:Clear Skin Blog

Barely have time to blog this week, as there’s just a lot going on. I’ll be moving soon and so my hands are full with going over the details of that. Besides moving, there’s also taxes (yay!) and the plans for Acne-Vitamins that I’ve been working on. We’ve recently upgraded the quality of our Clear5 labels, so the labels are now sleek and shiny, but the label design itself is still in need of some work. I continue to get requests for local availability, so one of the things we’ll be incorporating in the new design is a UPC barcode - so that, if retailers pick up Clear5 in the future, the packaging will be ready to go. Moreover, the new design itself will also be more informative, as well as looking a bit nicer. We continue to hear good news that users are really seeing clear skin, with two customers sending in positive feedback in just the last day. It’s great to hear that Clear5 is working, but really, I could use a few more pictures! I’d really prefer to continue getting our before-and-after pictures from real customers. Keep in mind that shots don’t need to be of your face. For instance, we’ve heard from a lot of users who are seeing clear skin for their back and shoulders.

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Hot on the heels of Zeno, the latest entry in the new and growing “acne gadget” market is a handheld LED projector called Lumiport. The product is mainly a spot treatment used to reduce inflammation and kill underlying bacteria using precise light frequencies projected directly upon emerging pimples. The science behind the product seems well documented. In research studies, blue light has been found to kill acne-forming bacteria beneath the skin, while red light has been found to reduce inflammation and speed healing. Lumiport focuses both of these light frequencies simultaneously to treat acne.

Lumiport appears to be about on-par with benzoyl peroxide and tea tree oil as far as the speed of results. You should see results within a week, sometimes as soon as next-day. Unfortunately, Lumiport’s page is fairly vague regarding the actual use of the product right now. One of the downsides to the Zeno heat treatment is having to zap each zit with two to three 2½-minute treatments spread over a 24 hour period - keep in mind that this is per-zit…not exactly a convenient choice if you have moderate acne or worse. Likewise, the application of Lumiport may be rather cumbersome for the average acne sufferer. In the acne light study found on Lumiport’s research page (highly recommended to at least read the summary in the pdf file), each participant was exposed for the light to 15 minutes per day - again, not to convenient of a treatment. I would assume that Lumiport’s closer beam would require less time, but this is offset by the fact that you have to treat each zit separately - and in most cases, multiple times per day.

Personally, taking a few vitamins sounds a lot easier to me, especially since they treat all your skin at once. Regardless, Lumiport (and Zeno for that matter) may in fact be very successful spot treatments, although the results don’t appear to be much different than benzoyl peroxide or tea tree oil (which are much cheaper, especially tea tree oil). I have not read much off-site feedback about Lumiport yet (Zeno seems to have been well received), but the science appears to be sound. Of course, as with every spot treatment there is always the drawback that these are temporary “acne band-aids” at best, since they do nothing to stop acne from forming in the first place. To actually prevent acne and transform your skin to be like non-acne-sufferers, an internal treatment is required.

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I mentioned green tea earlier as being a healthy part of a clear skin diet, and just as the extreme form of that diet involves drinking tons of green tea, the “apples diet” involves upping your daily apple intake (hehe, if you have a “daily apple intake”) for a time to combat skin problems. There are some pluses and minuses to the diet, but taken in a less extreme form, an apple a day is definitely a good thing.

Apples certainly contain a ton of great nutrients for healthy skin. In fact, they’ve even been referred to as “nature’s multivitamin”. Apples contain almost every kind of essential vitamin, but especially of note are generous amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C (with bioflavonoids, which makes for a great combination). Since most of the nutrients in apples are easily absorbed into your body, they make for one of the healthiest snacks around. It’s easy to recommend eating an apple every day.

Can more apples help your skin? The answer is yes. However, to get the dramatic effects that some acne regimens describe, you would have to eat upwards of 10-12 apples per day (and not much else for a time), and this I do not recommend. While it may work for some, a healthy diet still consists of more than just apples, and that much fruit may send your bowels into an uncomfortable state, if you know what I mean. While the vitamins and minerals present are more easily absorbed from an apple than from a multivitamin, the multivitamin is still easier to take, and will not require a extreme diet change. The main reason the apple diet works for some is most likely due to the higher vitamin A intake, and in this respect it may actually help, as it’s hard to overdose on vitamin A from apples, but not very hard to do so from supplements (unlike vitamin B5, there are some real risks with high-doses of vitamin A). The result is that apples are generally a safer way of increasing your vitamin A, and ensure that you get important supporting vitamins at the same time.

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After a brief hiatus I’ve decided to put our Adwords back up for Acne Vitamins, but I totally scrapped the old campaign and decided to build this new one from scratch. Last year when I structured the old campaign, I knew a decent amount about natural search engine rankings, but never bothered to really learn the ins and outs of pay-per-click, and our Acne Vitamins ads probably cost us a lot more because of that.

