www.affiliateconfession.com

Part of the winnings I accrued in the Webmaster Talk contest was $750 in cash and that’s a nice little chunk of change to go have a big party with, go out to a nice super expensive dinner and a show, go buy a nice gadget or rent about 175 movies from Blockbuster. But are any of those things a smart move to make for the affiliate marketer?

If you said yes, then it’s time to stop playing with your blogging and affiliate business and get your lifetime membership to your choice of online video stores. Hopefully most everyone reading knows that’s not the best thing to do with a windfall of $750. As long as I’ve been writing Affiliate Confession and even before that, I decided any contest winnings or excess monetary gain would be invested right back into my affiliate business in the form of either advertising for this blog or into getting a better grasp on the pay per click game.

What I intend to do with the $750 is put all of it into PPC a little at a time as I try to figure out and benefit from a few new things learned over the last couple of months. For some, $750 isn’t a lot of money to spend in even a week on Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing, but the plan is to carefully research various ClickBank and affiliate products and try to at least double that money and reinvest the profits again. As reported previously, I am seeing a little bit of profit in a couple of PPC campaigns I’ve been running lately, so at least there’s a little track record of success to build on.

I’ll be basing my PPC campaigns on information I’ve learned at Super Affiliate Mindset, Cash Tactics and CDF Networks (Thanks goes out to Poll Factory for alerting me to those last two resources). There’s also a good rundown of 3 distinct PPC bidding strategies that’s a good resource for search marketers I will be testing from. I especially like the tactic that Kris Jones from Pepperjam has used in the past and will be giving that one a try. You’ll have to go read the article mentioned above to find out what it is.

There’s a lot of info in the above mentioned blogs and article and you should be careful not to try too many different things at once, as I will be trying to avoid. As I’ve read, spreading yourself too thin and not really doing your due diligence in a niche and with a specific PPC technique may cause you to never find a profitable campaign. It may take failing a few times in the same niche with different strategies and keyword combinations before you find profitability.

I’ve been given a nice opportunity to delve into an area of online marketing that I frankly have not done very well in and I don’t want to squander the $750 winnings on something that isn’t going to ultimately benefit my business. Reinvesting in your business is really no secret, it is a necessity. Stay tuned for updates on hopefully good results. 

Albert Einstein has always intrigued me because he was just as much a philosopher as he was a scientist. Consequently I’ve borrowed one of his quotes for this Sunday’s thought of the day.

“Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”

A couple of months ago I was talking a morning walk and was a bit frustrated with the way things were going with my affiliate businesses, thinking how hard I’ve worked on many different things and the sometimes less than desirable results. As I walk, I occasionally like to kick rocks, acorns or what ever rolls well just to see how far they go. This particular morning I couldn’t connect with the acorns and my kicking effort ended in frustration as I seemed to be topping every one and watched them roll about 3 feet in front of me.

After 4 or 5 attempts to kick game winning 70 yard field goals, my acorn kicking desire waned and I continued on around our neighborhood cul-de-sac. As I passed nearly the same spot as my latest failed 3 pointer, my left foot (I’m right footed) connected perfectly with an acorn and it rolled out about 30 to 40 feet in front of me as if it were making a statement. After telling my wife about this little encounter, when either of us is struggling with striving too hard towards a target now, one will jokingly say to the other, “Let the acorn kick the foot.”

No effort and no payment had produced the greatest result.

Are you working hard and paying a big price for something you could get for free?