After just 3 days of testing his offers, I realized my traffic dropped exponentially. I emailed the advertiser directly and asked what happened. I got a whack response stating my traffic was immense in such a short time frame. The problem I had was I told him the type of traffic I was doing. Also this source of traffic is so new that no network accepts it or very little.

I explained that to him my traffic and where it was coming from and how I test it. Apparently he didn’t like the traffic and that sucks, so he decides to just remove my link or dead it. No redirect or email stating it was removed etc.

This sometimes happen with network where they do not notify you of change, but they are redirected to a landing page or a more successful offer.

Remember first impressions are important, especially if you are making a landing page, better yet an advertisers landing page should have done their research to put in time and effort to cross test their offer across all browsers. I mean this is important because you need to assure yourself that every person viewing your landing page or offer will properly be viewable in whatever browser they are using.

Well, I was looking for some IQ stuff lately (cause everyone is banking off it), I decided to go into a more well known network and found a good landing page or offer. Everything looks good within IE and FireFox, but when under Safari it busted! I was like boo!

While I was watching my prosper202 spy window just seeing the surge of traffic, I was pretty sure it was the new ad network I was working with. My whole spy view on Prosper202 was just filled with the same campaign, what a surge of traffic literally within minutes or might be seconds I launched the ad on the network.

Below is a screen shot from the network, which shows the impressions and my CTR – which cost me 100$ pretty fast, literally in seconds after I launched and it got approved. I saw the pop up notification from my Thunderbird saying it was approved, then a minute later another email notification saying I need to fund my account! I was like DAAAAAMMMMNNNN.

I even tweeted a comment about how I hate IE and I got a ton of response via twitter:

• from aroussi: @ianternet IE Sucks. Here’s why: http://tinyurl.com/57vm83
• from blackbottom_com: @ianternet ya -IE 6/7, Safari 3+, FF 2.0.0.16/20, 3.0+, and all the CSS intricacies, I’m usually tuckered out.
• from blackysky: @ianternet feel you for IE or I hope IE8 will be more like firefox
• from: quirkyjessi: @ianternet I couldn’t agree more!

But last night while at launched, I got an email saying it looks messed up in IE. I decided to check and to my astonishment here is what I saw:

As you can see the dashed table is pushing into the sidebar, the reason for this is because the form button is extending too far out. So it pushes everything that is on the sidebar at the bottom of the table. I am too ashamed to show the whole site, but you can see it in crap action in POS IE!

I decided to go ahead and use the Arthemia Theme from ColorLabs Project. The theme has a magazine style and blog style to it. The biggest complaint I received from my old blog style was the clutter of the front page, so I wanted to change that a little bit but also have dedicated spots for specific posts. Arthemia allows me to do just that and let recent posts be posted on the front page. There are some loses such as the random posts, the forum rss feed, and other aspects but there are going to be changes for 2009.

Since this is a new theme, there are still a lot of things that I am playing around with, for example the thumbnails, I want to give a default thumbnail so its not just text you will see. I will also be adding a free email report subscription at the top, I have joined a new email system other than aweber as well. You will also notice some new changes within the posts as well.

The posts will have related readings on the far right of the blog post, which may distort old pages with images or posts that maybe shorter than usual but it was a change I wanted to implement. Also at the bottom you will notice a small footer of link such as an rss button, tell a friend, etc. Trying to get the blog to be more social, some aspects such, may still be the same such as the hiding of the comments, until you click on a link.

You will also notice I added the google friend connect to this blog as well. I want to see how effective it will be for this blog and see how many people actually will login to claim their face on IanFernado.com!

The theme is currently still being worked on through out the week, until I get it the way I want it. Below is the screenshot of the old design, let me know what you think of the new design and I hope that it will be better suite for my readers, since you told me what was wrong I hope I satisfied you with the new design.

Let me know what you think or if you want the old design back, remember that I am still working on the small quirks.

Well I noticed via analytics that my site was being ranked number 1 in the SERPs for about 500+ keywords. I will show you how to grab these keywords, later on. I then realize one of my offers can relate to those group of keywords. I exported those keywords and added them in the Adwords Editor to upload to my account. I gave it a day and then realized that the keywords were not converting.

My Theory:

Since I was ranking #1 in the SERPs for these specific keywords, I am competing against my own sites. SO what, I compete against all the other sites as well. Then I realize that my site was providing information, where the offer was providing the information as well, but with a payment. Interesting.

