www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

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.

If you belong to any of the CPA networks you’ve probably seen the offers where all someone has to do is enter their email address or zip code and you get paid anywhere from $1.10 to $1.75 per lead. These offers always revolve around getting a free Wii game console, getting a free trip to Las Vegas, or getting any number of things for free. Most of these offers are promoted via large email lists, but you may have also noticed that you can promote some of these offers by using pay-per-click search marketing. Fantastic, you’re probably thinking right now, how can you spend 20 or 30 or 40 cents a click and possibly make money with an average lead only earning you in the neighborhood of $1.25?

Believe me, you can do it, because I’ve been doing it for the last 4 days and have earned more than $250 in the process. Only you aren’t paying any more than about 6 or 7 cents a click, but more like 4 or 5 cents. Here’s my stats for the last 4 days below:

There are 2 secrets. The first is using the Google, Yahoo or MSN content network and doing non-traditional targeting. For instance, lets say a CPA network has an offer where a user can get a chance to win a set of Callaway golf clubs just for entering their email address (and with completion of program terms) and you get a $1.25 payout. Most people, including me in the past, would target golf club type keywords and other high profile golf keywords such as manufacturers, golf balls, etc. The only trouble is, these keywords are way too competitive to attempt to make a go here even with the low cost of the content network.

So instead of targeting competitive, high cost keywords, you could maybe target a list the most popular golf courses in the United States, or the names of the top tournaments throughout the US during the year, even better would be to make up a list of the top golfers in history, the more modern the better. Obviously people interested in top golfers, golf courses and tournaments would also be interested in winning a set of Callaway golf clubs.

The second secret is a little more secret in that I can’t really divulge much here because of TOS violations with PPC Coach, but I can at least explain the concept. You have to think out of the box for this one. What you normally do when promoting any offer is pick the one you think will do best and then target it with various keywords to get traffic. Stop right there! Switch your thinking 180 degrees and brainstorm about traffic first. Regardless of what the offer is, how would you get traffic? Think about what the sources and issues surrounding high traffic are. How can you maximize the most traffic using the content network on Google, Yahoo or MSN and pay the least for it?

Once you have that figured out, then you set up an offer to capitalize on the traffic. Also, make sure you read Google’s Contextual Targeting vs Search Targeting guidelines and don’t put more than 50 words in an ad group.

If you want to learn more, you’ll have to join PPC Coach for the details.

I’ve confessed in the past my weakness in the area of search marketing. Pay-per-click has consistently been an area that I have not done well in, and I think a lot of affiliate marketers are in the same boat. Here and there I have made some money, but for the 3 years I’ve been an affiliate, I’ve probably been lucky if I’ve broken even in PPC.

There are lots of good blogs throughout the net that do a pretty good job of helping you figure out PPC, but I wanted something that I could study, where I could ask questions, I wanted tools and I wanted to see exactly how people were making money in PPC. That’s why I joined PPC Coach about 5 days ago. PPC Coach isn’t cheap at $50 per month, but if you are tired of spending money with Google Adwords and not seeing results, then you seriously ought to take a look at it. In the 5 days I’ve been a member I’ve already learned enough to run some campaigns and earn my first month’s cost back, so right there I know this stuff works.

For $50 a month PPC Coach gives you a series of videos, tools, a tracking system, an offer database where you can check out and compare the best paying offers between networks and more goodies, but the real power of PPC Coach is the month-by-month suggested campaigns and techniques to utilize, and the forums where people making more than $1,000 a day offer advice and sometimes literally walk you through difficulties you may be having trying to get a campaign profitable.

The thing that excites me the most is the monthly techniques and campaigns to run. And the nice thing about the way PPC Coach works is that you can only see the number of techniques according to the number of months you’ve been a member. “Coach” as we call him, specifically designed the system this way so newbies like myself don’t jump right in and try to start learning and doing everything under the sun. So when you first join PPC Coach, in the Merchants section, you can only see posts related to technique number 1 for the entire month. The philosophy is, “Here, run this, we’ll tell you exactly how to do it, and don’t do anything else.”

I can’t tell you much more than the month one technique involves making money from zip and email submits, because I’d probably get in trouble, but as you can see from the screen shots below, you can. Only a couple of months ago I didn’t think it was possible to make money by producing leads via search that pay just $1 to $1.75, but a friend explained them to me a little better and PPC Coach sort of refined the process. I’ll write a post about it in a few days explaining the concept, but again, I can’t be specific because of TOS violations. 

PPC Coach is great if you are frustrated with trying to figure out PPC and want to jump right in, have some money to spend and are ready to get started. If you are hesitant, are short on cash or PPC isn’t the direction you want to go, then do not spend the money on PPC Coach, it isn’t for you. I only decided to join because I spend way more than the $50 membership fee every month on my own pay-per-click marketing and don’t have that much to show for it.

You can check out PPC Coach here only if you are ready to learn the paid search game or are looking to make even more from what you are already doing in paid search.

I finished up the Harsh Realities of Affiliate Marketing series a few days ago but wanted to write a short review and have 1 single post where you can find all 7 posts in the series and get a quick summary of what each one is about.

I did the series to let mainly new affiliates know that as much as the ebook pimps want you to think how easy affiliate marketing is, it takes lots and lots of work, there really isn’t any shortcut. But as long as you are willing to put in the time, it can be very rewarding and can give you the freedom from a job that so many look forward to, you just may want to be aware of the obstacles in the road ahead though.

The post titles and a short summary of each are listed below:

Harsh Reality 1 - Ranking For Keywords That Get Zero Traffic Means Nothing
Don’t make the mistake of spending time getting your blog or web site to rank for keyword phrases that don’t bring you any traffic.

Harsh Reality 2 - You Will Lose Money Starting In PPC
If you are going to try your hand at PPC, be prepared to lose money before you make money. Set a budget you can afford to lose before you get started.

Harsh Reality 3 - You’ll Never Make A Living With Banner Ads
We’ve all seen those websites plastered with nothing but affiliate banners. If you own a site like that, I can guarantee you aren’t making enough money to buy yourself a decent dinner once a week, probably not even once a month.

Harsh Reality 4 - There Will Be A Major Setback In Your Affiliate Career
If you don’t get slammed at least once in your affiliate marketing efforts and have a disappointing setback, you aren’t trying hard enough.

Harsh Reality 5 - No Risk Equals No Reward
If you’re going to make money at affiliate marketing, you will have to risk time, money or other goodies until you get the whole thing figured out. Even when you start making some money, you’ll have to take risks to get to that next level.

Harsh Reality 6 - Those Who Analyse The Most, Do The Least
If you’re stuck in the perpetual cycle of over analysing and planning, the only way out is to actually do something. Ultimately it is the action part of affiliate marketing that earns you the money.

Harsh Reality 7 - Don’t Count On Your Blog Making Money
If you are blogging about how to make money online, it’s probably a good idea that you go out and make some money first.

The real harsh reality of affiliate marketing is that you can make some very good money having an online business, you just have to watch out for the lazy work habits, stupid mistakes, bad advice, deceptive marketing and false dreams that can end up hurting you in the end. However, some of these trials are a good thing to work through, that way you know what not to do. The better perspective you have on the truth about being an affiliate, the better chance you have of making a living at it.

I hope you enjoyed and benefited from the Harsh Reality series.