Another affiliate income report is due and July turned out to my best month in affiliate earnings so far, topping last month by 24% which was also a record month. Fortunately I haven’t been slowed down at all by the summer slump many affiliates experience.
Two of the biggest increases in July came from a new record in AdSense earnings, beating the previous best month by $200 and earnings from the eBay affiliate program for the first time crossed the $1,000 per month barrier thanks to Build A Niche Store. Earnings were also good from Pepperjam Network, Market Leverage and AzoogleAds.
Expenses were a bit higher than usual this past month due to experimenting with PPC and having some success. I hope to scale that up a bit this month. Total income for July 2008 came in at $4,312.31 and breaks down as follows:
Three things I’ll be working on this month to hopefully increase the income again will be paid advertising through Facebook Ads, Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, getting more incoming links to my travel sites and continued work on my Build A Niche Stores. A single BANS store produced more than $800 in revenue this month and I’d like to get that store over the $1,000 barrier.
I’ve also started working on a store mash-up that can bring in content from eBay, YouTube, any RSS feeds, ClickBank, Amazon, Overstock and more that could be pretty lucrative. I’ll be explaining more about that coming up in a few more weeks.
With another 24% increase in August that would put things over the $5,000 per month mark which is a fairly significant milestone in earnings. I’ll be taking a week off this month and a week off in September for a birthday and anniversary so it will be hard to keep up the steady pace of seeming non stop work for the next couple of months. Hopefully there are enough things in place to keep the income on auto pilot while the work pace slows down until mid Sept.
If you have enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed or you can have posts send directly to your inbox if you subscribe by email.
Over the last 3 weeks or so I’ve had the joy of trying to make money with Facebook Ads and trying to figure out what the minds in the ad department will allow to be shown on their site. Luckily I was able to secure $250 in free Facebook advertising coupons (some have expired as of this post) via NeilsWeb.com so this little advertising experiment didn’t cost me anything.
Probably the biggest drawback to advertising on Facebook is just trying to figure out what the ad editors want. In a previous post I lamented that the ad editors were so arbitrary in their decision making that they were causing blood to shoot from my eyes. After posting some 28 ads and getting 8 disapproved, I think I finally have somewhat of a handle on what is acceptable. They won’t accept anything that even remotely resembles spammy advertising, whether it be in the way you write your ads or the product you’re advertising.
Their old advertising guidelines don’t give you much direction on how your ads should be worded and while their new guidelines (not yet published, but found at Nickycakes.com) are much better at explaining what they’re looking for, their philosophy on advertising in general is bizarre to say the least. The text in your ad can’t imply that there is anything wrong with a person who might click on your ad. For instance, ads for weight loss products can’t say something like, “Want To Lose That Weight?” because that would be implying that those who want to lose weight are overweight. Well ya! Your ads must be worded in a neutral way such as, “Lose Weight With Product X” or Product X Weight Loss”. Completely lame.
It seems like the ad department at Facebook needs a little schooling in long established marketing principles because they seem to be hell bent on rewriting the rules of advertising. For Facebook to not even allow you to creatively pique a potential customer’s interest by asking a question, to establish a need, is just plain foolish. The powers that be at FB might have to rethink that one when their ad revenue starts drying up.
So what exactly happened with the $250 in free advertising credits? Well, my results didn’t turn out all that well. After spending $247 of the $250 I managed to only earn back $87.15, not a good return. Here’s how it all breaks down:
3 Paused due to bleeding revenue to the tune of $97 in about 2 days time.
Probably the biggest hindrance to earning back the $250 was the high bid prices that are suggested you start your campaign with. Many of them are in the 50 to 70 cents per click range and I started 3 campaigns that ate up $97 rather quickly and produced zero results. I didn’t really figure out how some people such as Neil from NeilsWeb.com are able to get their bids low and still get a decent CTR. Most of my campaigns ran at a ridiculously low CTR of 0.03% and while I ran one campaign after I’d spent the $250 in free credits that got a 0.27% CTR, it ended up producing zero revenue after spending around $30.
Okay, what did I learn from this? While it’s still somewhat of mystery as to how some people are rockin Facebook Ads and cleaning up in revenue, I learned these basic things:
Don’t advertise spammy offers.
Find the fine line between neutral and creating too much of a sensation and you will get your ads approved.
Watch your ads closely and reduce bid prices accordingly if you are spending too much.
Look for offers or products that pay high, cost the consumer little and have appeal to the young Facebook audience.
