www.affiliateconfession.com

I’ve been with Neverblue for a few months now, but I’ve only been running active campaigns with any effort for about 10 weeks through them. Back just a few days ago I passed the $10,000 mark in total revenue with them in that 10 week period. Do realize though, this is not profit, it is total revenue produced from all the offers I’ve been running through them. Without doing to much research, I can tell you that about half of that revenue produced is profit though, so that’s about $500 a week in earnings I’ve been generating through Neverblue.

Most of the revenue generated in the last 10 weeks through Neverblue has been from what I learned through PPC Coach.

Let me tell you, working with Neverblue rocks. My affiliate manager, Mike, was great to work with and anytime I needed anything I could call him up and he’d get back with me always the same day either by phone or email. I talked with Mike once or twice a week and through close communication he knew what I wanted to promote in my business and kept me informed of new offers and gave me an income bump on a few offers that I was doing well with to give me even more profit. Mike has since moved on to go back to school and I’ve been switched over to super affiliate manager Michelle who I’ve only had the chance to talk to once and she is equally as nice and helpful.

Beyond the helpful affiliate managers I like the way the control panel looks and functions inside your account. When you first log in you can see your revenue produced for the month, for the day and the total amount since being with the company. You can also see links to your current campaigns running, other campaigns recommended for you, the newest campaigns just coming out, your affiliate manager contact info and pic and a bunch of other info.

Once you click over to the available campaigns I love the way this screen is organized. All offers are classified by category and include the number of offers available. When you click to see the offers you can then see the total network earnings, EPC and the payout for producing a lead. If you then click to an offer the creatives are organized under tabs and on the left of the screen you will see the kind of promotions allowed, the EPC and total earnings and the payout and what constitutes a lead somewhere in the middle. It’s great to have all this info right at your fingertips so you can see if this is an offer you want to run.

I try to choose offers with high network earnings and a high EPC, the payout isn’t really that important. That may sound strange to not be concerned about the payout, but what I look for in an offer is if it’s making money for the network at has that good EPC. If those two things are high, I feel like I have a better chance to make money with it regardless of what it pays. If you see an offer with high network earnings, high EPC and a high payout, those are obviously the best.

Organization, great offers, lots of info to help you choose profitable offers and affiliate manager friendly and willing to get to know you and your business is what makes Neverblue rock.

Sign up with Neverblue, earn some affiliate cash and experience their personal service.

I discovered something last week while trying to find an alternative place to work while one-fourth of our home is being renovated, blogging at the local coffee shop isn’t really as sexy as you would think. While it is nice for a change of pace once a week or so to relocate for the afternoon and hang out with other mobile office-mates, doing that for an extended period of time for an entire week or longer, is actually quite a drag.

Here’s how it went last week:

Monday - Headed over to Calvary Chapel WiFi Cafe and after working for 3 hours had to leave and sit in my hot car for 10 minutes with the windows rolled up to thaw out. It’s a great location to work because there are little to no interruptions and you get a huge workspace, but the temperature is so cold you had better dress for winter or buy lots of hot tea or coffee.

Tuesday - Went to SunShoppe Cafe in downtown Melbourne and spent about 4 hours surfing the net, reading and responding in the forums at PPC Coach and working on a BANS site. Not a bad experience, but the temperature was a bit on the chilly side again and the seats were somewhat uncomfortable. However, it was a pretty good deal to be able to use a table for half of a regular work day and only spend $2 on an iced tea. It’s kind of a hip place to spend some time and I’d rate it as the best place I went last week.

Wednesday - Went back to SunShoppe Cafe and hit the lunch crowd…bummer. It was loud and distracting, but at least I wasn’t such a bogart today because I did buy lunch and only stayed 2 hours.

Thursday - Went to the local library. This wasn’t a good experience because I had to contend with some guy sleeping in a chair and snoring loudly near the nice desks with sides panels to help avoid distractions. The snoring was a huge distraction. Moved across the library to the magazine section and sat in front of the music CD table when 5 minutes later someone decided to look through every CD in the rack. Endured click…click…click for 15 minutes.

The biggest drawback I experienced in goin’ mobile last week was simply not being able to get up and take a walk, get some fresh air or take a restroom break for the 3 or 4 hours at these various locations. It’s a bit of a hassle to pack up your stuff and take it to the boys room with you so someone doesn’t walk off with your laptop while nature calls.

The second biggest issue is just the temperature. I can only sit for so long in an ice box before rigor mortis sets in and I can’t move. The only place I’ve found so far where the temp is absolutely perfect is Java Surf on the beachside, but that’s about a 15 minute drive away from the house and you have to buy something every hour to get “free” internet access. 

Unfortunately, the hunt for the perfect office away from home continues…

Getting into pay per click marketing can be expensive because unless you really know what you’re doing, most everyone tends to lose money in the beginning. There are those that have the golden touch and are profitable with PPC right away, but for most of us, including myself, you end up spending a lot of money with Adwords long before you see profit.

So what can you do if you want to get started, but don’t want to risk the money initially? Try financing your PPC campaigns. I’m not talking about taking out a loan and risking money you don’t have, we already have a huge problem with that in the world today, what I’m talking about is to finance your paid marketing with other present or newly created revenue from your affiliate business.

If you want to get into PPC and have little money to do so, determine right now to either use a specific amount of money (a budget), a specific CPA offer that’s generating x amount of cash or build a new stream of revenue with your blog, a new site or sell some stuff on eBay just to get going. You are essentially borrowing money from one part of your business to finance another part of your business. The only way you are going to be truly profitable in the long run as an affiliate is to put those profits back into your business on an ongoing basis.

Initially I sold some things on eBay to have some seed money when I decided to get into PPC again. And when I reached a level of income over $2,500 per month, my wife and I decided I could spend anything over that amount on PPC. I’m also profiting from a PPC offer that’s making more money per day than all my other campaigns are costing.

If you are successful with this method of financing your PPC efforts this way, be careful not to overlook your campaigns that are losing money just because you are making more in the long run than the losers are costing you. You still have to weed out and either delete or heavily tweak your campaigns that aren’t making you any money if you want to build a good income. I have to stay diligent and check my campaigns every day to find the ones that aren’t doing well.

This may be done fairly quickly for some or may take some time to implement for others depending on how profitable you are or how quickly you can start to be profitable with various affiliate offers. Once you budget the amount you’re going to spend or are going to finance your campaigns with a changing amount of revenue from one of your best affiliate offers, then don’t exceed the amount you are making for that day. If you keep working at it and are smart about your cash flow when just staring out, you will eventually be making enough that you can try bigger and more riskier PPC campaigns and hopefully make even more profit.

You should know by now that I’m not about get-rich-quick, so if you thought that was what this was about, head over to ClickBank and get one of those kind of ebooks. If you want to learn how to do PPC the right way, check out PPC Coach.

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!