My Analysis:

I looked at the stats more and noticed repeated IP addresses from both the offers and my website. I then thought to myself:

1. They went to the website, hit back went to the offer
2. Went to the offer, hit back went to the website

Interesting. I figured I would be able to leverage my own website’s keywords to benefit my own campaigns. Looks like it did not. I noticed low return today and was kinda shocked at that. I had very targeted niche specific keywords, but users were very specific to the keyword they didn’t bother completing the offer.

So these 500+ sets of keywords turned into negatives for the offer I was running. Now I believe that my site was providing the answer, where the offer was providing the answer for a price and FREE obviously won. I was kinda of disappointed that I saw the clicks but not a high conversion.

To me this was a mistake for me, I should have just let my site take in all the traffic. I just wanted to find a way in which my offers can benefit from the new set of keywords that were generated from my website. Maybe if the page did not provide so much information, the offer might have converted? Well in anycase I added the offer link at the bottom of my page to see if readers would filter through and then convert.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well this morning, I found an email stating I have reached my bandwidth capacity on my free account. I was what I used up 25Gigs already? This is why I have my own box just incase I go over the hosting limits. I was kinda of astonished really. I wouldn’t expect my sales pages and landing pages would be taking up so much bandwidth with image alone. Well this is the email I received.

From Photobucket:

Every free account with Photobucket is allotted 25 GB of monthly bandwidth and our records show that you have less than 5 GB of bandwidth left to your account.

Now the question is to upgrade and I have decided not to. It is 39.95 a month to host with Photobucket. Even though they do have a great service, I would rather just host it on my own box. I want to find a simple image hosting script, since I am use to the formation of photobucket with some security. The only reason why I hosted my images with photobucket is because I didn’t want anyone hotlinking to the images, if they did it would be an issue with Photobucket.

But I think I will be just using the wordpress upload tool built in to make life easier and just deny access to the images folder to prevent hotlinking. There are other services out there but I just enjoyed photobuckets interface and their image editor tool. Well that is it really – I will be just securing my images folder form now on since I will now use my box for my images, I mean I pay a hefty load for this might as well use it.

I personally have 1 .NET domain and the rest of my domains are .COMs (with the exception of LPs). I personally think that .COM has and is part of everyones daily speech. If we take a look in the past .NET was not even that successful to try and take over the dot com boom. .NET tried to ride the .COM and tried to make itself overwhelm .COM but failed. Again, we know of .NET but we automatically say .COM

Another instances that received a lot of buzz in the past was .WS (.WebSite). This became very popular and was listed to be the next top domain extension after the .COM – does anyone even buy a .WS?

When it comes to domains it may have a good SEO functionality but if it is going to be a business it needs to be easily remembered. Everyone will attached a .COM to any website that is given to them, again its part of our vocabulary. .ME is very personal and I was going to actually buy several domains, then I thought of other domains and its’ history, no one really uses them.

I want the 2 domains under a .ME (which are still available, crazy right!) but what will I use it for? Will it be easily remembered? A lot of domain buyers are buying into the concept of a sentence “ForgetAbout.ME” or “WhatAbout.ME”. Does it sound weird “WHATABOUTME” – someone can easily just attach a .COM and go to another users website. When in actuality you are saying “What About DOT ME”, just so the end user will visit your site. Now doesn’t just sound weird? “Hey Mr. Person – I have a a website visit ‘WEBSITE DOT ME!’” On paper it may look interesting and creates that curiosity feeling but verbal speech is part of marketing and networking, what if the person does not write it down?

With new domains coming out, the first day there is a huge buzz and everyone tries to buy the best domain name possible with the specified .WHATEVER. Does anyone think the buzz will last more than 1 day? .ME was heavily buzzed for 1 day but anyone actually buying it on the second day, especially after some negative feedback from buyers? I do not think there will be another big dot com takeover, .COM is currently king and I doubt any other .WHATEVER will take it’s thrown.

Just the fact .COM is part of everyone’s speech will be hard to remove that speech and replace it.

]]> http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/why-other-whatevers-will-fail/feed/ 12 http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/earnings-screenshot-kills-your-database/ http://www.ianfernando.com/2008/earnings-screenshot-kills-your-database/#comments Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:52:54 +0000 Ian http://www.ianfernando.com/?p=463 Not too sure what happened the other day when my database just decided to blow up and not produce anything to my readers. Yesterday my blog was bombarded with traffic because of one specific post. Several traffic sources resulted into it and I my database just decided to give up.

I was going to update my blog later last night and when I tried to login I had a database issue and I was furious! I immediately called up my hosting provider and asked for immediate help. I swear my service providers’ customer support is so useless – they can not tell me anything except test the domain then create a ticket – WTF! Luckily Twitter was on my side and Nate Whitehill and Shawn Collins came to the rescue. I called up my service provider about 3 times to see what the updates were and what the issues were.

