I received this mouse a few days ago and have nothing good to say about it.

As you can see, you hold it like a Wii Nun chuck- buttons on the bottom, and a navigation ball on the top.  The concept is great, the reviews seemed okay, but nobody told me the thumb-controlled ball was sticky and non-responsive.  First of all, you have to understand that I use a trackball mouse on my desktop (previously posted image) and it will fly from top-to-bottom, left-to-right, and all over the screen.  Flip your thumb and the ball has a lot of “give” (if that is what you call it).  Nonetheless, the fish mouse ball is its major problem.

I probably won’t return the mouse anytime soon.  I’m thinking about using grease or graphite to get the sticky rollers working better.

So if you are thinking about a hand held mouse, then stop already.  The whole reason I needed something like it in the first place was for my laptop.  I actually changed my opinion on the mini-mouse and bought one for about $30 that works wonderfully.

Every since I began working in the PPC industry I am amazed that I learn something new every day. Lately I have been putting a lot of thought into spending money on campaigns and how to get the most of what I spend.

With my current process I setup a test for an offer, throw some ads up, and then see what happens. At first I was tracking all the stuff I had to track and optimizing what I had to optimize. However, after about the second time of doing this, I noticed that there was a lot more information that I should have been keeping track of than I was.

I have read a few times that you should track everything, but always took the advice with a grain of salt. But once I looked at the money I was spending on PPC and not feeling like I had enough in terms of research to show from it, I changed my mind and my process. For example, if you have two different Ad copies and you delete one that isn’t performing very well, maybe you should log the bad Ads so that you can learn what isn’t working. As opposed to just trashing the Ad and creating another Ad to test against the good Ad. The same goes for landing pages. Put all your bad landing pages in a folder and every so often go back and analyze what you are doing wrong.

After all, you are spending money to show both Ads, so you might as well get your money’s worth from both. Think about it, after optimizing the campaign a few times and building up an excel sheet of a handful of bad Ads, wouldn’t it be nice to go take a quick look at it and see what ISN’T working?

If you think you are wasting a bunch of money on PPC, just keep in mind that there shouldn’t really be any “wasted” money in PPC. All that money you just gave the search engine and didn’t get any commissions was for research data- don’t disregard it or throw it away.

The thing I am quickly learning in PPC is that the sooner you learn from your mistakes and correct them, the more money you make. A lot of PPC marketers say that you have to lose money before you can make money – but why? You have to test something, spend money to do it- then learn what you forgot, didn’t know, and what you could have done better.
I’m still intermediate to PPC and still learning a lot about the industry and I hope this information helps you.
-God Speed-

I noticed early this morning that Yahoo Search Marketing went down around 4am and about 20 minutes later it came back up.  However, later today I logged in and noticed that I only had one click and only a handful of impressions.  Now I know that I should have had a ton more impressions by this time of the day, so I logged in Tracking202 and noticed there were clicks coming through.  So I shoot an e-mail off to Yahoo because I can’t get a hold of any other affiliates to see how their accounts were doing.  To my surprise, I get a phone call from Yahoo to inform me of the outage.

Now I have two takes on what just happened.  Either Yahoo is calling each and every person with a problem instead of e-mailing them - which seems highly inefficient.  Or they are calling everyone as sort of a customer service move to show that they care.

I did a couple searches, hadn’t checked any forums, but couldn’t find anything about the outage.  You’d think that such a large company would send out e-mails or at least post on their own blog about this outage.  In the end, it would have been a lot less leg work on my part.

First of all, I apologize that I haven’t posted in a few days, but I had to “go off the grid” this week and get some work done and do some reading.

Do you ever feel like your hard work isn’t showing any results, you are losing a little hope, and in the back of your mind you are contemplating changing direction?  Suddenly out of nowhere, something you did shows hope.  That little prayer you made to see some result was answered and something positive happened.  That scattered puzzle in your mind comes together a little, and you have proof that what you are doing is going to produce results.

This past week for me has produced a coctail of these feelings and I just wanted to share with you some hopeful advice.  If you find yourself losing hope and wanting to give up and start again- DON’T.  Stick it out a little longer and if you are passionate enough, you will undoubtedly see something happen.   Don’t let all your hard work go to waste.  Yes, sometimes you have to overcome pride and learn from your mistakes.  But other times you have to get your knees dirty, your knuckles blooding, and stick it out.

I apologize if I got you too excited with the headline, but I just felt like one of those kids selling newspapers on the street corner in old New York.

Have you ever had an idea that you felt was so great that you should tell everyone you know?  Yet, you know that it is such a good idea, that you might want to keep it on the down low for a little while until it takes shape.  Well my friends, I have such an idea, but that is not what I’m going to talk about.  However, I just wanted to address that feeling to tell the world that you get when the idea first comes to you.

That best way I have found to help myself keep the idea secret is to journal about it, write about it, and express it in anyway I can.  The idea usually stays in my head because I am trying to develop it only in my head.  When I start to build the idea in another medium, it is still in my mind, but not completely occupying it.  This way I can hold off talking about the idea to other people until I think it is to a point that they will completely understand it.  That gives me an idea for another post…