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Jumbo Keyword

Business Lessons: What I Learned from an Unsuccessful Website Launch

by Michael Wong on July 10, 2009

mikesmarketingtools2001 It just occurred to me that it’s been almost 3 weeks since my last blog post. I have received some positive feedback about my blog in my Twitter account, so that has encouraged me to not let the blog lapse into disrepair. Thanks to all those who gave me the wonderful feedback. I appreciate it very much.

I’ve been so busy that I found I got a lot more work done when I didn’t worry about writing my next blog post or Twittering. In fact I hadn’t logged into Twitter for 3 weeks. I did just log in and post an update and respond to those feedback tweets.

For the last 3 weeks I have been working from 9am to 12 midnight, 6 days a week, updating my sites. That is no exaggeration.

Why am I working so hard? Two reasons: First, I want to increase my income to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible and also give my family a comfortable lifestyle. We purchased our first home a few months ago and the mortgage is a bit of a burden. I’m 40 this year and I want to pay it off long before I reach retirement age.

My wife gave up her career as a flight attendent for United Airlines so that we could bring up a family here in Sydney, Australia. Hence, I took up the responsibility of becoming the sole breadwinner so that my wife can spend more time looking after our son (and me).

I know how tough her job is. I looked after our son when he was two, for 4 days a couple of years ago while my wife went skiing with her friends (she needed the break). I quickly realized it is a full-time job. So the last thing I expect is for her to look after us and go out and work a full-time job.

maverickbusinessinsider200 Second, I want to build the business to the point whereby I can live a lifstyle whereby my business fits around my lifestyle, not the other way around. I realized that this should be how it works after I read Yanik Silver’s 34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs from his Maverick Business Insider newsletter.

Don’t get me wrong. Business is good. I’m making more money than I ever dreamt possible. But I don’t feel rich. I don’t live a millionaire lifestyle. I don’t work less than others - in fact I’m working more. I don’t wear designer clothes. I have a big mortgage. I fly economy. I drive a Toyota.

I am grateful for everything that my internet business has given me. I don’t take it for granted for a second. But I don’t feel secure. I feel like I’m not realizing my full potential. Success has made me lazy. But now is time to let my foot off the brake. Maybe it’s mid-life crisis talking. Whatever the reason, I know this is the right way to go.

The problem started because a few weeks ago I realized that that my new AdWords keyword tool at JUMBOKeyword.com is not going as well as I had hoped. Since I switched off the advertising, the site has just attracted 2,761 visitors in the last 30 days. That is extremely disappointing to say the least.

Upon some analysis, I realized that while a few advanced AdWords advertisers find it useful, it offers far too many features and is probably too complicated for most people. I also spent far too long developing it - something like 8 months.

Second, I realized that affiliate marketing is unstable and becoming far too competitive. For example, one of my most profitable campaigns, WebPosition Gold, was earning me as much as $4,500 a month a few years ago. It went downhill after it was acquired by WebTrends. They wrote to me last week telling me that they are shutting down the affiliate program. So it went from $4,500 a month in 2005 to zero in a few short years. That isn’t the only campaign that has crashed and burned. I’ve had bigger losses.

I also don’t like the way affiliate marketing is going. This year has seen a flurry of software tools that allow anyone to spy on AdWords campaigns to steal profitable affiliate campaigns. They help you to copy the ads and keywords of profitable campaigns that you find. So, let’s say affiliate A uses one of these tools and copies a profitable campaign he has found. Then affiliate B stumbles upon affiliate A’s campaign and copies his campaign. The affiliate C finds and copies affiliate B’s campaign. And so on. When will it stop?

Hence, I have decided on a new plan of action. I want to diversify my business away from affiliate marketing and relying on big product ideas.

First, I will bring all my sites together with the same look and feel as my most popular site, Mike’s Marketing Tools. I have interlinked them all, but have blocked most of the links with the ‘rel=nofollow’ tag so as not to upset Google. I will slowly release the links to make it look for natural.

Second, I will update all the sites. I have already updated most of the sites. Mike’s Marketing Tools requires a bit more work but should be done within the next 2-3 weeks. I did a bit of house cleaning with Mike’s Marketing Tools. There were pages that I hadn’t touched since 2002. It’s like the loft you dare not enter because you know it would take a lot of work to tidy up. Do you have old sites like that?

