My max budget on cost per hit is $1.00, so I am hesitant to again increase my limit on what I will pay the search engines for a clickthrough. I don’t want to pay more, but at the same time I would like to spend more! I would happily double my advertising spend if the money were well spent.

I think it is time to get creative on my advertising. I will try to find an alternative source of advertising for Live-Answers.com. In the meantime, here are the hit results for last week, broken down by category.

Hits Last Week for Live-Answers.com Experts by Category

The number of impressions purchased last week was approximately the same, at 2.2 million. The number of clickthroughs on those impressions, however, dropped from 584 to 320. Our advertising clickthrough rate last week dropped precipitously.

One change I made at the beginning of last week was to reduce the amount of money I would pay for two of the most popular questions:

How can otherworldly contact transform my life?

and

What’s the acceleration of gravity?

I added to how much I would pay for other questions, trying to even out the traffic on the site.  The end result was a far lower clickthrough rate.

I will try boosting my payouts on the other questions this week, to see if I can drive a bit more traffic.

Hits Last Week for Live-Answers.com Experts by Category

More broadly, I purchased 2.2 million impressions from Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, resulting in 584 new visitors to Live-Answers.com. Those 584 visitors clicked through to expert websites 121 times.

Here are the hits last week by category:

Hits Last Week for Live-Answers.com Experts by Category

Check out the tables below showing hits over the four days prior to advertising compared to hits during the three days of (very small) advertising. The site generated 3 hits over four days prior to advertising versus 27 hits over the three days of advertising.

Those three days of advertising were very light — I spent $9.70 on 88 clickthroughs over those three days. This week, I will try to spend $120 on advertising. Lets see if we can get this place humming.

27 Hits during three days of advertising

3 Hits during previous four days with no advertising

• How do I best use the Internet to market my business?
• How can I use social media to make money for my business?
• How do I find a great business coach, mentor or counselor?
• How do I handle a difficult boss?
• What are the HR compliance issues for a new business?
• How do I get started in freelance writing?
• How do I set up a great blog?
• How do I write a great resume?
• How do I get my manuscript published?

• Do I have enough money to retire?

• What are the best solutions for identity theft?
• How do I find a great technology consultant?

• How do I find a great personal injury lawyer?

• How do I save money on my taxes?

• What’s the acceleration of gravity?
• How do I get into a great college?

• What are the best performance enhancements for a sports car?
• How do I save money when buying a car?

• What can I do about my hair loss?
• What independent boutiques would you recommend?
• What is a great skin care brand for sensitive skin?

• Can I practice yoga even though I am not flexible?
• What do I need to do to heal from my breakup?
• How can I find the right person to love?
• What are the resources for gifted children?
• How do I find the spiritual life coach that is right for me?
• How can otherworldly contact transform my life?

• How should I plan my meals to lose weight and get healthy?
• What alternative medicines can help me live a healthier and happier life?

• How do I create a custom wedding ceremony?
• How do I design the perfect home for me.

• How do I pick a dog trainer?

Its not working, however, because the experts here at Live-Answers.com are different from the experts over at Justanswer.com. The experts here are process and relationship experts while the experts there are quick fix experts.

Consultative Sales versus Regular Sales

Its kind of like the difference between consultative sales and regular sales.  A consultative sale involves a much higher understanding of a client’s individual needs, and it has a correspondingly longer lead time.  Live-Answers.com experts are by-and-large looking to make consultative sales.

Many of the Justanswer.com PPC questions are detail oriented, offering to answer questions on individual brand names or specific diseases.  Live-Answers.com experts are looking to answer much broader questions.

For example, the Live-Answers.com pet experts tell me that their most commonly asked question is “How do I pick a dog trainer?”  Justanswer.com advertises answers to questions like “How do I stop my dog from urinating on the carpet?”

We’ll do it a little differently

What this means for the Live-Answers.com advertising campaign is that I have to target much softer questions than Justanswer.com targets.  I will advertise on these more general questions and see if I can bring traffic.

