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Short post today, but one of the biggest things that I’ve learned by joining PPC Coach is that pay-per-click marketing doesn’t work…most of the time. Over the last few years I’ve spent a considerable amount of money and time trying to figure out the PPC game and even with being a part of the PPC Coach program, I can still say that most of my pay per click marketing campaigns don’t work.

Let me explain: Like anything you will do in the world of affiliate marketing, paid search is a lot of work. It’s a lot of work identifying possible niches, making lists of keywords, setting up ads, creating landing pages, building sites, tweaking campaigns and finally finding something that’s going to be profitable. There isn’t any magic potion except for the hard work.

While I was immediately successful with 2 campaigns out of 7 (normal is 1 out of 10) in the month 1 portion of PPC Coach training, the rest of my Google Adwords campaigns haven’t seen that kind of success. I’m taking what I’ve learned through PPC Coach and trying the techniques on various kinds of campaigns and the success rate is about the normal 1 in 10 or maybe a little less. But the difference is that 1 in 10 are successful instead of my old record of probably 1 in 50. The lessons have taught me how to better identify possible profit areas, how to structure campaigns and adgroups to be more focused, when to keep a campaign going and when to drop one, how to tweak a successful campaign for maximum profitability and a lot more.

One of the more important things I’ve learned is to keep working until you find success, keep building campaigns until the profitable ones are identified. While there are some great tools in PPC Coach that help you work smarter and quicker, there is never a substitute for putting your nose to the grindstone and hammering out your next campaign or building your next landing page.

Really, it’s no secret, ppc doesn’t work most of the time, the trick is to keep working at it until you find the gems that do work.

PPC Coach is the best thing to come along that really gets into the nuts and bolts of paid search marketing, however, there are still some that simply don’t get it.

It’s important to know your limitations and one of mine is still in the area of pay-per-click even though I’ve had some limited success. Because of that minor success I am now getting a steady stream of private messages in the forums at PPC Coach from people wanting me to coach them on “how I did it.” The PM’s all say something like this, “Wow dude, congrats on your success. I can’t figure out month 1, could you help me?” or “Such and such isn’t working for me in Adwords, what do you think the problem is?” The interesting thing is that 90% of these questions are coming from people with less than 3 posts in the forums.

I certainly don’t mind questions, but it’s painfully obvious when people aren’t doing their homework and immediately look somewhere else for answers. If you don’t dig for the gold yourself, you aren’t going to find it.

Now, when you join PPC Coach you will see there are videos for nearly every aspect of the program and complete walk-throughs showing you how to set things up and use various tools available to members. There is also an extensive forum that covers everything and more dealing with PPC. Within that forum are the specific threads for each month of the program going into great detail on how to make each specific technique work and you can even ask questions on those threads if you don’t understand something.

Beyond that, once you spend a few hours in the forums, you soon begin to realize who the serious money makers are and you can then click over to their profiles and do a search so you can read everything these guys have written. And the nice thing about the PPC Coach forums is that the experts (some making between $50,000 and $100,000 per month) are very candid with their information. I’ve read tips and tricks from these experts I’ve never read on any blog. And beyond that, PPC Coach members have Coach who makes over $100,000 per month and almost begs people to PM or email him if they don’t understand something.

All this available information and resources are essentially the PPC Coach manual. Coach stresses to new members to look at all the videos and spend a few hours in the forums before trying out any of the month 1 techniques just so you can get a feel of what everyone else is doing and what makes for success in the program. This is what people are paying $50 a month for. This is how the system works and if you don’t use the system you won’t succeed.

So what would you think about someone who pays $50 a month for a coaching program and then doesn’t use the resources? Success isn’t going to happen for those who continue to do business as usual. Sometimes it’s really obvious why people don’t succeed. Unfortunately it’s not all that obvious to the individual it’s happening to.

Please, if you are spending $50, or more, for any coaching program, use the resources and RTFM!

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.

What about the rules, how closely should we follow them? The slaps, algorithm changes, TOS updates and constant policy changes we’re supposed to comply with as affiliates can be a bit overwhelming at times. And we know that the mother of all rules changes is the almighty (they just think they are) Google. If you don’t comply with Google, you essentially don’t get to play the game…that is unless you look at the rules a different way.

