Over the past couple of days I've been debating the direction I want to go with internet marketing. For the past 3 months I have been doing paid traffic. Spent on average about $800/month.How much did I make back?Not nearly as much, lol....that's ok though. It was a learning process. I was testing out a bunch of creatives figuring out what worked what didn't work etc...but that's not the point of this post. I'm pretty happy that I spent that money on traffic instead of buying another "shiny object".

A New Beginning

I am close to finishing a chapter in my life and I'm about to begin a new one. I've been working at a job for the past 8 years. It's had it's ups and downs. Sometimes I really like it, other times I really dislike it. Overall, it's helped me pay the bills and fund my internet marketing adventures. :)About a year ago I decided to leave my job and go to college. What ultimately led me to the decision is that I didn't like the stress involved with the job that I had. I also didn't like constant changes in work schedules and the amount of time I spent traveling away from home. Overall, it's a pretty chaotic job.Fast forward to now and I am currently 3 months away from my last day on the job and starting college. I know most likely my income will drop, which I have planned for. As a result, that's less money that I can put into internet marketing which is both a good and bad thing.It's good because it'll make me be smarter with my money, bad because I'll have less money to use.

The Meat of This Post

I've been thinking lately how do I want to proceed at this point. Do I want to focus solely on SEO and article marketing?orDo I want to continue to do paid traffic on a smaller budget?Neither one of them is option that I like very well. I can be a pretty impatient person. I want results NOW, lol. Article marketing doesn't seem like it gets a whole lot of traffic very quickly. It seems like it takes awhile to get the traffic to come through. At least that's been my experience, but I can't say I've put an honest 100% effort into article marketing.Doing paid traffic on a smaller budget wasn't too appealing because I would be getting less traffic than I would with a bigger budget resulting in it taking more time to get statistically significant data.With paid traffic I was thinking about doing a budget of $5/day. Which is $150/month. And in case you're wondering, "Yes, I do like to point out the obvious." :PAnyways, where was I? $150/month...oh yes. I remember reading somewhere that either Kyle or Carson I can't remember which started out by borrowing a girlfriends credit card and spending $5 a day. At least that's what I can remember. I might have gotten stories mixed up with some other people.While pondering the $5 a day budget I started thinking about how much traffic that could get me. Right now I'm paying CPM. In case you don't know, when you pay CPM you're paying for every 1000 impressions. If you bid $0.50 CPM then you'll pay fifty cents for every thousand impressions your ad gets.The advantage to CPM bidding over pay per click bidding is that if you know how to create really high CTR ads then you can get traffic at a cheaper cost than pay per click. If I'm bidding $0.50 CPM at a .1% CTR I'm paying fifty cents a click. A .1% CTR means I get 1 click every thousand impressions.Now if I get 2 clicks in that 1000 impressions I have a .2% CTR and I'm effectively paying twenty five cents per click. The higher your CTR the cheaper you're getting your clicks for.However, a high CTR isn't necessarily the end all be all. If your ad gets a high CTR because it generates curiosity which causes people to click through it might actually have a lower conversion rate than an ad with a lower CTR. Meaning that just because people click on ad doesn't necessarily mean they take the action you want them to after they click. The action being purchasing a product, signing up for a site, opting into your autoresponder, etc...Based on bidding a $1.00 CPM with a CTR of .1% and a budget of $150 I could get approximately 150 clicks to my landing page.The bid is pretty high and the CTR is on the lower side, but I like to plan for the worst. If I either bid $0.50 CPM or doubled my CTR to .2% I would get approximately 300 clicks to my landing page.I could potentially get anywhere from 150 clicks to 300 clicks each month with a $150/month budget.Then the thought process went to well what can 150-300 clicks get me?I've never done very well direct linking with paid traffic I've never been able to get it profitable(see beginning of post). The highest conversion rate I've gotten was less than 1% direct linking and with spending $150 for those clicks that puts me in the red assuming the commission was $50 and was not a recurring membership commission.At this point I was totally considering not doing paid traffic at all.Then I started thinking of those clicks as people. I also remembered my squeeze pages and autoresponder that I haven't been doing anything with. I've sent paid traffic to it in the past and I got about a 5% opt in rate which is pretty shitty, but it's somewhere to start and can always be improved.150-300 visitors to an opt in page that gets at the worst a 5% opt in rate results in 7-15 subscribers each month. How much money I make from them is unknown at this point. I've never fully implemented email marketing or followed through with it. As a result, I don't know what the lifetime value of my subscribers are.However getting 7-15 subscribers each month to my email list excites me because there is the potential there to make back that $150 I spent in advertising and more.I think what I'm going to do going forward is set a budget of $150/month for paid traffic. Once I spend that for the month I'm done. No "IFs" "ANDs" or "BUTs" about it.At the same time I think I'm going to do a little bit of article marketing as well. However, this time instead of using the article as a backlink to try to get the site it's linking to higher in the SERPs I'm just going to send the traffic from the article to a squeeze page.To answer the question: "What is 150 clicks worth?"It all depends on you and what you're doing with them. And stop thinking of them as clicks. Think of them as living, breathing human beings because that's what they really are. I have to constantly remind myself of that.Till next time,Thomas