…and I feel fine…

Lately I’ve been contemplating the direction to take this side gig that has shown such promise. Along with the future of my main gig, which carries the complications of certain obligations with it. And, well, lots o’ things.

What can I say — looking at the calendar it shows middle age creeping up on me. I seem to be having a touch of a midlife crisis here. I’m not looking at trading in the minivan for a Porsche, or trolling for Young Bombshell Wife 2.0, or anything that stereotypical.

Merely contemplating concepts like meaning and purpose and time and happiness and other such light topics. In other words, deciding what should be my next step.

So today I log in to my advertising account, and see that the big G has slapped me for the third time in this little adventure. Had a minor freak out for an hour or three. Not really because it kills my side biz or anything — though that is my first impulse even though all it really does is slow me down for a while — but because it means I have to rebuild.

I’m a lazy man, and would much prefer to add on to versus re-laying that foundation. Or, better yet (because I can be a truly lazy man at times) be able to just watch the earnings roll on in on those days or weeks I wanted to be doing other things.

The first time this happened, I panicked for a week+. This time, mildly for maybe an hour. Now, oddly, a certain peace has settled upon me as the day goes on. Yes, G is fucking with my business model. But that’s their prerogative. I’ve realized that I just have to build that reality into my model going forward. The key part of that last sentence: going forward.

I still haven’t decided where to take this side gig. Or what to do with my main one and it’s attachments. But this last year’s successes have opened up potential pathways I never would have imagined even five years ago. Or one, for that matter. Gilbert was certainly right in my latest read — we seriously underestimate the potential change that the future holds for us.

…begin the begin…

Ah, Tax Season 2009 has come to an end. Two days out, I’ve now spent most of two days playing a lot of LEGOs and Mario Kart with my son while the wife is out of town. (Shhh, don’t tell her — I know Mario Kart is essentially brain rot, but what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her! ) Should probably consider looking for something a bit more productive to do eventually, but right now I’d say spending time with my little five-year-old is just about the absolute right thing to do.

So in the last two months, what have I actually accomplished?

• A couple hundred tax returns.
• Completed somewhere in the range of half a Campaign Blast Challenge. The brain and time just wouldn’t cooperate to allow me to finish the whole thing. Outside of the challenge, I built next to nothing.
• A hard slap of my eBay AdWords campaigns by Google — twice. You know Google, if you don’t want my money, fine, I’ll move them and the substantial amount I was paying to advertise with you to…
• Yahoo & MSN. Transferred all my campaigns over. The traffic isn’t quite up to Google’s numbers, but they are slowly building. And the traffic appears to convert even better!
• I’ve got another side business that is in serious need of, well, going the hell away. I just have to come up with a means of making a clean break with it. Now that tax season has ended, I have no excuse in putting that off other than not wanting to deal with it.

OK, so I guess I did at least get a few things done on this side endeavor that I’d like to make my main one.

Immediately after the slaps, my earnings took a major nosedive to the tune of around 10% of my peak. I’m back to around 60% and steadily increasing. Now that I have time and available brain cells to focus, it’s time to get back to the game and see where I want to be and what I need to do in order to get there.

After all, I have a single monetary goal for the summer: September 1st, I plan to write a check for the remainder of our mortgage…

photo credit: phunkstarr

Having a fine ol’ time this month watching all my work over the last few months really take off. I won’t go into specific dollar amounts right now, but my profit’s seven day moving average is almost 700% greater than this time last month. And last month, quite honestly, kicked the crap out of any prior month’s online income. Nevertheless, I’ve still been doing a little self sabotage.

I’ve got two campaign blasts in my stable that took off like a rocket as soon as I put them up. Enough so that I paused the first after less than half a day and in less than four hours with the other. And I’ll pause the next campaign that eats a sizable chunk of my daily budget that rapidly. That’s just common sense. You wouldn’t want an out of control campaign bankrupting you after all.

But what isn’t reasonable is discovering that those campaigns are actually profitable, to the tune of just over 78% return for both of them over that brief period. And then, despite that fact, letting them lie there paused because you were afraid to make the adspend. Apparently, I’m perfectly comfortable spending a dollar to make $1.75 in a campaign in a day. But not $50 to make $90. Or $1,000 to make $1,800.

