Pursuit of Profit

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.

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!!

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)!

I just put up two new ad units for Neverblue Advertising on the right sidebar. I get the majority my CPA (cost per action) campaigns through them. In the next few weeks I will start tracking a few campaigns that I will be advertising for them. So if you want to follow along and create a similar campaign feel free to sign up and get access to their massive inventory of high paying campaigns.

After posting that I was considering purchasing my own domain with my first months earnings, I recieved a donation from fellow blogger Dylan who’s also talking about making money online over at WMHaven.com, to purchase a domain name. There are some good tips on monetization, and are definitely worth the time it takes to read them.

Okay so I am pumped that I don’t have to spend my current earnings on the purchase of a domain name, now I can invest them in another way! After realizing that my previous choice of caseysquest.com just got snatched up this week, by what appears to be domain tasters, I had to put my thinking cap on and began searching for domain names.

With a little bit of luck and inspiration from the recent big Willy Smith movie “the pursuit of happiness” I came up with pursuitofprofit.com . I’m just waiting for the domain to go through, so I can get wordpress on there and get to blogging hard on my own domain! It won’t be too long before it’s all loaded and ready for your eyes, I’m thinking Wednesday or Thursday of next week (It’s final exam time for me, that’s why it won’t be up as quick as it could be).

Thanks again Dylan!

Readers don’t forget to update your bookmarks and feedreaders when the big switch to pursuitofprofit.com does happen!

I am seriously considering purchasing a domain name with my current earnings from this blog. I figure it is the best time to switch while the blog is still in its infancy. The only problem is that the domain I was planning on getting, (domain removed, I still may have a chance to snap it up if the register is a taster), just got registered this week! What are the odds of that happening?!

What are some good suggestions for a domain name for this blog?

There is some ambiguity in my previous post about how I plan to achieve my goal of $10k a month. First let’s get two things straight!

1. I don’t plan on making my income solely from this blog!
2. I don’t plan on relying on google’s adsense for my income!

Okay now that I’ve said that let’s move on.

Question: How do I plan on making the money?

Answer: I plan on creating multiple streams of income. Okay, that’s probably not the clear concise answer you are looking for. But that’s not what this journey is about. It is about testing and trying new things, and seeing which ones work. The ones that have potential I am going to invest more time and money into to, in hopes of creating highly profitable revenue streams.

Question: Any hints at what kind of systems I am going to try?

Answer: I do plan on focusing on increasing my traffic and backlinks at the beginning of this journey because those are crucial to readership. I also want to give domaining a shot; I have no experience in it so it is very interesting to me. I’ll give arbitrage a go as well as affiliate marketing.

However, I have not ruled out anyway of making money online yet (except things that fall outside my morals). I may even sell on ebay to complete my mission, who knows?

But now that I do have about $10 I am thinking of investing it in a domain name. That way I will be in control of all my content, and the site will actually be mine as opposed to google owning it through blogger. What do you guys think about using this month’s money towards a domain name? Also any suggestions on a domain name?

I have put adsense up and talked about complimentary colors in ads, which I submitted to Digg (the king of social news sites, please Digg me!). Since doing this I went in and checked my Adsense account, I’ve made a whopping $0.67 (edit: scratch that I just checked and I’m up to $1.91 well I think I am going to get to the first goal of $5)! Just wanted to keep you posted on this journey.

Plus I have found another similar blog called the 31 day challenge, where a girl from London is putting herself to the test and trying to make as much money as possible in 31 days. Stop by and wish her luck.

Here’s the deal, this blog will track my progress on making money online and go in depth on what’s working and what isn’t.

So at the end of April I’ll need to make $5 and double that each month for a whole year. The only money I can use is the money from the previous months. Here’s the break down:

1. April $5
2. May $10
3. June $20
4. July $40
5. August $80
6. September $160
7. October $320
8. November $640 (this is where it starts to get interesting!)
9. December $1280
10. January $2560 (from here on is going to take wise investing as well as action)
11. February $5120
12. March $10240

Wish me luck, I think I’m going to need a lot of it!