My income is in the shitter. I’ll probably only net about $4K or so this month.
There are 3 reasons:
1. Normal cycles. I’ve been pushing financial related offers like payday loans. They always perform badly this time of year so I expected this to happen.
2. I’ve stuck with doing paid search and have started having trouble with MSN slapping campaigns or inexplicably not giving me volume. So I’ve had trouble scaling my campaigns.
3. I’m not building out new paid search campaigns right now. I’ve decided to switch to alternate traffic sources and new niches. Because I’m getting into doing completely new things, I’ve been spending time trying to figure out this new stuff and not doing things that will make me money today. Also, there will be a learning curve that’ll probably eat into my profit margins.
So you ask, “What is Danger going to do next?”
I’m thinking I’ll try some dating offers with small targeted media buys on individual sites. Later, after I understand media buys better, I’ll scale up with network and larger media buys and make a mountain of cash.
Why dating? Because it has the potential to go massive but also has low payouts which should allow for more efficient optimization of creatives, offers, etc. Example: A $30 payout diet rebill would require me to spend a bare minimum of $30 to test each new ad variation, but a $3 payout dating offer would require a minimum of only $3 per creative. So I figure with dating I’ll be able to throw a lot more shit at the wall and see what sticks.
Why small media buys? Because I’m sick of having a lack of control over my traffic. Most traffic sources involve a wildcard element. With search engine dependent traffic you can get a slap and be out of business in the blink of an eye. I know dating is big on Facebook, but they love to disapprove ads and even ban accounts over there. I figure that media buying gives the maximum amount of control over traffic and most especially traffic volume.
If you happen to know something about pushing dating offers via display, I’d love to hear from you (please comment). Right now I’m struggling to figure out the best sorts of sites to target.
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You know why I like you, because you take crazy pictures. I also agree with your reasoning for getting into dating and am in the same boat, I suck right now but am trying to crack it.
Wouldn’t epcs on dating be too low on a large scale media buy to be profitable? Its something I’ve considered also and that seems like it could be an issue.
@Darryl It has certainly occurred to me. I’ve seen display advertising for dating in the past and it’s my understanding that it can work. Right now, I see a lot more in the diet and biz op niches, but I had the idea that dating might be more stable. I don’t really want to run rebills or unstable offers that go down every 3 or 4 days.
I don’t know what to do right now. All I know is that I want to start anew.
Sorry I can’t help you on the dating thing, I met both of my wives in bars! Don’t sweat it though-you’ll figure it out.
Hey Danger, I started anew this year focusing on dating/seduction offers.
Shoot me an email, we’ll talk more.
Tommy
I might have a couple tips for you about MSN – hit me up in an email and I’ll send em to you!
Did you see the email about MSN relaxing policies on trademark bidding? May not be relevant to your campaigns, but figured I’d mention.
I have never done dating, but it’s an evergreen vertical, with tons of offers, and a worldwide audience. I know a few guys who focus exclusively in this space.
Best of luck man.
Hey Danger-
I know offervault is experimenting with dating and mobile. (Another space besides media buys). Is media buys similar to display ads? I know that the Google remarketing thing is pretty effective. Its funny to see godaddy banners follow me around chemical journal websites.
Do you ever consider building some content sites in a niche – maybe five pages deep and all leading to either a mini course packed into an autoresponder about “online dating” that has the aff offers included.
I don’t know how big attraction marketing is in the aff space, but I know from my company’s experience that I wish we would have captured email addresses on all the ppc spending (millions) we did over the past ten years. You are paying for the lead so you might as well try to build a relationship so you can sell them other stuff.
Hang in there! There will be ups and downs! I know you’ll figure something out soon!
It pretty much happens eventually. It’s just a matter of when. You diversification will certainly help. I have tried small display runs with dating with modest results. I think you can do it, I just got bored and moved on so I never got things really clicking. Good luck.
@Jon and Tommy, emails sent guys. Thanks for your interest!
