www.affiliateconfession.com

My wife asks me on a semi-regular basis why I don’t just hire someone to do the lawn for us. I don’t because I like mowing the lawn. It’s one of those simple pleasures in life that provides instant gratification. With the new lawn mower we recently got, it has cut (no put intended) 15 minutes from the time it takes me to mow and when the work is done, instant results, we have a nice looking lawn. I get to enjoy the fruits of labor by seeing our nicely manicured yard.

That’s why pay per click marketing, once you finally start to make a profit, is like mowing your lawn, you can throw a campaign together in an hour or two and start making a profit in another hour. Sure, it does take a bit of a learning curve for most to get the hang of how to actually make a profit in the world of PPC (It certainly did for me). But when you do, if you direct link to affiliate offers or just build simple landing pages without all the work that goes into building out a large site, you can see nearly instant results. There isn’t any waiting to see if Google will show you some favor and index your pages high enough to get good traffic. Normally within a couple of hours you can see the results of a good pay per click campaign start to take shape and it’s a marvelous thing. It obviously doesn’t always work out this way, but with the info I learned from PPC Coach, I was making a profit with my first campaign about 3 hours after I started it and 24 hours later, after a bit of tweaking, my ROI was 100%.

Now there are two major schools of thought to PPC marketing. One is to build landing pages and there are those that say this is the only way to do it. Pre-sell your traffic with your own landing page, or at least collect your visitor’s email address and build a list that you can market to over and over. And the other option is to work with CPA offers and merchants who allow you to deep link to their website directly from your ads. In fact in reading the PPC Coach forums the other day, I ran across someone who has been at this game for a few years and claimed that he has never built a landing page. So whenever you get into the PPC game, you’ll just have to figure out what works best for you.

I tend to like the direct linking option better because you’re still sending traffic to a landing page, it just happens to belong to the merchant. You just have to find out which ones convert better than others through testing different offers or different merchants with the same kind of offer. One of the nice things about PPC Coach is that a tool they have is a database which shows the top paying offers through several networks, searchable by keyword, so you can look for the latest Acai Berry or Green Tea diet and weight loss offers and more easily find the landing page that converts the best.

PPC Coach has definitely helped the instant gratification of PPC become a reality. While on vacation this next week, a lot of planning will be going into heading more into this direction with my online endeavors.

By the way, my wife recently hired someone to do the house cleaning for us and I’m so thankful, because I got zero enjoyment out of running the vacuum around the house. However, I don’t know if I’ll ever hire someone on a regular basis to mow our lawn. It’s too easy to do and I get too much enjoyment out of it to farm it out to someone else.

I’m not the accountant in our family. Crunching numbers for hours at a time makes me loony, but I do love to figure out affiliate earnings every month because it gives me a legitimate excuse to be obsessive about checking stats, which I usually have a bad habit of doing way too much.

I was hoping to get to $5,000 in earnings this month, but actually had a slight drop. This month was a good example of why you should keep your affiliate business diversified. Revenue shifted quite a bit from some solid earners into newer and unexpected income streams. While earnings from the eBay Partner Network were down by about $400 and revenue from my top BANS store was down by nearly $600, other affiliate streams almost replaced it. Earnings from Azoogle, Clickbank and Market Leverage were up and after advertising expenses, profit was around $500 from these three. I also earned a nice $282.51 from Site Build It which I rarely ever promote.

Pay per click advertising between Facebook ads and Adwords showed the most promise this month as a spend of $1,115.11 (this is what I can specifically track)  created revenue of $1,609.90, realizing a profit of $494.79. It’s now a matter of weeding out the losers and attempting to tweak and ramp up the winners.

Total revenue did come in at over $5,000 this month, but costs were at an all time high. Everything breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense - $1,415.24
Commission Junction - $110.37
EPN - eBay - $719.19
Meal Planner Ebook - $102.00
TripAdvisor - $177.03
Clickbank - $266.83
Private Advertising - $175.00
AzoogleAds - $1,152.85
Microsoft - $200.00
Pepperjam  - $49.70
Market Leverage - $252.85
Other Affiliate Programs - $405.46

Total Revenue - $5,026.52

Total expenses - $1,208.46

Total Income - $3,818.06

The goal for September is to reach $5,000 in earnings even though this month is traditionally very slow and we’ll be on a nice beach vacation for a week. Hopefully we can avoid the 3 storms churning up the Atlantic ocean as I write this. Our last vacation was rained out, so it would be nice to get a break from that.

