As mentioned in one of the other AJ posts I recently bought 1M clicks from AJ and promised to provide an update, well I'm 1/10 of the way through and here are the facts so far:
02/03 - Bought 1M clicks for $550
02/03 - Loaded 472 hosted galleries from 1 sponsor into a single campaign/program. Sponsor is one of the many full DVD download sites available, galleries have nice quality thumbshot screensgrabs, with DVD title, summary and pornstar names available for spidering. Also added (dvd, movies, download, pornstars, full) as my 5 chosen program/campaign keywords. Categorised as "General Hardcore", no gallery specific keywords added, maximum 3 galls/day scheduled, several galleries disqualified for already being run by others.
03/03 - campaign starts
10/03 - approx. 100K clicks delivered, stats:
~12.5K/day (not bad!)
clicks to sponsor - 586 which represents a 0.006% CTR! Something seriously wrong here!
1 sale @ $38
38-55 = $17 loss on first 100K
Who do I blame? Well firstly myself, this was a fairly deliberate approach to see if there was easy money to be made on AJ, I was deliberatly lazy with my choice of a generic sponsor, just dumped their entire hosted gallery collection into AJ and slapped-up a few keywords that were vaguely appropriate. All in all I spent about 30 mins on this first 100K and the results speak for themselves. I also feel some blame has to lie with the sponsor for that appalling CTR, if traffic is getting to the galleries they should at least be able to get a percentage point or 2 through to their site on design merit alone?!?
Conclusion: No easy money for the lazy. Which to be fair is what AJ have said all along.
Anyway learnt quite a bit and now onto the next 100K and some new tactics to be employed, dropping current sponsor (no really?!?), uploading new hosted galleries from a niche sponsor(s), spend some time on keyword research (1-2 hrs max), let it run....
Any comments, advice, sponsor suggestions, text-heavy hosted gallery suggestions greatfully appreciated.
Cheers.