So this song makes me feel like and old hippy and I like that.

Download audio file (track.mp3)
Burn One Down

Let us burn one from end to end,
And pass it over to me my friend.
Burn it long, we’ll burn it slow,
To light me up before I go.

If you don’t like my fire, then don’t come around,
’cause I’m gonna burn one down.
Yes, I’m gonna burn one down.

My choice is what I choose to do,
And if I’m causing no harm, it shouldn’t bother you.

Your choice is who you choose to be,
And if you’re causin’ no harm, then you’re alright with me.

If you don’t like my fire, then don’t come around,
’cause I’m gonna burn one down.
Yes, I’m gonna burn one down.

Herb the gift from the earth,
And what’s from the earth is of the greatest worth.
So before you knock it try it first,
Oh, you’ll see it’s a blessing and not a curse.

If you don’t like my fire, then don’t come around,
’cause I’m gonna burn one down.
Yes, I’m gonna burn one, oohhh.

But recently, I’ve started having a series of “a-ha moments” at practically everything I look at in the field of Internet marketing. I hate to say it, but I think I’m finally understanding what this stuff is all about. I actually think I’m about to bust this shit wide open!

The first exciting thing is that I started my first eBay Classified Ad campaign today! It’s for my new site: Get Your Girfriend Back

I found this idea when doing keyword research at eBay. I wanted to try something to get my feet wet and this is what popped out at me. There is no way to tell if there is a marfket out there without trying, but it seemed worth a shot. I’m sure I’m going to be trying a lot of these ads until I find something that clicks. I really want to make it in a smaller niche first. Of course I’d like to play in the big leagues, but that’s still a long way off.

The second exciting thing is that makeup-discounters is starting to rank on Google!  For the month of January, I’m averaging 10 visits a day. That’s pretty good for a super small niche like Stila Makeup. I definitely need to expand that site out and I know just where it is going next. What is really great is that my visitors are averaging 2.66 pages viewed, which means I’m getting a lot of people who are actually checking it out.

This is interesting…

Here are the days I made sales and the average time on site for that day.

1/11   1:03

1/14   0:20

1/15  0:51

1/16  1:45

1/18  1:10

1/19  4:37

There was Jan 2 with an average time on site of 4:21 but no sales were made. That 4:37 yesterday was the longest time on site average.

The longest time on site by keyword was “stila madison” (madison is the name of a particular eye shadow palette) at 30:22 and she looked at 12 pages.

Someone came in on “discontinued stila makeup” and looked at 27 pages.

All very interesting and each one reveals a way for me to improve the site.

So there it is… one new business and an older one starts to finally bear some fruit.

Cool

The Click Through Rate on my ads was abysmal. Less than one percent where four percent is considered minimum performance. But I actually did a search of the competition and revised my ad strategy completely, so we’ll see if that helps.

The resounding success part is that I spent 82 cents on clicks, and made $1.26 in sales! That’s just a hair shy of 35% profit. Cool!

And these had to be “low value” clicks because my ad was so lame. My new ads target buyers, so they should be high value clicks. (Assuming I get any clicks- they are a totally different direction)

If I could make the same sort of conversions on high value keywords, then this could be a very good market.

Now I’m going to have to spend hours setting up individual campaigns for every instance of phpBay on the site. Oh dear.

Still, how many times have you heard of people starting a new business and making a profit the first day?

This is actually not makeup-discounters first dollar, but it sorta feels like it. We’re having fun now!

Enter my new best friend, phpBay for Wordpress and the site now has new life. It looks like a million other commercial sites out there, which is actually a huge step up for me. Kinda sparse and minimal looking, but I’ll be tweaking it as I gain experience in this new way of war.

Check it out: Makeup-Discounters

Now I’m off to start a PPC Campaign and see how that goes.

But sometimes it seems that it’s all a fool’s game and I’m the fool.

Sometimes I feel like I’m the engineer of a train. I can make the train speed up or slow down, but I actually have no control at all over where it’s going. Other times I feel exactly the opposite.

Go figure.

I’ve got the new look and feel up at cure-yeast-naturally.com and I should have the five day min-course in place tonight so I can start my name squeeze campaign. I’ve also got to do some more pages optimized for my keyword phrases.

Then it will be time to get makeup-discounters going. There’s a cool new eBay widget that I want to put to good effect. I have a feeling that site is going to take daily maintenance to really do it right.

I got Bob and Pearl going. At least everything is working. I’ll need to go back and do some more “how to” lessons.