never getting anywhere.
-
NegBox
This brings me to a little unproven theory I have. I started thinking a while back: How can Google or other search engines tell apart a real Blog from a Flog (Fake blog)? … The answer was staring right at me: Social media. Folks that have a blog have a ton of stuff on it pointing to their other online identities – Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, their Diggs, etc… Flogs don’t. Of course the last site I made has all these “Social Media” extensions. Good/bad, no clue – it just made sense.
-
NegBox
I love TinyEye to find connections among sites – or when a site is a ripoff. However, I found something pretty tasteless – A Flog from Clickbank user “hawran” that is using the image of a guy that died a pretty nasty death late last year: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/west/view.bg?articleid=1215065
Ideally, the dead should stay dead. -
NegBox
Landing page CTR: 11%. Is that good? Bad? Not enough, for sure. My keywords on Google all have 7+ quality scores, which I take to mean pretty good. Finally found the landing page CTR statistic! Confusing is an understatement.
-
NegBox
iTunes is the vortex of evil in my computer. Its taking up a huge amount of resources. It has a massive thumbnail cache (we’re several gigs), uses an incredible amount of memory when running – (again, over a gig) and hammers the system object stacks along with the CPU. The only piece of software that was ever worse for my computer was Sony’s Minidisc management crap that got renamed a dozen times – I think the last name before I buried it under a pile of rocks was SonicStage.
-
NegBox
I’m an Audiobook nut… I’m about to buy all nine Seth Godin’s audiobooks.
-
NegBox
If work sucked just a little more it would create a wormhole into another dimension.
-
NegBox
Filling out a census form… So tempted to put Twilee’k as my race.
-
NegBox
Just had a chat with a rep from Tracking 202 Pro on an issue I’m having… Really nice folks. A little creepy that they can see everything I do. At this point, they can only help since everything I do is sucking big time.
-
NegBox
Spoke too soon about John Chow’s very informative post… He followed-up the post with an e-mail upselling “Clickbank Cash Supreme”. Never fails. I’m taking note of this technique… Post soft-sell, then drive-to and upsell of related offer.
-
NegBox
Commission-based marketing is addictive, scientifically for sure – I can easily see people developing an addiction. It isn’t that surprising, it uses what is called a Variable-Ratio Schedule of Reinforcement. Dictionary definition:
“In Operant Conditioning, a variable-ration schedule is a schedule of reinforcement where a response is reinforced after an unpredictable number of responses. This schedule creates a high steady rate of responding. Gambling and lottery games are good examples of a reward based on a variable ratio schedule. ”The reinforcement is, of course, the sale and watching the numbers go up – I’ve refreshed my stats page enough to be classified as a Denial-of Service attack!
-
NegBox
My box of Cheerios says “Enjoy the Non-Challenging way to help lower cholesterol”. Is Non-challenging retard-speak for “simple” or “easy”. I don’t care what their marketing research might say, I think it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on the face of a cereal box, right after the Trix bunny.
-
NegBox
Google charging “API Fees” to access AdWords is the bullshit near-monopolies can pull off. I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to charge API fees if their search bazaar ever gets a little bigger than Tinkerbell. It may not sound like much – $0.25 per 1,000 calls or so, but a call is so insignificant my piddly account racks up fees quite fast – forget near-real-time reporting, I’d go broke. Freaking bastards.
-
NegBox
Negative keywords are clearly one of the most valuable lists to have. The crazy stuff people search for – and then click on your ad for the heck of it. I mean, if you’re looking for crocodile zoofilia and by a random chance croc matches my ad for croc shoes, what do you think you’re going to find behind my ad? Seriously.
The best one so far was the one that typed, essentially, how to prostitute their significant other – c’ome on people!I do have a negative keyword list, but here’s the list of keywords I had to add manually:
Keyword
pic
quiz
friend
clips
craigslist
directions
ebay
facebook
free
free sample
game
games
lyrics
map
maps
myspace
nude
porn
recipe
samples
sex
sexy
utube
you tube
video
teen
usher -
NegBox
This does not bode well – My sale stats suck
-
NegBox
Before I keep going… What I love the most about this way of blogging – is that i isn’t blogging! I do have a full-blown blog, but this is like Twitter without the Twit-retards or the stupid limits, and its blogging without having to worry about SEO, all the bells and whistles of the platform, etc, etc. I Love that I don’t have to make up a title for my updates. If I knew what I was going to write about, enough to be able to title it, then it wouldn’t be very spontaneous – putting the title afterwards means reviews. This is my stream of thought – Mispelligs, poor formatting, bad graphics, sucky ideas and all. Damn the search engines, damn whoever wants to read, and everything. Finally, blogging like it was supposed to be – Just type and go!
