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. 

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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.

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Want to try out some pay per click advertising for free? Microsoft is currently offering $75 in free clicks for new sign-ups to their AdCenter PPC advertising program from now until June 30th 2008. How does that sound for a nice deal?

If you haven’t tried PPC advertising before, it is a bit tricky to lean how to be profitable in, but this is a great opportunity to learn the ropes and spend someone else’s money while figuring out the whole process.

Some veteran PPC advertisers have seen better conversions on the Microsoft network through Live Search and MSN, than they’ve seen through Google or Yahoo. Apparently Microsoft has a different demographic of shoppers that tends to buy at a better rate than through other search portals. But hey, with a $75 coupon for free clicks, what difference does it make?

If you want to avoid the ridiculous landing page rules and $10 minimum bids if you don’t get it right from Google, give this offer a try and see if you can make it work. You have $75 to play with so give it a shot.

Make sure you use the coupon code on the sign up page to get your $75 credit. I would post the code here, but it looks like it generates a new code every time you go to the page.

The offer is only for new advertisers and does require a $5 set up fee. Would you pay 5 bucks to get $75 worth of clicks?

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