This is a guest post by Matt Marcin, the dude who came in 2nd place in Nickycakes’ xbox 360 contest.
Hey guys, this is Matt from mattmarcin.com. I recently came in as #2 in Nickycake’s contest and only lost by about 2 minutes. The Cakes asked me to talk about how I came from behind to earn $1k in under 24 hours and nearly win the contest.
Let me start by saying that without Geoff over at Advaliant I would have never found a good offer to run with. I always start by looking at the offer list and determining what would work with my traffic sources. Offers that perform well on search might not perform on a media buy so you definitely need to keep that in mind. In this case, my main traffic source was socialmedia.com
SocialMedia lets you buy banner space on about 80% of the Facebook/Bebo/MySpace apps that exist. 200 clicks a minute isn’t uncommon once you have the campaign tweaked correctly. I tested out about 5 offers that I thought might convert and ended up finding a couple that didn’t fail miserably. Socialmedia’s main demographic is 13-25 year olds so make sure your offers fit in that demo. I’ve tried debt relief offers and let me tell you right now, they don’t work. The offers need to be applicable to the general population.
I picked one of the offers that was breaking even and built it out into a full campaign in about an hour. Nothing too fancy since we don’t care about quality score. Try playing with both direct linking and a landing page. Remember it is all about split testing. My aim with SocialMedia is to get at least a 10% ROI. If after playing with it I can’t get it that high then I trash it. My real goal is to hit at least 50% in the long term.
It’s pretty easy to scale a campaign on SocialMedia. I created 5 text ads for the offer which were all slightly different and I tracked their performance using tracking202.com. When I found a text ad that was losing me money, I threw it out and replaced it with a new one. Once running, I was getting about 50-100 clicks a minute and earning a solid profit. With all those clicks coming in it was just a matter of time before I hit $1k. Looking back on my stats it looks like I was running the campaign for about 6-8 hours to hit $1,000.
With all that said, Socialmedia is a difficult beast to tame. It can be very unforgiving and their interface doesn’t tell you how much you need to bid or even if your ad has been approved to run yet. Going into depth on using it isn’t something I have room to talk about today but I will be doing an article on my blog this week that goes more in depth.
I wanted to say thank you to both Nickycakes and Advaliant for running the contest and sending an Xbox 360 my way. Been way to addicted to COD4!
Thanks for the post Matt. PS. Cut your hair:
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 26th, 2008 in General
Last week Geoff at Cant Get Rich asked Nickycakes to do a phone interview for the first in his series of weekly podcasts. After some technical difficulties, it finally got recorded, and today he posted it. The interview with the Cakes is about 20 minutes long and there are some pretty funny parts. Topics discussed range everywhere from facebook ppc to what john chow ate for dinner last night.
There’s another interview on the podcast from some boring moron from dubai who does some crappy article writing service, so that may be worth skipping (or listening to for a good laugh).
Anyway, check it out: Cant Get Rich Podcast - Episode 1
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 25th, 2008 in PPC Search
Several months ago the guys from Tracking202 let Nickycakes beta test their ppc campaign tracking service. It was pretty sweet. It let you monitor everything down to the keyword level in terms of traffic, conversions, ROI, etc. Pretty much everything you need to track and optimize your campaign. It even had a sweet realtime ajax traffic monitor that let you see the clicks coming in.
But when they asked Nickycakes if he thought the service would be popular, he had a few problems with it. Most importantly, it wasn’t self-hosted. It was hosted on the Tracking202 servers. People would obviously be skeptical of any ppc tracking platform that wasn’t self-hosted because it would allow the admins of the service to view anyone’s campaign data and easily duplicate profitable campaigns for themselves. They assured the Cakes that they wouldn’t be stealing anyone’s data and that the service was meant to help people and build traffic for their site. While this explanation was good enough for Nickycakes, he told them that it would NOT be good enough for the general public. Because of this, Nicky decided not to make a post about it. As predicted, the public release of Tracking202 met with mediocre results. The guys were even banned from Wickedfire forums for advertising it, just due to the possibility that they could use it to steal peoples keyword data.
To clear up any misconceptions, the guys immediately started working on a solution. A self-hosted solution. A FREE self-hosted solution. So it’s pretty much the exact same service now, except you install it and host it yourself, ridding yourself of the possibility that your keyword data can be jacked. Good deal.
As mentioned earlier, Nickycakes did have a chance to try Tracking202 out when it was hosted on their servers, and was really impressed, to be honest. He gave it a trial run with one of his own small campaigns and was really happy with the tracking. It basically lets you see graphs of each keyword and ad copy, and its profitability. So you can basically set up a campaign with a couple thousand keywords, dump a decent amount of money into it for traffic, look at which keywords converted into profit, and delete the rest, and you have a completely profitable campaign. Doesn’t get much easier than that.
Anyway they just released it so go check it out at http://www.prosper202.com. Leave a comment here and let everyone know what you think.
Published by nickycakes //
Nicky has spent a little time writing up a short internet marketing newbie guide to help new people to the industry and answer a lot of common questions. It’s going to be permanently linked right at the top of the page here, so feel free to flame any morons who post questions answered in that guide without reading it first. Please check it out and post in the comments here what you think, and if you have any suggestions on information that may have been left out:
Newbie Guide
Published by nickycakes //
Being involved in the Internet Marketing industry gives you a slightly different perspective in everyday life sometimes. When see ads on tv, it makes you wonder things like, “How much are they spending on that ad spot? What’s their ROI like?” It helps you spot obvious scams much more easily than the average Joe. It also opens your eyes to the creative efforts of other internet marketers and their strategies.
Last week Nickycakes visited his folks to surprise his dad for his birthday. While driving around town Cakes spotted a sign that read something like “Single? [LocalCity]Dating.org.” It was a small sign, white cardboard, maybe 2 feet wide, with 2 small metal posts, stuck into the ground near a sign at an intersection. Later on, he noticed more and more of them, all around the city.
That’s nearly free advertising. Thousands of impressions per day. It couldn’t have cost more than $100 for all the signs. Nickycakes made a mental note to check the site later on.
That evening, checking the site out was a little surprising. The guy/girl had set up their own service where you had to fill out a lengthy 4 step signup form and then wait to be contacted by some “dating expert.” Too much work. It would have been much easier to make a little landing page saying something like “there are 234234 singles signed up in [LocalCity]. Sign up here to search for free.” And just direct em to singlesnet or true.com at your favorite affiliate network. Seems like you could put up the signs and forget about it until you start getting your checks.
Cakes out.
Published by nickycakes //