You want to know what a starting affiliate / Internet marketing thinks, does and bumps up against while trying to make money – shooting to change life a bit, then welcome.. Subscribe to my updates somewhere – no clue where that Icon might be. Leave a comment if you have a suggestion on how to tackle something here – I take all the help I can get.
-
NegBox
I’m probably promoting a failure. There is something wrong in all these stats and numbers.
Let’s take a look. YouTube reports some 3k views of the video that is in the thank you page in the past 19 months. Mind you I have no way of knowing when the video was actually added to the “thank you for buying” page and weather it was used consistently. Judging by everything else, this is probably the case.So.. 3k impressions on the video means 3k units sold over 19 months, which is lame… worse still, this product has a triple-digit gravity in Clickbank. I’m seriously wondering how gravity is calculated and I’m doubting the whole “gravity” idea. Seriously concerned about that.
I know this is a good niche, and I know a ton about the subject. I’m going to have to figure out a way to increase my conversions, because clearly the single offer itself is not going to cut it.
Int he best of possible worlds, this merchant is making $10-12 per sale on this product, which works out to 36K over 19 months – 1.8K a month. Did I mention this one is NOT one of the best worlds?
Something that pisses me off to no end is that he has a nice upsell on the thank-you page – out of which affiliates get zilch.
Then they force customers to submit e-mail and of course they’ve got an autoresponder on it. The first product they blast you with seems to be from them directly, but then its all Clickbank products.
So much for that. What am *I* going to do here….?
Off the top of my head my alternatives seem to be:
1 – Turn the landing page into a review page with multiple products.
2 – Set up an autoresponder series and try to capture peoples emails – perhaps using a shadowbox signup from aweber. Mind you I’ve never used aweber but I keep hearing good things – either they’re really good or they have a killer referral program.
3 – Use Google Website Optimizer or maybe Genetify to optimize the bejesus out of this.
Agh!
-
NegBox
Google is taking my conversions as $1, which is throwing everything off. Agh! I don’t quite understand their conversion setup – I’ll have to fiddle.
-
NegBox
Finally, on a real host.
-
NegBox
Another sale yesterday!!! That makes three sales in two days! Wanted to update last night but of course the black hole in the routing is there again. Never mind that, I’m changing hosts for this. Free ride over. Though I have to say I like the free hosting to try things out.
-
NegBox
Mental note: If you have one or more layers of e-mail forwarding, and something isn’t coming through, you have to check the spam folder / rules of all the accounts in the forwarding chain.
-
NegBox
Profit Analysis… Nice!.. This is Tracking202. Now if I could just convince a couple thousand more..
-
NegBox
Google going bananas? Yahoo recorded the conversion a few hours later, thanks to Clickbank allowing this conversion tracking. Now I go into Google and its showing there was a conversion – which I would think is ANOTHER conversion. I log into Clickbank and my tracking and see no such thing. Is Google telling me about the conversion that Yahoo brought in? WTF?
-
NegBox
First affiliate Sale! Score! This came in yesterday, but of course this little thing was down… I was slowly losing hope.. Now its back. I can work on and improve on *something* – But if I don’t have anything to improve on, it becomes very difficult. Anyway, take a look at this collage snapshot of Clickbank and Yahoo – the sale came through Yahoo – Whoever had that 67 IP address yesterday, probably from Little Rock, Arkansas: You are my hero.
What I can see is that it took me $18.57 to make $26.30. Not bad. Then again, I have no clue what’s good or bad since I don’t have a feel for my fixed costs. All I know is spending more than I’m making is bad – just not sure how much clearance I need between these two numbers. With only sample, this is statistically irrelevant.
-
NegBox
My stats for Yahoo, Google, Bing and Clickbank suck. I was looking at them this AM and this was my snapshot- The quartet of doom:
