Experimenting with Google AdWords

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In my quest to find a traffic source for My Babysitting Co-op I’ve moved on to Google AdWords. After very little success with Microsoft AdCenter and only 8 days remaining on a $75 Google AdWords voucher I thought I’d go full blast. What a mistake!!

Over the next few days I’m going to blog what I’m doing in the hope that it will help someone not make the same mistakes that I am. Each day I’ll do a post about how I’m optimizing the campaign until I run out of money or I get it working.

Day 1: Campaign Setup

Mistake #1: Assuming that traffic on Google AdWords would be as low as Microsoft AdCenter.

With only 8 days left on my $75 coupon I decided to set all my budgets high. My daily budget was $25. My max CPC was $3.00 for both search and the content. The next day I’d used $56.

Lesson: Google has way more traffic than you think.

Mistake #2: Starting the campaign late at night.

I started the campaign at about 9 or 10pm at night. Google AdWords happily chewed through two days worth of budget before I realised what was going on.

Lesson: Start your campaign during the day so you can make changes before the second days budget has been used.

Mistake #3: Running on the content network.

The content network is full arbitrage sites that suck away your budget and provide no value.

Lesson: Turn off automatic placements on the content network and use managed placements instead.

Until tomorrow…

My first 1,000 visitor month

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Tomorrow I expect that ASP.NET MVC Ninja will have it’s first 1,000 visitor month. Based on current usage we’ll do between 1,200 and 1,400 visitors in the next 30 days. I know there are much larger blogs around but it’s exciting because I can still remember reaching 30 visitors/month (1 per day) and then 100 visitors/month. The growth over the last month has been nothing short of a rush and my eyes are now firmly on 10,000 visitors per month.

5 months on…

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At the start of this year I set myself a two year goal to be in a position where I didn’t need to work for someone else. I’m hoping to do this through a combination of activities including blogging, other websites, developing software and non-software products. It’s now the 1st of June 2011 and it’s time for a 5 month update.

Blogging

Over the last few months I’ve been operating a number of blogs. Most of them have been used for SEO experiments. Some have shown promise but the only one I’m really interested in running is ASP.NET MVC Ninja. As a result I’ve been spending a lot more time on it than the others and that’s reflected in its growth.

Over the next few months I’ll continue to focus on writing quality content and increasing the subscriber base/number of visitors. I don’t want to start monetizing the blog for at least another 3 months. Too many blogs die because the owner gets distracted by monetization too soon and forgets that people come for the content rather than the ads.

The Zoombug blog has been pretty quiet. While I’ve had stuff that I wanted to post I just haven’t been able to find the time to do it. I’m hoping to change that by setting up a regularly weekly posting schedule.

From the other blogs I might keep two of them to promote affiliate products via SEO but that’s very unlikely.

Other Websites

Planet Micro ISV has been chugging along nicely but it’s barely covering the operating costs (which are very tiny). I’ve been thinking about building a spin-off site based on the expanded concept of “products” which would cover everything a micropreneur might do. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in then let me know (rich@zoombug.com.au).

Software Products

For a while I’ve wanted to build a babysitting group/babysitting co-op application. Lately I’ve been sending traffic to a landing page to measure the general interest in the product. While it’s something I’d definitely use myself I’m starting to wonder if the market for this is large enough to justify the effort. My most successful source of registrations has been posting comments on blog posts about babysitting co-ops/groups but that isn’t sustainable. I have a couple of traffic sources still to try but unless I can find a good source of traffic soon this might get put onto the back burner again.

If the babysitting co-op/group application falls through then I have another web based software product I’m considering. The market is very quantifiable (around 400,000 world wide), it has existing players (some of them big) and people are use to paying for the product. My initial research indicates that there may be an opportunity for an easy to use product designed for the average person rather than the professionals in the industry.

Over the next month I’m hoping to make a decision on which way to go. I’ll only be building one product so I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on the wrong one.

What my SEO Challenge taught me about SEO

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A few months back I started a personal challenge to SEO a couple of sites. The main site was going to be blog called ASP.NET MVC Tips. Over the last few months I’ve learnt a lot about SEO by playing around with that site. They key points from my experience so far are:

1. ALWAYS do keyword research. At the start of your blog you’ll have no regular readers and no traffic. If people are going to find you then you need to be using the same phrases they’re searching for. For example: ASP.NET MVC Tips gets 170 searches globally per month while ASP.NET MVC Tutorial gets 9,900 searches per month.To find the phrases that your readers are using you can use the Google External Keyword Tool.