My financial advisor told me some time back that our politician friends running the show (if you want to call it that) in DC just go about their business continuing to complicate the tax code and then people like him read it and figure out ways to get around it. It’s just a game that’s been played ever since the wicked lawmakers have inhabited the halls of Congress and state capitals. My financial advisor’s job is to look at the complicated mess and figure out a way to save us money. People pay ridiculous amounts of money to Uncle Sam when they don’t have to.

I’m beginning to learn that rather than freak out about what Google throws my way, it’s a whole lot better to just absorb it and figure out how to use it best to my advantage or what to do to get around it. One thing I’ve learned to get around lately is the big freakout about lading page quality. The only thing Google wants there is your landing page to reflect what’s in your ad and they only look at your destination url. As long as your top level destination url matches your top level display url (even when it goes through a tracking link) and there aren’t any quality problems, you are good to go. You can then set your individual keyword url to whatever you want.

You can use this to your advantage if you direct link to offers and are having a hard time getting a good quality score, don’t put in your affiliate link as the destination url, use the top level url of your offer and then use your affiliate link with a tracking code as your keyword url. This works on both Google’s search and content network. Now put on your thinking caps and brainstorm on ways you can really take advantage of this little trick and you’ll never have to worry about quality score again.

Just as a warning here though, I’m not in any way condoning purposely breaking the rules or the law. If you violate Google’s terms, you will get nailed and if you break the tax laws, you may go to jail. There is a big difference in taking advantage of what’s in the rules vs walking over them and crossing the line. If you do Adsense, there are ways to optimize your ad placements so you earn the most possible, then there are idiots who ask their friends to click on their ads and can’t figure out why they get banned.

Don’t worry about the rules, adapt and take advantage of them. Oh, I was looking for my wife when we stopped at a rest stop, so I climbed up on the planter wall.

If you belong to any of the CPA networks you’ve probably seen the offers where all someone has to do is enter their email address or zip code and you get paid anywhere from $1.10 to $1.75 per lead. These offers always revolve around getting a free Wii game console, getting a free trip to Las Vegas, or getting any number of things for free. Most of these offers are promoted via large email lists, but you may have also noticed that you can promote some of these offers by using pay-per-click search marketing. Fantastic, you’re probably thinking right now, how can you spend 20 or 30 or 40 cents a click and possibly make money with an average lead only earning you in the neighborhood of $1.25?

Believe me, you can do it, because I’ve been doing it for the last 4 days and have earned more than $250 in the process. Only you aren’t paying any more than about 6 or 7 cents a click, but more like 4 or 5 cents. Here’s my stats for the last 4 days below:

There are 2 secrets. The first is using the Google, Yahoo or MSN content network and doing non-traditional targeting. For instance, lets say a CPA network has an offer where a user can get a chance to win a set of Callaway golf clubs just for entering their email address (and with completion of program terms) and you get a $1.25 payout. Most people, including me in the past, would target golf club type keywords and other high profile golf keywords such as manufacturers, golf balls, etc. The only trouble is, these keywords are way too competitive to attempt to make a go here even with the low cost of the content network.

So instead of targeting competitive, high cost keywords, you could maybe target a list the most popular golf courses in the United States, or the names of the top tournaments throughout the US during the year, even better would be to make up a list of the top golfers in history, the more modern the better. Obviously people interested in top golfers, golf courses and tournaments would also be interested in winning a set of Callaway golf clubs.

The second secret is a little more secret in that I can’t really divulge much here because of TOS violations with PPC Coach, but I can at least explain the concept. You have to think out of the box for this one. What you normally do when promoting any offer is pick the one you think will do best and then target it with various keywords to get traffic. Stop right there! Switch your thinking 180 degrees and brainstorm about traffic first. Regardless of what the offer is, how would you get traffic? Think about what the sources and issues surrounding high traffic are. How can you maximize the most traffic using the content network on Google, Yahoo or MSN and pay the least for it?

Once you have that figured out, then you set up an offer to capitalize on the traffic. Also, make sure you read Google’s Contextual Targeting vs Search Targeting guidelines and don’t put more than 50 words in an ad group.

If you want to learn more, you’ll have to join PPC Coach for the details.