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.

If you want to figure out all the intricacies of paid search and make money in PPC, you will have to lose money first. While there may be a small percentage of marketers that manage to make money the first time or very early on in their paid search campaigns, for the vast majority, you might as well just put aside a chunk of money in your piggy bank that you’re ready to spend when you can afford to lose it.

I’ve just started to make a little money with a few campaigns from Market Leverage and Pepperjam by either direct linking or building a niche web site, but it has taken me years to get to this point and I’m still not that good at it. I did see some return when I produced retail and recruiting leads for my own mlm business several years ago, but the actual ROI was hard to measure and I have not had that much luck up until a couple of months ago in my affiliate marketing PPC trials.

Fortunately with the last few months revenue being very good in the rest of my affiliate ventures, I can afford to jump into paid search full force again without having to worry about losing a few thousand dollars. Not that I want to lose the money, but it’s there to be able to take risks and experiment with. And if you do want paid search to work, that’s the kind of mentality you have to develop. You can’t be afraid to lose it, because you almost certainly will.

A few readers have left comments indicating they were hesitant to get into PPC because of the risks of losing money and the uncertainty of how it really works. The harsh reality is that if you are afraid to lose money, you shouldn’t even be giving paid search a try. Really. I’d even go so far as to say, Google counts on making a lot of money from people that have no idea about how to make money with Adwords. Until you have a budget laid out and a good chunk of change to just try your hand at a few different strategies, earn your internet income from other sources.

When you do feel you have the money to spend, I’d start with a budget of $250 to $500 to be able to put into clicks and start reading some of the guys that are making a killing in the mad world of PPC. The techniques I now use have been learned from people who reportedly make $20,000, $50,000 or even $100,000 per month or more dabbling in paid search. Some of the blogs I read on a regular basis to get tips and strategies for paid search are listed below:

JonathanVolk.com who learned from:

ClickConsultants.com- Read everything on Derek Salyers blog. He has mentored some of the top players in PPC and makes $200,000 per month, much of it with PPC, what more do you need to know?

Super Affiliate Mindset- Run by Amit Mehta who makes $2.5 million per year or more just using PPC.

Cash Tactics - Lots of good info on PPC. I should probably read this blog more often than I do.

UberAffiliate.com - Another affiliate marketer making a ridiculous $250K per month.

Before you spend, or rather lose, a dime on PPC you should read some or all these blogs because they will certainly help you minimize your losses and eventually help you gain the upper hand and hopefully start making some serious cash. The best thing about reading the info on all these blogs is that it is free, no expensive ebooks to waste you money on getting just a tidbit of info. I just wish these guys had been around when I started throwing money away on PPC 4 years ago.

If you are one of the fortunate ones who actually make money the first time you try your hand at PPC, power to you (you should probably start a blog and let us know what you’re doing). But if you are of the majority, you will lose money in PPC. Just chalk each loss up to experience and learn. Eventually you should learn enough about what not to do that there will be only positive, money earning lessons left.

Honestly, dealing with any kind of tech support or help desk is sometimes frustrating, but dealing with Google Adwords support is probably one of the most frustrating experiences in life. I wonder if they planned it that way? Waiting 3 days for an answer to a question, and then have that answer come straight from the online help files, is a complete waste of office space, a computer, a desk, a chair and the human being using it. Oh yea, and me even asking the question.

In my previous post I wondered if the Google Keyword Tool search volume feature was giving accurate results because of large discrepancies between what it was showing for volume and what other very popular tools reported. I inquired to Google Adwords support giving them an opportunity to respond and possibly clear up the matter, but as usual they’ve managed to dodge the issue completely with a canned response. Here’s my email below followed by their robotic reply:

Hello,

I see that the Google Keyword Tool now reports on approximate search volume of keywords, but they seem to be much higher that what other keyword research tools around the net are reporting.

For example, Google is reporting the term ‘apartment rentals’ has a June search volume of 673,000 searches, but the tool at http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html is reporting 4,786 for the same time period. I was wondering if you have any insight on this apparently large discrepancy?

Thanks for your assistance,

Alan LeStourgeon

Pretty straight forward I would think. Hello mama Google, can you help me clear this up?

Here’s their response. Is this an RTFM answer or not?

Hello Alan,

Thank you for writing in. I understand that you would like to know why there are discrepancies in the keyword traffic as shown by your AdWords Keyword tool and the external keyword tools.

Please note that the AdWords keyword tool displays traffic based on Google’s performance statistics for your keyword results. Data includes keyword search volume, search volume trends, and predicted cost and ad position on the Google Network. This is the reason there are bound to be discrepancies between the data as shown in the AdWords Keyword tool and the other external keyword traffic estimating tool.

To know more about the Keyword tool features, please visit
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=25109

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation.

(name removed to protect identity of Google help entity living near Earth’s core)

What? What the flip kind of a response is that? No explanation like maybe it’s cumulative searches with those terms in all inquiries, or we’re still in beta trying to sort out data, or yea dude, you may have a point there, we’ll check into that.

Instead, it’s the typical response of a help desk that feels they’re bothered by questions rather than being there to actually lend a hand and help the peons figure out something. What does “search volume trends, and predicted cost and ad position on the Google Network” have to do with my freaking question? I didn’t ask anything about predicted cost or ad position and that data doesn’t even show up when you are inquiring into search volume. Someone just copied and pasted text from the link above to give me an answer.

So there you have it, nothing made any clearer in trying to figure out why Google reports 140 times more traffic for a keyword than someone else does. Once again, another frustrating episode in dealing with all things Google.