@Bozeman Definitely building a list is a wise way to go. I have thought about something like that. It will certainly cut into conversions in the short term though. Gotta do it right.
@Compound, Yes, the MSN relaxing on trademarks thing almost prompted a blog post out of me. Google did this a few months ago and MSN mentioned something like “aligning their model with the current industry standard”.
It made me think “MSN is still Google’s bitch”(even after absorbing Yahoo). Whatever Google does is instantly the industry standard.
Danger, I have followed you for a long time and always appreciate your honesty and helpful insights. Best of Luck on the new approach.
Yeah I know what you mean regarding MSN. Their new quality rank mechanism is destroying some of my really good campaigns. You see traffic coming and in a week or days it stops completely. At least support is still more helpful than Google’s.
Hang in there man. Dating is very good place to start. I’d suggest going even more specific as choosing ethnic dating offers or gay/lesbian ones. Much more targeted and better ROI’s. Also consider international on Facebook. With ad cloaking this can work pretty well.
Forget media buys. All you’ve gotta do is get some yard signs, put “Single in ______?” on it, and then an easy to remember url such as “denverdating.com”. Money in the bank.
@Keith, thanks very much!
@Josh I like the idea of bandit signs and have considered them in the past. Think I’d do it if I lived anywhere near a city. Maybe a guy could make stickers with QR codes on them and stick them in bathroom stalls or anywhere else.
Your net income is only gonna be 4k this month and you call that in the shitter…??
I’ll take that shiiter income anyday…lol
” Your net income is only gonna be 4k this month and you call that in the shitter…??
I’ll take that shiiter income anyday…lol”
Gotta agree with Big Dave, $4k net is nothing to laugh at for some of us.
aybe it’s also time to check out some other niche areas ? Hope it all goes well. By the way are you thinking of going to blog world this year?
Hi Paul,
No I won’t be going to blog world.
Hang in there. With MSN, I’ve turned off all our ads serving content sites (our ads serve only on msn and yahoo search results), and focus my ads solely on the US. That helped cut down some “noise clicks” we were paying for, and reduced our ad expenditures. But that doesn’t help with the MSN slaps.
One interesting thing I noticed with my other business though – if MSN disapproves your ad for some reason, and you change the ad & resubmit, it might stay active for another day or two but will be slapped down again. But if you just create a new ad, (not a new campaign, just a new ad), it tends to stay up. It’s almost like new ads are reviewed by a different part of the company than edited ads? I don’t know, but it’s worked repeatedly for us.
Oh – and I agree about building the content site – having something out there that can rise in search engine rankings and bring you natural traffic without spending any advertising dollars is the long-term winning strategy. You just have to have patience for that to work.
Just my 2 cents!
Hey Brian!
I’ve tried that, with limited success. Some of my slaps have clearly been against my domains.
I don’t mind sharing this…..
With the slapped campaigns, I’ve been able to:
1. Upload my site to a new domain
2. Change the display and destination urls in the disapproved ads
3. Back in business
4. Profit.
5. Wait for them to slap it after days or weeks
6. Repeat
I haven’t had it happen, but expect that this may lead to getting my account banned. Use this strategy at your own risk.
sigh….you’re complaining about $4k income a month, while I’m pulling hair out of my bald head trying to figure out how to make $40 a month…..sigh
Things That Work 101: You left a comment on another (Competitor’s?) blogsite with a link to your site. While reading your comment at that site I decided to click on the link. And after realizing that I like what I see here, I have signed up for YOUR newsletter.
Firstly I have always appreciated your honesty, thats most probably why you have so many peeps from the IM community offering nuggets here.
If I could offer one piece of advice, it would be diversification into Local Marketing Services. Its very low hanging fruit. The profit margins there, can be phenomenal. Its a diversification strategy that I employed during the early days to keep me afloat . Some of my clients, have grown, with me, and the amount of easy extra addon services, that I sell into them on a monthly basis, makes life so much easier.