Here’s what’s helped (helping) me get over this:

• List everything you need to do on paper (or notepad)
• Assign each one a number of priority
• Suck up, sit down and get them done!

Try not to think about the other things you need to because you’ll just end up back thinking you’ve got too much on and worrying there’s not enough time.

At first I just assumed it was the offer, I mean I had kept everything the same plus I had gone through the keywords and cut out the crap that wasn’t converting so surely things should only go up? One of the main reasons I assumed it was the offer was because I was rotating them and the other offer seemed to carry on with the same EPC.

I switched up the offer that seemed to have gone down and threw in 2 more, as soon as I had done that, the next time I had checked I had a lead on the new offer.

By the way this campaign was first tested on Yahoo, another reason why I think that the campaign died is because when you first launch a campaign it takes some time to assign a quality score it seems, it makes sense as it’s based on the relevancy and click through rate etc of your ad amongst everything else.

One thing I did notice is that a low quality score had kicked in on a couple of keywords increasing the bid price – as well as lowering the position and draining my budget a fair bit. So although spend remained the same, the actual volume had decreased but I was paying more for various keywords.

Just a tip to keep an eye on your quality score, what I intend on doing is pulling off all the data I have now and going through each keywords that got a lead. Then I can tailor an ad to that keyword to try and increase the quality score. I may also decide to create a separate landing page for that keyword so I can keep it really targeted.

Joking aside I was in the shower the other day and went to use the shampoo, check out what I saw on the label

I’m sure that if you combine both the shampoo and conditioner you will have unbelievable results, heck you may even find a coupon to get a free trial of the stuff!

The same with ads, you could word your ads to get the highest CTR, the best quality score and lowest bids but you are better prequalifying your traffic so that the people that actually click on your ad are interested and a potential customer.

Just bare that in mind when you are reviewing your campaign ready to make any necessary tweaks. Also make sure you read my previous post about knowing when your test is statistically significant.

Just because ad1 or landing page 1 is outperforming the second at the moment, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the winner. A couple of clicks or leads either way could flip the results so you have to double check you are making the right choice when you are picking a winner.

Split Testing Ads

http://www.splittester.com – This tool is great because you just plug in your ads clicks and CTR and hit calculate. It will then say how confident your results are so that you can base your decision to pick the winner or continue to gather more data.

Some of you may already know this tool but for all that don’t – enjoy.

Anyway the reason for the post is one of my 2010 goals is to outsource as much as possible freeing up some of my time, the first thing I thought of to outsource is the thing I take most time doing. It’s just logic that if I can cut out the longer, more boring tasks my productivity should go through the roof.

Introducing LP Designer

I actually received a paid post a month or so ago about this service, they sent me a free batch to go through so I could provide an honest review of their landing pages. Saying that I immediately went and bought all of the remaining packs, you can never have too many landing pages to test and they covered all of the main niches and designs so initial split testing became a breeze.

I got an email the other day saying that they have brought out a PPV landing page pack, I checked it out because I was just venturing into PPV (mainly direct linking) and had no success. I would strongly suggest that you take a look because PPV is growing and a great source of traffic is done right.

Below is an image of some of the pages that’s included:

In total you get 16 landing pages for just $20 so you can’t go wrong, even if there not the right niche you are getting into the images/text can easily be edited as they provide the PSDs too.

Click here to check them out to see what you think.

Anyway during January my blog made $95.

I do have a couple of posts I want to get up pretty soon so I’ll work on those.

RSS count: 642

I’ve had very little experience in email marketing, I built a list months ago but that didn’t go anywhere because I didn’t know what I was doing (it had under 30 people subscribed). I did however email that the same offer not long back just as on off chance to see what happened. I did get 2 or 3 leads from the list which is months old so that naturally got me keen to go back to email marketing.

Anyway back to the post, I had everything looking fine in Firefox but when I opened the page in internet explorer and the alignment of the opt in form was all messed up. I don’t have the patience for cross browser errors at the best of times but I spent about half hour – an hour trying to figure out what it was causing the problem.

To cut a long story short the problem wasn’t with the html or anything, the opt in form text boxes were simply too big. I reduced the length by a couple of pixels and everything was fine in both browsers. I never considered that because I was looking too deep into the problem whereas if I started with the simple solutions I would have saved a lot of time.

Reach 1,500 RSS subscribers – Although I didn’t manage to reach 1,000 last year I’m hoping that as it naturally increases it will have a snowball effect. The first 100 were the hardest, just like earning your first $1 on the internet.

When I went through a series of records I always got spikes of new readers so I just need to keep breaking new records and this goal should be easily doable

Average $100,000/month in revenue for 2010 – Exactly the same goal as last year, just hopefully with everything I have learnt I can do it this time.

Do $1 million in revenue – This kind of ties into the above goal, if I manage to achieve $100,000/month then I will successfully hit $1 million in revenue for the year.

Buy a house – This is more of a personal goal but I guess it is work related, I need to make the money in order to afford it. I set up an Ltd company for all of my online ventures and I needed to have a year’s accounting books before I could get a mortgage, I’m not sure if that’s a years working or the accounting year which ends in April.

Either way you need to put a decent deposit down so that gives me a few months to get that saved up.

Either outsource as much as possible or hire an employee – I’ve not 100% decided how I’m going to go about this goal but at the very least I’m going to be creating a few sites so I would be hiring people to work on those full time keeping everything running smoothly and growing.

That’s all I can pretty much think of at the moment, if I add anything to that list I will update this post and let you all know.

Overall there is nothing I can complain about, I’ve spent 6 weeks out of the country, bought a new car and pretty much done what I wanted to when I wanted.

I won’t be repeating that this year because I want to get my head down and work my ass off, the great thing is that at the minute I enjoy researching and working on campaigns so spending 12 hours a day at the computer doesn’t seem like a job to me.

Having come away in the middle of December I didn’t really do anything affiliate marketing related, I setup a few sites ready to get going as soon as possible. I didn’t really want to get something ready to go and have to wait 3 weeks until I could babysit the campaign, a lot can happen in 3 weeks so I just cut my losses and called it a year early.

Below are my first year’s results:

Revenue: $487,162.13
Spend: $299,211.98
Profit: $187,950.15

Here’s to 2010!