www.affiliateconfession.com

I’ve confessed in the past my weakness in the area of search marketing. Pay-per-click has consistently been an area that I have not done well in, and I think a lot of affiliate marketers are in the same boat. Here and there I have made some money, but for the 3 years I’ve been an affiliate, I’ve probably been lucky if I’ve broken even in PPC.

There are lots of good blogs throughout the net that do a pretty good job of helping you figure out PPC, but I wanted something that I could study, where I could ask questions, I wanted tools and I wanted to see exactly how people were making money in PPC. That’s why I joined PPC Coach about 5 days ago. PPC Coach isn’t cheap at $50 per month, but if you are tired of spending money with Google Adwords and not seeing results, then you seriously ought to take a look at it. In the 5 days I’ve been a member I’ve already learned enough to run some campaigns and earn my first month’s cost back, so right there I know this stuff works.

For $50 a month PPC Coach gives you a series of videos, tools, a tracking system, an offer database where you can check out and compare the best paying offers between networks and more goodies, but the real power of PPC Coach is the month-by-month suggested campaigns and techniques to utilize, and the forums where people making more than $1,000 a day offer advice and sometimes literally walk you through difficulties you may be having trying to get a campaign profitable.

The thing that excites me the most is the monthly techniques and campaigns to run. And the nice thing about the way PPC Coach works is that you can only see the number of techniques according to the number of months you’ve been a member. “Coach” as we call him, specifically designed the system this way so newbies like myself don’t jump right in and try to start learning and doing everything under the sun. So when you first join PPC Coach, in the Merchants section, you can only see posts related to technique number 1 for the entire month. The philosophy is, “Here, run this, we’ll tell you exactly how to do it, and don’t do anything else.”

I can’t tell you much more than the month one technique involves making money from zip and email submits, because I’d probably get in trouble, but as you can see from the screen shots below, you can. Only a couple of months ago I didn’t think it was possible to make money by producing leads via search that pay just $1 to $1.75, but a friend explained them to me a little better and PPC Coach sort of refined the process. I’ll write a post about it in a few days explaining the concept, but again, I can’t be specific because of TOS violations. 

PPC Coach is great if you are frustrated with trying to figure out PPC and want to jump right in, have some money to spend and are ready to get started. If you are hesitant, are short on cash or PPC isn’t the direction you want to go, then do not spend the money on PPC Coach, it isn’t for you. I only decided to join because I spend way more than the $50 membership fee every month on my own pay-per-click marketing and don’t have that much to show for it.

You can check out PPC Coach here only if you are ready to learn the paid search game or are looking to make even more from what you are already doing in paid search.

I’m not the accountant in our family. Crunching numbers for hours at a time makes me loony, but I do love to figure out affiliate earnings every month because it gives me a legitimate excuse to be obsessive about checking stats, which I usually have a bad habit of doing way too much.

I was hoping to get to $5,000 in earnings this month, but actually had a slight drop. This month was a good example of why you should keep your affiliate business diversified. Revenue shifted quite a bit from some solid earners into newer and unexpected income streams. While earnings from the eBay Partner Network were down by about $400 and revenue from my top BANS store was down by nearly $600, other affiliate streams almost replaced it. Earnings from Azoogle, Clickbank and Market Leverage were up and after advertising expenses, profit was around $500 from these three. I also earned a nice $282.51 from Site Build It which I rarely ever promote.

Pay per click advertising between Facebook ads and Adwords showed the most promise this month as a spend of $1,115.11 (this is what I can specifically track)  created revenue of $1,609.90, realizing a profit of $494.79. It’s now a matter of weeding out the losers and attempting to tweak and ramp up the winners.

Total revenue did come in at over $5,000 this month, but costs were at an all time high. Everything breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,415.24
Commission Junction - $110.37
EPN - eBay - $719.19
Meal Planner Ebook - $102.00
TripAdvisor - $177.03
Clickbank - $266.83
Private Advertising - $175.00
AzoogleAds - $1,152.85
Microsoft - $200.00
Pepperjam  - $49.70
Market Leverage - $252.85
Other Affiliate Programs - $405.46

Total Revenue - $5,026.52

Total expenses - $1,208.46

Total Income - $3,818.06

The goal for September is to reach $5,000 in earnings even though this month is traditionally very slow and we’ll be on a nice beach vacation for a week. Hopefully we can avoid the 3 storms churning up the Atlantic ocean as I write this. Our last vacation was rained out, so it would be nice to get a break from that.

