David Leigh

I recently read some positive comments about Auction Ads, an alternative to Google adsense which allows you to display Adsense style ads website of Ebay listings. You earn commision from people signing up with Ebay as well as earning a percentage of the total amount.

It sounds a great product and so signed up, putting the code on just one page, but with a good number of daily page views and excellent Adsense clickthough rate. I left it for a few days and waited for the money to come rolling in.

Unfortunately Auction Ads on this test failed to perform at all. The Adwords CTR on this page is generally 30-40 percent, which is way above my overall average, so one of my top earning Adsense pages; the Auction Ads CTR on the same page in exactly the same position was….

…just 2.6 percent and my total earnings over this period were $0.

I’m not going to write Auction Ads off at the moment, I’ll take a look at running more tests, but what I do know is that you need to be careful. If you do change over do it slowly, preferably split testing each change. In this particular example I think that the Adsense Ads are much better targetted to the page than the Auction Ads, hence the excellent CTR, so I’ll look at a fairly high traffic page with bad Adsense CTR as my next test.

Let me know how you are getting on with Auction Ads.

Yesterday I talked a bit about the $1 Stompernet SIMPLE trial which I’m lucky enough to be part of.

Yesterday evening I was poking around in their video library which is fantastic. One of the best I saw was by Leslie Rohde, CEO of Windrose Software in which he talked about one SEO factor I’d never even thought of. The thing is, this problem is blindingly obvious, but I’ve never seen anyone talk about it before - not that that means anything

Of course being a trialist I didn’t see the solution; that’s reserved for full members, but I can guess what it is and have put it to use on 2 of my websites to see if it has the expected result. If it works as well as I hope then it moves me one step closer to justifying $800 a month.

I’m lucky enough to have been given the chance to try StomperNet for 30 days for just $1, pretty good since the normal price is around $800…

…a month!

The idea is to take you through a step by step process forcreating a successful ebusiness in a month and although it keeps being reinforced that the aim is to take us through the process rather than focus on the money it was also mentioned at one point that you should be able to make $1000/month within 90 days.

I do have experience of running ebusinesses, but have never focused much on info products -the focus here - so it’s good to go through the whole process from scratch, remind me what I should be doing that I have maybe forgotten as well as learn some new techniques for promotion and search engine marketing.

Having worked the system over the weekend I’ve gone as far as I can for the time being while everyone else plays catch up, but that’s no problem for me. We’ve been split into teams (or rather we created our own teams), so that nobody works in isolation, ideas can be kicked around and the less experienced members of the teams have always got someone they know to ask for help. Sometimes it can be difficult to know who to turn to for advice, and this alone is a great benefit.

At the end of the 30 day trial we can opt for full membership, or cancel before we pay that first $800. It sounds a lot - it is a lot - but my decision will be based on whether I can get >$800/month value from membership.

When I went in I was sceptical that I would, but for $1 had nothing to lose. But after a few days working StomperNet SIMPLE I’ll reserve judgement. If I do join up then I’ll want to see a pretty fast ROI, but the resources available and access of some of the top people in Internet marketing are fantastic.

It’s certainly worth more than $1, that’s for sure.