Walking through the eerie world of online marketing

Hoop Hoop! I checked my adgroups today and saw that I now have my first Perfect 10/10 Google Quality score! Can you say CHEAP clicks?

Perfect 10!

It looks like it’s all about having a good landing page / site with content, getting a good CTR, making sure your landing page, headline, keyword and ad text are relevant & spending money consistently with Google (really) is the correct combo to get 10/10.

This is a keyword I was paying up to $2.00 for when I started the campaign 5 weeks ago, now the minimum cpc is .20 cents. I’m paying about .40 cents to remain in the top 3 spots but I may just drop it to the minimum to see what kind of traffic / ctr I get with it.

If it gets good results at .20 cents per click it would be quite lethal.

• .20 cent clicks
• 5% conversion rate (low estimate, it converts between 5% - 15% daily
• $30 commissions
• $100 daily spend = 500 clicks
• 500 clicks = 25 sales
• 25 sales = $750 a day
• $750 - $100 spend = $650 in profits a day

Granted this is best case scenario… but still not bad for a single keyword.

It has been a wild ride. In the last 4 weeks I’ve invested around $3000 in my first PPC campaign. Up until this week I had lost about 1/2 of that in advertising costs (spent $3000 and made $1500).

I almost gave up and quit but stuck with it after a friend on a message board said “Most ppc campaigns don’t fail because of the product, they fail because of the affiliate…” Hearing that pissed me off enough to stick with it, and now, I’m glad I did.

I decided to take a close look at my stats and figure out what to do to get this thing profitable. I’m using Prosper202 to track the campaign and when I looked at the traffic vs. the conversions I almost fell over. I saw that ONE adgroup with a single keyword in it was costing me 70% of my $100 daily spending limit (so $70 a day) and had provided ZERO sales.

I paused that adgroup and several others that weren’t converting and things started running better. I actually made money that first day. Since then I’ve tweaked the campaign into a lean, mean converting machine and am getting about a 300-400% ROI on my daily spend now. So basically if I spend $10, I make $30-$40, or if I spend $50 I make back $150 - $200.

I also decided to go after some organic search results for the ppc keyphrases that were converting like crazy (they are VERY long tail with little competition). I launched two wordpress sites yesterday and today they rank in the top 10 for my targeted phrases and have brought in a total of $90 in sales.

I’m hoping to at least make back the $1500 that I lost with the campaign, if I can do that than this will truly be a successful learning experience. As soon as this one is moving along smoothly I’ll move on to a new campaign (I already have one in mind) but before I go dropping more cash into another ppc campaign I’d like to get myself back to even.

PPC is definitely fun stuff and combined with a good SEO effort I think I can do some damage.

I guess I’ve always been willing to take a gamble.

Over the last year and a half I’ve honed my skills at SEO and SEM and can rank pretty well pretty fast in organic search results for terms. I’ve promoted several types of affiliate offers and have found a few that sold well, well enough that at this time I do not have to work a 9-5 job.

I recently moved to Los Angeles and have been talking to other affiliate marketers and the common topic of conversation with almost all of the was PPC.

“You’re mean you do natural SEO… really?

I quickly realized that PPC was working much better and MUCH faster for a lot of these guys and it makes sense.

When I promote offers via natural SEO it takes a while. I can get a brand new domain ranking pretty quickly and keep it there but dominating the giant keywords and getting the huge blast of traffic is still a long, hard process for me. I spend week setting sites up, creating content for them, writing articles, building backlink campaigns, etc.

The work normally pays off and I don’t think I’ve ever launched a site that didn’t pay for itself but the truth is IT’S A LOT OF WORK.

So over the past 2 days I built a relationship with a few affiliate networks and am using Hexatrack, Prosper 202 and a landing page to see what I can do with PPC.

Here are my stats so far:

• The campaign launched this morning at 2:00am (I don’t sleep)
• In 6 hours I maxed my budget
• I spent $80
• I made $27.75

So I lost $52.25 for the day but have high hopes for the campaign. I’ll keep you updated as to how things go.

If you’re interested in finding offers to promote via PPC I recommend the following:

NeverBlueAds

• Great selection of different types of offers
• Great Customer Service
• Good Payouts
• Personal Affiliate Manager On Call Via phone, email or chat

Motive Interactive

• Amazing affiliate interface (best in the biz)
• Killer customer service (they actually called ME to become an affiliate)
• Over 300 offers to promote and more added daily
• High payouts
• Great conversions

No, that isn’t an Adwords ad title it’s really a warning. The internet is buzzing with talk about the new Stompernet product “Stomping The Search Engines 2″. It’s a large DVD course on SEO and the guys are giving it away free.

But not really. Actually it’s not free at all.

I’m surprised no one is talking about the fact that this new launch is exactly what Mike Filsaime did a few months ago with his ‘Free DVD Course’. He pushed the free offer up front and then upsells you on the backend for other products and REQUIRES you to sign up for trial offer of his printed newsletter.

*you cannot get the free offer without signing up for the newsletter and paying shipping*

A lot of people took the offer and then tried to get off of the paid newsletter and could not. Credit cards were being charged left and right and no one knew what was going on. Everyone went nuts and it left a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.

