I have been playing with a few new networks and some new places to promote affiliate offers of late and something has become painfully clear.

To rely on the stats given by the network is the same as dangling your cash in a shredder and flicking the on / off switch.

Typically the logic goes something like, lets have a look at the EPC for this offer and to start default bids on traffic at about a qtr of that until we get enough data to refine that.

This is the result from a new network I am trying (Not naming which one)

Quality I am sure you will agree. In my defense I was on holiday and didnt stop the test when I should have but it was a brief test at low value.

So in future I am going to use the following method for setting my default bids. (New network only)

Work out what a 2% ctr would provide me and set my bids appropriately. So if I know that the offer I want to test is going to give me $10 per conversion on avg then I will need 500 clicks to get that and 500 clicks cant cost me more than 2cents each, run away run away….

I would therefore conclude that its best not to PPC test this offer but to throw some cheap organic seo traffic at the offer to see what their data integrity looks like instead.

Anything else is burning cash until you know the network better or you get data to support theirs.

Its been about two weeks since I moved across from the .com version of my site across to the .co.uk version.

I did what most of us would do and 301′d the site across, some tweaking needed but fairly basic stuff.

I know whenever you do a full site 301 there are a few days when watching Google work it through can be a stressful experience but they are doing a good job so far.

Time yet for a major fekk up but so far so good…

Have you had any problems doing something similar?

Moves can go wrong…

Over the past two weeks I have finally given into the pressure to use Twitter, its amazing how addictive it is.

So after just a few weeks I have come to a few conclusions about the best ways to Tweet.

1. Get a decent client
Many people use the basic web interface but that makes Tweeting a task like reading and replying to email. I have been using Tweetdeck which runs as a separate application and makes Tweeting quick easy and part of the days background.

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If you use a free theme from a Google advert you are an idiot..

Yeah you are, admit it. You would have to be unless you knew what you were doing. Having spent some time recently helping out when people have had their blogs hacked I decided to take another look at the free theme scams and was shocked by what I found.

I say I was shocked, thats a lie really. I knew what to expect and I knew where to look. I have to also admit I know all this and how effective it can be as I have done some of this in the past too.

OK so what I did was nip over to Google and search for ‘Free wordpress themes’ and heres what we get: -

Now as you can see we have a few paid adwords ads for free themes, suspicious? Yeah me too…

We also have a couple of decent organic results from upstanding places like Smashing Magazine etc.

So what we will do is grab a random theme from the top adwords adverts and the top organic result and have a poke around to see whats there.

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Like most people who make money from the internet I am always on the lookout for what might be an opportunity and testing things to see what works. I might do a test run of a new type of spam or I could hear about the launch of a new community or service and decide to do a few tests to see what potential it has for delivering adverts or leeching off visitors. This is the brief story of one of my experiments, a tame one but it nearly had a rather scary outcome.

Anyone making a living from the internet or even those using the net to supplement their day job should be testing all the time, it doesn’t have to be writing scripts and doing large runs just testing the water with various ideas can unearth a gem that will make you thousands. This time I decided to continue to mess around with Gumtree, a Craigslist like classified site with a large user base in the UK.

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