I have to say that it felt good cleaning out all those sites, removing unprofitable products and broken links, and replacing them with new up to date products. I feel the last few weeks have been the most productive I have been since 2002. For the first time in a long time, I feel I have more control over my sites than I ever had.

I also decided to integrate the Mike’s Ecommerce Software site into a new ‘Ecommerce Software‘ category, because Mike’s Marketing Tools has much better link popularity and PageRank than the Mike’s Ecommerce Software site. The Mike’s Ecommerce Software site didn’t attract any top 10 Google rankings and hardly any traffic.

I used 301 redirects to direct Google to the new pages, and my efforts have paid off. The new ‘Ecommerce Software’ category in Mike’s Marketing Tools has been indexed by Google and is already ranked #10 (sometimes #11) for the search query, ‘ecommerce software’.

Third, I’m thinking about integrating my GoDefy.com, Jumbo Keyword .com, and Michael Wong .com sites into the Mike’s Marketing Tools network and give them the same look and feel. I haven’t completely made up my mind about them yet. But I’m leaning towards doing this because I feel it would benefit those sites if they were integrated with the rest of my sites.

I did think about updating the look and feel of the Mike’s Marketing Tools site. I got the idea to use that orange/yellow color scheme back when CNET was using a similar color back in 2002. Being a marketing site, maybe I should use a color scheme that better reflected the nature of the site. i.e. blue for business. After giving it some thought, I decided I didn’t want to change it.

Here’s why: Firstly, the orange/yellow color scheme actually makes it stand out from all the other marketing sites that use a blue color scheme. Second, millions of people have passed through the site over the last 7 years. People like things that are they are familiar with. Changing the site’s color scheme could confuse some people. So why change? Hence, I decided not to. The downside far outweighs the upside from what I can see.

Once I have updated all the sites, I will start work on diversify my business away from affiliate marketing.

Like I said earlier, part of the reason was because of the JUMBO Keyword .com disappointment. I realize now that I spent far too much time developing that site and putting far too much hope into it. I realize now that I should develop products that people want, rather than ones I want and think others would want too. So I’m going to find out what people want based on search queries. Plus I will advertise in AdWords and ask visitors what they want and how much they want to pay for the product.

armandmorinmmt200 The basic idea is to develop easy-to-use products, as quickly as possible, that solves a single problem, for an affordable price. I only realized this was a good idea while I was adding all of Armand Morin’s products to his page in my Mike’s Marketing Tools site. I noticed that his products are relatively simple and are designed to solve just one problem, nothing more, quickly and easily. As a result, he has over 20 products to his name and made millions with them.

I also thought about what people really want nowadays. And I came to this conclusion. Most people, including me, are lazy. In this world of instant gratification, they want things done for them, right away. So it makes sense to create products that offers just that, instant gratification. And with the internet offering so much free stuff, people don’t want to pay a lot, if anything. But people are willing to pay a fair price if you make it afforable enough.

So without giving too much away, I have decided on developing a line of internet marketing products, that solves a single problem, quickly and easily, for a low price. The idea is to develop and launch one product a month, on a limited budget, say $1000 to $5000, so that within a couple of years I will have a couple dozen products to my name. Some of those products may not be a success. That’s okay. I would have only wasted a limited amount of time and money on them.

Now instead of putting all my hopes on one product, I spread the risk over dozens of products. This will also help minimize sales fluctuations. Having my own products also helps to attract customers to purchase affiliate products via my affiliate link because they can get my products as bonuses if they sign up via my affiliate links.

I had been using this strategy to promote WebPosition Gold for years, and it worked very well. After all, affiliate products are just commodities. People don’t care if they buy it from you or another affiliate. But if you give them an incentive to purchase the product via your affiliate link, then you will have an edge on those that don’t offer anything.

You might be thinking, hasn’t this product idea been around like forever? Yes, you’re right, it’s nothing new. But it’s taken me 10 years to finally see it! As you can see, I am not that bright. Don’t ask me why I did do this before. I guess part of the fun of building a business and of life is the learning from the mistakes you make.

Thanks for listening to me. Well, you’re now up to date with what I’ve been up to. I hope you found my update interesting. Until next time, I wish you continued success with your internet business.