So this evening I did a little more analyzing. Tweaked the campaigns ever so slightly. Added a zero onto those campaign budgets.

And resumed them.

So I’m hard at it trying to throw together a fairly ridiculous number of campaigns in the latest challenge put forth at the campaign blast membership site. I decided to stretch myself quite a bit, because all of a sudden I’m seeing some real progress. Total ad spend is rapidly taking off, as are earnings right along with it.

Never underestimate having a goal. I really am having a blast!

We are a fifth of the way through and are due to end the challenge a week before Thanksgiving. And all I can say is, if I can reach this goal I set for myself, the mass quantity of turkey and stuffing consumed isn’t going to be the only reason I’m sleeping all day…

The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size.

You don’t say?

Looks like Google wants to slow me down a bit. Ah, well, they are right after all. With all the smooshes (ala ‘thisisakeywordphrase‘) in my account, I have far too many keywords with not so much as an impression in the mix. So it’s probably time to do a little housecleaning. Sure, I could just open another account, but why let things get really unruly before doing some cleaning?

So, I am going to tack on another day to my 50 blast goal deadline and spend that day pruning.

Wednesday, I was winding my day down trying to find a little something to babysit my mind on the old idiot box. And what do I find but a program on an international channel I’ve never even seen concerning the main topic of possibly the strangest of my 100 blasts. The particular campaign has made a couple dollars since putting it up half a month ago, but it’s also only cost me a couple quarters in ads, so technically a winning campaign. But definitely a low key one.

‘Hmmm… might want to keep an eye on that campaign tomorrow.’

But it being 2am or so, and coming from some oddball channel, and not having a notebook near my body in which to make myself a note, I, ummm, well, forgot about it.

I wake up Thursday to an exceedingly busy morning at my ‘real’ job, and don’t bother to check my Adwords account until over lunch. Only to see a campaign that ordinarily might see a click a day showing 400+ clicks.

Here’s hoping there were at least a few buyers in the curious!

There most definitely is money still to be made as an eBay affiliate. Last month was, by a long shot, my most profitable month as one.

photo credit: ethorson

That said, my future eBay efforts will likely not involve creating any more BANS sites. I’ll certainly keep my current BANS sites as they are as long as they continue to make a profit. For instance, I have one site that I literally have not touched since I set it up last November that has made me a couple thousand, and it is about to hit its peak season again. Why mess with it?

But I just do not much care for building sites the BANS way anymore. Nothing wrong with the software, but I have found ways I just like better.

Off On Tangents

I have gone off onto a couple different tangents as far as eBay affiliate stuff:

• For sites built to get search engine traffic, I’m using a great little product called phpBay. It lets me take a WordPress blog and quickly turn it into a store. With the billion or so themes available for WordPress, I can make it look however I want.
• Lately I’ve been focusing on using Adwords to drive traffic to eBay mini sites. I used the API version of phpBay to build mini sites specifically for PPC campaigns. If you happen to join Earn $1k A Day, I can’t recommend these three threads more highly to give you some truly astounding ideas along these lines:
  1. My First 1K day, now 2nd and 3rd
  2. Questions for Gary
  3. How I choose my keywords from ebay listing titles

  I’ve been following Gary’s system since midway through September, and am more than thrilled with the results I’ve gotten so far.

Tool Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations for tools I use I’ve found particularly useful as an eBay affiliate:

• Irregardless of the route you’re taking, finding a good niche is a given. I really like Hot Item Finder to find what is actually selling on eBay. I’ve hit on some truly oddball niches using it that have done very well for me so far.
• Some software to pull eBay listings and format ‘em with your affiliate links. Whether it’s BANS or phpBay or any of the other eBay affiliate scripts out there.

Those are really my only indispensables. Now that I’ve gotten into pay-per-click to get traffic to my mini sites, I’ll tack on two more, but if you’re not going into PPC right now, ignore ‘em:

• Keyword Transformer to let me easily set up keyword tracking.
• My membership at Campaign Blast. This site has really kicked me in the pants. I set up 44 mini money sites in around a week recently because of this membership. And will probably put up another 60 in the next.

End of the Day Job?

So, have I made enough to replace the day job yet?

Well, no. At least, not yet. But last month certainly reduced the multiples required to do so!

Seeing results really gets you motivated…

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…