PowerDosh.com

Using Facebook to target affiliate commissions

David — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 22:53:41 +0000

So if you have a great affiliate product you want to push that you can target at a particular market, two years ago your PPC advertising campaign might have been focussed on Google and/or Yahoo. With Facebook’s penetration into the web community probably at its peak, the use of it’s collection of demographic data means that it is a marketer’s paradise.

I like to compare facebook advertising not to Google, but to the roadside billboard. With Facebook I find the best way to price your campaign is on an CPM impression basis. This is from where I draw the comparison with the roadside billboard. If you want to advertise a product on a roadside billboard, you will pay more for “high traffic” roads and it doesn’t matter if any of those drivers turn into leads, you still pay your fixed cost for your advertising, unlike Google of course where the status quo is to pay for clicks.

The advantages of Facebook over the roadside billboard is that you can decide to only target women over 30 in New York who are single, or Men at University in London who are in a relationship. Facebook will even tell you how many of its users match your requirements. You need to look at your product and decide not which types of people it will interest, but which types of people are most likely to convert. Effective facebook advertising on a CPM basis is about getting the click thru ratio up as high as possible. This will in turn reduce your cost per lead, which is what you want. You don’t want to go wasting your spend on impressions that won’t convert. So if your affiliate product is a high end product designed for men over 18, you may decide that men under 30 aren’t likely to have the disposable income to purchase your product, so don’t go wasting your CPM spend on them. Focus on your target market with the highest possible conversion rate.

Getting an advert on facebook is notoriously tricky, so you need to obey the rules they stipulate, which is no excessive capitalisation or exclamation, and the ads have to be tasteful, with no aggressive call to actions. Once you have your ad up running, duplicate it instantly and then tweak the words or pictures slightly. This is called split testing and what you’re going to do is observe which one produces the higher CTR. I always find that a CTR in the region of 0.02% to 0.05% is realistic, but as the CPM on facebook is fairly cheap the CPC still works out nice and cheap, for now. Keep tweaking your ad and recording which text and call to actions converts the most and you’ll soon see the CTR begin to rise.

If you have used Facebook to advertise I’d be interested to know how you got on and your thoughts.

Getting a Virtual Assistant

David — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 18:33:41 +0000

I am pleased to say that my online endeavours have got to such a point where my workload warrants getting extra help. I don’t want to go through the paperwork of hiring someone to work part time for me in the UK. I am a one man business and I want it to stay that way. I don’t want to have the responsibility of keeping someone in a job, especially in these difficult economic times.

As I don’t have enough hours to feed to a UK based person, I am going to take the plunge into Mumbai. It is clear that you get what you pay for with a virtual assistant, especially a Mumbai VA, and I have heard mixed reviews. Many people have told me “Mumbai is cheap but they take hours to do a job, and don’t always do it right”. However, without being too disrespectful, Indians are good natured and hard working people, and yes I could continue to pay my existing web developer £35+/hour with zero risk, knowing exactly what I get, but enterprise is all about risks and in my eyes there is no better validation of current business processes than a good bit of split testing.

So I am going to look at outsourcing these specific tasks:-

50% Blog Posting for DailyEcoTips.com
Chunky data entry SEO tasks
Customer service emails for thejohnnyshop.co.uk
Graphic Design

I am not sure how this will turn out for me, and I will keep you posted. I am hoping to get a dedicated assistant for 20 hours a month, and will not settle for a situation where I deal with a different assistant every day, as I want to build up a working relationship with my assistant. My research at present is leading me to getfriday.com or taskseveryday.com. Does anyone have any experience with either of these? If so, i’d be delighted to hear from you.

Pain of Discipline ii

David — Tue, 19 May 2009 21:26:23 +0000

So it’s been a while since my last post. A few things have been going on online which I will blog about soon and offline I have been training for the Manchester 10k. As I said I will blog about the online stuff soon but until then I thought I would just humbly share with you a few schoolboy errors I have made recently!

AdSense

I recently setup a new account with google merely to segregate my earnings from this site and dailyecotips.com. Dufus David however has stalled in inputting the pin number to verify his address! As a result google have suspended my account until I receive the pin in the post! Grrrr! So that is roughly two weeks earnings down the gutter….

Hosting

I usually check my hotmail account frequently, but I haven’t of late. Not only have I missed a potential job oportunity in my email but I missed regular warnings that my hosting fees haven’t been paid. So this morning they pulled the plug on me. Anyhow all is back to normal on the hosting front but i’m very disappointed in myself for letting things slip somewhat.

Goes to show- The pain of discipline is better than the pain of regret.

I am determined to no longer lose focus in such a schoolboy way again!