The success of the initial advertising campaign on “How do I write a great resume?” is actually a good model for what I should be doing throughout the site.

I will try to create PPC programs for 40 of the frequently asked questions offered by the experts.  If they can all be as successful as the “How do I write a great resume?” campaign, we’ll drive a ton of traffic throughout the Live-Answers.com website.

More broadly, websites I classify as Q&A (see the tables below) have grown more than 60% during the last year, to over 126 million combined unique visitors during September of 2009, up from 78 million combined visitors during September of 2008.

Paid Q&A websites are only 4.9% of that total, with free websites garnering 95.1% of the unique visitors.  Paid websites are tiny compared to the free websites, but there’s still a huge opportunity here.  I compare it to the song download world.  Free downloads through peer-to-peer networks are estimated to be 90% of the total number of songs downloaded.  That hasn’t stopped the iTunes music store — which captures the vast majority of the 10% of downloaded songs that are paid for — from being a huge success.

A closer look at JustAnswers.com

So who is the iTunes music store of the Q&A website space?  At this point, it is JustAnswer.com. As you can see in the tables below, JustAnswer.com dominates the paid Q&A website space with 4.6 million visitors during the month of September. The next largest paid website is Keen.com, with a much smaller 0.7 million visitors last month.

Clearly, JustAnswer.com has done a great job in our chosen area of paid Q&A websites. Their success is due to a combination of factors, including a clean user interface and an intelligent business model. A visitor to JustAnswer.com is immediately aware of the business proposition — ie. we will answer your question quickly and personally for a small fee.

Importantly, JustAnswer.com does a superb job with the search engines. They spend a ton of money on CPC advertising, and they have opened up the completed questions on their website to gather in the free traffic generated by organic keywords.

Let me explain quickly what that means. Every question answered by the experts on JustAnswer.com is catalogued and published on the web for non-paying users to peruse. If your question has already been answered, JustAnswer.com allows the major search engines to catalogue it. Only new questions need be paid for, theoretically. This provides great advertising for the experts and personalized, paid service offered by JustAnswer.com.

Here on Live-Answers.com, we will have a difficult time following JustAnswers.com in the area of organic traffic. Because we send visitors directly to the experts’ native websites, we are unable to monitor or save the interaction between experts and clients generated by our efforts. In addition, Google.com specifically refuses to grant keyword status to directories like Live-Answers.com. So it is very difficult for us to generate organic keywords.

We can, however, try to mimic JustAnswer.com’s success in running a good paid search program. We’ll be a bit smaller than JustAnswers.com, of course. But even slimmed down to 1/100th the size of JustAnswers.com, Live-Answers.com will generate a ton of useful free traffic for the experts here.

The Question and Answer Websites

Let me explain the columns in the tables below showing top Q&A websites. Monthly unique visitor data is pulled from the Compete.com website. Click on the values for September, 2009 to see up to data visitor stats from Compete.com. Pay-per-Click advertising statistics and number of organic keywords are pulled from the KeywordSpy.com website. Click on the PPC values and see up to date advertising metrics for each website from KeywordSpy.com.

Paid Question and Answer Websites – Ranked by Unique Visitors in September, 2009

Free Question and Answer Websites – Ranked by Unique Visitors in September, 2009

091024 15:33:24 InnoDB: Operating system error number 23 in a file operation.
InnoDB: File name .\ibdata1
InnoDB: File operation call: ‘Windows aio’.
InnoDB: Cannot continue operation.

If you find that elucidating, congratulations. I published the error on the Microsoft and MySQL free forums, to no avail. Then, I offered to pay an expert on JustAnswers.com $65 for explaining why my database would not start.  He was basically as clueless as I was, so I now have a $65 credit over at JustAnswers.com.  They make you pay for your answers in advance, but the expert does not get paid unless you are satisfied with the answer.

