My shiny new Thesis install is done, but I’m still playing with all the bells and whistles.  So far though, it’s pretty sweet.  I’m sure the look will be continuously changing for a while, but I’m very pleased so far.

Anyway, here’s a little holiday cheer- Boston Style

Last week I received an email from my hosting company, NetProHosting, that they were closing their doors. It’s a shame, they were super cheap and I never had any trouble with them.

The sadder news is that I’ve spent a week migrating everything to my other host, hence the crappy default WP theme you see now.

I’ll be upgrading to the Thesis theme this week and tweaking the look fr a while after that. Until then, enjoy the amateur look and feel of the blog.

Chris and Kelly - just married

So yeah, I got married.

I’m serious!  We exchanged rings and everything.

Elvis was there.

Hail to the King, Baby

You have your keywords, you’re tracking conversions and you’re adjusting your bids accordingly… or are you?

Are any of your keywords on broad or phrase match?  Are you simply adjusting your bids based on the performance of the keyword on which you’re bidding?  Then you’re potentially throwing away a lot of money.  Efficiency in PPC is all about analysing data, so if you’re only looking at surface level data, you’re missing the big picture.

Here’s what I mean: with broad and phrase match, several search queries are being matched against the term you’re bidding on.  If your keyword is something like “shoes” and is being broad matched, just think of all the search engine queries that could potentitally contain the word shoes!  It’s a rather severe example, but I’m trying to make a point.

Say you’re bidding on Keyword X, and Queries Y and Z and both being matched to it.  You’ve spent $110, received 120 clicks and made 6 conversions worth $30 each.  You’ve spent $110, made $180 and might feel pretty good about that.  Let’s dig a little deeper and see what’s actually happening:

Keyword X

• Query Y: 100 clicks, $100 in spend, 1 conversion
• Query Z: 20 clicks, $10 in spend, 5 conversions

So while you’re bidding on Keyword X, it’s actually Query Z that’s making all the money while Query Y is losing it.  You think you’re bidding on a single term, but in reality you are placing a bid based on the aggregate performance of all the queries being matched to it!

The solution of course is to gain this kind of insight into the actual search queries your keywords are getting and their performance.  Then it’s simply a matter of adding those queries as exact match keywords so that you can bid them appropriately.  In the above example, Query Y converts and is probably worth holding onto at a much lower bid.  It will convert far less often, but will at least turn a profit.

So how do we go about gaining this insight?  If you use Google’s conversion tracking, you can simply run a Search Query Performance report in the report center.  This will show you some of the search queries triggering your ads along with some performance metrics like CTR and conversions.

If you’re running ads as an affiliate or are not using Google’s conversion tracking, you might want to look into a product like Xtreme Conversions.  This program tracks each individual search query and matches a TID based on the query, engine, referring domain (great for “search partners”) and the bid keyword.  You can then match the TIDs from your conversions and see which search query and bid keyword produced it.

This info should be plenty to take your keyword targeting to the next level and improve your PPC efficiency dramatically.

Sweet dancing Jehova, I haven’t posted since before Christmas!

While you’re busy whiping the look of utter disbelief and dismay off your face, let me tell you what I’ve been up to:

-Nothing.

Now that we have that out of the way, here’s what’s coming up!

The Content Network Cure is continuing to evolve and grow into something bigger and better than I ever thought it would.  Sometime this weekend you should be seeing a totally new site going up with more content and resourced to help with mastering this tricky tool.

What I’m most excited about is a free Q&A video series I’ll be working on.  You’ll be able to submit questions on the site, and we’ll probably pull some questions from the customer support emails as well.  The videos might be hosted on YouTube for easy sharing, or I may just host them myself and make them easy to link to.  Either way, free vids!

The CNC affiliate program will be discontinued for the time being.  I want to work all the bugs out of the new site before I even try to incorporate an affiliate system.  Besides, there may just be a bigger ticket item on the horizon for you to promote.  No promises, I’m just sayin’…

If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see from the Content Network Cure in the future, or ways for me to grow the business in general, please leave your comments below.

I first came across this on The Sneeze (or was it Retrocrush?) a couple years ago.  It still makes me delightfully uncomfortable.

Happy Holidays, everyone!!!

Welcome to day 3 of the case study.  If you’ve missed what’s been going on, you can catch up here, here and here.

Disaster struck.  My #2 ranking on my primary keyword has turned into not ranking at all.  I’ve only had 3 clicks on my affiliate link and no sales.  I don’t know if I’ve overdone it using my primary keyword or what, but I’m not showing up, so I’m not getting any traffic.  If I’ve really killed my traffic, than it’s going to take another couple days to recover.