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JUMBO Keyword: First Month’s Marketing Results

by Michael Wong on May 21, 2009

jumbo-keyword-2001 It’s been over six weeks since I launched JUMBOKeyword.com, my free online AdWords tool offering 70+ 1-click Google AdWords, keywords and text editing functions to help you create, manage and edit hundreds, even thousands, of AdWords keywords quickly and easily.

I thought it would be interesting to look back at my first month’s marketing efforts and discuss the results achieved. The stats were provided by Google Analytics.

Time span

April 6 to May 5, 2009

Web Site Statistics (Google Analytics)

Visitors: 52,162
Unique visitors: 44,822
Average time on site: 25 seconds

Fifty-two thousand visitors may sound impressive to some people (or not depending on your point of view), but it’s not really because I paid for most of the traffic. The real test would be when I switch off the paid traffic.

Visitors (125 countries/territories)

United States:	46,692
China:	1,815
United Kingdom:	347
India:	303
Canada:	257
Ireland:	185
Australia:	173
Germany:	124
Indonesia:	104
Turkey:	103

Top Traffic Sources

Direct / None:	15,258
Bravenet:	14,282
Google AdWords:	2,065
Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com:	1,466
StumbleUpon:	4,642
Google (organic):	770
JavaScript-2.com:	78
JohnChow.com:	52
Search (organic):	64
Ask.com:	45
MichaelWong.com:	34
Twitter.com:	26
URLWire.com:	18

Length of Visits

Length of Visit	Visits	% of visitors
0-10 seconds	43,759	83.89%
11-30 seconds	3,801	7.29%
31-60 seconds	1,587	3.04%
61-180 seconds	1,698	3.26%
181-600 seconds	891	1.71%
601-1,800 seconds	368	0.71%
1,801+ seconds	58	0.11%

We can safely say that a visit between 0-10 seconds means the visitor left the site without using the keyword editor. I would expect the average time on site to increase as I reduce my advertising efforts and rely on repeat visitors.

I am going to list the various marketing and advertising methods I used to promote JUMBO Keyword .com. I provide exact statistics and my thoughts on each method’s effectiveness.

Bravenet Media (Pop-Unders)

bravenet-200 I purchased a $500 pop-under campaign with Bravenet Media, which sells advertising for its Bravenet network. I bought advertising on Bravenet because Bravenet had delivered positive return-on-investments on a pay-per-sale offer I promoted last year.

I wanted the campaign to just target U.S. visitors, with a frequency cap of one unique visit per 24 hours. That cost of $6CPM meant I would receive 83,333 impressions or visitors.

The campaign went live on April 17 and wrapped up on May 1, resulting in about 6,000 impressions a day. But when I checked my Google Analytics stats, it registered just 46,580 impressions for the landing page that I gave Bravenet. So in effect I was charged $10.73 CPM, not $6 CPM.

I brought this to the attention of the sales rep, Melanie Peake. She told me that before they attempt to deliver a pop under, they test to see if a user is blocking pop-ups. If they are not, they deliver a pop-under. But if they are, they deliver a floating div - in other words, a pop-up.

All along I thought I was getting 83,333 pop-unders for $500. Now she says I got a mixture of pop-unders and pop-ups. I don’t like pop-ups because they are intrusive and most people simply close pop-ups. I told her that they cannot promise pop-unders and then deliver pop-ups. They are two different products. I would never buy pop-ups for the reason I gave above.

Another thing was that I didn’t understand why Google Analytics didn’t track the pop-up impressions. Melanie told me that floating divs are loaded in iframes, and iframes are not tracked through Google Analytics. Hmm… I’m none the wiser.

Anyway, Melanie did the right thing and offered to deliver an addition 66,226 pop-under impressions, which I gladly accepted. By the way, I forgot to mention that out of all the impressions Bravenet delivered, an impressive 99.54% were from the United States.

It’s difficult to judge whether the campaign was a success or not. It delivered the traffic from the targeted market, the United States. The test will be how many people return to the site.

If you want to try Bravenet Media, I recommend you:

insist on receiving only pop-unders - no pop-divs or pop-ups
target U.S. visitors only or whatever country you want (non-U.S. visitors should be cheaper)
set a frequency cap of one unique visit per 24 hours
provide a landing page so you can monitor the quantity and quality of the traffic
monitor the traffic with traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics
use a tracking ID if you’re promoting a pay-per-lead/sale offer

Google AdWords (Pay Per Click)

google-adwords Google AdWords advertisers are everywhere so I set up two Google AdWords campaigns targeting all languages and all countries.

