Day 24: Post Mortem - part II
Today we’re going to continue on with the Profitmart dog training post mortem. I want to focus on what didn’t work today. It was interesting yesterday to see how much positive information came out of this project. Let’s see how the downside measures up.
What didn’t go so well:
- Skyrocketing bid price. I was aware that the estimates Google gives you in the keyword tool can be misleading but in this case it was getting cost prohibitive. My initial estimates showed that I could get onto the first page of ads for cheap (about .16 cents) but I ended up paying around .75 cents a click just to get onto the first page. That does have a lot to do with my quality score but it goes to show that you don’t really know the bid price until you try it. I should have estimated better based on the actual amount of competition. I still think that I could make money sending people directly to the SitStayFetch sales page but I don’t think it would be a good enough profit to make it worth my while. I like to see at least 100% profit on my campaigns, preferably more.
- Too much competition. There were two full pages of ads for “dog training” and “dog obedience training”. This market is mature and they were already trying every trick in the book. This really reinforced with me that when everyone approaches from the right you should approach from the left. Healthy competition showed me that there was a strong market here. I just need to approach it a different way then everybody else. For example I could try to run banner ads on pet related sites or create a viral youTube video. There are lots of other marketing avenues if you want to put the time in.
- Didn’t get onto the first page of results. This was critical to my article marketing strategy. I forgot one of the main principles of research which is to look at the total number of search results for that term. The term “dog training” has almost 3 million search results which is far too many to compete with. “dog obedience training only has 239,000 and I wasn’t able to get onto that one either. I have managed to get onto the first page of “Profitmart” though which has 105,000 results. I didn’t try to get an article onto the Profitmart search results but I did get there through blogtoplist and digg. A good strategy is to look at the sites on that first page of results and see how they got there. I noticed that the Profitmart blog was listed through blogtoplist so I did the same thing and it worked.
- Didn’t use the Profitmart affiliate feeds. I was intending to use as much of the “turnkey” features of my Profitmart site as possible. My initial objective was to explore Profitmart’s claim that you could make money off clickbank, adsense and ebay through your site. In the end I didn’t use a single one of their out of the box feeds because they weren’t giving me the products I wanted. I did put ebay on the site but I used the ebay tool to generate the code for it. You could probably argue that I didn’t give those feeds enough of a chance. I have yet to see an example of them working well for anyone though.
- Low quality PLR products. I was able to pick up quite a few PLR products for under $20 total cost. I was able to repackage the ebooks and brand them with my own site information to give away as bonuses. There wasn’t anything in that batch of PLR that thought was ”article” material. I ended up writing my own article for submission to the article sites. I will definitely go the ghostwriting route in future. I don’t think that throwing mediocre (and likely duplicate) content out there is going to benefit me in the medium to long term. It’s just going to piss off Google and turn customers away. Unique quality content isn’t expensive to create.
- Profitmart site limitations. Profitmart is a nice turnkey solution for someone to get a website up and running quickly. The interface is relatively easy to use and you can turn stuff on and off as you need it. This is great for a lot of people but I found it very frustrating to be forced into that simple mold. The first thing I did was to find ways around using the site in it’s “out of the box” format. Of course I could have just added some focused content and turned on all the feeds but I’ve seen enough people doing that and not succeeding at it. I wanted to push it to see how far it would go. I would love to see an example of a non-membership affiliate income site created with the the tools Profitmart provides. I don’t think it’s impossible but for myself I would rather start from scratch or just send people directly to a sales page.
Can you make money with your Profitmart site?
Let’s discuss that tomorrow.
mike
www.profitmuse.com
:8^)