My Plans For 2009

As is typical for me I’m a bit late posting about my plans for 2009. This really isn’t a post about my goals and certainly not one about lame resolutions. I’m still working through New Year’s resolutions from 1986. I think striving to make improvements in one’s life and overcoming obstacles and bad habits is a 365-day a year effort.

At the planning level, things are a whole lot broader and it came down to identifying my strengths and weaknesses. I took a self-assessment test that Jerry West linked to on his blog. To be honest, I already had a pretty good idea what mine were as I think will all do. However, taking the self-assessment test confirmed things for me.

My primary and secondary strengths:

1. Analysis
2. Teaching

You can really only focus on 2 strengths so it’s nice that the test breaks it out like that. My weaknesses were in management and striving to win. I readily agree with the former, but have a hard time accepting the latter, but maybe sometimes the truth, if it’s not what you want to hear, is difficult to accept. More about this later.

Getting back to my strengths, my primary one, analysis, meshes quite well with my goal to focus even more on the PPC side of my business. I actually do enjoy tracking and massaging the stats in Excel for my PPC campaigns. I know this kind of detail drives a lot of “Type A” personalities nuts – just like a lot of the “techy” stuff does.

I can get completely absorbed in it.

I plan to expand my PPC effort by finally wading into the CPA pond. This area has received a great deal of attention lately, particularly in light of the hugely hyped “Arbitrage Conspiracy” launch (don’t worry, I’m not promoting it). If the CPA landscape wasn’t competitive enough, it should get even more so in the wake of this launch.

However, like most hot trends, the herd will eventually peel away after experiencing initial failure and the cold realization of Google Slaps and inflated click costs. This is why I think I’m positioned about as well as I can be to take on CPA promotions. I harbor no illusions about CPA being easy – if anything, it’s probably more difficult than affiliate CPS offers that I promote with CJ and other affiliate networks.

Perhaps going in battle-tested and without illusions is the best preparation.

My peripheral plans for 2009 are to hedge my PPC efforts with expanding my SEO and organic traffic generation strategies and efforts. Being dependent on Google Adwords for 99.9% of my traffic keeps me up at night. Yes, my plans also include expanding into MSN Adcenter and YSM, but the amount of traffic available from those two combined doesn’t even put a dent in what’s available from Google despite how well traffic from the other two may convert.

So at least initially, I will be using Adwords to generate traffic to CPA offers. I think my thin advantage will be the experience I’ve garnered from doing PPC for CPS offers in terms of niche and keyword research, tracking, and most importantly, a system for quickly building out Google-friendly landing pages.

Like most all PPC affiliates out there, I’d love to “Google Cash” (direct link) all day long if it was possible.

If one of my identified weaknesses is not driving hard enough to bag the win, then that does jibe with my desire to pull up my overall conversion rate for my PPC campaigns. I’ve now got this in big letters on the white board next to my desk: “Conversions!”. I’m now looking at doing more split-testing of my landing pages, which is a huge pain in the ass, but that’s probably why a lot of PPC affiliates lose money rather than rake it in.

Concluding with my secondary strength, which is teaching, yes, I can see this being a minor strength of mine. I do like to tell people about things I have some experience with, but most people don’t seem to want to listen for too long. That’s fine, I’ll just look around for the next victim and see if I receive a more positive response to my pontifications. So in that vein, I will make an effort to share my experiences, both the successes and the failures, with CPA right here within the pages of this blog.