www.affiliateconfession.com

Even though I had major revenue reductions this month from eBay, Adsense, Azoogle, Market Leverage and a few others, I still managed to have a record month in affiliate earnings. Most all of the increase came from pay per click earnings to the tune of more than $2,100 profit. I owe nearly all of what I’ve learned about PPC to PPC Coach. The bottom line you see below would have been $2,100 less with out it.

I’m not sure what’s going on with eBay, but many an affiliate are seriously complaining about revenue drops in September. I was down $300 in eBay earnings this month and nearly $750 from the month before that. What’s very odd is that my earnings per winning bid have gone from $4.80 in July 2008, to $3.52 in August, to $2.25 for the month of September. That’s a 55% reduction in revenue earned per winning bid in 3 months time. There will certainly be shifts in earnings, but I’m not liking the trend. Time to contact eBay.

Regardless of the inner workings of eBay I’m very thankful for the overall increase this past month. Total revenue for September was $7,292.33 with expenses at $2,551.70, making for a net profit of $4,740.63. It all breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,055.10
Commission Junction - $109.28
EPN - eBay - $458.61
Meal Planner Ebook - $170.00
TripAdvisor - $105.76
Clickbank - $45.83
Private Advertising - $35.00
AzoogleAds - $694.45
Microsoft - $200.00
Pepperjam - $33.00
Market Leverage - $73.35
Neverblue - $4,042.50
Other Affiliate Programs - $269.80

Total Revenue - $7,292.33

Total expenses - $2,551.70

Total Income - $4,740.63

My goal for September was to earn $5,000 profit, but I missed it by only $260. Hopefully with Halloween promotions and PPC looking nice this month so far (and maybe some favor from eBay), the $5,000 will be reached in October. As always, remember to diversify your affiliate income to make up for when eBay and Adsense aren’t as nice as they could be.

On the heels of Monday’s PPC earnings of over $200, yesterday was a significant milestone in my affiliate career as I realized a record profit of over $500, of which $446 came from pay per click. The two PPC campaigns that are the most profitable for me more than doubled in volume and earnings from the previous day.

The last few days of nice profits have been a really great way to end the month, however I don’t think it will be a record overall for the entire month. I got hammered this month on eBay earnings and Adsense income suffered a bit because of the slowdown during this time of year in the travel industry. I make the bulk of my Adsense earnings from travel. While earnings from PPC is up significantly this month, combined Adsense and eBay income is down by more than $1,000.

While it is great to earn this much in a day, and do the bulk of it from PPC, it’s not really where I want to be with by online endeavors. The earnings from paying for traffic are very tenuous and could go away tomorrow. One of the campaigns is a little more stable than the other and should be able to  make a profit for the next few months, but I don’t expect the other to last that long.

This is why it’s so important to diversify your income as an affiliate and why I sometimes harp on this point. You just never know where your income might come from month to month. It has been the story of my affiliate career to do really well with one source of income only to have another source drop significantly or even completely dry up. I used to make $200 to $300 per month producing $1 leads for Rentalo.com from my travel sites, but no longer use their program.

It’s nice to make $500 in one day, but at this point I’m only considering it bonus money. I’ll get really excited when I make that kind of money every day for a month. 

Finally, I get to say I’m making a decent profit from pay per click advertising. It’s been a long journey from the post I wrote last November declaring that PPC was a scam as Google and Yahoo run it. Even before that post I had been dabbling in PPC for 3 years with not much to show for it.

Yesterday however, was different. I’ve had several days this month over $100 in profit, but yesterday’s profit was over $200 from PPC alone. There are some great blogs around the net that teach techniques about PPC, but nothing has helped me get into serious profitability like PPC Coach has.

Here are some screen shots from yesterday:

As you can see, revenue at Neverblue was $352.05 and total spend at Google Adwords was $151.21 giving me a profit of $200.84. This comes from being profitable on just 2 offers at Neverblue and running 2 campaigns with 6 adgroups total on Adwords. Oh, one additional bit of info, this is all being done on the content network, not the search network.