2. Singular and plural rank differently. In point 1 I told you that ASP.NET MVC Tutorial gets 9,900 global searches per month. The plural, ASP.NET MVC Tutorials, only receives 720! If you’re going to rank for one then make sure it’s the one that counts.

3. The easiest way to rank for a search phrase is to buy a domain name that matches that phrase. Before I did my keyword research I decided I wanted to rank for ASP.NET MVC tips so I purchased aspnetmvctips.com. This helped me rank for the phrase ASP.NET MVC tips in a short period.

Note: There has been some discussion recently that the domain name no longer carries as much weight with Google.

4. Using Google Webmaster Tools and 301 redirects you can transfer rankings from one domain to another.

How did this impact the blog?

1. The blog started out as ASP.NET MVC Tips using aspnetmvctips.com.

2. After finally doing some keyword research I knew that I wanted to rank for the phrase ASP.NET MVC Tutorial. With the knowledge that an exact match domain name would help my search ranking I setup a clone site called ASP.NET MVC Tutorials using aspdotnetmvctutorials.com and added a few new posts. This is when I learnt that plural and singular rank differently as I ranked well for the plural but not for the singular.

3. By this point I’d been reading a lot about branding your website/blog. I also had a pretty good hunch that I could switch all of the karma (aka search rankings) from my other domains to a new domain using Google Webmaster Tools and 301 redirects.

All of this finally lead me to ASP.NET MVC Ninja using aspnetmvcninja.com. When I set this site up I merged the other two sites into it by redirecting traffic. I only made the switch to this domain 19 days ago but so far there has been no negative impact from doing this.

I’ll post about the future of the site in the next couple days.

My Babysitting Co-op Site

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Lately I’ve been on a “just do it” kick. While there are many people who could share the blame for this the main two are Rob Walling and Mike Taber thanks to Rob’s book (Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup) and their podcast, Startups for the Rest of Us.

My latest site is My Babysitting Co-op. It’s an online application to manage your babysitting co-op. If you’ve never heard of a babysitting co-op or babysitting group then it’s a group of parents who exchange babysitting services for points. Most co-ops consist of friends or relatives so you know the children are safe. By using points you create an economy so you don’t need to babysit for someone just because they babysit for you as long as you provide an equivalent number of hours to other people in the co-op. Managing these can be a hassle as you need to:

  • Track member details,
  • Track babysitting and transfer of points,
  • Send babysitting requests to all members

I’ve been playing with the idea for this site for many years now under a different domain. What’s changed lately is the way I look at building sites. In every other attempt to build the site I’ve looked at it from a developers perspective. That meant looking at what features I wanted to build, the technology I was going to use, database schema, how it would scale, etc. The end result was NOTHING every time. This time I have two simple goals:

  1. Get 500 people to register their email address. This is to validate the market and to give me a list to market to at launch.
  2. Design the screenshots WITHOUT worrying about how I will build them.

This means my focus is on market and product rather than technology. Once I have 500 people registered and the screens designed I can either build it myself or outsource development. If I can’t get 500 people to provide their email address then there really isn’t a market for this product.

The only thing I’m considering doing against Rob & Mike’s usual advice is allowing free registration but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a plan to monetize the site.

How to fail at launching a site

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There are a number of groups in Australia that support the startup community with one of the more popular being Silicon Beach Australia and its mailing list with over 1,100 subscribers. Recently there was a email sent to the list about a new startup podcast called StartCast that is in the pre-launch stage. It went into great detail about what the guys were doing and included a link to the site. This the point where everything FAILED.

Their website didn’t include an episodes that you could listen to, a mailing list that you could join for more information or even an RSS feed. Instead it was the standard Blue Host domain parking page. Sure there were a few helpful emails about how they could get a site up quickly (which they have now done) but the horse has already bolted. If everyone on that mailing list clicked on the link then they had 1,100 people in their target audience see a domain parking page and failed to collect one single email address. Now any posts they do to the mailing list will be marketing (which the group strongly dislikes) rather than the more subtle introduction to me and what I’m doing style emails that are considered acceptable. They certainly won’t be able to get away with mailing to the group every time they release an episode.

By contrast I watched Kim Heras pre-launch PushStart which has a similar audience. From two tweets and a website that contains very little information he has 117 followers on Twitter and 250 email addresses (including mine) from people who were interested enough to provide them. Of course Kim isn’t the first person to do this with one of the more successful ones being a company called Hipster that collected 10,000 email address while refusing to say what they planned to do.