One campaign was for the Google search and search partners network, while the other was for the content network. The reason why I didn’t combine both the content network and the search networks into one campaign is because I use different keyword formats to target search and content networks, a technique that most affiliate marketing experts recommend.

My keyword categories included AdWords, Google advertising, Google products (GoogleCash, etc.), keywords, and pay per click. I set a max cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.10 and a budget of $10 per day for the content campaign.

I value search traffic higher than content traffic because they are proactively searching for a solution. Hence, I set a higher CPC of $0.20 and a budget of $20 per day for the search campaign.

The Google search and search partners network campaign produced the following results:

Clicks	Impressions	CTR	Avg. CPC	Cost	Avg. Pos
1,335	329,801	0.40%	$0.11	$153.07	5.0

The content network campaign produced these results:

Clicks	Impressions	CTR	Avg. CPC	Cost	Avg. Pos
3,884	2,719,466	0.14%	$0.05	$191.74	4.1

The fact that the content network generated almost three times the clicks for half the cost didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was that virtually no content traffic came from English speaking countries such as the United States, UK, Canada, Australia. They were all from countries like China, Turkey, and Taiwan.

I had made a mistake targeting non-English speaking users. They generally don’t end up being paying customers (for affiliate and advertised products) so the value of that traffic was minimal to say the least.

As a result, I decided to remove all languages except for English, and remove all countries except for nine English speaking countries, including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Malaysia, New Xealand, Singapore, United Kingdom, and the United States.

I also removed Google search partner and just kept Google search traffic to minimize the risk of click fraud and ensure the traffic was of the highest quality. The search campaign click through rate dropped marginally from 0.40% to 0.39%, while the average CPC increased 54% (6 cents) from 11 cents to 17 cents.

The content campaign click through rate dropped by half almost, from 0.14% to 0.08%, while the average CPC dropped from 5 to 4 cents.

StumbleUpon (Targeted Visitors)

stumbleupon-jk-200 StumbleUpon is a social booking service where users bookmark sites they ’stumble upon’ and are offered similar sites other users have bookmarked. With over six million users, it is one of the most popular social bookmarking services around.

StumbleUpon users are shown websites in a framed window, so it’s almost as good as a pop-under. Each visitor costs just 5 cents, so it is very cost effective.

I paid $500 into my account and set up two campaigns; one targeting ‘internet-tools’, and the other targeting ‘marketing’. You can choose from 500 categories. I set a maximum of 100 visitors per day, targeting U.S., male only users, between the ages of 18 and 65.

StumbleUpon provide daily visitor stats (last 23 days only), along with the percentage of users who liked or disliked my site. I didn’t take much notice of these stats before until now. I see that in the internet-tools category, I can see 5 liked and 10 disliked ratings. Whereas in the marketing category, there are 56 liked ratings and only 15 users who disliked the tool.

While the internet-tools users are overwhelming negative towards the tool, the marketing crowd were the opposite. The lack of responses, especially positive responses, in the internet-tools category made me realize that I am wasting my time targeting the internet-tools category. Hence, I have paused that campaign.

Google Analytics show that while not every visitor was from the United States, 97.4% of visitors were, which is acceptable. The disturbing statistic is that the average time on site is a mere 3 seconds, which is poor.

I have just paused the internet-tools campaign so that may help improve the average time that StumbleUpon users spend on the site. Although the remaining campaign is targeting users interested in marketing, I think the category is too broad for my AdWords tool. There is no category for AdWords or pay-per-click, so I think I will stop the campaign, which I have just done.

Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I have been doing SEO since the late 90s so I guess I know a thing or two when it comes to SEO. I specialize in optimizing for Google so any rankings I get for Yahoo! or MSN Live are a bonus.

I registered JUMBOKeyword.com in January 23 of this year and launched the site in April 6. In just over 5 weeks, JUMBO Keyword .com has already achieved some decent top 30 search engine rankings.

