Where are YOU struggling?

I see quite a few people on here earning next to nothing with ppc in general. Where are you struggling most? Is it in niche selection? Getting targeted traffic? Just wondering as I would like to write up a few articles and give some pointers. I made over 100K last year with yahoo ypn and adsense. The money is out there and more of you should be making some of it

 

YPN and AdSense are no problem for cash. Affiliate programs on the other hand...

 

for me it is my sites subject, google say its not a suitable topic *sigh*

 

I started a similar thread for affiliate programs. I have spent this year, and most of last on the affiliate market. I firmly believe that there is more money to be made there than with ppc networks. Right now i'm making a few thousand a month with cj alone.

 

Are they the sites in your signature?

 

Very few people struggling with the niche to find the high paying one..

very few people struggling to get the high CTR...

But, A large number of people struggling with the TRAFFIC, can you give some valuable points on getting REAL TRAFFIC...

 

In a high paying niche you are unlikely to get traffic from natural search because by the very nature of things, the highest paying niche will be the one with the most competition. I spent about two years doing ppc arbitrage. With arbitrage you find related low competition keywords and redirect the traffic to a high paying keyword page. This works great, but it gets expensive. Now what I do is use software to build tens of thousands of pages based on these lower competition keywords, then redirect the traffic to the related higher paying keyword. In the end it does exactly the same thing that ppc arbitrage does, but I don't have the expense of using adwords or overture to pay for the traffic. It works quite well

 

I agree with the fact you can make more with affiliate programs than adsense or ppc.

Most people use adsense because they think it is fast easy money and find out that is not the case at all. Most people never make the money they hoped for.

 

I'm mostly struggling with SERP issues, and getting hits from other places beyond Google (which in itself is a very small number of hits...especially if I drop Adwords).

 

It is the traffic. One of my niche sites currently isn't using anything from CJ but once the traffic picks up - I will definitely incorporate affiliate to bring in more. But for now it is the traffic - well, the site is less then a month old

 

Waiting for traffic from the serps is an ongoing process as everyone here should already know. Personally I build cloaked sites with thousands of pages, then redirect that traffic to my sites while i'm waiting for google, yahoo, and msn to send some traffic. This way I can start making money from day one instead of waiting months to see the results. Think ppc arbitrage, but without paying for the traffic.

 

I've been doing that with social networking sites, and I had my sever host link to my page (he's PR6), as well as my CMS's home page link to me, etc. It's bringing in very minimal hits. Very frustrating. It seems like if you aren't listed on DMOZ or any big directory, it goes at a snail's pace.

 

I never bother with ANY directories for any of my sites. It sounds like your content or your keywords may be off target if you are seeing minimal results. A pr 6 link should be enough to get things moving rather quickly. I usually post a single link on a pr4 site of mine and have seen pages indexed and sending initial traffic within a few days.

 

I wish Webmaster would update so that I can see the results...it seems like it updates every 2 weeks, and when it does - the backlinks section shows no change.

I recently re-wrote my meta description and keywords, as well as my front page.

 

I'm struggling to attract a reasonable amount of visitors and acheive a decent CTR. With the way my site is set up, I really expected more.

 

Traffic.

 

So almost every reply comes down to traffic. Well, here is what I do step by step. It isn't for everyone, but it works for me.

I go out and register 30 or 40 .info domains. They are 88 cents a piece where I get them so it isn't a big deal.

I then insert the domains into the software in my signature. This only takes a few seconds per domain. Select the url you would like the traffic to redirect to and click go.

Next we figure out our keyword to target for the first site. If I were targeting blue widgets I would run the term through some keyword tools around the net. The adwords tool for starters, then any number of other free ones out there. This gives me a huge list of keywords related to the one i'm targeting, but long tail so they are easier to rank well for.

Now I combine these keywords into a csv file or simply put them in a text editor. The software has a csv import utility so I just pop my csv in there, select the domain to add the keywords to, and click go. (don't forget to put the redirect url for each keyword) Otherwise I can use the many keywords one use feature to redirect a bunch of url's to a single page or the many keywords many uses to redirect individual keywords to individual pages. At any rate it builds the pages for you so you just sit back and relax.

That's it. Get a couple links to each of these sites and move on to building the next one. These sites rank well because they target very exact keywords. These keywords may only receive 1-10 searches a day each, but add that up across a few thousand pages on a few hundred domains and you can see the power. I've got almost a half million pages indexed and ranking in yahoo alone using the above.

 

The idea is pretty cool, but why you charge $69/month instead of a one time fee...

 

I find it hard to get real traffic in too..

 

If there is a better definition of what "spam" is and how spam sites are created, I would be hard pressed to find one

On the other hand this approach definitely works and brings money, so I guess it is down to your personal understanding of what Internet is, what it means to you as a WebCitizen and whether to use or abuse it.