Google’s new motto: “We are Google, Please Don’t Bother Us.”

I wonder if Google is as green and carbon friendly as they would like you to think. With their latest move in censoring Water4Gas.com and ebooks and web sites promoting any such product that uses water to give your car better gas mileage, they look rather suspect. Believe it or not I received and email the other day from the powers that be at Adwords letting advertisers know that they will no longer be allowed to run these types of ads in their pay per click network.

What’s the reason given for this business hampering move on Google’s part? The email stated they won’t be allowing this kind of advertising because of customer feedback and “business considerations.” What!? Business considerations? Who is Google in bed with on this one? What about the business considerations of the people trying to make a living selling ebooks and information such as this now that they don’t have access to approximately 25% of the world’s online advertising market?

This is exactly why I have a problem, as do thousands of others, with the way Google operates. They have their tentacles into nearly everything that has anything to do with being “on the grid” and they can just arbitrarily decide they don’t like your product and immediately 25% of all online advertising is no longer available to you. And you have absolutely no recourse. I don’t know what percentage of their business an operation like Water4Gas.com gets from Google Adwords, but I assume it’s a lot since they are a product sold through Clickbank. Any way you look at it, Google’s decision will have a devastating impact on this business and others like it.

As with any product, there will be people who think something like this is an outright scam and others that benefit from it. Products like this one are legitimate and after talking with an engineer friend of mine who has actually built some of these systems, he assures me they do work. I can understand where people may have a problem with Water4Gas.com because what you are actually buying is an ebook showing you how to build one of these systems, not any physical parts as the landing page kind of makes it look. You have to get the parts and assemble the kit yourself, but it does work.

Regardless of what you think of water for gas type products, a decision such as this from the mothership Google should trouble the hell out of you. Now that Google is in the affiliate business with their acquisition of DoubleClick, what product, advertising strategy, ad network or affiliate network is next on their hit list?

In 30 seconds anyone can go to ClickBank.com and find several products that are ripoffs, but look them up by searching with their domain name and you will find plenty of ads on Google. Or look up anything related to making money in real estate, mlm’s, online, trading stocks, whatever, you name it and I’ll bet you can find someone running a scam and advertising it via Adwords. We all must have some discernment in the purchases we make. If you don’t know that by now I have some swampland in Florida I’d like to show you. Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware.

Google has way too much power. When are they going to protect us from themselves?

I know it exists somewhere. That small, yet butterfly effect straw, placed on the unsuspecting camel’s back inviting closer scrutiny, congressional hearings, government intervention or a huge class action into the affairs of the mothership Google, is out there. All the little flags keep popping up, one more business ruined, many more cases of click fraud, one more tweak in the algorithm that damages commerce, one last utter absurdity that drives someone important to the brink of insanity.

Or maybe it will be the one hack or mistake that releases too much personal data or one sensitive government database indexed and opened to the public in an attempt to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and the tool we use every day to find information in this vast library known as the internet will get the colonoscopy they deserve.

If I weren’t so anti-government, and the US government weren’t so inept at what they do, I’d be championing the cause. Why? Because Google is an unyielding monolith that exists only to organize that which has already been created and is working as diligently as possible to mold the world’s information and our access to it as they see fit.

If you think the notion of a Supreme Star Chamber of 9 black robed men and women deciding law for an entire nation seems absurd, what must you think of a single company that controls nearly 50% of what the entire world searches for online and the order in which they are able to find it? And what must you think of that same company who takes in 25% of all advertising revenue spent online, yet doesn’t have to clearly define what they actually expect of their advertisers? What must your average legislation writing bureaucrat think of it?

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m on a rant. Another run in with the absurdity that is Google Adwords is the cause. I often wonder why I continue to even try to to business with a lifeless algorithm and equally lifeless canned responses to email inquiries once I actually make contact with a real human. Oh, that’s right, I do business with them because they’re virtually the only business in town.

The latest judgment by the almighty algorithm came as I was attempting to set up a PPC campaign in two different Ad Groups, bidding on nearly identical keywords, sending traffic to the exact same landing page in both Ad Groups. Not similar pages, the same page, with the same url. The only difference was the tracking sub-id so I can tell which keyword is converting. Both groups ran for 5 minutes and I get an email alert from Adwords telling me my landing page url is wrong in the second Ad Group. No, it’s not wrong, how could it be, it’s the same url? Please, I’m losing my mind, can I get a human being to look at this.

So in an attempt to humor the lifeless entity disapproving of my advertising, I switched the .us ending of the url to a .com and get another 5 minutes to run my ads until they’re again switched off for the same reason. I then switch back the url to the correct .us suffix thinking that maybe a human will take a look at it this time and only end up getting another 5 minutes of ad time before the email once again lets me know of the supposed url error. At this point I’m livid enough to start swearing, drinking and writing bad checks and have to walk away from my desk before I end up on YouTube in the next computer and office destroying video frenzy.

I find it beyond amazing that it takes only 10 minutes to disapprove my ads twice with the effect of shutting down half of my advertising, but it takes 3 days to answer an email inquiring into what is an obvious error. Of course there will be no easy resolution as the first email I see hopefully from Adwords tomorrow will be the usual nonsense response that won’t even deal with the issue and instead will be a rehash of some policy found buried deep in the bowels of Google’s Adwords help files.

After 3 or 4 emails traded between myself and the helpmeister from somewhere near the molten core of our planet I’ll probably just decide that’s it’s better to do my own landing page and be done with the whole thing. Or maybe I’ll just spend my money at Yahoo instead.