Right after I posted that last blog entry, I ended up with 2 more sales on Nature Cleanse, wow! I think I may just leave this campaign alone (google seems to have stopped slapping me) and see what it can do. I've done no more work on it since my last report, only watch the money go in (commissions) and out (adwords).
Date
Commissions
PPC Costs
Godaddy Costs
Landing Page?
06/30/2009
$2.44
Yes
07/01/2009
$64.00
$1.77
Yes
To date (including all my mistakes) on this campaign, I'm at $160 revenue, $85.57 expense, $74.43 profit (46.5%). My target profit should be around 50% (from what I've read), and I'm getting pretty close even with some serious mistakes.
If I could just figure out how to get more clicks!! Maybe it's time to start playing with Yahoo and Bing and other traffic sources.
I've been researching different ways to make money on the web using arbitrage. I've used credit card arbitrage for a long time (it's how I paid off my 6 years of college debt in 2 years, but that's a story for another day). Credit Card arbitrage is getting harder to do because too many people know about it, and because the prime rate is so low and cards rarely offer free balance transfers anymore, so what you can make per month on it is nominal and not worth my time anymore. So I've started looking for a new slight of hand to make a few extra bucks here and there.
The thing I've read a lot about recently and have been doing some research on is adwords arbitrage using google adwords. In doing some various tests, there seems to be someone out there that is a step ahead of me at every turn. With the big ole internet, I'm pretty used to that. In fact, there are usually thousands ahead of me. Everywhere I turn I keep seeing one particular amazon associate id (googhydr-20, and of also googhydr-21 on amazon.co.uk). This person seems to have tagged every single amazon product and nearly ever possible google search keyword! I'm amazed! I can only guess that this person, whoever they are have managed to amass a large fortune for themselves.
Oddly enough, nobody else has written about this person that I can tell. I googled googhydr and googhydr-20 just to confirm, and all I can find is 3 pages of links where folks have copy/pasted the URL into their blog to talk about a product. They're all random folks too so I don't think they even realize they're giving this person some free press. So it makes me start to wonder... [tinkly music should play here, but I was too lazy to search for some in creative commons] Is this possibly Google's ID? Are they getting amazon referral fees for forwarding traffic to amazon (probably at the tick of 8-10% per amazon transaction)? I tried to figure out what the tracking ID stood for, but the best I can come up with for googhydr is "Google Hider."
In any case, I found this amazing, and since nobody has managed to write about it, I decided it was my time.
More on my forays in arbitrage to come.
Oh, and if you want to help me out. Click on the Amazon spinner below. I picked out a few interesting songs that I'd heard today, and I thought you might like as well. Amazon has an amazing MP3 store now with DRM-Free music (can I hear a wooo hooo?) priced at a great price (.89-.99 per track). And even better, I get 10% commission if I can point people to go there and buy.
