I have recently been getting more into doing media buys.  I think its a great way to open the floodgates of traffic, and you can go barter a deal with ANYONE who has space on their site.

One thing that has bugged me is the fact that all the 3rd party ad servers are quite expensive, like $500/month to rent.  I wanted a solution so that I could still do professional media buys, but by hosting the ad server platform myself.

After doing just a bit of research and asking around, I came to the conclusion that OpenX would be the best route to take.  OpenX is a free open source project so you don’t have to worry about any hard hitting costs when starting fresh with this stuff.

I dug through OpenX the last few days playing around with it and I would have to say its a pretty powerful script.  One of the things I wondered was if it could handle tracking pixels, which I was a bit surprised to see that it does.  This will help me automate some of the things I’m doing right now even more.

I decided to test out OpenX a little bit by adding some "zones" to a few of my websites.  One of the sites I integrated this into is this blog.  The reason I added this ad section was to start to do some testing with AdSense and some of its competitors for a case study that I will be conducting.  The adserver will keep track of all the data and optimize the ads according to the best performer.  I will be testing quite a few different things, but I had to get started so I got the adserver setup and two different companies in rotation: Google AdSense and Bidvertiser.

If you use OpenX and have any good resources or tips, please post a comment and let me know!  If there are any companies similar to Google’s Adsense that you would like me to include in this monetization study, please also comment here with the company name and any other info!

The last few weeks I have been going bezerk with attempting new ways (or ways unfamiliar to me) with purchasing traffic.  One thing that I have been playing with much more is Media Buying.  I wasn’t aware of how many people you can get your ads out to with meda buying.  I also like many things about it like you can cut deals to get better advertising prices.  You are also getting loads of traffic compared to one of the many other routes out there…

You may be wondering why I’m worried about such mass amounts of traffic more lately?

Well, there is a simple answer to that, I have now actually entered a few "niches" and have had some actual physical products manufactured for these niches.  I was getting tons of traffic just using the simple means of promotion I had used earlier, but since everything was rolling a good profit at that level, I wanted to ramp things up with a few insertion orders.

I would have to say that so far, I am liking this media buying process.  The only downfall is you need to have some money to put down at first.  Some of these buys can be pretty expensive compared to throwing up some campaigns with just PPC or whichever way you are promoting offers.

If anyone has any decent info or tips related to media buying, please leave a comment, I’m interested to hear others opinions in this area!

Until next time, best of luck guys!

So I’m sure many of you wonder why in the hell it took me so long to update you all since my last post.  The truth is this is not such a simple answer. 

What happened was that I started playing around with the contextual traffic I had posted about earlier and it made me really start to see that I need to not be so narrow minded on traffic generation.  I started testing tons of different sources (not contextual traffic, but any source of traffic I could buy) to get traffic and ran into a lot of little networks and companies to purchase traffic from way cheaper than using adwords like most everyone else has been doing.  So in the process of testing out all these new sources I also was testing out my tracking script to make sure and nail out any of the bugs in case we really do end up releasing this sucker to the public. 

So during allll of this I also ran across a lot of really good campaigns and more than quadrupled my overall revenue and profit levels for March.  This month was a pretty decent month for me and I realized how big this world really is.  There are literally thousands of different ways to generate traffic…and I’m starting to see that more and more.  When I originally started out with internet marketing my plan was to master ppc.  Since then, my goals have changed however.  I am now not as concerned about ppc, although that is still a big concern…I want to move my focus to finding much cheaper/better converting/more volume methods to finding quality traffic generation.

I’m noticing a much easier to recognize pattern of users for each traffic source also.  Its now much easier for me to see an offer and know which source it will probably perform well on and which it will perform poorly on.  It can really be hit or miss on making something work.  It’s starting to come around to simply testing and tracking everything.  When you can start mass testing and tracking, you can find the traffic sources that perform strong with a certain offer in a matter of minutes to a couple hours usually, depending on the volume you receive.

I’m unlike many internet marketers, which I also think is one of the reasons I am succeeding in this game.  Most marketers get very emotional over their campaigns.  They think they can make anything work or find that one keyword that will start pouring in the profits.  The fact of the matter is although you MAY be able to expand enough to find that special keyword, the odds are not in your favor that it will happen.  Not only that, but why waste your time and money trying to make it work.  You should be testing as many offers and sources as you can.  Its all like a puzzle, you have to piece together the traffic source with the right offer and the right types of people, THAN when you find that match you will see some major dough roll in.  DO NOT get emotional with your campaigns, if it isn’t making money, DROP IT….don’t continue to try and make it work.

I also want to let you all know, my computer is dead and dell’s replacement won’t be here for like 10-15 more days.  This has been a bit of a good thing as I was becoming glued to my computer throwing up campaigns and analyzing the data all day and night.  I will try to keep you all updated but realize the next couple weeks I will continue to post but it may not be everyday like it regularly is.

I want to really try and ramp up my reader base for April so I will try to get some pretty good quality posts going on this month.  Also, I get a lot of questions from people so I am thinking maybe once a week or so I will just post up a couple questions from readers and answer them.  If you have anything you would like an answer to just use the contact me form and send me your question.  If I don’t post it on the blog, I will get back to you with the answer, I am pretty good about answering everyone.