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So I set a SMART goal of a cool 100 campaign blasts by this 28th of this month in early August, and what do you know, we’re creeping up on that date. With less than a week to go, I still have about 40 to go. What can I say? It was a lazy September…

That said, I easily have that number of potential campaigns to pick from mostly fleshed out in text files on my thumbdrive. But quite honestly, I may just make these last forty straight to quick eBay niche landing pages. My little experiment with them seems to be going well, with a few winning campaigns in the mix already and covering the experiment’s total ad spend so far. Cut some non-performers, optimize those winners, and I see some great things going forward.

While I got a half dozen done this afternoon, I didn’t get much accomplished on those last 40 tonight. My son insisted we build tunnels with blocks and race tennis balls through them for a couple hours. And who am I to argue?

That, and I left my thumbdrive with all my campaign info in my work PC, so I’m flying blind anyway.

So I’ve been experimenting with my campaign blasting in the last couple days, attempting to drive traffic to a series of very niche-specific eBay affiliate landing pages rather than direct to merchant.

And so far so good. I’m seeing a fair number of clicks. Plus, I’m not freaking out by blowing through my daily ad spend budget in a couple hours or anything. But even with me taking it slow and steady, it sure would be nice to get a quick read on any successful campaigns.

But no, EPN has decided that just as I start paying for traffic, they’re going to delay reporting the prior day’s results from my standard 7pm or so until several hours later. Tonight is yet another night where midnight has come and gone, and I still don’t know if anything converted from the prior day.

I see all kinds of people freaking out over recent events, but I love ya’ EPN.

• Your program converts well.
• I don’t have to harass anyone to get paid.
• Your API is a snap to play around in.
• The potential niches I can try out are essentially infinite.

But sheesh, let me know where I’m wasting money already…

I spent some time today setting up a handful of PPC campaign blasts to my latest group of phpBay mini sites, and in the process realized that what used to be a luxury is rapidly becoming a requirement: multiple monitors.

Here at the work, I have a decent single 19″ LCD monitor, which is wonderful if I’m working in a window or two. But if I get much more complicated than that it gets to be a pain to manage. At home, I have dual 17″ LCDs, which allows me to get quite a bit more done. 4 or 5 windows open at once becomes manageable. But it looks like I’m getting close to the point that a big middle third might not be such a bad idea. Today, while blasting away, this is what I had going on:

• TextPad, my favorite text editor
• the Adwords Editor
• a wonderful little spreadsheet that automagically simplifies the whole Adwords campaign process in Excel (picked up from the ever helpful Campaign Blasts forum)
• Keyword Transformer, an insane time saver if you plan on doing any PPC and would like to actually track anything
• Firefox to randomly check on the keyword landing pages that Keyword Transformer is giving me
• an explorer window or two

Trying to do this at work on that single monitor, at least rapidly, was a bit chaotic. Time spent finding and switching to the app that I wanted definitely took away that flow state I want to get into when I’m batching my way through a process.

Might just be time to do a little shopping when this month’s EPN payment comes in…