It’s been awhile since my last blog post and you may have been wondering where I’ve been?   Did I give up CPA/Affiliate marketing?  Did I retire and move off to some exotic country?   No no, nothing like that.  What I have been doing is grinding out (when I can find time after working full time and hanging out with family and friends) CPA campaigns and testing out new traffic sources.  I wish I can say that I’ve been successful in all my endeavors, the honest truth right now is I’ve experienced quite a few failures over the past few weeks.  Most internet marketers like to talk about the successes.  They like to talk about their magic system that prints them money daily while all on auto-pilot.  Although there may be some truth to their tales, one thing I will tell that for every 1 major success story, there are at least 10 or so failures.  Those failures are not something they always share with the public.   Well today I felt led to buck that trend and talk about my failures while at the same time letting you all in on how those failures are shaping my mindset.  In the next few paragraphs, I will highlight a list of campaigns and idea’s I’ve been focusing on these past few weeks and the results of each “brilliant idea”.

1.)  Kindle E-Book Authoring

So I was listening to a webinar a few months ago that talked about a guy making over 20k per month selling e-books on Amazon’s Kindle Publishing platform.  The host of the webinar was Ty Cohen and he was selling a product called “Kindle Cash Flow” for $997.00.  Before you gasp at the price, I will just say that I did NOT purchase this course as it was, IMHO, TOO EXPENSIVE.   However, I was able to acquire this program through some friends online.  After watching all the video’s, I was pumped and was ready to start publishing e-books.  I got an idea of a niche I wanted to go into and hired both American and Filipino writers to write short stories that I would combine and sell on Amazon.   I hired American writers from Guru.com on a per project basis, while I hired Filipino writers from www.onlinejobs.ph on a salaried basis.  What I found was that although the American writers produced better sounding “content”, the Filipino writers could produce way more content for a cheaper price.

SO what happened?  After about 6 weeks of working with my writers, my team produced a total of 14 shorts, 4 of which I uploaded to Amazon.  The books were priced at $3.97 of which I got 70% royalties.  It took a few weeks before I started to get sales, however, over time my sales dropped off dramatically.   All and all, the project has been a failure.

So why did I fail?

Cash Spent:    $1211.93  =  (writer’s salaries)
Book Revenue:    $  80.19
Total Loss     ($1131.74)

After doing some analysis, I can definitely tell you where I went wrong.  First, I had 14 books written, but only uploaded 4.  Well I did not have the time to really proofread the rest of the books.  Over time I got busy with work, family, and other projects that I let this go to the wayside.  So the additional 10 books were not uploaded.   Plus, I was getting really frustrated and discouraged by the small sales volume of the 4 books I’d uploaded.  Also, after some time I realized that I was not utilizing my workers as efficient as I could have been.  There were days where I did not assign them any work but they were still collecting a paycheck.  This was poor planning on my part.

How will I remedy this situation?

• - Proper Planning of the scope of the project.  Don’t hire more than 1 worker if you can’t fill his/her workload.

• – Don’t expect things to happen rapidly.  Just because person in a course makes 20k a month on Amazon does not mean you’ll do it overnight.

• – Follow through.  Just because I did not see sales on the 1st 4 books does not mean the other 10 books would not sale.  Strength in numbers.

2.)  Ringtones.com Marketing

I know you may be thinking, who downloads ringtones these days.   Well truth be told there is still a viable market out there for ringtones.  The problem is its very very saturated and its hard to make a buck.  I figured, however, I could still go into this market if I’m smart about it and make some money.  I struck a deal with a broker that represented www.ringtones.com.  The deal was that I would buy traffic from this domain and redirect it to my personal affiliate link.  This sounded like a really good plan.  The problem is the broker representing the owner of www.ringtones.com would not sell me traffic (clicks) for no lower than $0.42 a click.  Although cheaper than most places for targeted ringtone traffic, I quickly found that I was not able to make a profit on my ringtones campaigns.

 

Cash Spent:         $200.00
Ringtone Revenue:    $158.00
Total Loss:           ($ 42.00)

How will I get this campaign profitable?

• - Open up negotiations with the domain owner directly.  If I’m able to get him/her to lower the price of my clicks, I’ll definitely have a campaign that a winner.   I found that if I can get my costs down to at least $.030 a click are less, I’ll be in profit.   Don’t you people go out and still this campaign now .

• - Ask for an increase in my payout for the campaign I was running.

3.)  Free Business Cards Domain SEO Failure

All of you may know I used to owe a business card domain that was on the 1st page of Google (position 7 to 9)  This domain was bringing in some sales for me on the SEO side and I was attempting to really skyrocket my sales by pushing my site to within the top 3 listings of Google.

The problem with wanting to do this “quickly” is that you have to rely on “blackhat” tactics that if not used correctly, can get you website deranked or delisted from Google.   This is exactly what happened to me.  I used a technique that would point lots of backlinks to my site in a huge burst.

Hindsight being 20/20, I know that this was not the best thing to do.  Google quickly caught on and dropped my site from Page 1 to Page 20+.  I lost a site that was bringing in a steady $100.00 a month in SEO traffic to a site that brought in $0.00.

What did I learn from this?

• - Patience!!!  Don’t try to trick Google.

• – Google will always catch you and punish you with a vengeance.

As I type this post, I realize that I’m getting a little long winded.  There are actually quite a few more failures I wanted to tell you guys about, but then I remembered that I didn’t want this post to be just about my failures but more so about my mindset after the failure.  The way I look at it is we are all going to fail at some things.  Some people will fail more so than others.  But in the grand scheme of things, you have to get over your fear of failing, because if you don’t then you’ll never take action.  If you never take any action, you are doomed to be stuck in your current state of affairs.

The reason that I keep testing and moving forward in my endeavors is because I see (I know) the light at the end of the tunnel and that light shows me that I have a bright future up ahead.  So, I tell you this.   DON’T GIVE UP.

- Ollie James Hales.