In March, I had a horrible PPC run. In fact, I lost $70 in all my poll PPC campaigns and have come to the conclusion that polls are a very difficult strategy for PPC and they are no longer effective due to the high amount of scrubbing that happens. So for April, I’m going to keep it simple and just do plain old-fashioned direct linking. Since the most important part of a direct linking campaign is the adcopy, it reduces the number of variables that influence my success or failure of affiliate marketing. I will report back at the end of the month on my results.

Despite my PPC failures in March, I had an incredible return on my eBay affiliate sites. I cashed in $110.89 from just two sites generating traffic purely through SEO. My sites are simple blogs with links to eBay auction listings. Here is a cool graphic showing my clicks to earnings ratio. I know that my numbers are very low and that there is so much more potential to develop these sites, but I am happy with where they are sitting at the moment.

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.

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.

Google Adwords

Today I launched my first Adwords campaign on Google’s content network. I am driving traffic to an Obama related site, but without using the word “Obama” in any of my keywords. I targetted the topics in the news that are related to Obama. This indirect reference allowed me to set my CPC very low due to longer tail keywords. I am hoping for a 30% conversion rate at my current CPC amount so I am not expecting to make a profit. If I hit my 30% conversion rate, I will profit about $5 for every 100 clicks to my landing page.

The goal of this campaign is to learn about setting up a proper campaign and verifying that links are sending users to the appropriate offer pages and that Tracking202 is doing its job of tracking CTRs and effecitve keywords.

What I learned

• Google’s Adwords page was a pain in the ass. The wizard setup mode was nice for setting up the ads. But I quickly abandoned this in favor of the offline editor.
• Google’s Offline Adwords Editor software was a pain in the ass, but an awesome tool. It is incredibly powerful for offline adwords management, but has a somewhat steep learning curve.
• Setting up my campaigns for proper tracking is a pain in the ass. There were many Tracking202 links to manage each offer on my rotation.
• It’s a pain in the ass to do everything properly. As I launch more campaigns, the process will get easier and I will find more efficient ways to launch them.

Summary of Campaign

• 340 Obama-related keywords.
• CPC set at $0.25USD.
• $10.00USD max daily budget.
• Rotating 5 offers from 3 affiliate networks.
• Offer lead range $1.10 – $1.40.

My biggest accomplishment for January was making $16.00 profit without spending any of my own money. In the process, I had to setup my website, my tracking software, and pick an affiliate offer to promote. All this was scary to me at first, but now I feel more confident with this. All-in-all, I think I have accomplished a lot for 2-weeks of work in January. What else did I accomplish?

Affiliate Networks

I was approved into the following affiliate networks with little to no effort. I didn’t have a website when I applied and I made it very clear during the interview that I will be using PPC campaigns with custom landing pages to promote the offer. They didn’t hesitate to approve me.

• Neverblue
• MAXBounty
• Advaliant
• Azoogle
• Amped Media
• COPEAC

Note: I was disapproved from Convert2Media. Too bad for them.

PPC Networks

I, begrudgingly,  signed up for the big-3 PPC networks. I wanted to get any delays in the sign-up process out of the way.

• Adwords. This one was free and didn’t cost me a single cent.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing. Had to prepay for $30, but I also found a $100 coupon which I hope works.
• Microsoft adCenter. Had to prepay for $5 of ads. Couldn’t find any coupons.

Other Accomplishments

• Tried and negligibly succeeded in Facebook advertising. $16 profit. heh!
• Dusted off the cobwebs from my older websites and started optimizing it for organic traffic through SEO optimization. Always have Google Analytics running on your sites to see what’s generating traffic.
• Setup Prosper202 system on my server for tracking purposes and truly understood how it all works.
• Continued to maintain this blog providing useful information to those who needed some guidance.
• Becoming the mentor for 5 students. I am no expert, but for the most part, I am 2-3 steps ahead of them.
• Took the plunge and subscribed to PPC Coach. So far, I am mildly impressed with what I see, though the community there is friendlier. Lots of intelligent people willing to help though.
• Setup a fully loaded content site ready for my next plan of attack on PPC.
• Built a Wordpress plugin for rotating segments of HTML code. I named this plugin: WP-HTML-Rotator and can be found on this site.