Remember, keep your earnings streams diversified to avoid getting crushed when that big stream turns into a tiny creek and your income suffers significantly because it’s the only thing you have going.

May is turning out to be a very good month for my Build A Niche Store web sites and the eBay affiliate program. The final numbers won’t be in until Monday or late tomorrow, but it looks like earnings for my BANS stores should be around $900 for the month and earnings for the best performing BANS store around $650.

I did spend some money driving traffic to one of these stores this month, but only to the tune of a little over $100 and it has apparently paid off fairly well. Last month my top store produced $246.68 in revenue and I spent a whopping $2.90 in PPC traffic, this month $101.97 has been spent on PPC and revenue is at $629.44 for the same store. PPC search traffic this month has produced 304 clicks to this store resulting in 314 bids and 97 winning bids. Last month with virtually no PPC traffic, there were 139 total bids with 53 winning bids at the same store.

A little closer examination needs to be done on organic search traffic versus paid traffic to see where the real gains are coming from, but initially it looks as though paid search is paying off for this Build A Niche Store site. I’m working on another BANS site that I will be trying some paid search on, the earnings probably won’t be as significant for at least one reason. The store I’m sending paid traffic to right now is based on products that sell for between $500 and $1,000 and sometimes even more.

It is questionable as to whether paid search would work on a BANS site with items selling for much less than $300 to 400. The reason being is that you earn about 2% for a sale at eBay and earning anything much less than $10 per sale is hard to make work with PPC. Of course there’s always the chance of selling multiple items and earning a few $25 new member bounties which would make paid search worthwhile. The new store I’ll be sending search traffic to will have items ranging from $100 to $300 in price so it will be a little experiment to see if this theory holds true.

One last note is that the store bringing me good returns with PPC is a fully built store with substantial content in both articles and content on auction pages so I’m getting very good quality scores from Google on the pages I’m sending traffic to. PPC probably won’t work on pages that have nothing but auctions.

You can get more info on Build A Niche Store here.

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. 

If you’ve been reading Affiliate Confession for any length, you’ve probably come across a post or two where I’ve exclaimed how difficult it has been to actually make money from pay per click campaigns. I have in the past made a little money producing leads for an MLM company and for producing leads for retailing the air purifiers I sold through that MLM company. But since then, my PPC success has been pretty dismal.

Fortunately, the lack of success in the search marketing arena seems to be taking a turn towards the positive in the last couple of months. In one of the campaigns I’ve been running I’ve found a product I can direct link to through Pepperjam Network and I’ve had some limited success until I changed the landing page and lowered my conversion rate to zero. I’ll be switching this one back to the original landing page and adding money to my account tomorrow or later today and we’ll see if the conversions return. I’m running this particular campaign through Yahoo Search Marketing.

I’m also seeing some success by sending paid traffic to one of my BANS stores and although it is next to impossible to really know for sure how well a PPC campaign is working for one of these niche eBay stores, as far as I can tell it is working. Build A Niche Store does automatically add a custom sub-id to your links as they go into your EPN tracking so you are able to tell with reasonable certainty what page your winning bid originated from. You can also tell what specific products you sold by looking at your downloaded stats so you do know if traffic going to a specific product page is producing results.

I’ve read lots of info on PPC but none so easy to understand than what I’ve found at Super Affiliate Mindset. Amit Mehta spends around $150,000 per month on Google Adwords and other PPC campaigns and he ends up profiting more than $2 million per year just from his PPC activity. Needless to say, Amit is probably a person you should listen to if you are trying desperately to figure out how to be profitable at PPC like I am.

The biggest thing I’ve learned from Amit is to run individual YSM or Adwords campaigns with only a single word single keyword phrase in each campaign. I know this sounds like a pain, but this is the only thing that I’ve been able to do that gives my campaigns profitability. With this strategy you add your keyword to your ad and it keeps your quality score high enough that you get a good position and a relevant ad that people will click through on.

I’ll go more into how to find keywords that are profitable and will bring you some traffic, but for now, go read Amit categories on Google Adwords and PPC Marketing because there’s some amazing stuff there that just might help you get in to profitability with your PPC campaigns as well.