Newbie Learning – 8 Months In

byrevansca

166 followers

Updated 4 years ago

Newbie Learning – Launched, Indexed, Commissioned, and Crashed… Oh My!

Yes, I am a Newby, with a capital 'N'. Just 8 months in and trying to get back on track to stay the course…

I was able from when I first got started to get my first website launched within my first month. I consider that to have been my first goal accomplished. I had followed the initial training, step-by-step pretty much without faltering to achieve that goal, and within the second month, I had been notified that a couple of the pages and posts on my website had been indexed by Google. That, for me, was goal #2 accomplished.

Both of these two goals had been goals but beyond getting a website launched, I really didn’t appreciate what that second goal was until, of course, the training taught me about indexing.

So, where am I now, six months after becoming indexed?

I reported to my ‘sponsor, Tim McKinlay, when he checked on me at my 6-month point that I had received some Amazon Affiliate commissions - although not enough to get crazy over – only shortly after to be dropped by Amazon as I wasn’t meeting their minimum requirements. This was actually the second time I had been dumped by Amazon, and the first was for a violation I wasn’t aware even of.

I had chosen to recognize a website that I had an interest in promoting and so I had copied-and-pasted a tips list that they had posted on their website, given credit to where it had come from, and also posted the URL. Because I had posted the copy-and-paste text, which was, of course, 100% verbatim, my website was flagged, and my Affiliate account was summarily terminated. I contacted Amazon Affiliate support – and this was during the first phase of CoViD-19 restrictions – and was advised to reapply and be given a new account. That I did but, oddly enough, my early commission-earnings success has yet to be repeated.

… and that leads me to my next step of learning. What are Clicks and Impressions?

- Clicks and Impressions

Amazon describes Impressions as 'An impression happens when your ad is displayed and is seen by a shopper'. However, you don’t pay for impressions. You only pay when shoppers actually click on your ad. This is referred to as a “pay per click” or “cost per click” model.

Your ad will continue to display until enough shoppers click on your ad to exhaust your daily budget. Each time a shopper clicks on your ad, the bid amount will be deducted from the daily budget. Here’ s a simplified example: if your bid amount is set to $1 and your daily budget is $10, the maximum number of clicks your ad can receive is 10.

So: Daily Budget ($10) ÷ Bid amount ($1) = Number of clicks per day (10)

Once enough shoppers have clicked your ad to reach your daily budget, your campaign will pause until the following day when your daily budget will ‘reset’.

From Facebook, I have learned that rather than Clicks and Impressions, they reference ‘Reach’ and ‘Engagement’ and provide a cost per Engagement rather than a cost per click, and additionally provide ‘Post Reactions’ and ‘Post Shares’ counts.

For example, a $25 ad spend on Facebook reportedly gave me 305 reaches, 62 engagements, 61 Reactions, and 1 share.

Stats-wise, Insights reported that Facebook had been the source for 16 of the connections made to my website, with Google Analytics reporting only 5 clicks over roughly the same period.

One thing is for sure, the learning has to continue if I am to succeed in my mission to successfully earn a recurring income from this venture, and so the training must continue for I am still far from being trained. There are many intermediate goals to be identified, tasks to be worked on, actions to be executed, and implementations completed before this mission will be accomplished...