On a whim, I ran CHKDSK on the server. I got several scary messages:

File record segment 30836 is unreadable.
File record segment 30837 is unreadable.
File record segment 30838 is unreadable.
File record segment 30839 is unreadable.

This looked nasty, and I called the support group over at GoDaddy (they are the keepers of my dedicated server). The GoDaddy troubleshooters ran CHKDSK /f and reported that the disk errors were so widespread they had no hope of fixing them. Kind of like a surgeon going in after your cancer, seeing the extent of the disease, and just closing you back up.

Long and short, I have spent the last week porting two websites (including this one) over to a new dedicated server. As my chief marketing officer once said, “Technology sucks.”

I tried the easy way out first — I lowered the cost per click I would pay on Yahoo search from $1.00 to $0.25.  Yahoo came through spectacularly with a ton of traffic at low cost.  I ended up paying $0.10 per click to Yahoo, and my own conversion rate on hits plummeted to $1.30.

Hats off to Yahoo, and I hope this isn’t a fluke.  I will expand this out to a couple of dozen more frequently asked questions, each with their own marketing campaign.

I tried a similar tactic on Microsoft yesterday, but the results were disappointing.  Lowering my offer from $1.00 to $0.25 resulted in a desultory 627 impressions and 0 clicks.  Thank goodness I pay only for success in this internet advertising world.

Google, of course, was not allowed to participate in yesterday’s $15 marketing campaign.  Suffer, biatch, said the ant to the elephant .

In total, I spent $147.45 on the three search engines (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft), gathering 314 clickthroughs on 179,252 impressions. That is a cost per click of $0.47 and a clickthrough rate of 0.18% for the text ad. Any clickthrough rate above 10 basis points is good, from my experience, so the text ad did a good job pulling people from the search engines onto Live-Answers.com.

Those 314 new visits to Live-Answers.com drove an incremental 39 visits to our experts’ native websites (a conversion rate of 12%). That is a very high conversion rate, but I had hoped for something even higher. Where else can people go once they get to Live-Answers.com but on to an expert’s website? Clearly, many people just jump back to the search engine. That jump back is called a “bounce” and my “bounce rate” was about 70% throughout the advertising campaign.

My final cost per hit for the experts can therefore be calculated as $3.78. Each new visit to an expert’s website cost $3.78. That is too high for me. I will have to bring that cost down through either paying less for new visitors (less than the $0.47 cost per click I paid last week) or getting a higher conversion on new visitors (somehow lowering that bounce rate). In the end, I want to be paying less than $1.00 per incremental visitor (hit) to an expert’s website.

Google slapped me upside the head with a large trout

Perhaps the most interesting (ie cursed) portion of last week’s marketing campaign came after the first day, when Google effectively shut down all Live-Answers.com advertising through Google AdWords.

The powers that be on Google’s staff took a look at the Live-Answers.com landing page and decided it was too — I’m not sure what — too derivative?  too salesy?  too closely resembling an affiliate program?  Whatever, they slapped a quality score of 1 (out of 10) on all Live-Answers.com advertising, and my google impressions went from 82,000 on day 1 to 2,000 per day on days 2-4.

Luckily, Yahoo and Microsoft took up the slack, and the new visitors to Live-Answers.com remained around 100 on each of the four days of the campaign.  Going forward, I will not spend any more money on Google.  As it turns out, that’s the way they want it.

Yahoo was a huge bright spot

Yahoo Marketing Solutions was a trooper throughout the week, driving in 10 times the traffic of Microsoft.  The clickthroughs on Yahoo were particularly strong at 0.34% compared to the totals for all three search engines of 0.18%, and as a result Yahoo was our best performer.

I will expand the number of frequently asked questions that I use as landing pages over the next few days and launch a series of new campaigns.  Let’s see if we can drive down that final cost per hit from $3.78 to below $1.00 while expanding the benefits of this marketing to the rest of the Live-Answers.com experts.