The first tool is a new service from Adobe called “Acrobat.com“.  They have had a web conferencing service for quite awhile for companies.  However, they are now offering this service for free as long as you only need three people or less.  The tool provides the ability to share desktops and have audio through either VoIP or a landline.  There are other functions as part of this tool but the web conferencing is the superstar, in my mind.

The second service is GoToMeeting / GoToWebinar.  These services are ones that I have been using for almost a year with the local PMI Chapter (Mile Hi) and it has worked very well.  As opposed to the Acrobat.com free service, these services have a cost involved (Adobe has a paid version of their web conferencing as well).  The nice thing about these services is that they are “flat rate”.  You can use them as much as you want for as many meetings / webinars as you need.  The primary issue is that the number of attendees is limited to 25 for GoToMeeting and 2000 (with only 25 able to speak at a time) for GoToWebinar.  The other issue is that there is no “toll free” capability.  Everyone that dials-in on a landline has to call a non-800 number.  Once you get passed these limitations, the service works very well especially when you are doing both VoIP and dial-in.  I just held a meeting the other day with folks from Canada, US, Vietnam, and Australia and there was no difference in the sound quality.  Also, the price for these services are very reasonable as well; just $49 per month for GoToMeeting and $99 per month for GoToWebinar.

The last tool that I have been using is “LogMeIn“.  It is a service that is used to access a computer from a remote location just like the Windows Remote Desktop but for any source and destination computer.  These service is similar to (I think) the GoToMyPC service that is provided by Citrix in the same fashion as GoToMeeting.  However, the LogMeIn service has a free option that works great.  The only limitation is that you can’t transfer files, hear sounds or print to the remote or local printers.  But, if you want to pay a price, you can get these capabilities as well.  I just haven’t found enough of a need for it but I am sure there are lots of people out there who might need it.  The service appears to work well with pretty much any platform.  I have used it with Windows and Mac remote machines and Windows, Mac and Linux local machines and a large number of different browsers.  I highly recommend it, especially if you are your family’s non-resident IT expert.

I have been using all of these tools and they work great.

In addition, I came across a couple of other tools that I want to try but haven’t gotten the time yet.  These are EverNote and BackBlaze.  The EverNote tool is intriguing because you can take pictures of hand-written notes, charts and boards and the software will (supposedly) do OCR and then index the images for search on your local machine.  They have an app for the iPhone (doesn’t everybody?).  Looks pretty cool!

BackBlaze is an online backup service that seems to be pretty inexpensive ($5 per month per computer for unlimited storage).  Sounds very reasonable as long as they stay around and you can get your data off when you need it.  As I said, I have not used these and don’t have a recommendation either way.  Just thought they were cool!

I welcome your thoughts about these tools and any other tools that you think are as good or better than these or just any tool you think is cool!

The response I got back from AdWords was interesting.  First, it was immediately rated at a QS of 7 (out of 10).  Interesting because that was the value applied immediately.  However, this morning I got up and found an email from Google AdWords saying that my ad had been disapproved.  Oh no, what is wrong with this ad and the keywords, they were very generic and I would have thought completely acceptable.

Based on that, I started looking through the ad and keywords to see if I could see some problem and then started reading the Terms and Conditions, Editorial Policy and all of the other governing documents (which are only of interest to lawyers because they don’t give you any useful information about this sort of situation).  The results were that I was completely stumped.

My last ditch effort was to see if maybe the link to the landing page was causing the problem.  Sure enough, when I clicked on the link from the ad, it goes to “Page Not Found”.  Now, I know why they disapproved it.  This is not really something that they want to support.  Why you ask?  Well, from what I understand, at least when you initially submit your ad (and any time you edit the ad or links for keywords), there is a check done that the domain is valid and that it goes to a valid landing page.  This is to eliminate situations where you insert an invalid or inappropriate landing page after the ad is accepted.

Anyway, fixed the link and sure enough, it was approved.  In fact, it only took about 20 minutes for the approval to come back.  This was a great lesson (another one) in making sure that everything is working correctly before submitting an ad, campaign, keyword, etc.  At the same time, it also pays to not freak out when you get a disapproval.  There could be something simple.  At least its not an account shutdown situation which has been happening a lot recently.  I am hoping to stay out of this scenario.

Take care.

One of the first thoughts would be that the Landing Pages weren’t working well and they were sending lots of poorly qualified traffic to the sales page.  However, when looking at some comparisons, they looked to be in good shape.  Plus, one of them was one that has provided good conversions previously.  So that was probably not the issue.

