Pursuit of Profit

Well I haven’t wrote anything and a long time and I apologize. Most of my regular readers have found blogs that post regularly and my traffic has fallen. The truth is balancing school, affiliate marketing and blogging was too much for me. I had to cut back on one of the three and blogging was the one that got put on the shelf.

I probably won’t be writing regularly till mid December, after my last exam, but I do have a lot to share with everyone. For one I have almost met my goal of $10k profit in a month. This month I am up $9500 profit with all my affiliate campaigns combined.

I have learned a ton about adwords tweaking and a whole lot more about adwords in general. Keep checking back for more posts!

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!

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.

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!

June was a rough month that had me second guessing this affiliate marketing game. I came pretty close to my stress threshold this month. I put my life savings on the line as well as borrowed money with high interest rates. I was losing money like no tomorrow, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Now my losses are getting progressively smaller each day, while still spending the same amount of money. Yesterday I even turned a $30 profit! 30 bucks does not sound like much after losing up to $450 in a single day, but it is huge that I’ve tweaked my campaign in to the green! If this trend continues I’ll have no problem making my July goal, and I’ll be well on my way to 10k a month!

May was a pretty uneventful month for me online, but made offline. I started a new job and settled in to a new place. I was lucky enough to make $15 through adsense which allowed me to complete my May goal of $10.

Here is a snap of the earning statement.

I have now realized that I am not cut out to be making big adsense checks and I am not wasting anymore time and effort trying.

I am soley focusing on Clickbank affiliate marketing at the moment. My site is now up fully loaded with keyword rich content, contact page, privacy policy, and a killer landing page.

I had to get out of my comfort zone for doing this. I am spending up to $300 a day on adwords in hopes that my campaigns will become profitable, but for the time being I am continually losing money each day.

Yesterday I had to go get a new credit card with a bigger limit so I can cover my costs while I wait for my first check from clickbank to come in the mail. Obviously I am stressed out and even contemplating pulling the plug, fortunately for me I have friends in the game and they give me positive reassurances that my campaigns are doing fine, and they will level out over time.

On the plus side with my new credit card I’ll be getting airmiles out the wazoo!

After about 2 weeks of building, studying and drinking massive amounts of coffee, I have built my first affiliate site that I would call ‘good’. It has tons of related content, a privacy policy, outside resource links, and a contact me page; all absolutely necessary with Google’s PPC quality score.

I will be tweaking and split testing in the future, but it feels damn good having done the bulk of the work on the site. I have set up a few campaigns with Adwords after hours or researching and copying, pasting and categorizing my keywords.

I am trying dynamic keyword insertion for a small portion of the campaign, which will see a high CTR hopefully.

That is all for now!

After talking about spyfu in a recent post, I started doing some digging around to find other useful keyword tools. These keyword tools will give you the background information you need, so you can decrease your risk when investing in an affiliate or arbitrage campaign.

5. Wordtracker

Very powerful keyword research tool, and it has a free trial that is worth trying out.

4. Niche Taxi

Allows you to isolate a niche and gather information on it before you start getting down to work.

3. Keyword Discovery

Probably the top choice for professional web marketers, I have not tried this service out yet because of its price tag. If anyone has used this service let me know!

2. Google Keyword Tool (Site down right now couldn’t grab the logo)

This Google tool shows the search volume and suggested keywords. This is a very strong tool and you do not need to be logged in to your Adwords account to access it.

1.
SEO Book Keyword Tool

This tool pulls from multiple results and displays information like monthly search volume, and links to more suggested keywords to target.

New Addition:
KeywordSpy.com
This site allows you to see your competition’s keywords. This tool is capable of creating massive keyword lists that only take a few minutes. For more info check out the full post here.

Well I am definitely going to put my effort into this affiliate project. Today I got my start by purchasing a domain name and finalizing my products to offer down to 3 from my short list of about 15. I created my hoplinks in clickbank, which is a way of tracking your referall click-throughs.

Once I completed that I got on to designing the site layout and then on to making some buttons in photoshop. They look pretty good if I do say so myself!

The site is designed to compare three top products in a table, head to head to head in a visual table so the key information is easily extracted by the user. The user is given the information and prompted to go to the products homepage via an affiliate link.

I have the buttons completed, but the html on the site is giving me a few headaches. I should have the site up by tomorrow. Once it’s up I will have a friend look it over for errors and anything that could be improved. Shouldn’t be too long before I move on to keywords, tracking and the make or breaker…traffic!

Time to stop focusing on my traffic stats and adsense flow. It’s time to buckle down and make some real money with an affiliate marketing campaign. These campaigns aren’t easy profit, but if your do your research and put in the time you have a better chance of running a profitable campaign.

I have run few affiliate campaigns in the past, some were profitable and others I ended up losing money on. The first hurdle in affiliate marketing is finding a product or service to promote. Take a look at ClickBank for a huge list of digital download products to promote. You can also find CPA (cost per action) campaigns through an affiliate promotion company like Neverblue (referral link) . There are so many offers out there it’s hard to know where to start and which ones can make you money. Some companies will try to entice would be marketers with huge commissions, but look deeper in to their product. Are others promoting it? If not why? Remember, huge commission is nothing if it doesn’t sell!

After you find a product or service you believe has some potential, start researching the market. I will usually go to Overture and see if there are many searches per month for the item. Then I mosey on over to Spyfu (a comprehensive keyword/ competitor research tool) and see what the competition is like. After taking a look at these two factors I ask myself a question that requires a truthful answer about the profitability of the item. Can I compete against these competitors, or is the Cost Per Click (CPC) too steep to make a profit?

If you deem it profitable, it doesn’t mean that it actually will be! Even after a ton of research and a good feeling, I’ve been dead wrong more than a few times. However, this could be due to failing in one of the following steps.

After you have your product you have to create an affiliate landing page. This can be as simple as embedding an I frame of your affiliate link or even just linking directly to your pre-made affiliate landing page. I have recently heard from a friend that just like organic SEO, there is sponsored SEO. So writing or buying unique content and having a few pages is a good idea. This is where I’m at with my affiliate project right now.

I have picked out a few products, purchased a domain name, and checked out the competition. The product I am focusing on comes highly recommended from a friend who showed me his daily revenue stats. So I know there is money to be made and room for a few more marketers in this genre.

I am also going to try something a little bit different from my previous PPC marketing campaigns. And it will be interesting to see how it works out. Direct details wont be released on the blog pages for the first month, this will give me time to get settled in my market without excess competition. However, more revealing details will be released via a monthly newsletter once it’s set up (if you know of a good email newsletter plugin for wordpress drop me a line)!