There are a number of sites out there willing to sell you ebooks and programs on how to increase your the effectiveness of your Adwords. It’s grown into a whole little subsector of marketing. However, just like SEO, you’re probably best starting with a few key forums where people discuss website marketing and just learning from there. Article sites can also have some valuable information. I’ve already picked up a few key concepts that my previous program ignored.

At the moment I’m still tweaking our ads for Acne Vitamins, and will continue to do so as I monitor what works and what doesn’t, but some of the main changes I’d recommend: (1) Ignoring the “content network” (Adsense) - unless you’re one of the few people who converts well on the content network sites, just turn it off. Almost all of the time, the search network converts 5 times better, meaning the content network is just a drain on your bank account. (2) More groups! - I used to throw tons of terms into a single ad group, but by breaking up your groups more you can target more specific terms in your ad copy, which usually results in better conversion. (3) Exact and broad match - There’s a lot of debate on this one, but for niche sites like Acne Vitamins, you can maximize exposure by having a lower bid on a broad-match keyphrase and a higher bid on the same phrase in exact match. That way you only pay more for the really targeted traffic, but can still pick up those that wander in from broad match.

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We’ve updated our free acne products offer with yet another way to get free Clear5! Besides submitting feedback and pictures, you can now score extra bottles of Clear5 by referring friends to Acne-Vitamins.com. We’ve been doing a lot more referral business already this year, but I think this will pump up the incentive even more for customers to spread the word. Taking advantage of the free offer is very easy - just tell a friend (non-family-member) about Acne Vitamins, and when they make their first purchase have them contact us with the comments form to let us know you referred them (your name and city will do). We’ll keep these referrals on record and automatically include an extra bottle the next time you order a 2-bottle supply or more. There is no limit on how many times you can take advantage of the referral offer, so if you refer five friends, we’ll send you five free bottles. It’s that easy.

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Happy St Patrick’s Day!

While browsing around doing my usual survey of the acne resources on the web, I often come across any number of sites offering “professional” reviews of acne treatments. Obviously, from my perspective almost all of these sites are instantly recognizable as affiliate marketing sites, but to those less aware of all the ways people make money off search engines, it’s easy to mistake some of these for serious reference pages.

Even if you don’t know how to spot an affiliate link, there are a few tell-tale signs that give away false review sites. First off, you’ll notice the best product is often the most expensive one. Since affiliate sites usually stand to make more money off those sites with the highest average ticket price, expensive products such as ZENMED’s $100 per month program are often up at the top of the list. Secondly, you’ll notice many mainstream products are not reviewed. Comparison charts are often made up of online-only products that the “reviewer” stands to directly make money off of.

Now, the fact is some of these products may in fact work, but you would probably do a lot better to research them from a believable review source. So where do you go for better reviews? Forget about “professional” reviews, as these don’t really exist. Even many high-profile magazines often give you very loaded lists of products (usually only from manufacturers that happen to advertise in the mag). Your best bet is to look into actual user reviews and see if enough of them are positive to warrant giving the product a try. Be warned that a lot of people will complain about even the best products, but find a few sensible reviews from both sides and then decide for yourself. For a myriad of acne products, Acne.org has plenty of user reviews, and mainstream online retailers such as Drugstore.com are also a good place to start.

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Time for another off-topic rant! No, I’m not predicting the end of the world, although it may be the end of your social life if you’re an RPG fan. But hey, what better way to get rid of acne-causing stress than by bashing up some trolls, vampires and golems (ok, actual exercise is still preferable, but…)! The big event happening on the 20th is in fact the release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a game I’ve been awaiting for a while, along with most fans of open-ended RPGs.

While graphics are something that get better every month, for the moment Oblivion has probably the most impressive environments ever in a video game, and over 16 square miles of them to boot. The game is truly open-ended, with a go-anywhere, do-anything approach that rewards players for just exploring the world. As for story-driven quests, there’s over 200 hours worth of them, with all the dialogue fully voiced (over 50 hours of voice) and even featuring some star voice actors such as Patrick Stewart and Sean Bean. Most importantly, the game looks to have a solid and rewarding gameplay style that combines traditional RPG stats and skills with visceral action, appealing to both fans of games like Baldur’s Gate and Zelda. In a market increasingly crowded by mundane online multiplayer RPGs, it’s great to see a really ambitious single-player game like this - a game that captures the immersive feeling that western RPGs have been striving for all along.

In news actually related to clear skin, I’ll be updating our free offer page soon. Returning customers will now have three easy ways to score free bottles of Clear5, so stay tuned!

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Green tea is a natural acne treatment that has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine, but is only now gaining popularity in the west. The most popular regimen involves drinking lots of freshly-brewed green tea on a regular daily basis (”lots” meaning about 8 glasses per day). Green tea has been shown to be one of the most powerful herbal antioxidants available, and when applied topically as a cream, the effects are even comparable even to mainstream drugs such as benzoyl peroxide. Either orally or topically, green tea can be an effective treatment, although some of the long-term benefits are best seen by choosing the internal treatment.