Remember, keep your earnings streams diversified to avoid getting crushed when that big stream turns into a tiny creek and your income suffers significantly because it’s the only thing you have going.

The time has finally come to remove the Entrecard widget from Affiliate Confession and make better use of the sidebar space it has occupied. Over the last couple of months some major bloggers have dropped Entrecard and some of my favorite places to advertise (that have brought me the most traffic) have left as well, but the last straw in helping me make that decision was when Lisa from To Create A Website rejected my Entrecard advertisement because she is also leaving Entrecard.

I’ve had a 9 month love, hate relationship with Entrecard and sang it’s praises when I first installed the widget on this blog at the beginning of December 2007. Through those 9 months I’ve tried massive advertising experiments, purchased credits from eBay and Entrecard itself, won thousands of Entrecard credits and spent massive amounts of time dropping cards and trying to find blogs worthy of advertising on.

And that’s where my main issue with Entrecard comes in. Trying to locate blogs worthy of spending your hard earned credits to advertise on is a huge time waster mainly because 97 to 98% of the blogs in the Entrecard system are one small step above being spam blogs. And unfortunately the pricing system for advertising isn’t based on actual traffic a blog receives, it’s based on how many ads are waiting to be shown in the blog’s que. This sometimes creates hugely overpriced ads that bring little to no traffic.

The process of hunting down blogs in your niche, visiting them to see what they look like, weeding through blogs that have advert prices above 1000 credits, yet have less than 10 rss readers, getting less than quality traffic from your ads and then sticking with that process week, after week, after week is just too cumbersome. Where Entrecard fails in my opinion is that the adverts you place only last for 24 hours. In my last advertising blitz I spent somewhere around 8 hours using up 30,000 credits, advertising on 300 different blogs and did get some low quality visitors to the tune of 250 to 300 oer day. But that only lasted for 10 days and the whole process starts over again.

That just doesn’t work economically for me. If I’m going to spend 8 hours doing advertising for my blog, it should last longer than 10 days and bring better quality traffic. Entrecard is too much like those lame traffic exchange systems where you earn traffic credits for visiting other sites in the system you aren’t interested in just to get people who aren’t interested in your site to visit you. Sadly, Entrecard is not much different than that.

If you have an ad already in my que it will run, but as of today, I won’t be approving any new ads. See ya later Entrecard.

I finished up the Harsh Realities of Affiliate Marketing series a few days ago but wanted to write a short review and have 1 single post where you can find all 7 posts in the series and get a quick summary of what each one is about.

I did the series to let mainly new affiliates know that as much as the ebook pimps want you to think how easy affiliate marketing is, it takes lots and lots of work, there really isn’t any shortcut. But as long as you are willing to put in the time, it can be very rewarding and can give you the freedom from a job that so many look forward to, you just may want to be aware of the obstacles in the road ahead though.

The post titles and a short summary of each are listed below:

Harsh Reality 1 - Ranking For Keywords That Get Zero Traffic Means Nothing
Don’t make the mistake of spending time getting your blog or web site to rank for keyword phrases that don’t bring you any traffic.

Harsh Reality 2 - You Will Lose Money Starting In PPC
If you are going to try your hand at PPC, be prepared to lose money before you make money. Set a budget you can afford to lose before you get started.

Harsh Reality 3 - You’ll Never Make A Living With Banner Ads
We’ve all seen those websites plastered with nothing but affiliate banners. If you own a site like that, I can guarantee you aren’t making enough money to buy yourself a decent dinner once a week, probably not even once a month.

Harsh Reality 4 - There Will Be A Major Setback In Your Affiliate Career
If you don’t get slammed at least once in your affiliate marketing efforts and have a disappointing setback, you aren’t trying hard enough.

Harsh Reality 5 - No Risk Equals No Reward
If you’re going to make money at affiliate marketing, you will have to risk time, money or other goodies until you get the whole thing figured out. Even when you start making some money, you’ll have to take risks to get to that next level.

Harsh Reality 6 - Those Who Analyse The Most, Do The Least
If you’re stuck in the perpetual cycle of over analysing and planning, the only way out is to actually do something. Ultimately it is the action part of affiliate marketing that earns you the money.

