Lessons Learned From The $300 Challenge

Well it’s long past time for me to share my results and lessons from my one week $300 challenge. For those of you who may not be familiar with what I am talking about, on about the 17th of December I challenged myself to make $300 by the end of 7 days, without spending a dime. I planned to do this through article marketing that pointed to my affiliate offers - i.e. write articles and submit them to directories like eZineArticles and GoArticles, and in the author bio have some links pointing to my website, which would be pushing affiliate offers along the same subject on which my articles were written on.

So, I’m sure you’re all anxious to hear if I met my goals or not, so here goes…my total revenue was:

$7.25

Yikes - not even close. But do I consider this a failure? No, not at all - true, I did not meet my monetary goals, but I learned a ton and gained a lot of invaluable experience, which in the long run I consider even better. So instead of telling you how I made $300 and how you can too (since obviously I can’t talk about that), I am instead going to use my next couple of posts to talk about what I learned and how it can be applied.

First, let me give you the details of my challenge. I ended up writing 25 articles that ranged from on average 300 to 400 words in length on the subject of improving your abs - from exercises to cautions to eating habits, you name it. I submitted all of these articles to 3 directories - eZineArticles, GoArticles, and one more lesser known directory. I also created 11 videos (editing and compiling other non-copyrighted videos) which I uploaded to YouTube and MetaCafe. The articles of course had a link back to my site at the bottom and the videos have text at the beginning and end that pointed to my site.

eZineArticles tracks your click count, which is very handy. To this date my articles have generated 603 clicks and 4,381 views. I do not know how many clicks the other directories have sent me, and I am unable to track how many clicks each article has generated from once they have been republished on a third party site (eZineArticles only tracks the clicks that originate from their site).

From YouTube I have achieved to this date 7,132 video impressions with an unknown number of clicks, and MetaCafe has given me 36,087 views and again and unknown number of clicks, which brings my total video impressions to a nice 43,219.

During December I averaged 56 unique visitors a day to my site and this month I am averaging 68 per day. Now this is not a huge amount of hits by any mean, but keep in mind that these visitors are fairly targeted - they are all looking to improve their abdominal muscles. The fact that I only managed to earn $7.25 from them I am attributing to a poorly designed and written landing page.

First I redirected the users to an offer from ClickBank which had a fairly good conversion ratio, but I did not make any sells. Then I redirected the users to a zip submit offer through Copeac for free healthy food samples, which is where I made my $7.25. Then I tried creating a custom landing page that gave the user a couple of options - the two above and another offer through Copeac, but I failed to make any sells. Currently I have it back to redirecting to the zip submit offer.

My conclusion is that there is definitely potential - although 68 hits a day is not very much, remember that it is fairly targeted traffic, and targeted traffic is worth it’s weight in gold. Pretty soon I will be trying out a different version of my landing page and see if I can’t get some sells by improving my copy and design.

In my next couple of posts I will be taking closer looks into more specific parts of my challenge and really dissecting the ins and outs of my process and what could be improved upon and what I believe has potential. Stay tuned!

Posted in Experiments | 6 Comments »

I’m Not Dead!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I have not abandoned Abstract Promotion and you should count on seeing my in depth write up on the results and what I learned from my one week $300 challenge within the next couple of days.  Until then, how did everyone else’s websites fair over the holiday shopping season?

Posted in AbstractPromotion.com | 2 Comments »

Updates on $300 Challenge

So far things are going well. I have written 20 articles, probably averaging about 350 words each, and edited 12 videos. The articles I have submitted to EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleCity, and the videos I have submitted to YouTube and MetaCafe. The beginning traffic is just starting to come in - however, this may turn into a two week challenge instead of a one week challenge, as EzineArticles and ArticleCity can take up to 15 days to approve an article. I will keep up this work and hopefully within a day or two I will start to see some sales. As always, I will keep you updated.

