I know I have been lazy posting more on my blog. Lazy is the wrong term - I have been caught up in so much other stuff that I just could not get a complete post written and published. Anyway - mixed results in my PPC marketing efforts. Got some great campaigns going and beat the Adwords Quality Score slap pretty much. Still missing conversions and that’s where I am working on. Testing different landing pages is very time-consuming - especially if you still have a full-time job like I do.

So, how’s my PPC stuff really going. Really Good and Really Bad. Let’s look at the good stuff first. My campaigns are getting very good CTRs and I have been fine-tuning keywords and stuff. Click prices are slowly coming down. I am getting good conversion results on product related keywords that directly hit the product page of the matching product. Bad is that it does not mean much traffic as it is very narrow and that means not many conversions (some though). I am also running campaigns on broad keywords that are topic related and link to a landing page from where the visitors would drill down to the products herself. Example: a product related campaign links directly to the specific product. Let’s take Rachael Ray cooking books as an example. If I link directly to the book with the matching book title as the keyword I am seeing conversions. If I run a campaign that links to the Rachael Ray Category site with several titles displayed, I am seeing crap. I am still using cooking books related keywords and the ad copy is detailed enough as well. The latter is the section where I can generate much more traffic and need to optimize my landing page(s) more because the traffic does not convert. I will take the weekend to grab the keywords that generated the most traffic and see how I can merge products and more generic keywords into a winning combination.

This is one of my PPC issues I am seeing. I am too targeted and then generate barely page views and the overall conversion volume is just not high enough to justify the efforts and I have not found a reliable way around it. If you are more experienced in PPC - what would you recommend?

Anyway - I know I am blowing some money out of the window and I hope it is a good investment. It is at least good to know that my Adsense income is on track to be a record month for me. I am already way past the $1,000.00 marker for the month and today is just the 25th of January. January is traditionally a good month for me. A very large commercial website (they operate online and offline) always licenses content from me on a recurring base and I am expecting the check for 2008 in the mail here shortly. I receive about $10 per content page and it comes out to be a very nice 3-digit check (closer to 4-digits than closer to 2-digits). Every year we add between 5-15 new articles to the list and this is a very nice stream of income. Enough for today. I am on call for my full-time job this week and was called into work at around ~1 AM and have been working since then (can you say 11th hour … lol). But that job is fun so far and this just comes with the package (every 10 weeks I am on call for 1 week).

PS: I am not promoting Rachael Ray Cook Books, just in case you were wondering. I am using a CJ.com vendor that offers a data feed for their products.