www.affiliateconfession.com

Google Chrome, there it was, a copy of the same comic book announcing THE search company’s foray into the browser market, was for sale on eBay. Not only was this rare find, only given to Google employees or special contest winners, up for sale, the auction was scheduled to end some time around 11:30 on a Saturday evening, traditionally a low traffic time meaning lower final value on eBay.

While some copies of Google Chrome had fetched over $1,500, this one, only 6 hours from auction end when discovered, had a current bid of only $34. Thus began the mental process of valuation, and eventual profit, in my mind. After thinking about it for a while and waiting to hear back on my inquiry to the seller, I put in a bid of $105.03 bringing the current bid up to only $35. I was sure to get this one. As I checked the counter at the bottom of the auction, only 65 people even knew about this item and it was ending at a time when most people would either be out partying or asleep for an early rise to make it to church on Sunday morning, they certainly wouldn’t be doing business on eBay.

I went to bed about an hour before auction end, confidently thinking I would be the proud owner of this new rarity when I woke in the morning.

Come Sunday morning I was a bit short of breath as I raced to boot up my laptop and see how much Google Chrome ended up costing me. Zero…what?…OUTBID! Son of a biscuit-head, how did that happen? Someone bid $150 when I wasn’t watching.

I sat in stunned silence for a few minutes. My hopes of owning a rare piece of Internet history, for a steal no less, were dashed. Someone else now owned my Google Chrome comic book!

After several more minutes my blood pressure returned to normal and a barley visible smile broke out on my face that was quite a bit larger on the inside when the realization struck, so this is what eBay does to people.

I headed off to church that morning happy to be an eBay affiliate.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Good news for eBay affiliates, the eBay Partner Network will be expanding their stats starting next Wednesday October 22nd so you will now be able to see the specific categories where your sales are being generated. Not only will you be able to see the top level categories, but you will be able to see down to the 3rd sub category level.

An example report screenshot is below:

This is great news because many sales that eBay affiliates generate are not always in the categories or products they’re targeting. Since an eBay cookie lasts for 7 days once you send over one of your visitors, they can end up buying either closely related products to what you feature on your site or they may buy something not even remotely related.

This will now allow you as an eBay affiliate to see if your visitors are making purchases of related items and armed wth those stats you can now start to target items you may not have thought about in the past. For instance, maybe you have a BANS Store featuring model trains and in your research looking at the new category report you see that you are getting several sales in the antique model ship category, whodathunk? You can now include this category on your site or build a out a completely new site featuring these items.

You can also use the report to see the related categories that are already doing the best for you and likewise expand your efforts in that area. Maybe your model trains site specializes in HO scale Tyco trains, but you find many visitors are buying HO scale Lionel trains once they get to eBay, you can now put more emphasis on that category to feature it more prominently on your site.

At the present time you can download your eBay reports and see some of this information already, but the new category report coming out on October 22nd will allow you to get a quick look at the specific categories, in neat charts and graphs, where your sales are really happening. You can then act accordingly and tweak your Build A Niche Store site or whatever other kind of site you are using to take advantage of the eBay affiliate program.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Getting into pay per click marketing can be expensive because unless you really know what you’re doing, most everyone tends to lose money in the beginning. There are those that have the golden touch and are profitable with PPC right away, but for most of us, including myself, you end up spending a lot of money with Adwords long before you see profit.

So what can you do if you want to get started, but don’t want to risk the money initially? Try financing your PPC campaigns. I’m not talking about taking out a loan and risking money you don’t have, we already have a huge problem with that in the world today, what I’m talking about is to finance your paid marketing with other present or newly created revenue from your affiliate business.

If you want to get into PPC and have little money to do so, determine right now to either use a specific amount of money (a budget), a specific CPA offer that’s generating x amount of cash or build a new stream of revenue with your blog, a new site or sell some stuff on eBay just to get going. You are essentially borrowing money from one part of your business to finance another part of your business. The only way you are going to be truly profitable in the long run as an affiliate is to put those profits back into your business on an ongoing basis.

Initially I sold some things on eBay to have some seed money when I decided to get into PPC again. And when I reached a level of income over $2,500 per month, my wife and I decided I could spend anything over that amount on PPC. I’m also profiting from a PPC offer that’s making more money per day than all my other campaigns are costing.

If you are successful with this method of financing your PPC efforts this way, be careful not to overlook your campaigns that are losing money just because you are making more in the long run than the losers are costing you. You still have to weed out and either delete or heavily tweak your campaigns that aren’t making you any money if you want to build a good income. I have to stay diligent and check my campaigns every day to find the ones that aren’t doing well.

This may be done fairly quickly for some or may take some time to implement for others depending on how profitable you are or how quickly you can start to be profitable with various affiliate offers. Once you budget the amount you’re going to spend or are going to finance your campaigns with a changing amount of revenue from one of your best affiliate offers, then don’t exceed the amount you are making for that day. If you keep working at it and are smart about your cash flow when just staring out, you will eventually be making enough that you can try bigger and more riskier PPC campaigns and hopefully make even more profit.