Besides being valuable as a potent treatment to detoxify your cells, green tea can also help reduce inflammation, enhance digestion, and lessen the effects of hormonal shifts. It’s really one of the most all-round healthy beverages out there, but you have to take it the right way. Some things to keep in mind are:

1. Don’t add sugar. This can neutralize many of green tea’s beneficial effects.

2. Brew it yourself. Ready-made green tea is usually loaded with additives (like sugar) that again strip away many of the benefits.

So hang a bunch of tea bags in a pitcher and brew a day’s supply of tea at a time. This is, of course, if you want to go full-swing with the regimen. Personally, I find a full green tea regimen to be a lot less convenient than something like B5, but even if you just drink a few glasses per day, it can still help. It may be easier to take green tea in pill form by means of green tea extract capsules, but these seem to be less effective for many users - most likely because green tea is much more readily absorbed in liquid form.

In any case, green tea is another great natural alternative if you’re still looking for a clear skin solution. Buying green tea by the bag and brewing it yourself may not be the easiest solution, but it is very cheap, and there are no harmful side effects. It also tastes great, in my opinion.

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Some of you may have noticed that Acne Vitamins is no longer appearing in the Google sponsored result ads that appear alongside your normal searches (also in AOL searches). I had turned them off a few weeks ago during our backlog crunch in order to slow down our demand a bit and give our manufacturer (that was buried in the blizzard at the time) time to get us restocked. So far I haven’t bothered to turn them back on, although I may do so sooner or later. Adsense has indeed been the most directly effective means of generating traffic for Acne Vitamins, although our improved search engine results, particularly in MSN and Yahoo, are now helping out a bit. However, it’s amazing the difference in the quality of leads that natural search results bring in compared to pay-per-click ads. You would think that people clicking on ads would be those who are more motivated to make a purchase, but it seems the exact opposite is true from my experience. It’s always been a given that a certain percentage of our expenses are the result of click-fraud (non-interested parties clicking sponsored ads to either make themselves money or hurt their competitors), but it seems that percentage is probably a lot higher than I previously assumed. On the bright side, we’ve been getting a lot more referral business from satisfied customers telling their friends, and I’m glad to hear that Clear5 is working so well for most of you! It’s interesting, as right now our daily traffic is about half that of what it was while we were using Adsense, but sales are at the same level or higher. It’s got me thinking I should add a referral option to our free bottle offer, which might just happen in the near future…

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Well, I’ve recently talked a lot about tea tree oil being the natural alternative to benzoyl peroxide, but the fact is a lot of people don’t understand how to use benzol peroxide effectively in the first place. BP alone can give you impressive clear skin results if you use it properly, although it can be expensive and uncomfortable to keep up with (but then, most acne treatments are).

The key mistake made by most acne sufferers who use BP is that they simply don’t use enough. Yes, you should always start out with a small application so that your skin gradually adjusts to the presence of benzoyl peroxide (diving right in with a full application will usually cause irritation and peeling - not the best way to get clear skin), but the trick is to gradually ramp up that application to a much higher amount. In order to maintain a clear skin with benzoyl peroxide, you need to make sure there is constantly enough BP in your skin to kill acne bacteria before it gets a chance to mature. This is the central principle of the “clear skin regimen” made highly popular by Acne.org.

Yes, that’s a lot of BP! The image shown depicts the quantity you should be using if you’re applying Neutrogena’s On-The-Spot BP cream. While full-swing into the regimen, you should be applying about that much BP to your skin twice per day.

Does it work? Definitely. As thousands have attested, the regimen is certainly successful in clearing acne. In fact, even if you only follow the benzoyl peroxide element of the regimen, you will probably still get mostly clear skin. I used high-dose BP myself until I discovered vitamin B5. As mentioned, it can get expensive when you’re constantly going through that much BP though. Also, having to apply it every morning and night is not much fun, and even after your skin adjusts to the point where you no longer have to deal with rashes and peeling, most users will still have dry skin regularly. This last part was what convinced me that I had to find something better. I could keep my skin mostly under control with high-dose BP, but my face always felt dry and brittle. When I started with vitamin B5, my oil went down, but my skin didn’t dry out. I felt a lot more healthy and no longer had to bother with caking on a think layer of BP cream twice a day. It was a great feeling to have my skin under control without even having to get in front of a mirror.

In any case, it is possible to maintain clear skin with BP - if you’re using enough of it - and on the plus side compared to most natural treatments, the results are generally faster (provided you don’t have an initial breakout due to overdrying). So if you need to get clear asap and nothing else is working for you, stock up on the benzoyl peroxide kill off that bacteria as soon as it starts to form. I would, however, recommend switching to natural treatments down the road in order to maintain clear skin in a healthy and permanent way.

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