Leaving The Day Job

Archive for July, 2007

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Most of the promotion I’ve done so far has been through PPC advertising on Yahoo, MSN and, mostly, on Google. I’ve decided for various reasons that I need to be working on my organic search position to. This is something which is known in the trade as SEO. It is something which is known to me as really, really boring.

Keywords, meta tags, backlinks, reciprocal links, directories, sitemaps : all of these are things that have to be dealt with but which are about as much fun as picking up dog doo (and if you think that’s fun it’s probably time to get yourself a nice white jacket with arms that tie up at the back).

So basically, this post is a call for comments. Got any tips on making SEO easier, more productive or just less boring? Send ‘em this way.

A little light relief for the weekend

Harold is a Robot #3 - How to Earn a Six Figure Income From Blogging in Two Easy Steps

They’re at it again!

Spent twenty minutes on the phone this evening to Microsoft trying to figure out why they keep rejecting my ads. There had been a minor problem at my end which I sorted as soon as they told me about it (and they only told me after I’d asked three times) but when I resubmitted the keywords they got rejected again. Turns out that once an ad’s been blacklisted you can fiddle all you like with the keywords but they won’t ever get accepted unless you also make a small change to the ad copy and resubmit that too. Doesn’t matter what you change, just add a space and then remove it and it’s enough to flick some switch inside AdCenter’s head that says “ok let’s review this again”

Finally get that ad group running and they blacklist another entire campaign. The incredibly helpful auto email says “Reasons for rejected keywords: This ad did not meet Editorial Guidelines. To find out why, in the column to the right, click Reasons for ad and keyword rejection under Related information.”

So of course I click the appropriate link and I get taken to a generic help page which tells me bugger all about why my ads have been disapproved. Utterly infuriating. I’m seriously wondering now whether I can be bothered with AdCenter. After all, who the hell uses MSN Live Passport .Net Search or whatever they’re calling it this week?

Regular readers of this blog (are there any?) will know that I have a bit of a problem with Microsoft AdCenter. Basically I think it’s a poor ripoff of Google Adwords but I’m trying to broadcast my ads as widely as possible so I have to work with it.

Today they have excelled themselves by rejecting three of my keywords because they are not relevant to the landing page. Well, these three keywords are the subject of the site. They are in the domain name. They are in the title tags. They are in the page copy. How can they not be relevant?!

I set myself a target a few weeks ago of achieving a four figure a month turnover within three months. Half way through the first month and I’m half way to reaching that goal already. All was going well. Too well.

Last few days business has been dead. Jurassic Dead. OK, slight exaggeration, there has been some money coming in but the daily average is dropping and hitting that goal looks a bit less likely.

I’m hoping that it’s just to do with the time of year. Schools are winding down for the summer and so parents and families are off on holiday instead of sitting around buying stuff online like good little consumers.

Hand on heart though I know I could be doing more. It’s proving trickier to discipline myself to sit down and do affiliate work each evening after the day job and especially at weekends. I’m kicking myself for going to the pub on Saturday night and writing off pretty much the whole of Sunday with a hangover. I’m planning to take a few days off from the day job (soon, need to give two weeks notice though, grr!) and try to throw myself into some serious affiliate work.

And I really must chase HSBC to see what they’ve done with my business bank account application too. Not a good start to our banking relationship.

UPDATE: Half an hour after posting this I checked my referrals and my below average day has turned into a nicely above average day! Mental note: must write negative blog posts more often

I’m now using Google Adwords, Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing and there’s one thing that’s becoming very apparent. Google is huge and the others are mere also-rans. I’m running basically the same campaigns with the same keywords on all three networks and Google is several orders of magnitude ahead in both impressions and clicks.

Now, logically, this makes some sense. I don’t know a single person who uses Yahoo or MSN in preference to Google. But as an advertiser I don’t want all my eggs in one basket. If Google decides they don’t like my ads or my keywords or my bids I’m stuffed.

On a business perspective, how does Microsoft (let’s face it, Yahoo is yesterday’s news) expect to compete with Google as an ad platform if their inventory is so lacking? Microsoft’s search technology (even after all the hype of their new Live platform) is still woeful. They need to seriously lift their game if they’re to attract users and therefore advertisers to their site.