I’ve completed all the steps in the report, so I’m done as far as the case study is concerned.  I can wait until the end of the day to see of a sale comes in, but for the purposes of the case study, things aren’t looking good.  Like I said, I may have overdone it with the use of my primary keyword, so my current situation is probably my fault.  Given my terrific initial rankings, I would say that this is definitely viable method, just be sure to only include your keyword were Kevin explicitly tells you to.

I’ll keep working on this site, as I’m sure I can turn things around relatively quickly.

Ok, we’re about 36 hours into the case study.  I completed the work for day 2 late last night, which included another blog post, pinging, an article and some social bookmarking.  Including the work I did for day 1, I’ve put in a total of 2 hours- that’s it.  The blog has been indexed in Google, and is currently ranking #2 for the primary keyword phrase. I’ve received a total of 2 clicks on my affiliate link so far.  I really should have installed analytics on this blog so I could have a better guage of traffic.

One spot where I strayed slightly from the report is in the social bookmarking.  Kevin suggests using a service called Social Marker to make things a big easier.  I somewhat prefer Only Wire for their higher degree of automation, although they don’t work with as many higher quality sites, so I found myself still manually submitting a few bookmarks.

As far as SEO is concerned, we’re off to a roaring start.  In 36 hours, I’ve gone from nothing to getting indexed in Google and ranking #2 for my primary keyword phrase, I’m shocked and delighted.  If nothing else, Kevin’s report shows you an excellent way to pick a primary keyword and optimize for it in any niche.

I have a holiday party tonight, so I may have to postpone day 3 of the case study until tomorrow.  I’ll try to find time as I’m excited for this final step- Squidoo.  I haven’t had much luck wth Squidoo in the past, but admittedly my tinkering with them was truly half-assed.  I’m hoping the integrity of a case study, along with Kevin’s report telling me the right way to leverage it, will be motivation enough to do it up right.

Here’s my progress so far in my case study on Kevin Riley’s report for making quick cash in 3 days.  I know I said I would post again last night, but I was up so late actually following through on my promise to complete the first step that I figured this could wait till morning.  As I expected, the work only took about an hour, so I wish I hadn’t procrastinated until 11:30 last night.

I’m doing everything exactly as laid out in the report, despite knowing some tips and tricks that might help.  The only thing I’ve left out was an optional email blast if you have a mailing list related to the topic of the product you’re promoting.  I do have such a list, but I wanted to approach this from scratch.  I figure someone with an Internet Marketing related mailing list probably doesn’t need to be using free tactics only, so it was skipped for the sake of authenticity.

The blog is set up at http://learnhowtocreateanonlinebusiness.blogspot.com.  I’m linking it here for reference purposes only.  This link shouldn’t affect indexing or ranking since all links from my this blog are nofollow (Ya hear that, comment spammers?!?).  I’m not indexed in Google yet, but I’ve had one click through on my affiliate link so far, so it’s probably be from Blogger internal referral traffic.  It’s a slow start, but it’s only day 1.

Today is more writing, pinging and some social bookmarking.  I’ll post again tonight or tomorrow morning with my progress.

This morning I clicked a link in a tweet from Kevin Riley.  Kevin has put out some terrific products on product creation and internet business, one of which helped me write The Content Network Cure.  The link in Kevin’s tweet was to a YouTube video promoting a his free report called How to Make a Bundle of Cash in 3 Days.  It’s a mouthful of a title, but intriguing enough to tickle my curiosity.

The report is being given away free as part of the 12 Days of Christmas Give Away- skip the video, it’s intolerably cheesy.  I grabbed my copy and did a quick skim through to see what it’s about and it got my wheels turning.  I’ll refrain from giving away too much of the report’s content, since you should really grab a copy for yourself, but I want to cover the gist and conduct a case study on its step-by-step plan to see how well it works.

The report is, at its core, about how to promote Kevin’s products as an affiliate using tactics that are completely free.  These tactics can of course be used for any affiliate program, but his products are set up for instant commissions paid directly to your PayPal account, which is totally sweet.  This method can also be effective if you have products of your own that could use a little SEO boost.

The method is about using blogs, pinging, article marketing, social bookmarking and squidoo to get a page indexed, get referral traffic and make sales in a quick and painless manner.  That list might make it sound like a lot of work, but each step in the 3 step process should take less than an hour.  These aren’t new tactics- the value is in the streamlined process that walks you through an effective way to use them all together.

I’ll start testing the method outlined in this report this evening, and keep you updated on my progress.  The next three blog posts will be a case study in how to make some quick cash as an affiliate in 3 days.

Stay tuned and wish me luck!