Keyword	Google	Yahoo!	MSN Live
adwords keyword tool	#8	#8	#12
adwords software	-	#22	-
adwords tool	#18	#28	-
google adwords tool	#9	#29	#29

Those rankings aren’t generating a great deal of search engine traffic at this time. That should improve when the rankings improve over the coming months. I will explain how I achieved these rankings in a future post (maybe the next post).

Michael Wong .com Blog (Blogging)

michael-wong-site-2001 My Michael Wong .com blog has been around for a few years, but I haven’t been much of a blogger and let the site lapse into something I wasn’t too proud of.

With the launch of JUMBO Keyword .com I decided it was time to relaunch my blog. So I have upgraded the design and set myself a schedule of writing at least one quality post per week.

If I can manage more than that I will, but quality posts take time to research and write.

JohnChow.com (Blog Review)

I know the value of bloggers, so I paid for a review at JohnChow.com. The review cost me $500 which is not cheap but I thought it would be a worthwhile investment because John Chow is one of the best known internet marketing blogs around. According to John, his site attracts 200,00 unique visitors and 300,000 page views a month. And it has over 49,000 RSS subscribers.

So I ordered the review via ReviewMe.com on Wednesday. Four days went by before the order was accepted. The review, “One-Click Keyword Editing with Jumbo Keyword“, was posted on John’s site around on Sunday night, around midnight.

The site states that sponsored reviews will receive at least 12 hours as the top front page post. Twelve hours as the top front page post from Sunday midnight to Monday midday isn’t exactly what I call prime time!

The review itself was surprisingly long and includes several screenshots - so far so good. However, upon closer inspection the review is dry and lacks personality. I get the impression that whoever wrote the review had never used AdWords or edited big lists of keywords. And no wonder! The review was not written by John Chow - but a Michael Kwan. A quick Google search reveals a freelance writer by that name. John’s site doesn’t promise he would write the review so I don’t have grounds to complain.

I emailed John and told him that I felt giving my review 12 hours as the top post from Sunday midnight to Monday midday was rather poor timing. And if there was any chance he could leave the review at the top of the homepage for at least 12 ‘business hours’, I would be grateful. John duly obliged. I tip my hat to John for doing the right thing.

Okay, how about the traffic? Well, the review has been out for over 2 weeks now. According to Google Analytics, JohnChow.com has sent a mere 55 visitors. At least they stayed an average of 1 minute 14 seconds, so they’re quality visitors.

Is that it? Yep! I’m afraid so as far as traffic from his site shows. Google Analytics could be lying to me, but I haven’t done anything to upset it lately so I don’t think it is.

So what happened to the 47,000 RSS subscribers? Did all of them miss the article because the review was posted Sunday night? I don’t know. All I know is that Google Analytics recorded just 55 visitors from JohnChow.com. The review shows 26 comments so at least a few people did read the review and commented on it.

One thing I didn’t count on was that John tweeted the blog post to his 27,600 Twitter followers. The tweet lead back to his blog post, not directly to my site. Despite that, it was still a nice surprise. As a result, at least nine of his followers retweeted about JUMBO Keyword .com to their 18,011 followers.

So what are my conclusions? Would I do it all again? Yes, but only because of the tweets. If it weren’t for the tweets, I would say the $500 investment represented terrible value for money.

I would also do things a bit differently. I would request that John write the review. He may not do $500 reviews anymore - but it doesn’t hurt to ask. If John won’t write the review, I would insist that whoever writes it has some experience with AdWords and keyword editing, and that they actually use the tool before writing the review. I would also request they include one or two specific keyword phrases for the links to my site.

I would also insist that the review is posted first thing in the morning, around 11am EST (Eastern Standard Time) to get maximum exposure. I would also choose Tuesday to Thursday, which are always touted as the best days to send out a newsletter. Same with the tweet.

Publicity

I contacted the editors of 23 prominent internet marketing and productivity blogs, 10 search engine and marketing news sites, and an affiliate marketing newsletter about JUMBO Keyword .com.

As far as I am aware, not one has mentioned it so far which is disappointing. Most didn’t even bother to reply. At least Seth Godin responded with, “neato”.

I know an AdWords tool won’t change the world, but I thought it was good enough to warrant a mention in some of those sites. I guess I was mistaken.

