Pursuit of Profit

I’m off to Vancouver as soon as i wake up for the Adwords conference! The actual conference is on Thursday, but we are heading over a day early to do some shopping and dining. I’m pretty pumped seeing as this is my first seminar surrounding internet marketing.

I am heading over there with two friends who are also affiliate marketers. The conference is being held at the Burnaby Hilton, which is also where we are staying for the night.

Stay posted for some pictures and highlights from the conference!

The most profitable keyword on the entire intertubes is……

In exact phrase match:

[pwnd]

(To my regular readers, this is just a prank post. To find out what’s going on just click the wickedfire logo.)

The format of my goal has changed. Instead of doubling my profit each month I’m just going full throttle for my 10k goal.

The reason I deceided to do this is because, as the old saying goes “you gotta spend money, to make money”.

I have realized this the past few months to be more than true. Affiliate marketing requires you to spend a lot of money, before you see a dime of profit!

So you will see me post updates on what I am making my money on, and maybe some of my sales stats to show you that the money is coming in. Month to month there will be updates on my profit, if any, but not monthly goals. The monthly goals are too short term and can stifle the overall goal of $10,000 a month profit!

This guy is showing his love to Digital Point and Shoemoney. Most people will give a link to their favorite blogs in their blogroll, or maybe even a site wide footer link if it’s a site of distinction. Well this guy went further than that, he went and tattooed his favorite sites on his fore arm.

I think this has to be some kind of viral marketing, and the guy is either getting paid in traditional links or cold hard cash.

KeywordSpy is a new breed of keyword research tool in the arena and it is are downright powerful! You are able to see which keywords your competitors are bidding on and how much competition there is on each keyword. If your competitors are using this program you better as well, otherwise you will be left behind.

KeywordSpy is one of these new powerful tools. I have been using it and testing it out for the past few days and the results are jaw dropping. When I first started building campaigns it would take me a few days to build a targeted list of 2000 or so keywords, now you can build a targeted list within a few hours with KeywordSpy. Obviously not every keyword is a golden nugget and going to make you rich, but just seeing what the competition is doing allows you to steer your campaigns with a little more knowledge. In the affiliate marketing and adwords world, like most business, knowledge is power and the more you know the more you can make.

If you are looking to get in to the game using the KeywordSpy free demo will give you a pretty good idea of how it works. Check it out.

After about 2 and a half months of affiliate marketing I’ve realized that there are some easy traps to fall in to that can lead you to debt.

1. Giving up
You are going to hear this over and over again from anyone talking about the affiliate market “Do not give up!”. This is the biggest piece of advice I can offer to anybody starting out. My first month I lost more money than I would like to admit, I lost more money than I care to even say. However, I stuck with it tweaking, testing and retooling my way out of the pit that at the time seemed impossible. There were times that you are not going to be able to sleep because the fear of losing money is real and you will lose money. Just knowing that to get into the game you have to pay your dues and find what works for you should give you the hope you need to succeed.

2. Not tracking
Not tracking your conversions and keywords is like playing russian roulette with a 6 shots in the gun. It’s stupid and you cannot win! You NEED to track everything you do in affiliate marketing. Here are the most important aspects to track:

1. Keyword conversion tracking (your affiliate manager should be able to set you up, if not do not promote their programs)
2. Daily spending
3. Site conversions (google’s placement reports will show you which sites are sending you conversions)
4. Daily sales (don’t get caught up checking sales stats every 2 minutes)

3. Not using the tools
There are tools out there to help you succeed, it’s worth looking in to these and finding out what they can do for you. Mostly they will cut down on the time you spend working on your campaigns. The google adwords editor can save hours of your time by allowing you to make bulk changes to your campaigns.

Just learn from what you do, take what works and expand on it and don’t be afraid to leave non productive techniques in the dust!

We may finally get some intelligent leadership!