My first mistake

C

cambrant

New member
Jan 30, 2011
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So I've just started getting familiar with various online marketing methods... One of the things I tried was buying a cheap site which sells a certain service for about $10 a pop, and used Adwords to get traffic to the site. The orders would be placed with a payment to my paypal account, and the deposit to paypal would be my way of finding out about a sale. A week passed, and I got about 40k views and 1k visitors in that short time, but no sales. Yesterday I found out why.

I used phrase matching, language matching, good keywords and everything quite by the book. My ads at least kept up quality-wise with my competitors in this niche. After spending roughly $100 on the site, and then pulling in traffic like crazy for five times that amount, learning to increase my CTR etc, I started thinking that this niche was full of shit, and that no one would ever buy my services.

So yesterday I was browsing my PayPal account, and I discovered something called "Premier" accounts. Go figure. So basically I've burned through $500 on adwords traffic for users who perhaps tried to pay for my services, only to get the message that they couldn't pay me. After switching to a premier account I got two sales in one hour! Problem now is that I don't have any funds left in my adwords account, and I don't know if investing further in the site is worth the cash. I suppose getting another $100 voucher and opening up a new adwords account for the same site would be a bad idea? Does Google really care?

Oh well, I just wanted to share my experiences so far. Don't fuck up like I did.
 


dude, that sucks, but dont forget at least you got yourself out there and have started something instead of wondering what if and procrastinating. There gonna be many more bumps on the road to success so just hang in there
 
Yeah you're gonna have to forget about that little mistake and just crack on best you can. Put it out of your mind, it could get you down when it doesnt need to.

The vouchers are for new accounts, and I'm 90% sure they say you cant use 2 adwords accounts to promote 1 site/url. How strict they are, I dont know. Might be worth just trying to get hold of some $ to put to your current adwords account.
 
BNR34 said:
Yeah you're gonna have to forget about that little mistake and just crack on best you can. Put it out of your mind, it could get you down when it doesnt need to.

The vouchers are for new accounts, and I'm 90% sure they say you cant use 2 adwords accounts to promote 1 site/url. How strict they are, I dont know. Might be worth just trying to get hold of some $ to put to your current adwords account.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the dollaz isn't the problem really, but I just don't know yet if I'm gonna find success doing online marketing. That's why I'm reluctant to throw money at this yet. However, if it starts generating enough revenue using adwords, the site/business could at least be sold again, to pay back the money I threw at it.

It's amazing how fast you learn what works and what doesn't. I assume people who've been doing this for a while not only are able to tell which adwords will work, but can also quite easily evaluate an online business model without experience of that particular program...
 
you'll make crazier mistakes down the road,
it sounds like your campaign is showing promise, I'd just run/optimize it; and make sure to check your payment link when you run campaigns in the future
 
Do you not think the big guys within internet marketing have made mistakes in the past? We all have and thats a fact... just learn from your mistakes and work on them so that it won't happen again. If your funds are low work on different ways to raise your funds and start on it again. Thats the fun of internet marketing, if you don't succeed you have a million other methods to try...

Also you said you received 1k page visits within a weeks time... this comes out to about 143 unique visitors per day. That also comes out to almost 6 visitors an hour and with 2 sales that is a 15-20% conversion rate (didn't feel to calculating the exact number). Now with that conversion rate and 143 visitors per day you come out to around 20-23 sales daily all which are for $10 a piece. I see potential in reinvesting in this market due to the fact you spend $500 in a week and make $200-230 a day. $1400>$500 = success.
 
you said you spent $500 in a week, 7 days? ok, so that's $71.42 per day. Divide that by 24 hours, that's $2.96. Did the sales you received in that one hour equate to more than that? If so I say go for it. These numbers aren't going to be exact considering budget restraints, you could have ran through you entire budget in an hour for each day.
 
thats ok, I just spent 300 on advertising a page this afternoon where I didn't even notice that the link to the offer on the page got messed up when I was switching to another offer somehow and didn't even go anywhere.

Far from my first mistake, far from my last mistake.
 
Business 101

On all campaigns you must always be your first customer. Go through the paces that your potential clients will go through. You need to test all your links and payment processes. This way you will learn if there are any stumbling blocks that will make your visitors turn away. You need to make sure that the entire process is systemic and flawless. When you do this first, you will eliminate all the errors and then be able to determine if the niche is worth your money or not.
 
maybe your first mistake, but probably not the last. but sounded like you got some results at the end, what about last few days, did you spend any more dollars?
 
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