With mailing lists converting much better than other forms of advertising it is really important that your website is capable of capturing email addresses before you start handing out the URL. I know who I think will have a more successful launch.

ASP.NET MVC Tips

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In my first SEO challenge post I said I would launch 3-4 sites over the next month. Two of those sites are now starting to take shape. Today I’m going to post about ASP.NET MVC Tips. I got an early start on this site with the blog equivalent of “Hello World” being posted just after Christmas.

The site is a standard WordPress install and even uses the default theme. I’ve made three posts, including the introduction post, and have another six currently under construction. No time has been spent on building back links or promoting the site. Despite the lack of promotion I’ve still received two visits from people who found the site by searching Google.

If you know my background then you might be wondering why someone with 10+ years as a PHP developer decided to blog about ASP.NET MVC. I’ve been interested in it since version 1 was released and now use it regularly. While it might still have the ASP.NET badge it’s nothing like ASP.NET Web Forms (what most people associate with ASP.NET). All of this creates a unique opportunity:

  1. There is going to be a huge market for ASP.NET Web Form developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC. Most of these people will be searching for answers to specific problems.
  2. ASP.NET MVC has a fraction of the content written about it that ASP.NET Web Forms currently does which makes it easier to stand out (i.e. get back links and rank in search results)
  3. Switching to ASP.NET MVC is not the same as learning to program. I already know what I want to do so I’m just working out how to do it using a new framework. If I write a post every time I find something new or solve a problem then I should be able to generate content quickly and easily. Importantly, I’ll be generating content that other people are probably searching for.

So what next? Content, content and more content. I’m going to set a goal to have 10 new posts in the next two weeks. If time permits I’d also like to replace the default theme with something a little more professional. I don’t have time to create a custom theme so it will probably be an off the shelf premium theme with minor customization.

Learning SEO

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I have a confession to make. For 15 years I’ve been building websites and web applications (mostly the later) but I have never bothered to learn search engine optimization (SEO). All that is going to change over the next few months.

SEO is a skill just like driving a car or programming. I have the skills to build great software but that doesn’t help me if customers cannot find it. 2011 is going to be the year I finally launch a product I’ve been thinking about for the last few years. I could use PPC to promote it but like SEO it’s a skill I don’t have (yet). PPC is also a double edged sword. When used wrongly you end up paying too much for traffic that has very little chance of converting. When you finally work out how to use it then you’re stuck having to pay for traffic instead of benefiting from free traffic.

So I’ve decided to embark on an SEO challenge over the next few months. I know this will eat into time I could spend building my product but I think it’s an investment that’s worth it. What is the challenge? I’m going to setup 3 to 4 websites and build traffic using only SEO over the next few month. Of course I don’t want to my time to be completely wasted so I’ll be building sites that I can monetize once they’re receiving traffic.

Doing so many sites at once sounds a little suicidal even to me. I’m sure one or two will become favorites and will get most of my attention. The others are there to stop me getting bored with a single topic. Luckily it’s SEO so I don’t need to work on every site every day. I do need to make sure I’m generating fresh content regularly but I can write content for each site in batches then schedule it as required. I plan to spend 10-20 hours getting each site running. This will include writing some content that will be scheduled in the past, so search engines see content on the site today, and some in the future so I don’t need to spend much time on the established sites while launching the next one. Once that’s done I hope to only spend 5-10 hours per site per month adding new content.

If all goes according to plan I should have all of the sites running by mid February. Updates to come…

Black Friday Hosting Deals

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Black Friday in the US started a couple of hours ago. For those not familiar with Black Friday it’s the Friday after Thanksgiving and the traditional start of the Christmas shopping period. More recently it’s become known for crazy deals by retailers.

This year HostGator.com is giving 50% of everything for most of the day and 80% OFF between 5am and 9am CST. That makes shared hosting as low as $0.99/month, VPS from $3.99 and dedicated hosting from $34.80 for the first month.

Flipping Domains

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Over the years I’ve acquired the odd domain for  ”future use”. Most of these were spur of the moment purchases for a big idea that I never found the time to start. For about a month I’ve been watching the market at flippa.com and I’ve decided that it’s time to flip some of these domain (around 10 of them).

Right now they’re an under utilized asset at best and an annual expense that stops me from focusing on other projects at worst. Even once they’re sold I’ll still have enough domains to keep me busy for the next 10 years.