New Home Owner

Well the day had finally come, and I am now a New Home Owner! A few weeks ago in my last post about buying a house, and the horrid scenario of negotiating and bulkhead problems. After that last post, even more negotiating and craziness went on. I basically told the buyers I was no longer interested in the house. They then came back a few days later and offered $2,000 off the price, to cover the $25,000 I had asked for (which was also quoted), for the repair of the bulkhead. The $2k credit was really nothing, so I declined again. After that they came back with an offer to take all the furniture in the house for $10k, (which they originally wanted $20k for), which I also declined. A few more offers came along, which were higher. They eventually came to offering a $20k credit. The cost to fix the bulkhead was quoted at $25k, and could be more or less depending on who actually does the job, so I really wanted the actual price credited. I then told them to offer the $20k credit and take the rest from the brokers/realtors. It worked! I was able to get a $24k credit for the bulkhead. I also purchased all of the furniture in the house for $20k, which is all super high quality furniture and relieves us from the stress of having to go out and buy/move everything.

Yesterday I signed all the papers and we are now living in the house. There was a few scares at the closing where I had to sign all the papers. First there was a change that needed to be made to the final price, which was the credit from the realtors/brokers for the bulkhead. The other problem was a name change on the documents, but in the end it all worked out fine. There were so many delays and back and fourths, it’s amazing that we are finally actually in it! Internet, DirecTV and  Alarm System and are being setup next week, so my blogging may be slow over the next week, as I need to post from my previous home.

Here are a few pictures of the house and the furniture I purchased with the house:

Front View of House	Rear View of House
Downstairs Office Room	Kitchen / Living Room Area
Business / Entertainment Loft Area	Master Bathroom

Right now I’m in the process of deciding how I want to setup the master office room up stairs, next to the entertainment loft area. I will keep you updated with new pictures and events as things progress. I may even have to make an "Affiliate Cribs" video, walking you through the house!

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AuctionAds New 2.0 Design & Improvements

A few days ago I wrote the post, "The Fall of Auction Ads?"… which received a unanimous response from unhappy AuctionAds affiliates. The post was a result of AuctionAds‘ lackluster performance as of lately and focused on their declining earnings numbers, non-tracking of clicks, random downtime and what the future would hold for this once great Affiliate Program. Just in time for a new update, AuctionAds has come out with their new 2.0 design. The 2.0 design site boasts new features and improvements to the service, which are "web 2.0" creatives, optimized ad images, better ad network performance and a new cleaner look to the site.

What does the new AuctionAds site offer?

New Web 2.0 Ad Creatives
It looks like the main update and newest feature added to the site, is the ability to grab new AuctionAds ad copy. With a new "sleek ad design with multiple color schemes" you can choose and select what design will blend in best with your web site design. While I personally think the new designs looks nice, I don’t think it will be of any improvement to myself or promotion on my sites. I would prefer to run ad copy without borders and blend the AuctionAds creative in with content. You are much better to grab clicks with content, than an advertisement… so why post something that looks more like an advertisement? I would like to see AuctionAds ad more features to this new ad creative, such as make the borders white (right now you can only select Red, Orange, Green, Blue, Grey), or offering more ad creative sizes (only horizontals and verticals available, with 1, 2 or 3 ads are available on the new ad sets). Should AuctionAds continue to improve on their new ad copy, this may prove useful and beneficial to their affiliates.

Optimized Ad Images
The new Web 2.0 Ad Creatives also come with new Optimized Ad Images. This feature is pretty cool because it will clean up the images you display in your AuctionAds. With this new feature you should be able to attract more clickers as images will be less distorted and stretched. The site notes it will be a few days before the network of images are cached and cleaned up.

Better Ad Network Performance
AuctionAds also boasts that they have now "doubled the size of our hardware infrastructure and optimized it to ensure near 100% uptime of ad serving". More than anything else, this was the most important update. There is no excuse for downtime or non-tracking/reporting when you are dealing with other peoples money and their advertising space. The click reporting is still off, but they promise "all clicks are being recorded at the eBay level" and this will be fixed soon.

After my "The Fall of Auction Ads?" post, I actually received a few emails from other companies that were very interested in their ad spot. Two of these companies were Shopzilla and AdJungle (run by my long time friend Brad Waller). Since writing the post I have taken down a good majority of AuctionAds banners from my sites to test a few other ad campaigns in it’s place. More importantly than receiving emails from Shopzilla and AdJungle, I also received a direct email from AuctionAds’ President, Patrick Gavin, which said:

I really appreciate that Patrick personally got in touch with me, and to see that these new improvements to the network were made and put into place within only a couple days after receiving the email. As a result of the changes to the network, I will have to place the AuctionAds banners back into the rotation and let you know if we can see big numbers like we did back a couple months. What do you think of the new updates to AuctionAds and will you continue (or try them again) to run their offers?