Don’t listen to me, I essentially lost money! For crying out loud, read NeilsWeb.com and NickyCakes.com and learn from people who actually make money with Facebook Ads.
I’m not taking this as defeat though. There is a way to make money with Facebook Ads because other people are doing it, I’m just going to be a lot more careful with the next $250 spent, because this time it’s my money on the table.
If you have enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed or you can have posts send directly to your inbox if you subscribe by email.
I got an email on Tuesday from Debby Phillips over at Market Leverage letting me know that they featured AffiliateConfession.com on the latest episode of Market Leverage TV or better known as MLTV.
MLTV features the top 5 best performing offers of the week on the Market Leverage network and one of the offers they’re featuring this week is Vegas Baby where anyone interested can get free Las Vegas accommodations for 2 nights at the Summer Bay Resort just by filling in their first name, last and an email address. I’m making a little with this offer through search and was pretty surprised to find out you actually can make money with an offer that only pays $1.65. Little did I know how well some of these email and zip submit offers convert.
Vegas Baby converts between 20 and 30% and if you think I’m completely giving away a little niche here, think again. There is a trick to getting this to work on search that I learned from a friend and it definitely works. Just use your imagination, that’s all I can tell you.
Anyway, watch below and check out some of Market Leverage’s offers during the video and think about how you might put them into your traffic stream. The Affiliate Confession spot is towards the end.
If you have enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed or you can have posts send directly to your inbox if you subscribe by email.
Dina Riccobono, Mike Kelly and Debby Phillips from Market Leverage got busted and are in the slammer! At least that’s the way it looks from the photo above.
Actually what’s going on is that I sent them some Affiliate Confession T-shirts and jokingly mentioned that it would be great if they could do something to get arrested and appear on America’s Most Wanted, all while wearing the shirts of course. I figured this would be great promotion for the blog here. While it would probably be better for their careers and their permanent records (you know, the one they have on you since before kindergarten) if they didn’t get their mugshots on national TV, they willingly played along with the joke and came up with the creative photo.
If you haven’t noticed something here, you should by now.
Market Leverage is goofy, well yea, but they’re different too. How many other affiliate ad networks would go to this much trouble have fun with a little joke such as this? I really appreciate the way ML just engages with bloggers and what’s going on around the net by sponsoring contests, being easy to deal with and actually reading blog posts and commenting appropriately. Believe it or not I have had some people promoting ad networks and products for affiliates that just swoop in and are nothing but hyped promotion, not so with ML. In fact Debby left several comments on my blog before I even checked out her link.
I also appreciate the way emails are answered either the same day, usually within an hour or two and many times within a few minutes of me posing a question or asking about an offer. Everyone knows, you just don’t find email service like that with many affiliate networks. Most of the time you’re lucky to get your questions answered at all. Really, it’s an absolute pleasure dealing with ML and I’m sure you will find the exact same experience.
If you’d like to get personal service, check out some great offers, spend some time in jail (joking), and make some money, join the gang at America’s Most Wanted affiliate network, join Market Leverage.
If you have enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed or you can have posts send directly to your inbox if you subscribe by email.
I’ve emailed Jay letting him know he’s the winner and all he has to do now is email me back with his address and all the prizes will be on their way. Jay scored some pretty cool prizes in the contest which included:
Nintendo DS Lite with 2 games
AffiliateConfession.com T-Shirt
Flip Mino video camera
iPod Nano
$50 Market Leverage Rewards Card
2GB USB Pen USB Missile Launcher Banana Bunker (protect your bananas) Ambient Water DVD Video (very low maintenance aquarium)
I want to thank Stefanie for offering the great, and interesting, prizes from Vat19.com. If you can’t find the right gift for someone, you really should go check out the curiously awesome products Vat19.com has. If you think The Sharper Image catalog was cool, wait till you see what they have. They’ve taken fun to a new level.
And I also want to thank Debby and Dina from Market Leverage for going above and beyond the call of duty and adding to the initial prizes they were offering. That’s just the way Market Leverage operates and if you are looking to add some great offers to your affiliate marketing line up, go see what you can find.
Thanks also to everyone who entered the contest as well. If you didn’t win this time, there will be more blog contests in the future, so stay tuned.
If you have enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to my full RSS feed or you can have posts send directly to your inbox if you subscribe by email.
Over the last 3 weeks or so I’ve had the joy of trying to make money with Facebook Ads and trying to figure out what the minds in the ad department will allow to be shown on their site. Luckily I was able to secure $250 in 
Dina Riccobono, Mike Kelly and Debby Phillips from 
Most Commented Posts