IM adventures of a dunce

Schlabbersack

Schlabbersack

Banned
Feb 3, 2010
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Thank you for opening this thread and joining me on my mission to become RICH, ahem... I meant to say a IM Genius. As it stands, I'm anything but and am a total dunce.

My goal with this thread, is to keep myself accountable to this awesome WickedFire community, maybe receive a kind word and a snippet of advice now and then.

Quick background: Immigrated to the U.S. 20 years ago with nothing but a suitcase and this last April officially became a citizen (Yeah!). Living the American dream and have an awesome wife, 3 kids, house and mortgage. Been online and working in IT full time since 1994, am a infrastructure/computer security geek. Have good experience building websites using Wordpress and besides my corporate job am lucky enough to consult for several small businesses.

I just hit the 40 year old mark and wondered - is this professionally all there is? Read the books 'The 4-hour work week' and 'The art of non-conformity' and it kicked the old entrepreneurial spirit loose, which corporate America tried its best to kill. (Great books btw)

Over the last couple years I've scoured the web for info on internet marketing and read everything I could find. Ended up in total overwhelm and started to do - NOTHING!

After a while, I picked the ebooks up again, looked at more websites, read some more and realized that while I have gained some knowledge, I'm still a total dunce and quit again. Joined the ShoeMoney program to get some structure to my learning but after being strung along for a month on how to create a Facebook account I canceled. In one of his broadcasts however, he had his browser open and one of the url's was WickedFire. Curious as I am, I ended up here and read some more.

Then one thing, which is represented on WickedFire over and over, finally slapped me in the face - You've got to start somewhere! Things are NOT going to be perfect and I will probably not make much money or any for a little while BUT you've got to start!

Goals: While keeping my regular day job I will try my best to create some websites that are build for long term revenue. To build revenue I will also will try to do some PPC, promote some awesome products that some of my friends own. Would also like to build a couple educational products.

So with permission of this WickedFire community - here I am!

--

Day 1

I have a Facebook account that did not have my real name in it, which I created for several of the websites I maintain. So last night I found a coupon for $50 Facebook advertising online and used it as a funding source in addition to my Amex.

Build a PPC ad promoting my best friends product, offering a coupon code. Worked on it for about 2 hours until I finally had an ad I thought might work. Limited to a very specific area and targeted a user base of about 1,000. Set the cpc to .01 and my daily spending limit to $10. Let's see if I get any clicks at all at this price. With butterflies in my stomach I finally click that activate campaign button.

Minutes later I receive a message from Facebook! Facebook Ad Alert: Ad Approved

YEAH!!!!! My very first campaign is live!!!!

Even if I get just one click I'm HAPPY!!!!

By this time it's after midnight and I'm hitting the sack.



This morning I get up and have the following email sitting in my Inbox:

Suspicious Payments Activity: Your account has been suspended.

What the frack!!!!!!

Tried to log on to my Facebook account, same message 'Suspicious Payments Activity'. So I've filled out their form.

Received a email back saying they have received my inquiry. Since then - (4 hours ago) radio silence....

Wow - what a start!!!!

Guess if it would be easy ... everyone would do it!
 


Day 2 - Got another email from Facebook requesting more information about my account. Since I have nothing to hide I gave them everything I could think off with which they could verify my identity. This is suppose to be a long term business venture so I'm good with that.

Just got another email minutes ago: We apologize any inconvenience this might have caused, while we were doing our investigation and we have reactivated your account!

YEAH!!!!

My campaign was paused and I now have the pleasure of 'un-pausing' it!

Let's see what happens with my first ad!
 
I'd recommend raising your bid quite a bit. You're not going to get any traffic with a 0.01 CPC, even if you have an amazing CTR.

I usually start out a little below the low end of the FB recommended bid. Then if I get a good CTR after a while I will begin to lower my bids.

Congrats on launching your first campaign and good luck bro.
 
Thanks for the kind words everyone.

No, they never told me 'why' they suspended the account. Only that they verified my account that it was really 'me' and reactivated it. End of story. The entire time in email, they actually were nice.

Since I got no hits on my ad at .01 I upped it to .40 cpc which is still below the .89 facebook would like to see. Am going to try to find the sweet spot.

Still looking for a good affiliate software for my buddy. As soon as I'll have that we'll install it on his server. This way we don't have to rely on a coupon but can keep track of it.