Since they were no help, I went to my web logs and tried to see if I was being attacked by a bot from a single IP, Shawn thought I was being hit. Everything looked normal to me and I found 1 specific post to be very popular. It seems my earnings caught attention and caught attention fast. I was a little confused because it isn’t a six figure check like the big guys were doing. It is just a small snippet of what I was earning with a nice ROI from my Adwords campaign.

But since I received no help from my service provider and friends on twitter helped me I went ahead and redirected the domain to my other website which is a small site about my startup company. I even posted to what the issue was and now I am writing this because I finally have access to my blog, wow imagine all those hours getting continuous traffic and you have to redirect it because of a DB error and too many connections.

Nate has proposed to install WP-Cache which I recently just did and hope it will serve me well. I believe I have installed a cache system on my blog prior but it has literally slowed it down, I hope it does not. But I will see if it has helped or not – I have read a lot of good things about Wp-Cache so I hope the same results with my blog.

I also was mentioned on Paul’s Blog at UberAffiliate.com for Charity Check Tuesday, which brought good traffic as well. I simply was surprise to see multiple views on my earnings screen shot even though I have yet to produce 6 figures, was it my ROI that caught others attention or just the screen shot itself? I am uncertain to why my screen shot post was very popular.

Even my analytics shows the big increase of traffic and spike from that single post. I am not sure what it is that gets people’s attention about numbers and entrepreneurs posting their checks and statistics. I think it brings a lot of curiosity and the fact that ‘there is a chance’ feeling for the beginners.

I think maybe it is the curiosity – I receive congrats and received a lot of help from many of my readers. There is a chance and the screen shot shows anyone can do it as long as you keep focus and take pride in what you are doing. I believe by me showing a small amount as a beginner shows there is a chance for others to jump into affiliate marketing and especially in PPC. I have learned a lot and now I need to learn to scale it and assure its continuous growth.

So this is a lesson learned posting earnings screen shot create curiosity and creates a viral action which will crash your database. Don’t know if that is a good or bad thing.

This brought a valuable lesson to me, dedicate a credit card to your business. I can honestly say PPC marketing is part of my business model because it is earning me money. Having your own credit card strictly for your business can easily help you grow and being responsible for that dedicated credit card. The fact that I can not market on Adwords is really throwing my whole income source off.

I have to wait till the 15th to receive all my checks, deposit the checks and then wait for it to clear, wow! Some networks I have direct deposit and I am waiting for those to come in and then I can pay my credit card and then be on my grind to PPC marketing. I will have wasted about 2 weeks from today, because I can not pay for my credit card. Not being able to perform and earn money is really holding me back from learning and making more money. …sighs…

This is a lesson learned to dedicate my business spending on a separate credit card and my personals’ on a separate card. Also you really do not want to figure out what is business and what is personal when looking at your expenses, so this is definitely a lesson learned.

Chris Bibey says:

By keeping your personal money separate from your business, you can continue to live in the same manner as always. The only change will be funding your personal accounts from your business as opposed to a paycheck from an employer. Is this a big change? Sure. But if you want to start your own business, it’s one that you need to make.

This is a true because you can take a look at your business account and transfer some amounts to your personal to pay for bills etc. Just keeping the 2 apart from each other can help you be more organized. Also since I am treating affiliate marketing as a business I would need to act like it is a business and not just an everyday action. Affiliate marketing is a business!

With this in mind I will be opening a separate account as well with my bank for a business account. As Chris stated in the quote, having both separate and treating it differently can help me appreciate the business and industry more.

Now I will be off to my bank to talk about opening another account under my business (soon to get an LLC) and see if I can apply for a business credit card. So this is all going to be new to me and I will be reading quite a lot to just have a good understanding and what to expect as well. Any Recommendations?

Overall, this experience shows and tells me to better organize my business (making money online) vs my personal expenses. I am angered I can not continue my PPC marketing in the next couple days because of a maxed out credit card. So I will take a lost for the next couple weeks and I will definitely be on the grind and go heavier than ever, soon to be making 6 figures!!!!!

Make sure you separate your business and your personals on all aspects. If you are making money online treat it as a business and a business needs to be treated with specific aspects, which I have learned the hard way – but guess that is what my blog is a bout.

From my last post a lot of have told me about American Express. I have even got an email to try to use Advanta. I will be looking into new credit cards in the coming days. Thanks for everyone that has left a comment and recommendations.