AdSense for FeedBurner

David — Wed, 06 May 2009 21:48:31 +0000

Recently, I decided to ad AdSense to my feedburner feeds for DailyEcoTips.com, and the results were very pleasantly surprising!

I found this easy to set-up. I guess you need to have your feedburner feeds attached to the same Google account as your main adsense account - I find its easier to keep things together like that in one central location anyway, but it certainly helped with this.

In your AdSense account’s “Get Ads” section, just hit “AdSense for feeds”, and follow the options. I have found that certainly in the “eco” niche, that image ads are both attracting more clicks and certainly paying more per click at present, so I opted for Image ads to be displayed at the top of each feed. Select your feed at the bottom and then away you go!

I set this up a couple of weeks ago - it took me about five minutes to do, and it has pulled in a whopping $13.23 so far! OK, so I can’t exactly retire on such sums, but for five minutes work, if that continues for the indefinate future, then its well worth doing!

I’d be interested to see how anyone else has got on with AdSense for FeedBurner……

Pain of Discipline

David — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:57:26 +0000

The Pain of Discipline is less than the pain of regret

From chatting with friends of mine it seems that the above has been muttered by many CEO’s in the finance sector in the last few months as they look to restrict corporate travel, perks, pay rises and general corporate excess in light of the “credit crunch”. When mine said it in a company wide email I thought about it a little and what it meant.

It is such a simple phrase, and whoever thought of it (obviously not these numerous plagiarising CEO’s), can only be a genius. I think the best things in life are kept simple.

I thought about all the goals I have made in the last year. Some I have met, some I have not. I REGRET not making the goals I have set for myself. The goals weren’t unachievable because as everyone knows that’s not “SMART”. The real reason I have not met those goals can only be seen as merely DISCIPLINE. For instance I set myself the task of regularly doing my accounts and keeping my records up to date. I say to myself that I must take a day off the day job and do my accounts. Every time I do, I spend the day getting up to date and trying to unravel months of neglect. I constantly say to myself that I will update my accounts sheets weekly, and for a few weeks I do, and then it slips again. I hate doing my accounts (as most people do), but it must be done. If you hate doing something then why leave it so you spend longer in the long run doing it! I kick myself constantly over my accounts!

Discipline is a key ingredient if you want to be the best at what you are, be it a stock trader, wedding planner, triathlete or an online entrepreneur. In order to get one thing you have no choice but to sacrifice another thing. So every time you see you are losing focus, letting things slip, just remember:

The Pain of Discipline is less than the pain of regret

Once I get my accounts up to date - I’ll keep you all posted on keeping them up to date!

Meet & Greet

David — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:52:27 +0000

Well Hello. Not quite sure what to write here that isn’t on the site’s new about me page. My name is David and I have taken over PowerDosh.com from Dan. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Dan for all his work on this site during the time I was a reader of it.

Hopefully I will entertain and engage you all in the way that Dan did and you will carry on visiting and contributing. In summary - PowerDosh.com will still be a story of one man’s bid for financial freedom, but my bid is not just based online. I’m going to be blogging about offline life also, for instance, I am soon to go live with a Foreign Exchange Trading model, but I need to wait for the dust to settle in the world before I start trading. I’ll use this medium to share my successes, lifestyle thoughts, time management techniques, tips, mistakes & woes and I look forward to hearing from all of PowerDosh.com’s regular readers in the future.

Moving On - A New Direction

David — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 10:59:16 +0000

After a great deal of thinking, I’ve decided to have a big change in my portfolio. I’m selling off PowerDosh and DailyEcoTips (I’ve already made a deal). The reason is because my RSI is not getting any better, so I need to reduce my website commitments. The new owner will be continuing both websites in the same spirit in which I ran them. The new owner will introduce themselves soon!

You can get the same insight from me that you’ve had on PowerDosh on my new personal blog Dan Harrison. Updates on Dan Harrison will be around 1 or 2 a month, much less than what I had committed to on PowerDosh. If I have some advice to give or news to share, you’ll see it on my new blog. I will be making the Dan Harrison a do-follow blog, so please pop by and engage in some conversation. I look forward to seeing you there!

Think Visibility - My First SEO Conference

David — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:51:40 +0000

Think Visibility was the first SEO conference I’d ever been to, and it was held in Leeds last weekend. I met some top names in UK SEO, and learnt a great deal.

Tim Nash gave a great talk on search engine basics, along with a great demo trying to explain Google Pank Rank (PR). Tim gave the best explanation of PR that I’ve ever heard, as well as being an entertaining chap to listen to.

Al Carlton of Self Made Minds and Coolest Gadgets gave an interesting perspective on different monetising channels, and promptly told me off for not targeting my US traffic on EnviroGadget!