You should know by now that I’m not about get-rich-quick, so if you thought that was what this was about, head over to ClickBank and get one of those kind of ebooks. If you want to learn how to do PPC the right way, check out PPC Coach.

Popularity: 7% [?]

A huge thanks goes out to every one today who is a subscriber to Affiliate Confession. After almost a year of writing, this blog has reach the 500 RSS subscriber milestone. The counter at the top may show an amount below 500 depending on when you read this (it fluctuates a bit at times), but the first time the 500 reader level was reached was on Saturday Oct. 11th.

I initially started the blog back on November 1, 2007 after several months of thinking about it and having my wife tell me that I need to write about what I do. In fact, the name Affiliate Confession was actually my wife’s idea. We we’re sitting around one day brainstorming domain names for the blog and it just suddenly popped out of her brain. I didn’t really do much writing the first month and started blogging consistently on Nov 22, 2007.

One of the catalysts for starting the blog was probably for the wrong reason when I read one of John Chow’s ridiculous income statements. I believe it was around the $23,000 per month mark at the time and I thought why not get in with the crowd and get out there and make some money. That’s not a good reason to start a blog! It has since evolved into something I enjoy doing while I chronicle and hopefully give some advice on what it takes to build a successful affiliate marketing business.

Some of the more memorable posts over the last year include:

Why I don’t Do Network Marketing Or MLM- The first and longest post here at AffiliateConfession.com going into why MLM is mostly a waste of time.

Taking The 30 Day Blogging Challenge – The most commented post here.

Build A Niche Store Review – A review of the product that maximizes earnings from the eBay Affiliate program. It is currently one of my top money makers.

Lessons In Perseverence – A 4 part series on just working through the hard times despite what may come your way.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials – A 7 part series on how to set up your BANS affiliate store and get into profitability with the eBay Partner Network.

Explaining Twitter Is Like Explainig Sex to A Virgin – The day I saw the light and became a Twitter fan. You can follow me on Twitter here.

How I won A MacBook Air- Yes, I actually won $5,000 worth of prizes in an online contest and one of those prizes was a MacBook Air. This post explains how I did it.

The Harsh Realities Of Affiliate Marketing – A 7 part series on what affiliate marketing is really like. It’s not all fun and games, it takes lots of work.

Joined PPC Coach – I’ve finally started making some money with paid search marketing and this post explains how that happened.

If you are new here at AffiliateConfession.com please subscribe to my RSS feed and if you are already a reader of this blog, I appreciate the time you take to read through my ramblings. It’s been great getting to know a lot of you and respond to your questions and comments and I’m looking forward to the continued journey.

PS – As of this writing the count at the top is showing 486 readers and my Feedburner control paned is showing zero subscribers, so I’m not sure where it will end up today.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Very shortly, probably within the next few days, our home will be turned into a construction zone. We’re having our back porch enclosed and the bedroom across from the home office redone. Once the porch is enclosed and a new window put in the bedroom, our sliding glass doors leading to the porch will be removed, half the wall knocked out, the kitchen extended a couple of feet and all new flooring will be put in the porch, bedroom and a third of the kitchen.

While my wife has been wanting to do this project for years because we don’t really have a proper dining area in our small 1,300 sq ft home, the next couple of months (at least) will be rather stressful around the LeStourgeon home. It will be great when the project is finished, but in the mean time it will be nearly impossible to get any work done with the demolition, hammering, sawing, dust and general noise that goes along with an undertaking such as this.

I’m looking forward to having all the work done as well, but in the mean time, I’m going to have to have some place to carry on my blogging and affiliate marketing duties for several hours a day where interruptions will be kept to a minimum. There are a few places around the Palm Bay, Melbourne FL area that have “free” WiFi, but at many of them you should buy at least a cup of coffee or something every hour or two so as not to be a complete bum. That can add up when you end up spending $4 to $6 a day, plus gas, just to work away from home, plus I don’t really need to be drinking coffee and rotting out my gut every day.

As I’m writing this I’m thinking of at least two places where you don’t need to buy anything and can work as long as you need. One is the local library, but the connection there slow and you keep having to log in every 20 to 30 minutes. The other is the Calvary Chapel of Melbourne cafe, but they keep it so cold in the cafe you need to buy coffee every 30 minutes to keep warm or go outside to thaw out.

It will take some adjustments and planning to work away from home for an extended period of time. I do occasionally go to one of my favorite spots 3 or 4 times a month just for a change of pace, but this is going to have to probably be at least 3 times a week for a month or longer, so that makes it a different matter.

Maybe I could just rent a corner of an office or a cubicle somewhere for a couple of months. If I could find a nice space for $100 a month or so it might be worth it. I wouldn’t save any money over the cost of coffee and those tempting macadamia nut, chocolate chip cookies at Calvary Chapel Cafe, but I’m sure the office space and my water bottle would be much healthier.

I’m open to suggestions.

Popularity: 6% [?]