Update 3: Pausing Adwords Campaigns to Rethink Strategy
It’s been a few days, and my spend to conversion ratio still isn’t high enough. After a few thousand clicks through to my offer, I can pretty much say that the campaign isn’t going to convert with the current traffic that I am sending. [Read more →]
Update 2: Need More Targeted Keywords
It’s day 2 of the $1000 a Day Project, and things aren’t going so hot. The first day was a loss financially. The results are posted at the end of this post. Some rethinking around the campaign was needed today, so I will go through my thought process as well.
Update 1: Setting Up the Basic PPC Campaign
I’ve played around with online marketing for a while, but never on a full-scale basis. Mostly testing, or just trying to drive traffic to a new site. Today, I am starting a new goal for online marketing. That goal is to earn $1,000 per day through online marketing.
5 Lessons Learned From a Blogging Burn Out
As many of you know, I used to write for a somewhat successful personal finance blog. As many of the loyal readers of that site also know, I burned out on writing for a somewhat successful personal finance blog.
Ever since the great burnout of 2008, I have spent time thinking about what lessons could be learned from the failure. Lessons which could help myself and other’s prevent a similar turn of events.
From all of the reflection cam five lessons that could help prevent me, or someone else from burning out from blogging:
- Don’t force it if you don’t have to. Your readers will appreciate it. Often times I wouldn’t have anything to write about. But, in feeling like I needed to make every daily post, I would force topics, or just write a sentence or two. This occurred much more frequently towards the end. A true sign of blogger burnout.
- Focusing on the stats only leads to disappointment.
- You may get famous from blogging, but you probably won’t get rich. Most bloggers will never see a true income in return for their blogging.
- If your blog is very goal oriented, it may die off once that goal is met. With the other blog I was focused on one specific goal really. That was the topic / schtick of the blog. Once that goal was reached, I had a hard time transitioning to new goals, and readership suffered.
- Prepare your posts in advance. For two years I wrote a blog post every day. I would always find a way. If it was posting really late at night, or posting from a cell phone, my post would make it to the site that day.
These five things really contributed to my blogger burnout. Hopefully, I won’t repeat the same mistakes twice. Hopefully you won’t repeat the same mistakes on your blog.
Deadliest Catch Teaches Us About Online Marketing
Have you ever watched Deadliest Catch? We’ve made it a Tuesday night ritual in our house, and there are many things that one can learn about making money online from Deadliest Catch. [Read more →]
Amazon Super Saver Widget for OS X
A while back I had made a widget that would search Amazon.com for items that were only available with Super Saver Shipping and/or eligible for Amazon Prime.
The widget has been recently updated to fix some rendering issues in OS Leopard 10.5. Be sure to grab your copy.
Installation
- Download the widget
- Double click widget
Taking a Break From Personal Finance
Call it blogging burnout, but I am tired of writing. It stopped being fun a couple months ago, but I trudged on. Hoping that one day the magic spark would return.
It never did though. In fact, it only got worse. Yes, there are some things that you can do to prevent blogger burnout, but none of them seemed to work.
I think that once you realize that you’re burning out, it may be too late. You may have noticed that one of our sites is completely offline. It will stay that way for a while.
Call it a forced time out.
This does not mean that I am not working on our business interests, it simply means that I am in need of moving in a different direction, because the current direction just wasn’t working. Will post more later.
Touching Base
It’s been quite a while since I last posted on this blog. A lot of things have been finding their way in front of anything I have wanted to write here.Since I last wrote, quite a few changes have occurred.
For starters I am posting less regularly to our personal finance blog. The daily posts have started to get a little light on substance, so instead of alienating readers, we are hoping that trimming back will provide more useful tips on getting out of debt for everyone.
December Blog Earnings
This is our first blog earnings post. As part of my goals for 2008, I plan on increasing this number to $10,000 per month. Here is what I made in December 2007.
- Amazon: $107.40
- CJ: $56.54
- CardOffers: $142.00
- Adsense: $22.16
All of that gold amounts to a payout of $328.10 for the month of December. I will have a lot of work ahead to make that $10,000 figure.
Fetch Goals For 2008
A new year has come, and that means that it’s time to lay out some plans and goals for the coming year. Well, the planning is done, but the goals need to be laid out.Here are my goals for Fetch Industries in 2008.1. Focus on the content. I’ve spent a lot of time developing and modifying our sites in the past couple of months. In the past month, I have launched Cardie and redesigned the Fetch blog. All of this development time has decreased the amount of time that can be spent on content. My plan is to cease development and focus on content for the near future.2. Comment, comment, comment. One thing that I have never really done is comment on other blogs. Starting tomorrow, I am blocking time during the day to focus on commenting on other blogs.That’s it for my goals for 2008. They are all goals that can be achieved, though it will be hard work. Here’s to 2008 being the best year ever!