Last week I mentioned I was starting a new pay per click campaign to see if I can create another revenue stream because you can never have too many sources of income right?

Today is the end of one week of testing and the results aren’t as great as I’d expected but also not a complete failure.  I think I made a few classic mistakes when I began because I didn’t realize how fast you can blow a budget using Adwords.  It can be done fast!  In one day I spent over $55 on ads without even realizing why.  Unfortunately none of that money converted into any sales.

My problem was right off the bat I used targeted ad placements.  Now I know this sounds like a good plan, but the way it works you end up paying for impressions instead of actual clicks.  CPM as it’s called is “cost per 1000 impressions”.  What happened was almost immediately my ads were served on very high traffic sites.  Normally a good thing right?  Not really.  This high traffic, while potentially could convert to sales merely showed my ads without any clicks and cost me over $50 in one day.  That was a pricey experiment.

I then went back to the basics again and placed the same product in a keyword campaign, this time controlling exactly which keywords I wanted searched on.  Unfortunately, no sales of this particular product were happening.  I picked another product which seemed like it had a good chance of selling because the google search results produced very few paid ads.  After only running this ad for a day, I had one sale.  I had hoped to have more, but after a week, still only one sale.

The sale itself didn’t cover the cost of the PPC campaign thus far but i’m not giving up yet.  In any business there is always a period of investing in both time and money before you get everything just right.

I think it’s just a matter of finding the right niche product to really bust this thing wide open.

So to sum up:

Total Expenses thus far: $85.00 (and change)

Total Profits: $16.97

Again, I don’t consider the campaign a total failure because I did make one sale…now it’s just a matter of fine tuning my technique and getting the sales to outpace the ad costs.  These techniques I learned by using Google Assassin.  It’s an amazing collection of software and information for running PPC campaigns.  Much better, I think than the Rich Jerk and several others I have purchased in the past.

I haven’t reported income from this blog yet mainly because it’s still pretty new.  I only started this blog in May and I still feel that I am working out the kinks and figuring out what works and what doesn’t.  That being said, I have earned some income directly from this blog.

I sold one text link ad on a post for a measly $1. I also sold one entrecard design for $10 to a happy customer who I believe as a result of my design has passed me up in the listings on Entrecard.  Way to go!

So that’s pretty much it.  I have other projects out there making money for me but I wanted to share my experiments with this blog and associated monetizing systems.  I figure if I can do it, anyone can!

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