www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

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.

One bad thing about vacations is that it can be really hard to get back into the swing of things. Our week long getaway at Grayton Beach in the Florida panhandle ranks up there as one of the most enjoyable vacations I’ve ever taken. We had plenty of time for activities, business planning, eating some great food, long walks on the white sandy beaches and of course the all important relaxing, making it hard to return to normal life.

We chose this location because Grayton Beach was voted best beach in the nation in 1994 for its white sugar sand, its state parks featuring deserted stretches of beach and a phenomenon known as coastal dune lakes which exist in only 5 locations worldwide and our recent discovery of this area’s themed developments. My wife read about Grayton Beach several years ago and we finally got the chance to take a vacation here.

We stayed in a beautiful 4 bedroom 3 bath home that was much larger than what we needed, but was also much less expensive than what it would have cost us for a room or condo at a resort or a “vacation rental” for a week. The home was ideally located in a community on Highway 30A that runs along the beach towns of Walton County. Watercolor, Seaside and Alys (pronounced Alice) Beach are some of the planned towns that were within a few minutes drive or slightly longer bike ride from our accommodations.

These meticulously scripted developments all feature shopping, tons of nice restaurants, bars, numerous coffee shops and of course ultra-pristine beaches with a non-commercial, very relaxing atmosphere. The only drawback of this Disney like lifestyle is that it’s hard to find a home in any of these planned communities valued at less than $1 million, meaning that prices in restaurants and shops are relatively expensive. As an example, the occasion did call for a tasty $12 (ouch!) margarita at what became our favorite taco bar. If you’re concerned about spending money here, it would be less expensive to be a crackhead in Grayton Beach than it would be an alcoholic (I’m sure the Chamber of Commerce will love that line).

Here are some more pictures of a super enjoyable vacation:

Beautiful beaches:

I actually got my wife to ride a Waverunner with me. Not much of an action pic, but this is where we picked up our Waverunner. It was actually several miles west of Grayton Beach in Destin, FL.

Enjoying coffee at PJ’s, the best coffee shop in Grayton Beach:

Insane property values on Grayton Beach. This is a $13 million home we saw in a real estate magazine and then realized it was right beside our development’s beach access. I’m not sure why it’s so expensive.

We had a great time, but it’s time to get back to work and implement some of the plans made on vacation and things I’ve been learning at PPC Coach to offset what is shaping up to be a very slow September for affiliate earnings. The goal is always to make life more extraordinary than it is normal.

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.

We’re going on vacation next week and things are pretty hectic around the LeStourgeon household this week as we try to get things in place to get our bathroom remodeled while we’re gone. So for the next few days I’m just going to be doing a few short posts on stuff I’ve been checking out around the net or some interesting happenings.

Well, the world managed to survive the initial test of the Large Hadron Collider today, but if you read my post yesterday, there was some concern that we all might get sucked into a black hole when the LHC fired up. If you have nothing else to do, check out some amazing pictures of the Large Hadron Collider.

Would you like to hide your Whois domain info from the prying eyes of spammers and copy cat affiliate marketers by registering your domain privately? Would you like to do it for free? It doesn’t make much sense to actually charge for keeping your domain private, but that’s what a lot of hosts do. However Chris Guthrie has found a loophole to get free domain privacyfrom Godaddy. I’m all for anything to keep more money out of the hands of that weenie Godaddy CEO Bob Parsons, so go check it out.

I’ve been blogging about PPC Coach and how it has helped me get on the profitability side of pay per click marketing. The owner of PPC Coach, Will Haimerl, was interviewed yesterday by the director of search engine marketing at ClickBooth.com and it is a fantastic insight into the world of pay per click and another form of advertising you may not be familiar with, pay-per-view or PPV marketing. The interview is an hour long and is well worth listening to, so get yourself a cup of coffee, a snack and listen to the PPC Coach interview.

Next week we’ll be vacationing at Grayton Beach in this house my wife found online in 5 minutes when I searched for 3 hours and found nothing. I won’t be doing much blogging next week at all, if any. Hopefully I’ll get in a couple of posts of us having some fun riding a Jet Ski or lounging on the white sandy beaches in the Florida panhandle.

Cheers.