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Feb 06

Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.

Doodling, Heavy construction, Mind over Pixels 4 Comments »

It seems the less I write, the more readers I get. Strange huh?

Anyway, lets talk about a serious issue in any business venture. Optimization.

Optimizing something, means to bring it at its optimal state, at its best capacity. Some things can be optimized, others cannot.

Optimizing is a good thing, an essential thing. But I see many people getting caught in it too early.

For example, lets take a ppc campaign. You can optimize every aspect of it, every keyword, every color on the landing page, every little thing. Should you do it though?

No, basically. At least not until you have some serious volume.

What people do not understand, is that optimizing means a percentage increase, not a quantity one.

If I earn 100$ from a ppc campaign, is it worth it spending hours split testing landing pages and ad copies to squeeze out e.g. 4% improvement?

Of course not, the 4$ are not worth the time spent.

If I were to spend my time and ingenuity on coming up with ten times the traffic volume for that campaign, would then be worth optimizing it? Assuming the campaign earns 1000$, then 4% becomes a much less ignored 40$ profit. Still, 40$ are peanuts to some. What “a nice chunk of cash” literally means is certainly open to discussion. But still, there is a line for everyone. Make sure you point out that line, it will make your decisions much easier.

Please note that in the above example, the time that the optimization takes, is exactly the same! Yes, it costs the same amount of effort to gain 4$ and 40$.

Is it worth to you wasting 2-3 days working to earn 40$? If it is not, then instead of optimizing your campaign, focus on growing it.

Why am I babbling about this? Well, I recently went to a total overhaul of my web assets, and optimized a ton of pages. I am the sort of webbuilder, that builds something crude, and lets it rank and ripe before spending more resources on it. I also work on numerous projects simultaneously, and ruthlessly shut down whatever does not work.

Due to the strategy described above, there were huge margins for optimization on those assets.

First came my domain portfolio. I checked the stats, and simply removed the automatic registration from the non profitable ones. They were around 200.

Next, I saw that I was getting paid from my parking service by paypal, losing a 4% every single month. I was surprised to discover that my dear parking service offered free wires! Silly me, switch payment to wire, 28$ more every month, 336$ per year. Add in the domain renewal costs at around 2000$, and that is a nice sum to save.

Following issue on my list was my SEO. A quick look at google webmaster tools top search queries showed me dozens of keywords that needed a slight push to get me to the 1st page. But what do you know, we just saved 2300$! Pour that into linkbuilding then. The ranks were up in no time, followed by traffic, subscribers, buyers, links, more traffic etc etc that I am too bored to measure.

Next came my campaigns. I threw some brainstormed new ad copies to the mix, and tracked conversions. What do you know, another winner ad with an amazing CTR!

Last, I took the time to actually socialize, and call my affiliate manager on an offer that I have running for months. I said “Hello, I am the affiliate with the username Glowleaf. Can I get a payout increase on this offer?”

He checked my stats, and replied “Of course.”

The payout increase results in 110$ more profit. Daily.

Did I get the payout bump because of my big balls? No. I got it because I have VOLUME. The AM would be a retard to even consider rejecting my request.

Where am I going with this?

You need to focus on getting the volume first. Once again, optimization is a percentage increase, not a quantity one. It takes the same amount of time to optimize a 100$ campaign and a 10.000$ one.

So:

  • Don’t play around with your Adsense placements. Leave the fuckers where they are.
  • Don’t spend hours moving buttons on your landing pages. Instead, spread the campaign on other traffic avenues.
  • Don’t bother getting your 12 readers to engage and comment. Focus on more traffic.
  • Don’t bother writing SEO perfect articles. Just write more articles, that bring in more links and traffic.
  • Don’t squeeze your parked domain for 2 more cents. Spend the time to dig up a new gem.

I like to play real time strategy computer games. There is a rule on them, one that I follow religiously, the so called four Xs:

Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.

  • Explore.

Know the ground. Have scouts. Keep an eye on people, on the market, on everything. If it happens, you need to know it first.

  • Expand. 

Spread your claws on everything, whatever lies in your reach. Make sure you reach far. If you want to specialize in your niche, own as much area of that niche as possible.

  • Exploit. 

There are always systems functioning in everything. All systems do not touch each other perfectly, leaving holes between them. Some people call them “opportunities”, I like to call them “glory holes“.

  • Exterminate.

Use your knowledge, your foothold, your assets and everything else you got to leave no one in your niche alive. Metaphorically speaking of course…

More on the four X’es soon.

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