www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

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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.

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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!

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Even though I had major revenue reductions this month from eBay, Adsense, Azoogle, Market Leverage and a few others, I still managed to have a record month in affiliate earnings. Most all of the increase came from pay per click earnings to the tune of more than $2,100 profit. I owe nearly all of what I’ve learned about PPC to PPC Coach. The bottom line you see below would have been $2,100 less with out it.

I’m not sure what’s going on with eBay, but many an affiliate are seriously complaining about revenue drops in September. I was down $300 in eBay earnings this month and nearly $750 from the month before that. What’s very odd is that my earnings per winning bid have gone from $4.80 in July 2008, to $3.52 in August, to $2.25 for the month of September. That’s a 55% reduction in revenue earned per winning bid in 3 months time. There will certainly be shifts in earnings, but I’m not liking the trend. Time to contact eBay.

Regardless of the inner workings of eBay I’m very thankful for the overall increase this past month. Total revenue for September was $7,292.33 with expenses at $2,551.70, making for a net profit of $4,740.63. It all breaks down as follows:

Google Adsense – $1,055.10
Commission Junction – $109.28
EPN – eBay – $458.61
Meal Planner Ebook – $170.00
TripAdvisor – $105.76
Clickbank – $45.83
Private Advertising – $35.00
AzoogleAds – $694.45
Microsoft – $200.00
Pepperjam – $33.00
Market Leverage – $73.35
Neverblue – $4,042.50
Other Affiliate Programs – $269.80

Total Revenue – $7,292.33

Total expenses – $2,551.70

Total Income – $4,740.63

My goal for September was to earn $5,000 profit, but I missed it by only $260. Hopefully with Halloween promotions and PPC looking nice this month so far (and maybe some favor from eBay), the $5,000 will be reached in October. As always, remember to diversify your affiliate income to make up for when eBay and Adsense aren’t as nice as they could be.

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Finally, I get to say I’m making a decent profit from pay per click advertising. It’s been a long journey from the post I wrote last November declaring that PPC was a scam as Google and Yahoo run it. Even before that post I had been dabbling in PPC for 3 years with not much to show for it.

Yesterday however, was different. I’ve had several days this month over $100 in profit, but yesterday’s profit was over $200 from PPC alone. There are some great blogs around the net that teach techniques about PPC, but nothing has helped me get into serious profitability like PPC Coach has.

Here are some screen shots from yesterday:

As you can see, revenue at Neverblue was $352.05 and total spend at Google Adwords was $151.21 giving me a profit of $200.84. This comes from being profitable on just 2 offers at Neverblue and running 2 campaigns with 6 adgroups total on Adwords. Oh, one additional bit of info, this is all being done on the content network, not the search network.

It looks like PPC Coach is well worth the $50 per month cost.

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