It looks like PPC Coach is well worth the $50 per month cost.

In doing some research for another post I came across a huge resource for keyword terms for your Adwords and other PPC campaigns and for content pages. Believe it or not, it comes from Mahalo.com. It was bound to happen, I’ve finally found a use for Jason Calacanis’ search-engine-thingy-whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

It’s actually the category section of Mahalo and it is extremely useful. On this page you’ll find every category listed in Mahalo and then those categories go to their specific category page listing even more keywords linking to their individual page on Mahalo. It’s awesome because categories are listed in keyword fashion such as in the toys category. When you click over there you’ll get a list of all the most popular toy search terms for the last few years. And it gets even better because the words a listed in a way that you can just put your cursor over them and then click and scroll to copy whatever words you want in the list.

With Christmas coming up you could use the toys category to do keyword research for promotions for the buying frenzy during holiday time to figure out what parents will be spending their money on for kiddies. Want a list of popular toys that won toy of the year awards, go here.  Want to make a buck off of the Hannah-Montana-I-can’t-even-go-into-Wal-Mart-without-seeing-her-freekin-picture-EVERYWHERE insanity, checkout the Hannah Montana category.

Some categories are a bit sparse such as the vintage cars category (great for maybe doing ppc for vintage car parts) and other categories are overflowing with every keyword and subject you may have forgotten about such as the Xbox 360 games category. This one has thousands of keywords. I’m sure you could find something to do with all those words.

Some of the categories are listed in a way that you can just copy and paste your keywords into Adwords campaigns (I’d still divide them up into small adgroups by hand or with a keyword tool such as in PPC Coach) or you can just check them out to get some great ideas for further keyword research.

Check out the Mahalo category page and find a ton of great keywords to ramp up your ppc efforts.

I’m not usually in he habit of giving away niches, but because this one has sort of tanked, yet still provides a great example of what you can do with Build A Niche Store when you think outside the box, I’ll reveal it here.

I’ve never had a problem getting Google to give me a good quality score for any of my BANS stores as long as they had a good mixture of content and auctions on each site. So when SpoofCard teamed up with Pepperjam Network I decided I wanted to build a simple site around it and to make it easy, I used BANS as my content management system and based the page I would be sending Adwords traffic to on Zac Johnson’s free landing page template. SpoofCard is a system that allows you to change your caller id to anything you want and goof on your friends or hide your phone number from someone.

The way I built the SpoofCard site was just use the simplest 2 column BANS template with navigation on the left, made a nice header in Photoshop, included a faq  modified from the original SpoofCard site and then added a contact us and privacy policy page. For eBay auctions I looked at the calling cards category and used Spoofcard as a keyword and added some negative words to only get Spoofcards being sold on eBay to show up and also added some auctions from the caller id box category to give the site some content. Right now as I write this post the calling card category is only showing 2 cards, but has shown as many as 20 at one time. You also want to make sure you add an H1 tag, a title, keywords, a meta description and a couple of sentences to each auction page so you’re not just showing auctions.

To make the landing page I use the layout from Zac’s template mentioned above, found a pic of a spy looking lady on a cell phone, added a few bullet points, some text and a big fat button to get visitors to click over to the merchant.

I made about $400 promoting SpoofCard, but unfortunately it just stopped converting at a level I could generate profit about a month ago or so. I’ve since stopped sending paid traffic to the site, but may try some other things in the future. That’s why I don’t mind revealing this little niche I’ve been working on.

Even though this one isn’t doing that well any longer, you can still model a landing site for just about any product or offer being run through the CPA networks on this example. If you want to try any of the weight loss offers, you can set up a site and throw in a few pages with other supplements sold on eBay. You can promote many of the forclosure offers and include real estate sold through eBay as another idea. There are nearly endless possibilities. And after a few months you should be getting some natural search engine traffic clicking through on your eBay auctions and you’ll be making a little cash there.

Give it a try if you already own Build A Niche Store and if you don’t own it yet, you can get more info on BANS here.