Now, Stompernet is launching what looks to be THE EXACT SAME THING under a different name.

1. You get a free DVD course
2. You sign up for a trial edition of the newsletter
3. You have to cancel the newsletter to not get charged monthly

Is it just me or is this the EXACT same thing that Filsaime did? I have to put out a big buyer beware on this one. That being said I am going to grab the course even if I have to sign up for the newsletter but after doing so I will make it my life’s mission to get unsubscribed from that thing as quickly as possible.

If you sign up for it read ALL SMALL PRINT you can find. There are going to be offers hidden all over the place on this thing. Good luck and see you soon!

Ok, the title of this post sounds really cheesy but right now I’m really feeling the freedom that comes with being a full time internet / affiliate marketer. I prefer affiliate marketer because the term Internet Marketer conjurs up pictures of con artists and schemers in my mind and I don’t ever want to be a part of that.

Recently I left my day job, a high paying salary gig at an interactive marketing agency in the middle of nowhere, Oklahoma. I’ve done web design and development for many years and have always paid my bills nicely and had plenty of money to save.

When I quit one of my biggest fears was the loss of that steady income that I knew was coming in on a bi-weekly basis like clockwork. Part of me enjoyed the comfort of knowing that I had security at the job. That fear didn’t stop me though, I built up a profitable affiiate marketing business over the last year and a half and decided to go full time with it, I also moved to Los Angeles, CA (an extremely expensive city) immediately after quitting my job.

All fears that I had left me yesterday when I got a call that ALL of my friends and co-workers were just laid off from the company due to “down sizing”. I mean everyone, designers, directors, project managers… all asked to leave and literally walked out of the building by a representative.

The moment I heard that news I knew I’d made the right decision by leaving and going full time with affiliate marketing. Now, I work when I want to and don’t work when I don’t want to. I’m by no means lazy and I probably actually work more now than ever but it’s different because I’m pursuing MY interests and projects instead of someone elses.

Doing affiliate marketing is not easy, but once you strike a killer campaign that makes money it’s very simple to maintain and start looking for more.

Right now I feel very free and good and am thinking positive thoughts for my friends that are now jobless. Maybe now they will take my advice and look into promoting products online.

Wow, we’re almost half way through the Thirty Day Challenge. Day 14 is still focusing on building authority back-links to your main ranking blog. Today Ed goes over setting up a Tumblr blog and point a link back to your main ranking site.

If any of you were around last year then you know about “Tumblr Gate”. During the challenge we were instructed to use Tumblr to create our sales page for our affiliate product. We all made our pages, bookmarked and them and WAMMO they started ranking like CRAZY.

People were getting #1 and #2 rankings overnight using Tumblr. I guess it is set up very nicely for SEO and it was super easy to rank.

Then… it happened.

Tumblr caught on to what was going on and started banning Thirty Day Challenge sites left and right. Almost all of our sites were taken down and there was a bit of a war of words between Tumblr and 30DC where Tumblr accused us of posting ’spam’ to their site.

The problem was that Tumblr was relatively new at the time and took notice of thousands of Challengers posting affiliate pages all at the same time. Ed handled the trouble beautifully and we merely switched to some other sites to post our pages and everything went well from then on.

One of the sites he told us to use after the Tumblr fiasco is the one that I make the most money with today, so obviously I’m happy with the outcome.

So it appears we’re heading back to Tumblr today to try it again! My advice is be extremely careful about what you post and how many links you add. You can bet Tumblr will be watching closely and I believe I will wait a few days to see what happens before attempting to post a blog there.

As always, enjoy the Thirty Day Challenge and I’ll see you soon!

View Thirty Day Challenge Day 14

The Thirty Day Challenge is rolling right along and we’re now on Day 13. Today is a very simple but important lesson on checking your stats in Google Analytics. If you’re a seasoned internet marketer this lesson will be boring but for newbies this is going to be huge.

Google Analytics allows you to see exactly how many people are visiting your site per day, how they are getting there, what search engine they are using and what term they are typing into the search engine to find you.

Ed hinted that if you notice that a lot of people are finding your site by typing in words you might now have actually optimized for than it might be a good idea to optimize for those words. More on that soon.

For now, enjoy Day 13. View the lesson

It’s Day 3 and we’re still talking about Market Samurai. The tool has been crashing and acting very buggy. It appears that they MS crew weren’t quite ready for thousands of people to download the app and start using it.

It’s having overall problems from my house and rarely let’s me get any results at all. I’m pretty frustrated with it at this point but I KNOW this tool will rule when it’s cleaned up and bug-free so I’m sticking with it and moving forward.

Market Samurai is insanely smart and covers every angle of research anyone could ever want whether newbie or professional. I can’t believe this thing.

Anyway, progress continues.

View today’s lesson or check out Market Samurai.

Day 2 of the Thirty Day Challenge goes over using a new keyword / market research tool called Market Samurai. I’ve actually been playing around with this tool for a few weeks thanks to some guys on a forum that happened to have an early version.

That version was cool, but the new one that was just launch is MUCH MUCH cooler.

This tool is going to be insanely useful for anyone interested in quickly doing keyword or market research for affiliate marketing projects. Insanely useful.

View the lesson and Get Market Samurai