Harsh Reality 7 - Don’t Count On Your Blog Making Money
If you are blogging about how to make money online, it’s probably a good idea that you go out and make some money first.

The real harsh reality of affiliate marketing is that you can make some very good money having an online business, you just have to watch out for the lazy work habits, stupid mistakes, bad advice, deceptive marketing and false dreams that can end up hurting you in the end. However, some of these trials are a good thing to work through, that way you know what not to do. The better perspective you have on the truth about being an affiliate, the better chance you have of making a living at it.

I hope you enjoyed and benefited from the Harsh Reality series.

For the last few weeks I’ve been toying around with a new store building script called StoreStacker that I believe has potential even though I had quite the adventure installing it. Yes, StoreStacker has potential, but if you don’t have the right hosting that includes Zend Optimizer and the ability to easily run cron jobs, this could be one seriously frustrating install for you.

StoreStacker is a script that you upload and install on your server that grabs products and feeds from eBay, Amazon, YouTube, Clickbank, Overstock, RegNow, HotelClub and any RSS feed that mashes everything up into a nice little store that could have anywhere from 50 pages to 1,000’s of pages. With the exception of  products featured on your home page, StoreStacker creates an individual page for every single item in your store. For instance, I created this digital camera deals web site with products from eBay and Amazon, photography videos from YouTube and photography books from Clickbank and Amazon, with every product having its own page.

As you go to each product or video page, StoreStacker grabs the product description, tags and other pertinent info along with automatically mashing up different products, books and videos related to the content on the page, giving you unique content for search engines to index. I installed the digital camera site as a test only 3 weeks ago or so and as of this post I have 11 pages indexed by Google so far.

While StoreStacker does create a lot of content for you, I would never suggest you just throw up one of these stores and not add any of your own original content. There’s just too much garbage on the net today and we certainly don’t need to add to the cyber-landfill that spammers and spolgs have created. StoreStacker allows you to add content to any page just by navigating to each one and adding your own product description or whatever you want and I suggest you do this to as many pages as you can (my store still needs a lot of work).

Since your store will change over time because of updating you will do through a cron job, you probably aren’t going to want to add content to your individual eBay pages. They will obviously change once your store updates. What you can do is add content to your home page, each individual category page and to pages that will be permanent such as product pages from Clickbank, videos from YouTube and some Amazon pages.

Now for hosting StoreStacker. I have to be totally honest with you because that’s why I call this blog Affiliate Confession. Installing this script was a huge pain, no joke. It’s probably more the fault of my hosting company 1and1.com rather than StoreStacker, but it took me 3 days to get this thing working correctly and I was almost to the point of dropping the entire project. However, I see the potential of something like this to make some decent cash and I decided to stick with it.

I think the problem is that 1and1 doesn’t have Zend Optimizer installed and doesn’t use cPanel as as the default interface once you log into your hosting account. Most hosts either have Zend Optimizer installed or will do it for you because it is not something most companies want you to try on your own. After trying to install Zend with no luck on my own and a few emails to tech support pleading with them, they finally installed it for me and I was able to complete the installation of StoreStacker.

Another obstacle I ran into was the ability to run cron jobs at 1and1. Amongst many other things, cPanel allows you to easily set up cron jobs which will automatically update your StoreStacker Store with new products as eBay, Amazon, Overstock and other sites update their products (of course it is especially important for you to be able to update eBay at least once a day). Since 1and1 doesn’t have cPanel, it is a little more complicated process to run cron jobs there. You can still update your store without running a cron job by going into your store interface and updating each category page by hand.

I think StoreStacker can be a nice product for building a quick affiliate store or 2 or 3 (actually you can build as many stores as you want for the price of admission), but you definitely don’t want to host with 1and1 if you decide to use it. If you do get StoreStacker, make darn sure you write to tech support at your hosting company and ask them if Zend Optimizer is installed (or if they will do it for you, for each store) and ask if they use cPanel or have a way to easily set up cron jobs.

Pricing for StoreStacker is $97 for the script and includes the Amazon and eBay plugins. Additional plugins for Clickbank, Overstock, YouTube and others are $25 each. However if you are one of the first few customers some of the plugins will be free, but I’m not sure how many.

Check out StoreStacker and see if it’s for you.