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Posts Tagged ‘Haunt Jaunts’

Misadventures Experimenting with Facebook Ads

Posted in Facebook on July 21st 2010
Tags: advertising, Facebook ads, Haunt Jaunts, Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project
4 Comments »

I’ve got a lot of big things planned for Haunt Jaunts in addition to my Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project. Well, I should say related to that. One of them was ramping up my ads…the ones I put out there, not the ones I publish to try and earn money.

Yesterday I got to messing around with Facebook ads. I’ve tinkered with them before, but I never actually placed one. Yesterday I did –but I sort of messed up.

As is usually how I operate, I got a little confused. I put in $30.00 for the amount I wanted to spend. I thought it meant the per month amount you wanted to spend.

Something gnawed at me after and told me to go back and double check what I’d just done. To my horror I discovered I’d specified I wanted to spend $30 per day on an ad campaign!

Gulp! It’s not that much money for a business with a dedicated ad revenue, but for me? Whoops! That’s a little too much.

I quickly deleted the ad.

But that’s when I’d discovered my whoops had an unexpected and unintended immediate side effect: in the three minutes (if it was even that) that it took me to realize my mistake, I’d increased my Facebook page fans by 50%!

If I’ve done my math correctly, which, as this post proves, I’m prone to mistakes. Also, math is not my strong point. But I went from 76 fans to 115 just like that. (Well, just like that and $30.)

So do Facebook ads work? Apparently. And they are WAY more effective than I ever expected.

I placed another ad, this time one my budget can handle. Oh, and I did per impression ads instead of per click. That was another mistake I’d made first time around. I chose the latter instead of specifying the former. (Under Advanced Options, which I failed to click the first go around.)

So now we’ll see what kind of effect this has. How many more fans will the cheaper ads bring to HJ’s FB page? Any? How many of those fans will click through to my blog’s links? What effect will that have on my revenue streams?

Time will tell…and so will I when I have more data.

PUT IT IN PRACTICE

Have you ever posted an ad on Facebook for your business? What were the results?

If you answered no to the above: Have you ever thought about posting experimental ads just to see what might happen? What’s stopped you?

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Week 1 Results of Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project

Posted in Blogging on July 20th 2010
Tags: ads, advertising, Bounce rate, Haunt Jaunts, Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project, Project Wonderful
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How’s week one of my Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project (HJMP) going?

Step 1 was to focus on Bounce Rate Redux. Part of that was doing a blog redesign. Done. There are some aspects I can still improve, but overall I have the groundwork laid.

Did it have any effect on my bounce rate? Slightly. It’s down 1% from last week.

Gotta start somewhere, right? We’ll see if I can implement a few more things to lower that even further.

One thing I’m going to try and do is focus on Step 2. (Which I’ll write about in another blog.)

However, I did see some amazing results in ad revenue. Not that I made any big money. Still in the pennies category, but I haven’t seen this kind of increase in my blog’s history before.

The ads I saw the big bump on were my Project Wonderful ads. They’ve been traveling at about $0.03 for the past week/week and a half. Which I was happy about because that was up from $0.02 for the 2 weeks prior.

However, there was a point in time when they’d been at $0.00 for almost a month. That got me very worried. For the past few months they’ve been about $0.02. A few times they’ve spiked to $0.04, even $0.05. The most they’d ever been was $0.07.

Anyway, to see it hanging in there steady at $0.03 was a-okay. It’s not much, but it’s better than $0.00!

But yesterday I about fell over when I saw $0.40 in the ad box. Say what?

I blinked several times thinking I’d misread it. Nope. 40 cents.

But today it skyrocketed to $1.10 at one point! A whole dollar! Okay, it may be nuts to get excited over $1, but if you’ve read all the way to this point I’m willing to bet you’re trying to figure out how to get your blog to do that, too.

With PW ads I can tell you hits most definitely matter. I’ve seen Haunt Jaunts’ spike this past week. (In part due to my increased SEO efforts, but also I got some help in the form of two other blogs featuring mine last week. Very nice surprise!)

As I’m writing this the ad bids have dropped to $0.70. Still, that really beats $0.03!

So now I’m going to ramp up Steps 2 and 3 of the HJMP and see what kinds of hits I can bring in and what impacts it has on my revenue streams.

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Step 1 in HJMP: Bounce Rate Redux

Posted in Making Money on July 14th 2010
Tags: Bounce rate, Haunt Jaunts, Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project, HJMP, monetizing, Paranormal Gold
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My first project in the Haunt Jaunts Monetizing Project (HJMP) is improving my stats. Javier Ortega stresses that a lot in his book Paranormal Gold. Along with “Content is king,” which is probably the thing he stressed most.

I have decent content. (Don’t get me wrong. That can always stand improving.) But my hits have steadily increased. Not into the thousands like Javier’s numbers, but they’ve climbed.

I know better content and maybe more focus on SEO will help that. That’s something I’ll implement in Step 2. But for now I’m concerned with my bounce rate. Which, until Javier explained it in his book, I didn’t understand the importance of.

I check my Google Analytic stats regularly. Javier’s book explains why this is not only a good thing, but crucial to a blog’s success. However, understanding the numbers and working with them is even better. And while you mostly want high stats (i.e. for hits and such) there’s one that you want as low as possible: your bounce rate.