So, where do I go next?  I thought to myself, is there a potential that the impressions and clicks from outside the US were not providing the potential conversions that I was looking for.  From my stats, it was looking like about 60% of my traffic was outside the US and I didn’t really want to lose that traffic but if it wasn’t converting, then I didn’t want to be paying for it either.

So, I cut off everything except the United States and Canada.  Now, this is where things get a little strange.

After I made the change, my number of impressions per day has been dropping (down by 1/3 and continuing to drop) but more importantly, the CTR dropped from ~3.2% to 0.22%.  It has recovered a little bit today but still not up where it was.  So what caused such a drastic drop in CTR?

A little research has led me to a very interesting little bit of analysis.  What I have found is that I have a definite correlation between position and CTR.  Here are the results that I found over that few day period:

Graph of Average Position versus Click-Through-Rate

So, what this is telling me is that there is a strong correlation between “Average Position” and “Click-Through-Rate” but the sensitivity is a lot higher than I expected.  With a change in position from 4.4 to 5.9, the CTR has gone from 5% to 0.2%.  That’s huge but a very, very critical piece of information.  I am going to be adjusting the numbers so that I get my position higher and see where that takes me.

Good clicks to all!

In my way of thinking and experience, I have often said that PM expertise is generally transferable between projects, technologies and domains.  These specific experience job postings had me confused.  My epiphany was that the software world has tended to combine two roles that you will find separated in other domains.  Those are Project Manager and Technical Lead.  In other domains, the Technical Lead is the person who defines the technical requirements for the project while the Project Manager “manages” the execution.  These are two very clearly distinguished roles that are well understood in the more mature PM environments.

Just an epiphany that I wanted to share with everyone.

First, I found out that my landing pages were still sitting in test mode which meant that when folks clicked through to go to the sales pages, they were getting a test feedback rather than getting there.  Doesn’t make for great sales that way.

After I got that fixed, everything was cruising along just fine with good CPC, CTRs and decent hops.  However, I wasn’t getting any sales.  Isn’t that the point of this whole thing?  So, I got in touch with my mentor and described the problem.  he looked in his ClickBank records and didn’t find any hops from me.  Surprise, surprise!!! Why is this.

Well, after going back and forth a couple of times, we figured out that my links were not pointing at the right place.  I was going to a sales page that has one of the lowest gravity factors in this niche.  Oh well, it only goes to show that you really need to test and be very careful about making sure that the details are correct.

Now that I have everything fixed up, my two Landing Pages (LPs) (DIYSolarPanels and MakeSolarPanels)  are working fine and its just a matter of time before we see what the real results should be.

I have re-written my landing page or provide more information and less sales “stuff” and I can see where that goes.  I started by turning on one Ad Group (DIYSolarPanels) and determining that the ads were still drawing impressions and clicks and they were.  However, I made a big booboo.  I have code in my landing page that tracks where the click came from and where they went.  In that code, I have a flag that sets the code to either production or test mode.  Unfortunately, I had a very sickening feeling yesterday when I found that the code was set to test mode.  I know that this flag was set since I turned things back on but I am wondering how long the flag had been set prior to turning it off.  This would definitely tell me why I wasn’t getting any hops to the sales page.  Oh well, it’s a mistake that would be easy to make and there isn’t anything that I can do about it.  Just have to move on but learn the lesson to check things before releasing them for operation.

One other note is that the process of testing things is really slow when you are only committing $10 per day to the operation.  At this rate, it takes about 4 days to tell whether or not there is a potential buyer out there.  Obviously, if the hop & conversion rates were higher, it wouldn’t be a problem.  However, I think I am running in the right area so its a matter of waiting around to see what happens.

One thing that I have learned is that Google plays games with their bids (CPC).  I am not sure how their algorithm works but it obviously changes the “Estimated First Page Bid” based on my performance.  I have been told before that you can get lower rates as you show performance (and that does work) but I wouldn’t ahve thought that the “Estimated First Page Bid” would change that quickly.  Oh well, part of the learning process.

That’s it for now.  Going to keep plugging away.  I will be upping my budget tomorrow because I am starting a new Ad Group (MakeSolarPanels) and I want to see how that one does.  Will let you know.

What you have to understand is that the whole arena of Affiliate Marketing is (1) directed at the situation where the purchase of the product or service is a one-to-one transaction and (2) there are a large number of combinations of the different mechanisms to implement your marketing approach.

