I would like to create a series of guides simply because I have never really given anything back to the web but have learnt so much about many things including web development and graphic design (got me the job I have today), affiliate marketing, news, sports news, daily laughs and much more.

So soon I will be creating a new section entitled “Learn with Zinc” and potentially one of the following guides for launch:

SEO 101
I used to work for an SEO company so I am ok in this department.

Affiliate Marketing 101
Obviously I am a few years (x10) from guru status but I have learnt so much during my short experience that I would like to share. Ideas here would be; research, commission models, merchants, networks, gotchas, PPC, data feeds etc…

Photoshop 101
*rant* There are just too many shit tutorials on the web for example how create a golf ball… sure it’s cool, but why the hell would you ever want to do this? Before you say “but you can use the techniques for other stuff…” Bull shit I have used Photoshop commercially day in day out for the last 6 years and never had to use the polar co-ordinates filter… So I am going to create some of my own ‘practical’ tutorials that people need in the real world and not some fantasy playground where kids create golf balls all day.*rant*

PHP 101
Speaks for itself really but would relate to affiliate marketing i.e. how to implement a data feed etc…

Would anyone be interested in these? Do you have any other thoughts?

Well here are my adsense earnings for the day, they don’t exactly live up to the finance campaign I am running but they keep ticking and I get the odd $2 click here and there, I wont lose any sleep over it as I dont use adsense much… maybe I will have to wait a while for this check to come… hehe

It took ages to get my ads back up and running, but today they have been approved and I have had £120 already today but sadly a few declines from previous sales. However, here are my stats:

Expenditure: £23.06
Income: £364.27
Net: £341.21
ROI: 1480%

ROI is dropping pretty rapidly but still incredible this is because I am now running 2 campaigns. I need to give it a few weeks to balance out.

I think I can now predict a trend so I am gonna put my money where my mouth is and say this time next week income will break £500… Hopefully

This morning I logged into Adwords like normal and I noticed a lack of impressions / clicks so I started to sniff around wondering WTF is up… It seems that they have finally twigged that my display URL is not going where it says it is, so all of my ads are sitting in “disapproved” status, fair cop I guess but sheer laziness on my part.

I guess I need to actually do a bit of work now. My plan is to create a landing page on my domain and set a redirect to the merchant, I thought I had read this somewhere, does anyone know if this is allowed?

If anyone knows of a better way around all this please let me know?

Preferably of the Google flavour…

That’s right I am looking for the link juice of like minded bloggers / blogettes (a word?), the higher the PR the better. If you are interested in swapping links either leave a comment or drop me a line.

Sorry for the delay, I have had nothing worth reporting the last few days but I thought I should give a quick update.

As I mention in my first post, getting decent click volume is still proving a major problem and even more so for the last few days. I got into a bit of a bidding war and ended up paying through the roof for a few days just to keep it running. However, since then I have been adding new keywords and removing the non performers and tweaking ad variations like crazy to try and up my CTR, which should ultimately lower my CPC.

Because of my f**k up, both sales and ROI took a hit, but I am now back on track.

Expenditure: £18.06
Income: £338.00
Net: £319.94
ROI: 1772%

All in all the program is chugging along with the odd click and is converting at 1:4 which is pretty amazing. Now I need to leave it alone for a few days so Adwords can spit some stats at me.

More to come shortly

Yeah! 24 season 6 is finally here and it looks frikkin awesome, if you haven’t seen the trailor yet then take a look below don’t take a look below as Youtube sucks ass, if you would rather wait then don’t miss it, this Sunday at 9:00pm on Sky One. I can’t wait!

Ok so I said I would keep you updated on the ppc activity for my first financial campaign. I saw a big rise today, here are my updated stats. So far sooooo good:

Expenditure: £11.20
Income: £245.00
Net: £233.80
ROI: 2088%

I am still lacking click volume but not complaining

I think I need to get a site up pretty smartish for those organic sales.

Ok so I saw this over at Wickedfire and thought it was pretty cool, and btw a great example of a ‘link bait’ campaign

Here’s mine, surely the coolest?

The Flash

Find out which super hero you are at: http://www.thesuperheroquiz.com

So maybe it isn’t as hard as everyone makes out, or is it? I have been running a campaign for about a week now and here are my stats:

Expenditure: £7.36
Income: £105.00
Net: £97.64
ROI: 1327%

These results are mostly fluke but partly due to timing, but still far to early to tell. I am sure the ROI will come down a bit, maybe about 1000% or so

My only problem is now volume - it’s time to rinse and repeat x3.