Rory Hansen

Commentary: During the course of the month, I noticed conversions were steadily decreasing. I began to cut back on some of the traffic which was less targetting (ie, the content network traffic) so my costs are slightly below where they were for December. But you’ll notice that my revenue is off by more than 50%. This all adds up to a profit which is about 1/3 of the profit I had back in December.

Why? Really, I dunno. I suppose the easy answer is to suggest that it’s becoming harder and harder to attract users to my site that haven’t already installed Firefox or the Google Toolbar at least once in their past. Either that, or I’m not properly advertising to the right audience.

In any case, if profits decrease again next month, I’ll have to seriously think about whether it’s worth it to keep the Firefox/Google Toolbar site running.

Adsense: $98.05

Yahoo! Marketing: $291.44
Google Adwords: $369.26
MSN AdCenter: $6.24
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $7.40

Referrals: $955.60

Profit: $379.31

So, earlier this week I was looking for information on taxes for small businesses in Canada, specifically Internet-based businesses. I googled and eventually stubled upon the Small Business: Canada section on About.com, which is a great resource!

I ended up bookmarking two links:

• Calculating The Home Business Tax Deduction
• 7 Ways to Make Record Management Easy

I bookmarked the 7 Ways to Make Record Management Easy page because my current method is just not working. Maybe that’s because my current method actually means no method, but that aside, the tips that have been recommended do make sense and aren’t too hard to implement. The page mentions that credit card statements aren’t suitable records for prooving expenses and earnings, which is unfortunate since most of the costs for my Internet-based business are in the form of regular monthly charges to my credit card, such as hosting fees and PPC advertising fees. I guess what this means is that I’ll have to make it a point of actually printing out the invoices from these companies on a fairly regular basis now and then storing those away until tax time.

I also learned that as a sole proprietorship, I can simply fill out one additional form when doing my personal income taxes. That additional form is the T2124 Statement of Business Activities form. And while it looks fairly complicated to fill out, there’s a guide available on the Canada Revenue Agency website called the Business and Professional Income Guide which has step-by-step instructions on how to fill out the T2124 form.

Wanted: Income tax information for Internet-based businesses in Canada

I am looking for books, eBooks, or websites.

If you know of any good ones, please let me know! Revenue from my websites is getting to the point where I’d better cover my bases before the Gov’t comes after me.  : )

Google Adsense: $82.30

Firefox + Google Toolbar Referrals: $2,000.01

Yahoo! Marketing: $435.90
Google Adwords: $539.02
MSN AdCenter: $3.21

Profit: $1,104.18

Cost/earnings breakdown:

Yahoo! Marketing: ($145.96)
Google Adwords: (116.47)
MSN AdCenter: ($0.09)

Referrals: $592.40

Total Profit: $329.88

Milestones Dates:

Nov 2: Started website
Nov 10: Broke $3/day barrier
Nov 20: Broke $10/day barrier
Nov 23: Broke $25/day barrier
Nov 27: Broke $50/day barrier
Nov 28: Broke $75/day barrier
Nov 29: Broke $125/day barrier
Nov 30: Broke $175/day barrier

My goal is to send as much targetted traffic to my Firefox + Google Toolbar website as I can, while keeping the cost per visitor as low as possible. That way, the margins I’m making through Firefox conversions are as large as possible. So, along with Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, I’ve also signed up for MSN AdCenter, in an attempt to buy as much cheap traffic as I can get my hand on.

This is what I’m thinking. If I raise my PPC cost, my ads will appear higher in search results. This will generally send more traffic to my site which should also raise the number of Firefox conversions I get per day. But, on the flipside, I’ll also be paying more for all of this traffic, reducing the profit I’m making. As well, this significantly raises the possibility that I’ll actually LOSE money some days, on occasions when my conversion ratio drops.

So my decision up to this point is to pay just enough so that my ads appear 3rd or 4th or 5th on the search results. Yes, clicks on my ads are much lower when they are positioned like this, but I’m also paying much less per click than if I were to appear 1st or 2nd. So, to squeeze as many clicks as I can while keeping costs pretty low, I’ve had to sign up for other PPC programs. First there was Yahoo! Search Marketing (where I got a $50 credit), then Google Adwords (where I got another credit), and finally, today, signed up for MSN AdCenter (but unfortunately, could not find any promo codes that would work for Canadians). PPC costs seem pretty low when I signed up with my first campaign (between $0.05 and 0.08 per click) at least when compared to Yahoo! Internet Marketing, but we’ll see if the program generates much traffic.

One thing I realize I need to do, is set up specialized landing pages for each of these campaigns so that I can better gauge how I’m doing. Right now, since all the PPC traffic is being directed to the same page, I know that I’m profitting from my PPC participation, but I cannot see if I’m doing better with one program (say, Yahoo! Internet Marketing) when compared to another (like Google Adwords).

Anyway, we’ll leave that for another night.

Just a quick update on my Firefox + Yahoo! Marketting experiment.

When I first started using Yahoo! Marketting 10 days ago, I was only getting a few Mozilla Firefox conversions per day. Adding the revenue from those referrals up, we were looking at just a couple dollars per day– maybe more if I was having a good day.

Now, Yahoo! Marketting is sending about 100 visitors per day my way, at about a dime a visitor. Plus, some of my pages have started to get listed in the various search engines, leading to another 50 or so visitors per day from natural search placement. Total, about 150 page views per day.

With that traffic, I’m getting nearly 1000% more signups than when I first set up the website. Even with the Yahoo! Marketting costs, my figures show that I reap more from those visitors than it costs to get them to my site in the first place. So, although my $50 credit from Yahoo! Marketting is going to expire soon, I’m going to continue with the service.

Wanna start making some money through Firefox referrals on your own homepage? Click on the Google Adsense referral image on the top-right corner of the page. Not only will it take you to the Adsense sign-up page to get started, but you’ll also be helping me earn a few extra bucks through the referral to their service.

A few days ago I saw an offer on Red Flag Deals offering a $50 credit to sign up for Yahoo! Search Marketing, so I decided to take the bait and see how it compared to Google Adwords. The only condition to the deal was that I had to deposit a minimum of $5 to get the account going, but I figured that it was well worth it, since I’d be getting basically $50 for free.

I’ve been using the credit towards advertising my Firefox / Google Toolbar conversion site, using keywords like “download firefox” and “free firefox” and, so far, I’m pretty happy with the results. The ads are currently bringing in between 10 and 15 visitors per day, with about 20% to 25% of those visitors eventually downloading Mozilla Firefox from Google. With those types of click-thru counts, the $50 credit should last more than a month, at which time I should have enough data gathered to see if I’d actually be making money by continuing to pay for the service.

So far it looks like it would be worth it, as over the course of 3 days, I’ve used up approximately $3 of my credit, but have seen increases in Firefox conversions by nearly 300%. Overall, my daily Google Adsense revenue has increased to between $5 and $6 per day from about $2 per day, largely due to the Firefox conversions, so I’m pretty excited about that, too.