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Google Adwords Ad Variations

It’s only been a few weeks since I started to making some money in the pay per click market. It has been quite a learning process and there are so many variables on making the most out of your ad dollars. In addition to successfully making money off several test campaigns, I have had many fail. Once I run through a test campaign and see how the first couple hundred clicks perform, I make the decision to go ahead with the campaign, or trash it. During test campaigns, I am hoping to break even, or have a loss of around 10-15%. With this margin of loss you can still make a bad campaign into a good campaign.

Todays "ppc Tip" will focus on your campaigns ad copy, or "Google Ad Variations". If you are currently a Google Adwords users, you should know that you can setup several ad copies for your Adwords campaigns. Doing so will greatly increase your chances of cashing in with higher ppc earnings and becoming a successful PPC Marketer. Take a look at the example below.

To help you better understand, I setup four fictional ad copies which would be used if I was promoting this blog through ppc on Google Adwords. You should setup as many campaign ad copies as you can. Once the ad copies have been running in rotation you can weed out the performers from the non-performers. Taking a deeper look into stats, you can see a wide variation between click ratios and conversion rates. With pixel tracking you can track the overall cost for acquiring each lead, but I will go into detail on that another day. In this example, the first ad copy "Make Money with Zac Johnson" is the best performer, with a .01% click rate. Although the second ad copy "Zac is a Marketing God" pulls a better click through rate, it’s cost to conversion was more than double that of the first ad copy.

Once you know what ad copies are performing best, you can pause or delete some of the poor campaigns. This way you will receive more clicks and earnings, instead of letting the poor campaigns continually show. Continue to monetize your campaigns, weed out the good from the bad and you will succeed in ppc marketing!

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New John Chow Blog Design

John Chow just went live with his new site design a few days ago. Before going live with the new look, John made sure to send out an email to a bunch of his older advertisers to try and fill some new ad spot. I was one of his contacts and gladly took him up on the offer, and was actually the first to do so as well. You can see my 125×125 banner ad on screenshot below. I didn’t spend much time on the banner ad, instead I simply grabbed my Zac toon logo and sent John the image so he could add it to the site when it went live. If you would like to try and create a cool new 125×125 ad banner for ZacJohnson.com that will get some clicks, feel free to send them on over using the "Contact" page. If I use your ad banner I’ll be sure to send you a free "Damn It Feels Good to be a Super Affiliate!" t-shirt!

According to Google Analytics, initial stats show a little under 400 clicks have been sent over since the new design went live, which went live on Aug 22. Stats also show the average referral from John Chow views 2.24 pages and spends an average of 8:58 minutes on the blog.

The All New John Chow dot Com - With a splash of ZacJohnson on the side

John said the main reason for the design change was because his monthly earnings were stuck in the $12k range for a couple months. With the addition of the new 125×125 ad spots, John will easily add an additional $3,000+ to his bottom line each month. With traffic increasing, RSS feed numbers on the rise and new revenue sources added… a $15k estimate would not be far off, nor a surprise.

I really like his new site design and it’s something like what I wanted to setup as well. I’ll be sticking with this blog design for a bit as I’m still not looking to make money off this blog, but will continue to share my information and advice ad-free. When I do change over, look forward to a new design which will maximize content space, reader participation and overall site navigation. I’m sure we will see John Chow’s numbers increase with the new design as this month closes out. Any guesses on his new earnings with the new design in place?

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The Fall of AuctionAds?

Since the acquisition of AuctionAds to MediaWhiz, it seems like I now hear less and less about the company. It seems like their ads are still occasionally down, and I was going to write this article a couple hours ago, but was unable to access their site and check my latest stats. My network traffic is down a bit, as that’s what usually happens during the summer… but my AuctionAds earnings aren’t that great either. What used to generate over $1,000+ a month is now just a jumbled mess of stats.

Let’s take a look at this month’s reporting:
The first week of the month was fine on impressions and click tracking… but what happened to the rest of the month? The CTR falls from a .20% average to .01% every single day after. There is nothing consistent about earnings either. It seems like every other day is a dollar day, then pennies the next. My site traffic isn’t changing and I haven’t touched any coding in weeks…

As you can see, this month I have only earned $256.57 with AuctionAds, compared to my previous monthly earnings of $1.691.42 in June and $816.33 in July. Luckily the ad space that AuctionAds is filling it some extra area I have been testing the offer with, otherwise I would be quite concerned with this deep drop in commissions. Unless something updates on their end and shows better earnings, I will pull their ads this month… as almost anything else will pull these numbers or better with the type of volume I’m giving them.

AuctionAds was a BIG Earner during June, but continues to decline.

I’m sure they are still in a transitioning phase, but I was hoping for a much better month with the AuctionAds, now with MediaWhiz in control. AuctionAds is a really great concept and I’ve never had a problem with payment, but if everyone else on the network is seeing these same type of cuts in earnings and ridiculously bad tracking, I wouldn’t be surprised if they lose a good majority of affiliates. Is anyone else seeing these same tracking issues and a loss in earnings?

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