Wow … I have been very absent from this blog for a while, but I’m back so here are some updates.

Back from Vegas

I spent all of last week in Vegas on a business trip, not related to affiliate marketing. There was no chance to do affiliate marketing while on the road, but I had many opportunities to see how advertising is done in a different region. Since this was my first Vegas experience, it was interesting to see that sex sells and this is flaunted all over the main strip in Vegas. The city definitely does not sleep. Here are some pics I took with my old Pentax dSLR and let’s get to the real updates.

Affiliate Marketing Status

I setup 5 more campaigns before leaving for Vegas and although I got the clicks really cheap on the Google content network, I could not for the life of me get any conversions. This was my first Canadian offer that I tried that can be found in MaxBounty. I have had no luck getting any leads with MaxBounty, despite sending hundreds of traffic to the offers on their network. At the moment, I am not blaming MaxBounty or the advertiser. The quality of my traffic may have been poor and weren’t the kind punters to go submitting lead offers. I have not tried launched any more campaigns since because I got a nice little surprise from my old campaigns.

eBay Affiliate Makes a Comeback

So get this, I log into eBay Partner Network (EPN) and I see >$130.00 sitting there. To my surprise two of my older EPN websites generated decent traffic in the first 2 weeks of March and also resulted in some pretty big conversions. One site was a BANS (Build a Niche Store) site and the other was a Wordpress site running PHPBayPro. So I spent the all my time after I returned tweaking those sites and giving it a bit more SEO to see if I can keep the momentum going. I am really stoked about my Wordpress EPN site because it was my first blog-based site. All my EPN sites had an EPC of $70 or higher. Now that is pretty insane for little to no advertising cost; all organic Google traffic only.

The great thing about EPN sites are that they are great for long-term income. They don’t generate much profit if you don’t do much work pushing and promoting it. It is pretty much setup once and forget it forever.

If you are an Express Revenue affiliate manager, I hope you’re reading this…

For the last few weeks, I have been trying my hardest to get into Express Revenue. I had sent in my application, then missed a phone call, and got my application denied. Not a big deal … just call them up and get this sorted out just like every other affiliate network right?

I have attempted to contact Express Revenue numerous times without any success. The toll-free number provided was not serviceable from outside the U.S. Since I am in Canada, I get a busy signal. So the next best thing was through AIM. I installed AIM just for this, sent a message to an affiliate manager that was online to call me back, and still received no calls.

Guys, this shouldn’t be THIS painful. If you run a business and are contacted, I expect to receive adequate response. If this is the way they run their business, how can I trust sending my traffic to them that cost me money? Maybe I can’t and shouldn’t.

If you are an Express Revenue affiliate manager and would like to work with me, please feel free to use the Contact Me link on the top of the page to reach me. Otherwise, I won’t sweat it as you can see that my list of affiliate network is quite long already. Besides, Neverblue rocks!

UPDATE – Mar 19, 2009

I got contact with a senior affiliate manager at Express Revenue. Hope to see what he can do for me over the next few days. There’s hope yet for this network.

Wow, I have been quiet with my updates over the last few days. I have been busy researching, practicing, and launching campaigns trying to make my first $1M. Even though I accomplished a lot, this was not a good month for me profit wise. So lets get to the point.

Affiliate Networks

I doubled my affiliate networks so now I have more sources for my offer research.  This month, I added the following to my portfolio:

• Wotogepa
• affiliate.com
• Net Partner
• Market Leverage
• Revenue Wire
• Motive Interactive
• Clickbank
• Hydra Network

Campaigns

I launched 10 e-mail submit campaigns in February. None of them were profitable, though I had the most success with Neverblue. I’ve sent many many traffic to other networks including MaxBounty, Amped Media, Wotogepa, and Azoogle. But none of them would convert so the advertiser on those networks were scrubbing me quite heavily. My traffic sources were good quality, so I have stopped using them for the time being and sticking to the few decent offers from Neverblue to promote e-mail submits.

Revenue

This is where February was less than stellar. My total spend on PPC was $150.00, but my revenue was only $27.00. For those lazy to do the math, that’s a $123.00 loss. However, I am treating this as a $123.00 investment in my education on PPC marketing. It was indeed a very valuable lesson if you have been following my blog. Just read all my posts for the month of February to see what I’ve learned along the way. There are so many nuances of PPC advertising that you cannot learn without trying and failing. My mastermind group has been a great help too and they have been motivating me and contributing to the knowledge base in many many ways.

Take a look at my chart from Neverblue (the only network that is converting for me). Boy I hope my revenues will be 1000x higher before the end of the year.

Conclusion

I think February was a good learning month as I analyze and over-analyze the PPC strategy and launch campaigns to learn what works and what doesn’t. I have generated many new ideas to try and with time, these ideas will be vetted to see what works best for me. Unfortunately, there is no better way to learn about PPC than to try it and figure out what works and what doesn’t. The results vary from individual to individual so there is no magic formula that I can write here. The folks in my mastermind group are all trying different techniques with varying degress of success.  So if you are thinking about PPC and have not launched yet, get cracking.

I wanted to quickly add a note today that getting a 1% CTR on the Google content network is very easy. I did not realize that when I added 5 ad copies per adgroup would have the affect of bumping up the clicks on each adgroup. This is because each ad copy  fitted one of the adgroup themes better. So all my adgroups received really good CTRs. My conclusion is that the more ad copies you insert into a campaign, the better chances you have of keeping a higher CTR.

And if you are running several ad copies within the same campaign because you have multiple landing pages, all your landing pages will benefit from this. Remember that each ad copy can point to your specific lander. So you don’t need to send all your users to the same lander. The URL is set in the ad copy, not the adgroup/keyword.

For me, keyword research was the most time consuming part of setting up a new campaign. If you can think of 10 offers to run off the same Adwords campaign, boy you’re cooking. Think of how many variety of offers you can run based on the same keyword set. All of them can be shoved into the same campaign.

In the past when I had over 50 adgroups in my campaign, I found that I was deleting over 50% of my adgroups within a few days. The reason is it was attracting either the wrong traffic or was not getting any traffic. Now instead of wasting those adgroups, you can give it one last chance by sending it to a different offer in the same adgroup theme.

The one downside of this technique is that your clicks are going to be really high … so expect to spend a bit more in your campaign proportional to the number of offers your are promoting.

I am just throwing out ideas here. I got a new book called “How To Get Ideas” and in the book it teaches me how to think like a 6 year-old. Now I got all these novel ideas to share.