On Facebook we started targeting one specific city and a user base of 1,000. Interested to see if we'll get any sales from there.

Did some more reading (Go figure) and found a couple of excellent threads:

http://www.wickedfire.com/products-...tware-1-5-relaunching-case-study-allowed.html

and

http://www.wickedfire.com/products-...-make-money-tangible-products-e-commerce.html

My goal is to create my own products eventually and to sell tangible goods for the most part.

NCMedia in the first thread also offers a free e-book which is pretty interesting/helpful to noob's like me.
 
Alrighty!

Since last night my ad received 2289 impressions and 2 actual clicks at .81 a piece and a CTR of 0.05.

What should my CTR be?

Oh, no sales yet... :)
 
CTR is a useless metric without taking cost per click and revenue into consideration.

You can have a CTR of 0.1 that ends up making you a profit of $1000 but,
You could have a CTR of 0.05 that ends up profiting $1500.

A lot of things come into play. Always take your profits into consideration, in the end, that's most important.
 
cool. following ya. like your thread so far cause its every detail. often read useful posts that just talk about one area of implementing some venture. keep it up!:D
 
So after a couple of days here are my stats:

21,370impressions22clicks 0.103%CTR $0.62 avg.cpc
$13.73

Now, since we don't have affiliate software installed, I do not know if anyone bought product from my buddy yet. He uses yahoo business hosting, which offers affiliate tracking through commission junction. However, we don't know what kind of fees they are getting, for setting this up. Anyway, I'm checking with him this afternoon, if we had any conversions, since I should make about $65 (percentage based) per sale.

In the meantime, he has officially awarded me a distributorship to make it more 'official'. So, now I can resell his products online as well and just transfer the orders to him.

On Friday, I bought three domain names that have our main keywords in the title and get 9900 exact searches a month. One is keyword.us domain the other (keyword)store.com on which I'm planning to sell his stuff and might some other folks as well. The third domain is (Germankeywords with a - in between).com and I'm planning to try selling his product in Germany since I'm originally from there.

Set up a wordpress blog on each domain and now am trying to figure out what theme and plugins to use. Any suggestions?

On Monday I'm going to talk to a co-worker of mine who is an excellent writer and needs some extra cash. Let her write some copy for the site, as well as some articles but I have to get enough stuff together for her to know 'what' she should write about. She said she would do it for free for the first little bit to help out and see if she is good at it. Win/Win. I save on laying out cash and she gets to do something she has fun doing (Beats writing business documentation/proposals etc. all day).

Thoughts/Advice anyone?

One thing I just noticed. Just having this thread, is keeping me a bit more motivated and now think through things, a bit more. Don't want to look to much like an idiot in front of everyone! THANK YOU!
 
One week in and here are the final stats of my little experiment:

Run time 5 days at which point I specifically targeted 1,020 area from Los Angeles, Ca.

50,256 Impressions, 0.086 CTR, Avg. CPC $0.57 and I have had 43 clicks. Total spent $24.31 (All in Facebook credits).

Sales? Not sure… Nobody used the coupon I mentioned in the ad, however, he has received several orders from L.A. just none traced back to Facebook so far. He has a Yahoo Store and is calling Commission Junction in the next couple so we can do the affiliate link thing.

Installed Wordpress on all three domains and installed the WP E-commerce plugin. Did some more keyword research and while reading here I stumbled across Market Samurai. Ended up reading and grasping more concepts. Backtraced my steps and verified that my research was good to begin with. With a little bit of work I should be able to dominate this niche… (Got to have a goal!).

However, biggest concern I have is now a) design of the site and b) e-commerce software. Reading way to much and double guessing myself, maybe Magento is the better way to go? Going to look at that over the next several days.

In addition I'm going to reread the tutorial on Market Samurai and purchase that software. Looks like a great tool…. Hmnn maybe I can become an affiliate for them? :)

Sooooo… Magento or e-commerce plugin?

Wreckin my brain over that one….

Started looking into some link building and am going to promote the site a bit, so it can go up in rankings while I build it. Before I do that though, I have to work out the Title, Description, Keywords and Categories.

OOOPS, before I do that - I better tuck two pretty little girls in. This stuff can wait til they are off in sleepy land...
 
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