My bounce rate on Haunt Jaunts is a rather high 75%. So I’ve taken a couple of key steps to reduce it:

Blog Redesigned - My friend Nathan from A State of Mind has had me thinking about this one for a while now. He suggested I remove some widgets from my sidebars and make things less cluttered. Trouble is, I’m a bit of a pack rat. I had a hard time parting with some things. (Even though I knew he was right.) However, both he and Javier’s blog, GhostTheory, get great hits. I analyzed their blogs. In addition to minimal widgets, they’re also both set up in a magazine-style. I’ve been eyeing that option for a while now. After reading Paranormal Gold I finally decided to implement it. Why? Because I don’t “give it up” all on the first page. If you want to read an article, you have to click through.
Lead Them to the Blog, Not Away – This also kind of goes with #1. I think it’s why Nathan suggested I take down some of my widgets. So many of them lead people away. Nathan, as do I, subscribes to the “give out information” rule of blogging. I thought by being a place with links to ghost tours, other paranormal sites, etc I was providing useful info. I was, but now I understand why Nathan suggested if I want to keep those things to create a separate page for them. It’s all about the Bounce Rate. Unwittingly I was encouraging readers to go elsewhere instead of checking out my site more. So I took down some of the widgets and replaced them with ones that will direct people to other stories within my blog.

We’ll see how this works. If my Bounce Rate stays high, then I have to go back to Square 1 (which comes even before Step 1) and focus on Javier’s suggestion for the best foundation of any blog: content. Because at the end of the day it appears the bounce rate is the best indicator of how good a blog’s content is.

PUT IT IN PRACTICE

Do you know your bounce rate?

What steps do you take to keep it low?

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Haunt Jaunts’ Monetizing Project Using “Paranormal Gold”

Posted in Making Money on July 12th 2010
Tags: Haunt Jaunts, monetizing, Paranormal Gold
2 Comments »

As anyone can tell from my AdSense and Amazon ads on my blogs, I’m interested in my monetizing my blogs. I know people who make money from their blogs, and better money than the pennies I tend to average. Trouble is, I don’t know how they do it. And when I ask them, they’re usually pretty tight lipped.

But one paranormal blogger I admire very much was amazingly generous with his knowledge. His name is Javier Ortega and he runs GhostTheory.

But I have to back up. When I first started asking Javier questions, it was more to know how he got the kind of traffic and hits he did on a daily basis and how he got his blog listed in the News portion of Google Alerts. Because that’s where I’d often see his articles popping up in my Google Alerts: news not blogs.

He said, “You know, I had started a rough draft of an ebook that tells how I not only did that, but also earned money from my blog.”

It took me a while to get around to reading it, but last night I finally did. (He sent me this golden info back in February.)

But I’m actually glad I read it now. What he had to say made more sense to me now than it would have back then.

His knowledge was so priceless I wanted to pay him for it. I went to his blog to see if he had a donate button. I’ve used such buttons to pay people for Wordpress themes, tips, fonts or graphics or what not before. It only seemed fair I should do that for Javier.

Instead I found out he’d finally published his book and called it Paranormal Gold. He’s selling it for only $10.

Which, okay, granted it’s just a short book. Maybe 55 pages. It’s a super fast read. But it’s also loaded with information packed into those 55 pages about how to make money with a blog. And it’s not just the standard tips: SEO, affiliate marketing, blah, blah, blah. He gives details like I’ve never seen before on specifically how to put all those pieces together to maximize earnings.

So now I’m going to revamp Haunt Jaunts and see if I can start upping my earnings. And hopefully I’ll be disciplined about sharing what works and what doesn’t here.

Do you have any neat tips you’ve found useful for monetizing your blog?

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Keeping an Eye on Tontine Massacre’s Social Media Strategy

Posted in Examples on June 28th 2010
Tags: ads, advertising, Facebook, Haunt Jaunts, methods, movies, Tontine Massacre, Twitter
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Today I stumbled across a neat example of an upcoming movie, Tontine Massacre, using social media to drive hype. (Think Paranormal Activity.)

Well, I actually found it via an old school method: an ad. But it was via an ad on my Haunt Jaunts blog. One that cost them, literally, all of three cents to post.

So they combined the old with the new there, but they’ve also been making the Twitter and Facebook rounds.

Tontine Massacre on Facebook

Tontine Massacre on Twitter

It’s their Facebook method I’m most excited and impressed about though.

The ad on Haunt Jaunts led me to their “Watch Trailer” Tontine Massacre Facebook page tab. Because I like both Reality TV shows and horror movies, it automatically appealed to me.

The trailer evoked flashbacks to Paranormal Activity’s trailer a là showing audience reactions during a screening. They might be copycating that technique a smidge there, but hey. If it’s effective, why not? (And I do believe that was a very effective component of Paranormal Activity’s hype machine. It was provocative. You wanted to know what they were watching that made them jump out of their seats.)

However, something fresh that’s entirely their own spin (or at least this is the first time I’m seeing it; I have to admit I don’t follow all that many movies on Facebook): they’re offering a free sneak peek on July 1.

To be granted “exclusive access” all a person has to do is “like” their page. The viewing will be online. If there’s enough demand from that, guess what happens next? Yep, it’ll hit theaters nationwide.

I love an underdog, but ultimately the proof is always in the pudding. Let’s hope they whipped up a tantalizing batch that has people demanding more.