Are we getting to the stage where unless a site gets millions in venture capital, or is started by someone well known, or it’s a game changer, it doesn’t break through the noise and get a mention on a prominent blog or news site? Or are we at that stage already?

Twitter (Micro-blogging)

I have known about Twitter for a while but didn’t take much notice until I decided to relaunch my blog. I figured that if I was to allocate some time and effort to the blog, I should also do the same with Twitter. The buzz around Twitter has been building for months and I just couldn’t let the hottest thing since Facebook (which I’m still not a member of) pass me by. I also thought that if I didn’t register @Michael_Wong (some cybersquatter is sitting on @MichaelWong), someone else might register it.

So I signed up and decided to display the tweets on my blog. And once I decided to do that, I couldn’t exactly not tweet. So I did. I soon realized just how powerful Twitter can be. Twitter is like RSS but better. Like RSS, followers have to opt in to follow you, so you can’t get into trouble for spamming. And they can opt out at any time. So there’s no possible way they can complain of spam.

I don’t spam - never have, never will. But I did get into a slight bit of bother a few years back. I built up a mailing list of about 10,000 people but I didn’t email the list for a while. After a few months, I sent out an email and a few people, who had obviously forgotten that they had subscribed to my double opt-in list, complained to my web host and domain registrar, GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy immediately threatened to disable my MichaelWong.com domain. I think there were 2 complaints out of 10,000 subscribers, but that’s all it takes. That is the domain I use for my main email address so it would have caused a massive headache if it was shut down. I decided not to build another email list. I know all the big marketing experts say it’s essential to build a list. I have left a lot of money on the table by not building a list. But the fact is the trouble just isn’t worth the effort.

Anyway, back to Twitter. The benefits of Twitter include:

Anyone can see how many followers a user has
Tweeting takes a lot less effort than sending out an email to your list or writing a blog post
Users are much more likely to retweet something they like to their followers than send an email to their list or write a post in their blog
You can respond to any user without being accused of spam
It’s free: email lists can cost a bit to maintain when you have thousands of subscribers. Whether you have 100 or 1 million followers, it’s always free to communicate with them on Twitter.

The results speak for themselves. I had no mentions in blogs or newsletters. But at least 35 Twitter users who liked JUMBO Keyword .com enough that they tweeted about it to their 108,000 followers. I didn’t include John Chow’s 27,600 in that number because I paid for the review.

I think the main downside with Twitter is that users follow so many people and some users tweet so often that there is too much noise. Hence, most tweets just pass users by. Another issue is time. People tweet any time day or night, and unless someone is actively reading every tweet they receive or is following every tweet on their computer or mobile phone, the chances are most tweets just aren’t getting noticed.

Still, I consider Twitter to be a good marketing channel. It gives you the potential to reach a large audience, quickly, for free. SEO and Google AdWords is still the best form of marketing for me. But SEO takes time, and AdWords can cost a bit.

Press Release (URLWire)

Aside from when I sold my last internet company, this is my first press release. I wrote the release and decided to hire Eric Ward of URLWire.com to send out the release. I hired Eric because I’ve known about him since the late 90s. According to his web site, he has been in the industry since 1994 and has announced thousands of web sites including Amazon.com, Microsoft and AOL, to name a few.

Unlike most press release websites, his site really gives you the impression that his contacts/subscribers welcome his announcements. He says he doesn’t just send an email blast to everyone on his list. Instead he selectively emails those contacts that he feels would be interested in your website.

Anyway, I paid $495 for a press release on April 9. For technical reasons, Eric didn’t announce my site until May 5. According to Google Analytics, URLWire has sent just 45 visitors. Google shows 530 web pages mentioning the release but they link back to the announcement in URLWire.com. These seem to be automated news feeds, not write ups.

Conclusion? I would use Eric’s services again, but only if I really had a major news-worthy story to tell. Trying to get mainstream media to take notice of a free AdWords keyword tool without a real story just doesn’t work - at least not for me.

With blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.), forums and newsletters, news of a great web site will spread like wildfire without having a press release. Journalists and reporters typically hunt down stories on the web nowadays. Ten years from now press releases might be ancient history.

Conclusions

I am glad I tried all those marketing tactics. Some worked better than others. There are many other marketing tactics I didn’t try, including viral marketing, video marketing, submitting articles to article directories, blog commenting, etc. There just aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do everything.