Posted in Experiments | No Comments »

My Battle Plan - The $300 Challenge

I have decided to start my $300 challenge tomorrow, Monday the 16th.  For those of you who have not been reading this blog recently, I have challenged myself to make $300 pure profit (without spending any money) in seven days time.  To do this I have decided to take two routes:

1. Article Marketing - I will be writing at least five 300 to 400 word articles per day and submitting them to a couple of the more popular article directories.  These articles will be short but well written, and designed to attract readers to my website that will be linked to at the bottom of the article (and my website will forward the user to whatever affiliate offer I am pushing).
2. Video Marketing - I will also be making / compiling videos relating to my subject and uploading them to youtube.  These videos will have some opening and overlaying text pointing to my website, and the video descriptions will presell the product that I am pushing.

As for what product I will be selling, I have decided to use ClickBank to sell ab-workout related materials.  After browsing through their selection I think that there are some decent offers with a good chance of converting, and ab exercises are certainly a hot topic.

So my goal is to get traffic from websites that republish my articles and from viewers of my videos.  This traffic will go to my site then get redirected with my affiliate ID to whichever product’s site I am pushing, and hopefully then a certain amount of that traffic will decide to purchase their product.  As I stated above, my goal is to publish at least five articles and two videos per day, for seven days, and see where this leaves me at the end of that time.  I’ll keep you updated each day.

Posted in Experiments | 1 Comment »

The $300 Challenge - About to Begin

Well I’m home now from college finals and that means that within the next couple of days my $300 challenge will begin.  In these days preceding the start of the challenge I will be organizing and preparing myself.  I encourage you to follow along with the challenge if you are not yet making $300/week.  Stay tuned!

Posted in Experiments | No Comments »

Namecheap and Godaddy December Coupon Codes

The coupon codes for Namecheap and Godaddy for this month of December are as follows:

• Namecheap: Whitexmas - $8.41 regular domain name purchases.
• Godaddy: cjchea10 - 10% off of order

Posted in Industry Watch | No Comments »

The $300 Challenge

First of all, sorry for the lack of posts - it’s nearing the end of the semester in college, and that means cramming for finals - yuck! Anyways, on to the fun stuff.

The $300 Challenge

Here is a little challenge I am setting up for myself. Beginning two Mondays from now (i.e. after finals are over), I will have one week to make $300 without spending anything, except that I will be allowed to reinvest what I have earned. Now you may be thinking that $300 is not a lot, and it isn’t, but you have to start somewhere! Leading up to this time I will be making my battle plan.

Once my challenge starts I will update you each day here, and hopefully will have the pleasure of reporting success. Who knows, once I am able to make $300 a week, then maybe I’ll do a $600 then a $1000 challenge.

I also encourage you, if you are not up to $300/week yet, to participate in this challenge with me.

Posted in Experiments | No Comments »

5 Ways To Make Money From A Proxy Website

At first glance it may seem like making money off of a proxy website is easy business. After all, they’re very popular and fairly easy to start driving traffic to - and you can get lots of that in a hurry, if you use the right techniques. But anyone with a little experience knows that proxy sites are notoriously hard to monetize. Why is this?

1. Advertising restrictions placed on proxy sites
2. Horrible CTR from users
3. You are competing with the site that you are serving for your user’s attention
4. Small space to place advertisements on

Add this on top of the fact that a successful proxy site quickly requires a powerful and expensive hosting package and now you have the reason why most webmasters who set out to make money from such a site fail. However, in this article I am going to discuss 5 techniques that will help you turn the tables and make a profit from your proxy website.

1. Pop-unders / Pop-ups

Pop-ups used to be the huge new thing a while back, until the internet was flooded with them. Then came pop-unders, a modification of the successful pop-up. People were seeing CPMs of $3-5, which is huge. But then came pop-up blockers, and the war began. Nowadays, pop-ups and pop-unders are not in such proliferation, but if used properly they can still be an effective source of income. Find the companies which have been developing advanced pop-up/under technology that beat the latest blockers and implement them into your proxy website. Don’t overdue it, however. Test out different strategies on how to serve them and how often to serve them, and see what works.

2. Interstitials

Interstitials are the ‘new pop-up’ to say - most advertiser’s response to pop-up blockers. These are ads that load between pages - you’ve probably run into them from time to time. A user will click a link to go to another page on a website and be taken to a transition page that will automatically redirect the user to their target page in 5 - 10 seconds, but in the meantime displays them a full-page ad. These types of ads typically have higher CTR since they grab the user’s full attention. Try incorporating interstitials into your proxy site - for example, having one display for every 20 pages a user visits through your proxy.

