Keep my productivity up is something I’ve been having real issues with recently, and staying focused is not easy for me. Sometimes it’s getting carried away on IRC / AIM and Wickedfire, or whatever but I haven’t been getting work done.

There’s 2 things that have helped me get on track a lot recently, and neither of them are Aderall (which i don’t have ). Those 2 things are simply a whiteboard and a notepad.

I use the whiteboard for writing things down I need to do for example a new campaign or new traffic source. Then on the notepad I’d break down what I need to do within that, to get what’s on the whiteboard complete (if that makes sense?).

If your having trouble focusing on work or are just to lazy, you have to realise the competition and money waits for no one. While your being lazy, your competitor is testing, building campaigns and optimizing away making more and more money. Oh and if your problem is there’s to much work or you don’t enjoy what your doing then get the fuck out of this industry – it’s not for you .

I’ve found that if I suddenly have an idea, i’ll write it down and later in the day or when ever i’ll see it again and get a chance to follow up, rather than relying on myself to remember it and get it done. Useful stuff for buisness. The total cost of both these are under $100 too, so it’s worth a shot if you were having the same problems as me.

It’s been a long while since I updated this blog, and seeing as I don’t really want to delete it I’m going to update it.

We’ve been using Facebook’s self serve platform for a few months now and has been making us a good amount of money consistently. One of the key things to our sucsess on Facebook has been testing, which is basically what affiliate marketing is.

We use a few tools, but the core of it is Prosper202 to get/read our data as well as some other tools and software we use, but we’re not going to go into that. So if you don’t have prosper202 already, go get it and install an SSL cert, it’ll save a lot of headache. Easiest way to get an SSL cert is just buy a domain with namecheap.com and get one free. Use the SSL pixels, it’ll save some headaches, but remember to update the subids daily as some will get missed!

So to start off, you’ll want to pick what your going to promote and start gathering some pictures for the ad, we usually do about 5 per test initially. As well as 5 pictures, we do 2-3 ad texts. So there will be a possible 15 variations per age group you target – not easy work as you gather, and it never is. If it’s too much for you, hire some one in-house to do it for you and pay them weekly or commision it. I’ve personally gone the commision route and it has worked well (more motivation).

Now the way to track this with prosper202 is to use their keywords. In the keyword you want to include a few things like the Age, Gender, Country, Picture version, Text Version. So format it something like this:

1. M-18-20-P1-T1-CA
2. F-18-20-P1-T1-CA
3. M-18-20-P2-T1-CA
4. F-18-20-P2-T1-CA

And so on, till you have a combination of everything. Keep in mind certain pictures and ad copies will make different demographics respond differently. For example picture 1 may respond very well to 18-20yr olds, but very differently to 30-35 year olds.

Once you have the ads submitted and approved, run a good sized test and make it significant so 1 click or 1 lead won’t throw off your numbers. So get some good statistical significance – it’s important.

Once you have the data, you want to go into Prosper and go to the Analyze tab and in the keyword box (in the More options section) put in M-18-20 so it only shows the KWs matching that. Then sort it by EPC (not ROI). If you keep prosper up to date, and update the CPCs the CPC data will set for example 50c to all KWs when in reality all the keywords may not be 50c cost. You will want to grab the combination with the highest EPC for each age / gender and run that. Once the winning one has exhausted, move on to the 2nd and so on.

The difference doing these tests can make is huge. To further these tests, you can start split testing landing pages also, as this will have a huge impact on the EPC too.

I can’t be bothered to write any more on this, so there it is! It’s been a great year for me and my company. I’ve met a lot of new people in the industry and learnt a lot this year. This industry is definately a great industry and the potential from it is HUGE.