Google’s smartpricing and quality score updates pretty much ruined my parade of $20 revenue days. Minimum bids increased drastically meaning two things: 1) profit margin shrunk dramatically and, 2) this lower profit margin was applied to a significantly smaller amount of traffic. Couple this with the Grand Opening advertising campaign of my forum and what do you have? A net loss.

Revenue

$206.06 (adsense)
$10.50 (azoogle – 1 Dada Mobile ringtone lead)

Expenses

$370.27 (adwords)

Profit

NEGATIVE $153.71 (OUCH)

Explanation

This loss comes from 2 major blunders. Of these expenses, $130 was spent on a new sports related site for which the adsense code was missing! That meant I had no chance to recover these expenses. Another $100 was spent on driving membership for my new forum… I yielded only 40 members… that’s paying $2.50/member. That’s pricey. In addition to this, I wasn’t faced with the new google terms until mid way through the month… things could have been a LOT worse and I’m hoping they aren’t that way in December.

I lowered my maximum bid on many of my campaigns and as a result have seen much lower traffic, but I’m trying to keep things in perspective. Driving cheap traffic is pretty much the bottom line of everything. I’ve tried 7search and searchfeed, neither of which get ANY traffic for me. I’ve got about 1000 keywords in there and 25 bucks waiting to be spent, but the clicks are never used. It’s a mystery. I’m thinking about signing up for MSN and Yahoo just for this reason – at least I know they’ll drive SOME traffic.

I’m also working on getting quality backlinks to my new forum, which has been somewhat of a challenge. I’m doing it whitehat style, for obvious reasons.

On top of this, I’ve shelled out nearly another $1000 to have a couple more sites put up any my designer is MIA with the money in his bank. I’m getting a little worried. My plan to have a few dozen sites up by the end of December is looking bleak. I’ve been facing bad luck, seeing black cats and standing in thunderstorms with no umbrella. Where is my breath of fresh air?!?!

I have some great ideas but can’t execute because I have a lack of funds. In addition, these are more “long-term” projects and I need to see some immediate return. I’m going to be putting together a few arbitrage 2.0 projects over the coming week. That means more content and some outgoing links but not quite “mini-sites”. My existing network of about 40 related arbitrage pages brought in a decent amount so I’ll be updating these for ‘arbitrage 2.0′ if you will.

In any case, I need some goodluck and fortune this month, so cross your fingers and say a prayer that some light shines on me in December! Thanks, I’ll need it!

Here goes nothing…

PS – my birthday is very very soon!