Still Nothing...

No news as far as Tygo is concerned. Argh.

In other news, I started a new campaign (for a new site) on Adwords and on 7Search.com. This PPC company came recommended to me from a conversation I had on Revenue Source recently. That forum is growing pretty quickly and I think that it's going to be quite successful.

Anyway, 7Search seems to have a pretty solid program. Their stats actually work which is a major step above Tygo right now. In addition, it's generally much cheaper than Adwords for the same keywords. There is a $25 minimum investment, but that money goes towards your clicks. There is no startup fee that just disappears.

What I'm interested in is their traffic. It looks like they have a pretty good network of sites that display their ads (it includes Looksmart for example). I need a decent amount of traffic if I'm ever going to make any money with this site so even if the keywords are cheap, it won't be worth it if the clicks are few and far between.

That's one of the greatest advantages of Google and what prompted the creation of a book like Google Cash: There's a ton of people using it everyday.

Better...

Received an e-mail from Tygo yesterday (pretty good response time) about the stats issue. It basically said, "thanks for telling us about that, we're working on it now". The fact that I got a response is encouraging and lifts Tygo's potential test score a bit. Fixing the problem in a timely manner will make or break my future with them. They still have most of a month before my campaign ends, which is their deadline in my mind. Guess I'm in for more waiting.

In the meantime, I've found a brand spankin' new affiliate marketing forum that I like. It's friendly, it's managed by people who know what they're talking about, and the best part is that you can earn "RS Bucks" for posting which you can redeem for prizes. It's called Revenue Source. Check it out.

So far so bad...

Tygo update:

I sent an e-mail to Tygo today wondering if their stats work. The stats page is similar to the Adwords one, except...well...worse. However, you don't really have to do a lot of tweaking with Tygo's setup, so that's not really the problem. The problem is that the stats don't seem to work. I know that even if nobody else searched for my terms (which wouldn't really surprise me at this point), I did. I even clicked one of my ads (since you don't pay per click I figured I would test it).

No impressions show up and no clicks either. Ergh. I'm slightly peeved at the moment, but I will withold judgement until they get back to me. There could be a good reason for this. Anyway, the Tygo test is currently headed for a bad score. Stay tuned for more.

After reading a little article on WebProNews I've decided to try out Tygo.com's search engine ads.

As the article explains, the price for each ad is a fixed rate per month, independent of how many clicks it gets, so you don't have to worry about click fraud. Personally, I'm not all that worried about click fraud anyway because I don't think that I get much of it. There's no way to be completely sure about that, but my Adwords numbers seem to indicate steady and normal click patterns.

Anyway, the lowest price per month is $1 (per keyword) for a little side ad and the highest is $25 for a very prominent top position. I decided to test the service because $1 is really cheap and the service is almost devoid of competition. I made one ad that will show for two different keyword phrases. On Google, clicks for those words would cost me $.21 each so if I can get at least 5 clicks on each ad then I guess it'll be worth it. Hopefully I'll get a lot more than that...

I'm somewhat skeptical of this sort of system, but we'll see how it goes. Expect updates on this one.

Quick

Things have been pretty crazy lately, to say the least. In fact, they still are, so I'm just going to throw out a couple of my favorite links and call it good.

http://www.webpronews.com/ - Ecommerce news and articles.

http://www.webproworld.com/ - An awesome forum from the same people.

http://www.associateprograms.com/discus/index.php - Another great forum that deals mostly with affiliate programs.

Enjoy.