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!

Vancouver is an awesome city and I had an awesome trip to the Google Adwords seminar. To start the trip off we flew over in a helicopter which was amazing. There was a pod of killer whales as we were flying out of Victoria and we caught a glimpse of these amazing animals in their natural habitats undisturbed by humans.

Scenery from the flight.

After a quick shopping trip over at the mega mall Metrotown we headed over to our hotel and we checked in. We threw down our bags and headed right to the pool with some Coronas. It was a smoking hot day and some cold beers and a dip was just what we needed!

That night we met up with a friend and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Margaritas. The meal was massive and the margaritas were amazing. Then it was time to head back downtown for another quick shopping spree where I got a few t-shirts. It was getting dark and we were looking for something to do, so we popped in to a Irish pub/ club called Cailies. It was pretty dead on the floor where we had settled, but someone told us to head up to the patio for a special event. Once we got up top we saw a bunch of gorgeous girls on stage getting ready for a swimsuit contest.

The bikini contestants.

The next morning was pretty tough getting out of bed, but we troopered though it and got our seats. Our speaker was Brad Geddes of Local Launch, an adwords professional who has a deep understanding of pay per click marketing. He started us by walking us through the basics, such as keyword selection and ad copy writing. After lunch things really picked up and we learned about tracking and how to make the most out of our data, among other things. I even met one of my affiliate managers, who was also attending the seminar. More to come on the tips and techniques discussed at the seminar.

Our speaker Brad Geddes.

The end of the seminar.

The 3 day trip was just what I needed before heading back to university for the fall semester. The food was good, the seminar was informative and the bikini contest was amazing. I hope you enjoy the pics as much as we did taking them.

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 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!

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!

The profitable days are starting to come more often and the stress of starting an affiliate campaign is beginning to fade. I had a few $150+ profit days now which is really promising this early in the game.

To achieve this I followed some simple steps and stuck with them:

Found a killer product to promote on clickbank. I had heard from people that this product converts well, so I decided to give it a go. When researching a product to promote you want

Set up a targeted adwords campaign. I found one aspect of the product I am promoting and found as many keywords as possible in relation to this. For example if you were promoting a product such as a car there are a few different areas you can focus in on (obviously you don’t promote cars for clickbank but the example works):

Safety
Efficiency
Style
Performance
Price
Warrenty

For this example lets say you chose style, because it is a selling point. You would find every keyword imaginable related to the style of cars:
cool car
stylish automobile
sleek
etc..

Then you go on to google adwords keyword suggestion tool and put them in get suggestions, take those suggestions sort through them then take the ones that fit and put them right back in the adwords tool for more suggestions and continue doing this till you have 1500 or more keywords.

Next step is making sure your landing page relates to the keyword searches that people are looking for. Have images and phrases that relate directly to style and automobiles. With multiple calls to action ie: buy now, free trail, take a test drive.

Create targeted ads to display on adwords. Small ad groups of very similar keywords with equally targeted ads work best and will increase your quality score (more on this in future posts).

Check everything over and get it live. This will get you going, once the conversions start you will be able to identify which keywords sell and which keywords stink.

Adjust your bids accordingly to the performance of the keyword.
If you have a conversion ratio of 2% and your commission per sale is $50 you want to aim for an ROI of 100% so you would multiply your conversion rate by your desired cost per sale. So you want to pay $25 per sale ideally, this would be .02 x 25 which equals $0.50 bids.

Keep on adjusting and tweaking and you will soon have a profitable campaign.

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!

As my affiliate campaign continues to run my losses are gaining! I was running profitable for two days making about 70 a day, which was a mixed blessing. As soon as I saw a profit I bumped up my daily budgets on adwords and my conversion ratios plummeted for some unknown reason.

Last week on Sunday I lost $450, 450 DOLLARS IN A SINGLE DAY! I know in my heart of hearts I will not be making my June goal of $20 profit.

I am a little over $2000 in the hole right now, and things haven’t even begun looking up. I know I won’t be able to get my affiliate campaign back on track and becoming that profitable in the next 5 days. But I am glad I have tried this, I’m learning more each day about affiliate marketing. The hardest part is not pulling the plug and cutting my losses, but I’m in too deep to turn back now.

Even though I won’t make this months goal, I hope by next month I will be a little bit closer to my 10k quest!

All I think about is my affiliate campaign. I check Clickbank constantly to see if I have made anymore sales, then cross reference that with my adwords account to make sure my budget is not getting away from me. The past week and a bit have seen a whirlwind of activity, here is a short list of a few things that have taken place since June 5th.

June 5th Site and landing page are completed traffic starts to flow in from adwords, no sales.

June 6th I got my first sale, now I know my conversion tracking and systems are working.

June 7-10 Sales are increasing, but I am still losing about $70 a day.

June 11-13 Adwords stop running because I have hit my limit on my credit card, time to move some money around.

June 14-15 Sales are still climbing, but my losses are staying the same. Which means this campaign is getting closer to becoming profitable.

June 16 My credit card has hit its limit once again, and my ads are down. I have just called to get an increase on my credit card limit. Also my first pay period in clickbank has come to an end, which means I will be getting my first check in the mail pretty soon!

Every penny I have is on the line on this campaign, I just hope it becomes profitable sooner than later!

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!