3. Adsense

Using Adsense on a proxy website is hit or miss - it may work for you, it may not. You’ll have to try it out and see what your results are. I contacted Google a while ago to ask about using Adsense on a proxy website and they said that as long as the code is on your page (not somehow tacked on, or making it seem like it is part of, the page that you are serving through your proxy) then it is fine.

Most proxies keep a “bar” running across the top of the page that reminds the user which proxy they are using and links back to their homepage, etc., and place their ad there - however, this is unlikely to be effective because of “banner blindness” that users have nowadays, so try something different. Maybe implement Adsense like an interstitial - every so often between pages the user will be displayed a transition page that has some text (”Thank you for using myProxy - blah blah blah. You will be redirected to [page] in 10 seconds. In the meantime, take a moment to look at our sponsors.” or something to your liking) and then displays an Adsense box. This is much more likely to be effective because it captures the user’s attention by placing the ad block front and center.

Some people write Adsense off as something that is no longer as effective as it used to be - this is false, you just have to be more creative in your implementation of it. You can still make nice money if you know how to work it. Test things out, record your results, and modify appropriately.

4. Affiliate Offers

Affiliate marketing is becoming bigger and bigger with tons of money to be made off of it. Find products/offers through companies like Copeac and AzoogleAds and then use the techniques described above to sell them - display the offers and salestext in interstitials or pop-ups/unders. After a little experimenting you should find out which type of offers have the highest success rate, so stick to those. The possibilities with affiliate marketing is endless, so keep an open mind and try everything!  Remember that you can’t just place a link to the offer and expect people to buy it - you have to presell it first.  Read about successful landing pages and incorporate those techniques into your interstitials.

5. CPM

If you have enough traffic you can still make decent money off of CPM, even if it is only a single banner ad. Try placing a standard banner in your proxy info bar at the top of the page and see what your results are. Because proxy traffic is not generally high-quality traffic you may not get into the bigger name (and higher paying) CPM companies like TribalFusion, FastClick, or Burst!, but you will be sure to get into at least a couple of the lower quality ones. Let’s say that you only earn $0.30 CPM, but you are serving 300,000 pages a day - divide that by 1000 and you have 300. 300 x 0.30 is 90, so you would be earning $90/day - wow!

While proxy sites are hard to make a profit off of, I have showed you 5 techniques that will help you do just that. The most important thing to remember is to keep trying different techniques and see what works best for your site. Be creative - you’d be surprised at what might work!

Posted in Promotion Techniques | 1 Comment »

Experiment #1 Updates - 11/6/07

It’s now been about two weeks since I have submitted my ebook to around 20 directories. As I mentioned earlier, the ebook is about 5 pages long and I created a one-page site that offers information about the ebook and a link to download it, as some directories host the ebook on their own servers and some link to your site. Here are my results as of now:

• No affiliate sales
• No sizable amount of traffic
• No progress!

This leads me to the conclusion that if you want to promote and distribute an ebook you have to do more than submit it to a couple dozen directories - it will get you some traffic but nothing sizable. With this part of the experiment done I plan to take it to another level and see what kind of results I can get by trying these new techniques, which are as follows:

• Update my ebook website to be more than just a download link. Put up excerpts from the book, statistics, etc.. Use the website to establish credibility and draw in some search traffic.
• Update the ebook - use techniques for copywriting typically found in blogs (like killer headlines) to make my ebook more attractive.
• Start posting on a handful of forums/blogs that concern my subject (including a signature link of course).
• Guest write for a couple of sites concerning my subject.

As always, i’ll keep you updated!

Posted in Experiments | 2 Comments »

What Are Your Top 5 Required Tools?

I’m interested to hear what programs/applications everyone else uses to develop, promote, and maintain their websites.  You never know what you may hear of that you never knew about before!  So what are your top 5 tools?  Mine are, in no particular order:

1. Firefox with Web Developer plugin, Google bar plugin, and SEOFox plugin.
2. EditPlus 2 (advanced text editor)
3. CuteFTP
4. Adobe Photoshop 7
5. W3Counter.com (best visitor counter / analyzer that I have seen)

What are yours?

Posted in Resources | 4 Comments »