Patrick Altoft of Blog Storm gave a detailed perspective on gaining backlinks the ethical way and without buying them (essentially link baiting).

Dave Naylor talked about some of his experience with problematic websites that were after his SEO services. An interesting topic was what Dave calls a “silver bullet” website; a website that can get a website penalised by Google simply by linking to it from the “silver bullet” website.

And finally Kieron Donoghue who gave us some juicy tips on affiliate marketing.

Thanks to Dominic Hodgson for organising a fantastic event, also thanks to Raymond Theakston for giving me a few tips on own network of sites.

Here are some of the tips I picked up:

Google Adsense - can make a website look cheap. Avoid if possible.
Fat not Thin - go for websites that offer value, rather than cheap mini sites. (Something I was already starting to recognise).
Paid links - are bad, bad, bad! Many reasons, notably Google penalisations. Oh, and they are really easily spotted.
Affiliate Marketing - it isn’t easy, but if you crack it, you can earn big.

I’m looking forward to the next event, particularly because I made some great new friends and I learnt a great deal!

Lessons Learnt - Link Building, Link Selling, RSS readers, Monetisation and Guest Blogging

David — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:00:29 +0000

I’ve been doing a lot of different things relating to web mastering, design, monetizing, link building, link selling, etc. So for this article, I thought that I’d tell you some of the things that I have learnt recently.

Link Building is process, not a goal

Link building is something that should be done all the time. If you grow your links gradually, you’ll slowly increase your rankings in the search engines. Generally speaking, building up links too quickly puts you in a greater risk of being flagged by the search engines.

Another thing to note, make sure there’s variety in anchor texts that link to your site. Links that feature identical anchor texts are much more likely to get noticed and penalised.

Don’t rely on just one source of income

Nearly all of us have heard the popular saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. There is so much truth in that statement, and it applies to pretty much everything. Therefore don’t just rely on one form of advertising. What if you experience a massive drop in earnings, or your advertising account gets terminated? That’ll hurt a whole lot more if you only use one channel for revenue.

Up until recently, I’ve used Google Adsense as my only source of income. At the end of last year I started experimenting with Chitika, and I am already getting great results. I’m earning another 40% extra on EnviroGadget per month with Chitika compared to Google Adsense. Oh, and I’m using both of them at the same time!

Offer a product to a market, don’t try to find a market for a product

I found this advice in a book, and it’s actually great advice. So when coming up with your ideas, try to solve a problem that will benefit others. Those people you benefit are potential customers. Coming up with an idea, and trying to make your customers want it is really difficult, so don’t waste your time.

In my case, I’ve been focusing on sites that people actually get value from, as opposed to sites that have keywords that happen to pay well with Google Adsense.

Expect the unexpected

When I set my goals for 2009, one of my goals was to “Reach 150 daily RSS readers (currently around 70) for DailyEcoTips.com“. After just 2 months into 2009, and I already have 193 RSS readers on Daily Eco Tips!

I found that the significant jump was due to using the “What Would Seth Godin Do?” Plugin, along with my own ideas on how it should be implemented.

Incidently, all of my goals are on track for the end of 2009, except perhaps the £10000 pre-tax profits goal. We’ll see though.

Offer to give more than you’re asking for yourself

I was writing guest posts in order to get backlinks to my sites. It has been working really well. It seems to be because some blog owners struggle to write content frequently (I do too actually). By offering to write an article for just a couple of links, a surprising number of blog owners (around 25% of whom I approached) were interested. I got these links for free, links that would have otherwise been expensive to buy.

Conclusion

So there are some of my experiences and lessons learned. Please share your lessons that you’ve learnt from this year so far.

Useful SEO and Webmastering Articles and Resources

David — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:26:34 +0000

Every so often, I come across a really useful articles on other blogs. The way I tag them is by clicking on the “Share” icon in Google Reader.

If you want to read any of these resources that I’ve found, you can preview them in the widget in the sidebar, alternatively you can subscribe to this RSS feed. I hope that you find them useful. Please let me know what you think of these articles!

PowerDosh.com

Using Facebook to target affiliate commissions

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Getting a Virtual Assistant

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Pain of Discipline ii

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AdSense for FeedBurner

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Pain of Discipline

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Meet & Greet

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Moving On - A New Direction

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Think Visibility - My First SEO Conference

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Lessons Learnt - Link Building, Link Selling, RSS readers, Monetisation and Guest Blogging

Link Building is process, not a goal

Don’t rely on just one source of income

Offer a product to a market, don’t try to find a market for a product

Expect the unexpected

Offer to give more than you’re asking for yourself

Conclusion

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Useful SEO and Webmastering Articles and Resources

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