Adwords Marketing Campaign:
I have been marketing my site using Adwords for 10 days ending November 10 – so how did it go? One word – Expensive!
Paying RM0.52 cents for a web hit is too expensive – at least in Malaysia. When converted to US currency it’s roughly $0.15 per hit. If you are living in US, Europe or UK, I bet that this is darn cheap but for the price that I’m paying, I don’t think that it is worth it.
Throughout my marketing campaign, Adwords sent me 265 clicks to my site which totaled RM137.68. Look at the screenshot below:
My 1 cent: I rather spend my money someplace else such as purchasing paid reviews from other sites rather than paying one lump sum to Google. I believe that Social Media Marketing on the other hand is much more effective as the hits are natural and it’s free.
BlogCatalog Campaign:
On the other hand, I paid $25 bucks to be listed on BlogCatalog for a month. BlogCatalog is a PR7 site with an Alexa rank of 1,400++. I was attracted to the amount of traffic going through the site but to my disappointment, none of these traffic were diverted to my site.
I was expecting BlogCatalog to give me at least 100-200 hits on my first week, but so far according to my customized web stats software – they hardly contributed more than 15 unique hits. However, I noticed when you do a search on Google using ‘Make Money Online Malaysia’, you’ll see my site listed in the top 10 list under BlogCatalog.
My 2 cents: $25 bucks without any traffic coming to my site is plain stupid (yeah I’m really stupid in this case).
Concluding using my 3 cents:
1. Never advertise on BlogCatalog – even when they say they have a monthly traffic exceeding 1 million hits per month.
2. Google Adwords is cheap when you are advertising in the US, UK or EU. Unless you have cash to burn, try using other advertising networks or try using social media sites which is free.
On my previous evil backlink post:
Edward said don’t use the evil plan too often while xBrain recommends using commenthunt.com to check blogs with PR and ‘do follow’ tag. Mani Karthik on the other hand thinks it’s pure evil but it does not have effect on my ‘Google juice’.
You comment, I follow! What are your thoughts? |
There is the good way of doing things and there is an evil way to do the same thing – it might even yield better results. Link exchange is an excellent way to get a backlink to your site and if the blog owner places your link sitewide it yields more value.
The recent clampdown by Google worsens the situation. Not many blog owners are willing to exchange links – at least if you want a link back, he’ll put it somewhere in the subpages.
Nevertheless, exchanging links manually is time consuming! I tried once before and only 30% of the people whom I have contacted provided a link back – the rest just play dumb and STILL enjoy a link from me.
Still, there is an EVIL way to get quality backlinks to your site:
1. If you are targeting a single blog and wants quality links to your site use LivePR to check the PR of internal pages of the site.
*no screenshot due to Google PR fluctuation today*
2. Wants similar backlinks from successful sites such as Problogger, Shoemoney, Techcrunch, use iwebtool's backlink checker to check the entire backlink of the site.
3. Just go to the webpage that has a PR and drop a comment.
Now this evil way has its pros and cons and it might work or it might not. Some blogs have set their comment system to add a re=nofollow tag to the links/URL. If so, Google crawlers won’t follow the link but you might still get some traffic from the article through your comment – so it’s still a win-win situation.
According to iwebtool, I have already amass 5,554 backlinks :) I have only another 12,000 more to go to match Problogger.
PS – The tools here might not be 100% accurate, nothing is right? But it does serve its purposes, more or less.
PS2 – Don't go all excited and start spamming their comment box! Once you get banned by Akismet, you can't do this anymore! |
I got a shock of my life when I read one of TechCrunch’s post written by Duncan Riley speculating that E*Trade might head to the deadpool. Nevertheless, I used E*Trade’s system to check out on their stocks and their share prices dipped to an all time low of $3.50 per share. This is the first time in 5 years that their shares dipped this low. I shot to the nearest ATM to withdraw my cash just in case the speculation was right. Take a look at the screenshot below on their share prices:
Today, I checked on their stocks again and luckily it was back up to $5 a share – a HUGE relief for me. I have been using E*Trade for quite sometime now and so far it’s an A++ service.
You can follow up the latest news on E*Trade by Google news search or read Duncan Riley's post on Techcrunch here.
On the other hand, I noticed PayPal has been deducting service fees from my incoming transactions for the past 2 days. It seems that according to the author of MyOrganicIncome.com, some of these paid blogging programs such as PayPerPost, Blogsvertise, etc have stop using mass payment – resulting a small percentage of the payment being deducted as a service fees. You can read MyOrganicIncome’s post here - there’s a guideline on how to downgrade your account from Premier to Personal Account.
However, when I check my PayPal today and none of my incoming payments were deducted anymore. Take a look at the screenshot below:
Latest Update:::
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