To be frank with you, JUMBO Keyword .com hasn’t taken off anywhere as quickly as I had hoped. I will give it a couple more months before deciding whether it’s worth me putting any more effort into it.

I gave it a fair go (as Aussies here like to say) and learnt some valuable lessons. I hope sharing my experience with you helps you too. Subscribe to my free email updates, RSS feed or follow me on Twitter at @Michael_Wong for more marketing results in the future.

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Blogging: Top Secret - I Cheated!

by Michael Wong on April 16, 2009

top-secret Pssst… I’m going to tell you a secret. I’ve only just set up my Michael Wong blog today. I wrote all the previous posts in a text editor. I’ve only just copied them over to the blog and backdated them all.

I know that’s cheating but you can forgive me just this once, right? I promise I won’t do it again.

I’ve never been that keen on blogging - seemed like too much work. But I’ve enjoyed setting up this new blog and Twittering or tweeting. I hope the fun continues.

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JUMBO Keyword: 1st Week’s Marketing Results

by Michael Wong on April 13, 2009

Website	Category	Visitors	CPC	Cost
Google AdWords	Google search + search network	728	$0.13	$96.60
Google AdWords	Content network	1,437	$0.07	$96.46
StumbleUpon	marketing	485	$0.05	$28.50
StumbleUpon	internet-tools	485	$0.05	$28.50
Total		3,135	$0.08	$250.10

It’s been a week since I launched JUMBO Keyword .com and here are the results from my marketing campaign so far. See earlier posts for details of marketing campaigns I have set up.

According to Google Analytics, the site received 2,896 visits from 2,730 ‘absolute unique visitors’. It attracted 3,583 pageviews, an average of 1.24 pageviews. There is only one page on the site but I also track the outgoing product links which helps explain the 0.24 pageviews.

The time on site is only 32 seconds because the majority (90.28%) of visitors leave the site within 0-10 seconds. That should come down when I rely less on new visitors coming from advertising and more on returning visitors.

My other sites referred 312 visitors or about 11% of the total.

It’s interesting that the Google Analytics visitor stats are lower than the Google AdWords and StumbleUpon numbers combined. One possible explanation could be that they are overcharging me for clicks. Another possible explanation could be that some visitors leave the site before the site has even finished downloading. The site is about 100k in size and with a dial-up connection it could take bit too long to download for some people.

The final possibility is click fraud: people clicking AdWords or AdSense ads who then land on my site but leave before the site even downloads. One way to combat this would be to remove the list of countries where click fraud are likely to come from in my AdWords campaign.

A closer inspection of the Google Analytics numbers show 860 visits from StumbleUpon compared to 870 reported by StumbleUpon so that is okay.

The Google numbers are rather disturbing though. Google Analytics shows just 923 visits from all sites that aren’t StumbleUpon or one of my sites. Now considering that Google AdWords show 2,165 clicks, that is a big difference.

I think click fraud is a real possibility, especially in the Content Network, so I’m going to remove all the countries except for the major ones like USA, UK, Canada, Australia, etc.

I am encouraged by the fact that some users are staying on the site for as long as 10-30 minutes. It means people are using the site.

I have decided it’s time to reduce the Google AdWords bid by 50% to bring it closer to the cost-per-click that I would like to achieve: $0.05 per search click and $0.02-$0.03 per content click.

Stay tuned for more results in the coming weeks.

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Link Building: Broken Links

by Michael Wong on April 10, 2009

broken-link Vladimir Jakimov of Asidus.com has informed me that a link from one of my web sites to JUMBO Keyword .com is broken. A quick check reveals that he’s right. Thanks Vladimir!

I thought I better check the link on the other sites. My worse fears were confirmed - the links from all 13 websites to JUMBO Keyword are broken! I had missed out a quotation mark at the beginning of the link code. I give myself a slap around the head. Ouch!

I told Vladimir that I owed him one and he told me he is looking for sales partners for his Flash content management system, WebWizard.com.mk. Unfortunately I don’t know of any relevant sales partners I could send his way. If you are interested or know someone who might be, contact Vladimir (dot) Jakimov (at) Asidus (dot) com. Okay, I think I’ve repaid the favor.

The moral of the story is to always double check your links!

