Pursuit of Profit

It’s already May 7 and I have made almost no money online so far! I have earned a whopping total of $2.74 through adsense. I will not reach my goal this month, which is $10 not $20 like I mistakenly stated in a previous post, at thatrate. I will have to bump up my earning power!

This month I want to work on my link building and the affiliate site. For my link building I am going to use a domain I already own and develop it in to a link directory. I will point as many links as I can towards it, and build a solid page rank for the next update and do three way reciprocal linking to Pursuit of Profit.

The domain I am going to use for the directory is www.axonseek.com, so far it has phplinkdirectory installed on it and a template that I need to do some hacking on. I believe it will have it at a PR4 - 5 by next update, so it will be a strong backlink to have.

Another option I was considering for link building was setting up a directory on the Pursuit of Profit domain. So for example something like www.pursuitofprofit.com/directory. The benefit of setting up the directory this way would be all backlinks and recipricol links would be pointing at the Pursuit of Profit domain name and all the traffic involved with both the blog and the directory would be going towards one Alexa ranking.

The affiliate site is still sitting on pause until the landing page is built. Building this landing page is turning in to a more work than I had anticipated, but when it is done it will be my main income stream.

The possibility of earning huge dollars off of an affiliate campaign can make an it the highest work to profit ratio available to us web marketers. You build a site once, update, tweak and continually reap the profits.

Blogs can make money as well, but the effort to profit ratio is extremely small. If you want to make big money online you have to be selling items or services. Tip of the day: Sell downloads or anything you can automate and then pump as much traffic as you can to the site!

That’s all for today, but look out tomorrow for pictures of the basement with the ping pong table set up!!

Affiliate marketing has become the lifeblood for droves webmasters and internet marketers. Starting out can be difficult because people who are earning in this area don’t want to share their secrets and potentially create a competitor. Affiliate marketers guard their holy grail of keywords because it is their lively hood, it is the magic they have found that profitably turns traffic into money.

I have ran and run affiliate campaigns, some took a profit and some took a loss. Here are a few of the tips that I have learned over the years and want to anyone starting out. These are my do’s and don’ts that can make you money, there are plenty more out there. Add your do’s and don’ts to the comments!

Don’t!

1. Pick a product or service you know nothing about

2. Assume your keywords are profitable without researching them

3. Writing one ad for all your keywords

4. Throw up just a landing page without related content on other pages

5. Enter the most competitive markets without any experience

6. Leave your keyword bids the same day after day

7. Continue chasing your loses on keywords in hopes they will turn profitable

8. Think you are lucky and your products will convert without work

9. Believe that you are done work once the site is up and receiving traffic

10. Promote a product based solely on it’s commission amount

Do!

1. Research your competitors pages, ads, and keywords

2. Match keywords and phrase in your ads with your landing page

3. Dynamically insert keywords

4. Tweak! Don’t be afraid to change your layout, colors, content, ads, keywords and everything else related to your campaign

5. Split test

6. Adjust your keyword bids in accordance with their conversion rate

7. Use keyword research tools

8. Categorize your keywords into groups, write ads for each group

9. Make a site that has plenty of related content, a privacy policy and a contact page

10. Realize that affiliate marketing is an on going process

Remember that affiliate marketing is growing and changing. You have to adapt to these changes and continually learn new tricks and techniques or you will be left behind.

To me this month is all about breaking out of my regular routines and getting in to new areas. This is true for both my online income streams, and my personal life. I just moved in to a new place on the first and started a new job!

Tuesday was not the most fun day I have ever had. I got to bed late Monday, started moving at 7am Tuesday and began my first shift at my new job at 3pm. Tim Horton’s coffee was the life saver that got me through this extremely long day. Here are some pictures from the move:

Our Van

Our Real Van!

Filling Up the New Pad

Now that we have all our big furniture, rooms and electronics set up in the new place, it is really feeling like our own place. The media center is awesome, plus there is a tv in almost every room (wasteful sort of, cool definitely).

So nice I had to take a pic twice!

This is Where it All Goes Down

The basement is an unfinished amazing area that will host many poker and ping pong nights.

Endless potential

Ping Pong: like tennis if your were 100 m tall

The new job is very interesting as well. I am doing tech support for a software company that is a big name on Clickbank. Seeing how professional and dedicated this company is to their customers has given me a new found faith in software customer service.

As for income streams stay posted! I have a blog about tea, which I am an avid drinker of (coffee has sneakily snuck its way in to my morning routine lately). This blog was put on the back burner after one post hit the frontpage of Netscape and my old server crashed. But after talking with my partner on the project we both agreed that now is a great time to get back to the blogging action on the world’s best drink, tea.

May is going to be a very exciting month all around!

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!

Setting up an affiliate landing page is a lot of work! I once had the impression you just host a pre made site, slap some tracking on it, start sending ppc traffic to it and watch the money pile up. This is probably why I’ve had mixed results with ppc advertising in the past.

There was a time a few years ago that this way of marketing could net you a couple hundred dollars a day. This is when I launched my first affiliate marketing for a peer to peer music downloading program, and without much tweaking I was in the profit zone. I made sales of between $50 -$100 a day and a profit that would go from $10-$50 a day depending on conversion rates.

I tried promoting with this old school style more recently, and basically it just doesn’t work! Nowadays you need relevant content, you need a catchy landing page and you need golden keywords that have low bids. This doesn’t sound very easy, and I am 2 years removed from the game, so this affiliate site I’m making could be a very expensive learning experience if I’m not careful!

Well I’ve been working hard on the affiliate campaign, the site is really coming together. Adwords are set to run, but not feeding traffic quite yet. I have been talking with some professional affiliate marketers and getting some tips. There is a lot more to affiliate marketing than a nice landing page and some good keywords.

Keywords are a huge part of the campaign obviously, but so is keywords and keyword density on your site. If you are going to use the key word “ford f150″, for example, you will be charged more if you don’t have that keyword somewhere on your site. This only makes sense, we all know that google’s organic rankings are based on this same idea. Want to learn more about affiliate marketing?

When I was over at WickedFire forums, I noticed they had a free ebook sticky post. I clicked on it and found an assortment of todays top selling ebooks to download for free. I don’t endorse piracy, however if you want to check them out here’s the link to the WickedFire forums.

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)!