On the first point, the Affiliate Marketing concept does not work well when there are multiple people involved in the purchase.  This is why “Corporate Sales” are not typically handled through this mechanism.  The whole idea is that the person who is making the search (or finding your blog or whatever) is the person that will be making the purchasing decision.  This point is also why the Landing Page is most effective when it is based on personal reviews and/or testimonials because these sorts of purchases are typically going to have a significant emotional component.

In attempting to understand the world of Affiliate Marketing, it is important to understand that there are large number of approaches to Affiliate Marketing.  However, it can be distilled down to a four step process (when looked at from 50,000 feet).  (1) Find a niche and product that you want to market,  (2) generate traffic to your Landing Page (LP), (3) provide some information about the product that will provide more incentive for the potential customer to want to learn more about the product and finally (4) generate a sale.  The Affiliate Marketer is the one that does steps 1, 2 and 3 with the 4th step being the responsibility of the Merchant.

One other piece of advice that I learned and came up again during this Boot Camp was that when you are starting, you need to figure out which method of generating traffic (#2 above) you are going to use and stay focused on that approach.  If you choose to do SEO, then put all of your energy into getting your organic rankings up and thereby increasing your traffic.  Don’t worry about PPC or blogs or articles to start with.  Once you get good at whichever approach you want to use (and more importantly are making money) then you can branch out if that is really critical to you and your self-esteem.  You will hear lots of “mentors / coaches” telling you that you need to do articles, blogs, email lists and PPC.  However, all that this will do is to bury you in possibilities and you won’t be good at any of them.  Start simple and straight-forward and then expand in whatever direction you want to go.

Those are two little nuggets that you can keep in mind while considering your next move in Affiliate Marketing.  I know that the second point is one that I struggled with for

With all of this plus a low budget, lack of experience, and without the tools, I was struggling to get anywhere with the campaign.  At the same time, I have been working with Byron Walker (www.UltimateResultsNow.com) and he has a great new product in the solar energy niche which was of great interest to me.  I was also working on a method of tracking the clicks, where they came from, how they got there and where they went.  It’s not super difficult but works pretty well.

So, all of this together, I shut down the ArtJobs campaign and generated the newest EnergyAtHome.biz landing page.  My landing page is a lot better than the ArtJobs campaign landing pages.  At the same time, I am able to track how things are working.

One thing that I found, when I started this new EnergyAtHome.biz campaign, is that the cost for the keywords that I chose are quite a bit higher than what I was expecting.  When I started seeing this, I was a little concerned that it wasn’t going to be a profitable venture.  However, given the alignment with Byron and the fact that I will be attending his “Affiliate Marketing Boot Camp” through the DaVinci Institute, I decided that I wanted to work with the program and see where I come to.  We will just have to see how things go.

Finally, the other thing that I decided to do was to sign up with Microsoft Advertising Center.  I did this in order to get access to their keyword / pricing information.  In order to try out the service, I got signed up and created a campaign there.  There were some interesting insights there that I will talk about later.  But suffice it to say, I think there might be some opportunities here.  Again, we have to wait and see.

Having come out of the Engineering/Manufacturing world, I am fully versed in executing projects in the classic, pre-planned environment.  There are any number of reasons why projects need to be done in this way (the subject for another discussion at a later date) and it is difficult to do software development in this environment.  However, with good planning and management, it can be done (I have proven that).  Part of the reason that we can be successful in developing software in this environment is that the requirements are well thought out and documented at the beginning because the customer environment is well understood and definable.  At the same time, the hardware aspect of the projects are typically larger than the software and much less subject to change.  This gives the entire project a different flavor than software only projects.  This is the same issue that is presented when you have a project where there is a significant hardware component (typically seen in embedded applications).

But, getting back to my original thought, I think that one thing that we need to understand is that that classic, pre-planned approach to projects (i.e., Waterfall) is not a requirement, merely the most common approach to Project Management.  At the same time, we it is completely feasible to take the concepts of Project Management and, if we understand them, apply them to Agile Project Management.  It’s all the same thing, just a different set of priorities and processes.

Take for example the fact that every project has requirements (functional specs, user stories, use cases, whatever) and costs and schedules / deadlines.  The only significant difference between classic and agile projects is that these are prioritized differently.  The processes in the agile world are designed to deal with a highly volatile set of requirements.  The classic world assumes that the requirements are significantly less volatile while adherence to cost and schedule are critical.

For a great, in-depth look at this issue and to learn more about the relationships between the classic and agile Project Management worlds, see Michele Sliger’s book “The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility” (you will find it at Michele’s website: Sliger Consulting.  I highly recommend it.