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PR: Hiring a Press Release Expert

by Michael Wong on April 9, 2009

I think JUMBO Keyword .com is good enough to warrant a press release to get some exposure and links. So I decide to hire a press release expert.

I signed up with Eric Ward’s URLwire service for $495. I chose Eric because he will personally send out the announcement to targeted editors who welcome announcements from him. This should do better than standard press release services that blast your release to everyone on their list.

Eric has an impressive track record having announced the likes of Amazon.com, AOL and Microsoft back in the ’90s - at least that’s what his site says. I’ll let you know how the press release performs in a future post.

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PPC: StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign

by Michael Wong on April 9, 2009

I started an ad campaign at StumbleUpon for JUMBO Keyword .com. I’m targeting ‘marketing’ and ‘internet-tools’ in the USA. With a budget of $500 and $0.05 per visitor, the campaign will generate 10,000 visitors. I set a maximum of 100 views/day for each campaign, and a total daily budget of $15/day. This should ensure I get a regular stream of visitors over a period of a month. I’ll let you know how this marketing tactic performs in a future post.

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Google AdWords: 2 AdWords Campaigns

by Michael Wong on April 8, 2009

google-adwords I added 2 Google AdWords campaigns for JUMBO Keyword .com. One campaign is for ‘Google Search’ and ‘Search Partners’, while the second is for the ‘Content Network’. Each campaign has 4 ad groups, ‘AdWords’, ‘Google advertising’, ‘keywords’, and ‘PPC search engines’.

For both campaigns I’m targeting all 41 languages and 233 locations for maximum exposure. I selected accelerated delivery method and optimize ad serving, and a budget of $20/day. I only want to pay a maximum of $0.05 per search click and $0.02-$0.03 per content click. But to optimize the click-through rate and cost-per-click, I’m starting with a bid of $0.20/click for Google search and $0.10/click for the content network.

I will reduce the bid after a few days. I will let you know what kind of results I get in future posts.

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Link Building: Build Links Fast By Adding Links From Existing Sites

by Michael Wong on April 7, 2009

The quickest and cheapest way to drive traffic to any web site is to link to it from your existing web sites. Hence I add links to JUMBO Keyword .com from my 13 web sites, such as Mikes-Marketing-Tools.com.
I use various link text, including ‘AdWords editing’, ‘AdWords editor’, ‘AdWords keyword editing’, ‘AdWords tool’, ‘Google AdWords editor’, and [...]

Blogging: I Decide to Blog About my JUMBO Keyword .com Marketing Campaign

by Michael Wong on April 7, 2009

Last night I came up with the idea of blogging about my internet marketing campaign for JUMBO Keyword .com.
I thought it would be interesting to document it so that other people can learn from it. I have always respected other marketers who openly share their marketing tactics and I have learnt a lot from them. [...]

Google AdWords: New Web Site Launch - JUMBO Keyword .com

by Michael Wong on April 6, 2009

I’ve just launched my new web site, JUMBO Keyword .com. It’s a web-based software application offering 70+ 1-click Google AdWords, keywords and text editing functions to help you create, manage and edit hundreds, even thousands, of AdWords keywords quickly and easily. You don’t need to download or install any software, or sign up. Oh, did [...]

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Jumbo Keyword

Business Lessons: What I Learned from an Unsuccessful Website Launch

JUMBO Keyword: First Month’s Marketing Results

Time span

Web Site Statistics (Google Analytics)

Visitors (125 countries/territories)

Top Traffic Sources

Length of Visits

Bravenet Media (Pop-Unders)

Google AdWords (Pay Per Click)

StumbleUpon (Targeted Visitors)

Google SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Michael Wong .com Blog (Blogging)

JohnChow.com (Blog Review)

Publicity

Twitter (Micro-blogging)

Press Release (URLWire)

Conclusions

Blogging: Top Secret - I Cheated!

JUMBO Keyword: 1st Week’s Marketing Results

Link Building: Broken Links

PR: Hiring a Press Release Expert

PPC: StumbleUpon Advertising Campaign

Google AdWords: 2 AdWords Campaigns

Link Building: Build Links Fast By Adding Links From Existing Sites

Blogging: I Decide to Blog About my JUMBO Keyword .com Marketing Campaign

Google AdWords: New Web Site Launch - JUMBO Keyword .com

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