If you read yesterday’s post, notice that I had a -58% ROI. My first campaign with Facebook was quickly going down the shitter as my EPC < CPC.

Fast-forward another 24-hours with a lower CPC set at $0.13 and all of a sudden I get a 269% profit? I assumed that by lowering my CPC to $0.13, Facebook would drop my impressions considerably to promote higher paying ads. I guess that theory was also flawed as I was given >40,000 impressions today. Truly a WTF moment.

The reason Facebook kept promoting my ad was because I was maintaining a 0.08% CTR with Facebook. Word around town is CTRs lower than 0.01% will automatically get your ad decommissioned by Facebook. I cannot reasonably explain why with more impressions, I was getting less clicks, but much better conversions. I am tempted to attribute this to the unpredictability (read psychoticness) of human nature.

Another 24 hours. I am letting this ad run for another 24 hours at the same CPC to analyze if I encounter the same results as I did today. If this ad is able to maintain its current earnings, I stand to earn $150 month based on $5/day net earnings. Not bad for a little side-income eh?

P.S. I do not believe that this offer is sustainable over the long term on Facebook. The demograhpics is too small (~100,000) and I cannot keyword-target my audience more specifically for the best results.

My first Facebook campaign didn’t do too well. My ROI was -58% because my cost per click ($0.30) for advertising was lower than my earnings per click ($0.13). So instead of abandoning this campaign, I decided to lower my CPC to match my EPC to get a better feel for this game.

With $0.30 CPC, I was given approximately 31000 impressions by Facebook and a click through rate of 0.13%. With the new $0.13 CPC, I am wondering how much impressions I will get and whether my CTR improves. My budget has been set to $10 so that I can keep this experiment going. I have been using free sign-up money from Facebook, so none of this is coming out of my pocket yet.

However, with just 24 hours of campaigning, it has become pretty obvious how I need to improve my strategy.

• I need an offer with a payout greater than $1.60/lead to give a bigger gap between my CPC and lead payout. Either that or significantly lower my CPC, which I have already done.
• I need to provide enough information so that Facebook users are not unnecessarily clicking on my ads. This is a good thing for me, but bad thing for Facebook revenues. I need to find a good balance to keep me profitable (and Facebook) profitable. The users who click through my ads should be those who are already in the mindset to fulfill the offer.
• I should pick newer offers. With older offers, most Facebook users would have seen the offer landing page already and won’t bother proceeding further. Newer offers will look fresh to them.
• I need to work on my advertising skills and create a sense of urgency for the Facebook audience. My ad text should indicate that the offer is limited, or while quantities last, etc.

So I will see what the next 24 hours will do for my campaign with a lower CPC. I am interested in seeing my impressions, CTR, and conversion rate. I was told by my affiliate manager that the offer I am promoting has a conversion rate of 14%. Today, I managed a measly 7%.

I launched my first Facebook ad today. I ensured that my ad was very simple, one-liner sentences. The ad title and description only had one sentence that was short and sweet. The ad description was very direct as to what the user needed to do if they wanted to participate. Not only does this prevent unnecessary clicks (clicks cost me $0.30/each), but is also quick to read for the user.

However, immediately after launching the ad, I realized that the target URL for my ad would be changing due to the way Tracking202 tracks CPC. Everytime you change an ad CPC, you get a new URL from Tracking202. DOH!!!! Changing a URL in an ad requires re-approval from Facebook. This is going to be a problem because I will need to tweak my CPC to find the optimal value that works for my campaign. I implemented a fix for this and I will illustrate this later today.

Just spent the last 2.5 hours browsing through the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum looking for a hint on where I should start.

Here’s what I learned:

1. I have to pick a campaign from Neverblue of my choosing.
2. Setup a website to up-sell the campaign/product/service. This website is usually called a landing page.
3. Ensure that the landing page looks legitimate.
4. Setup an ad promoting my website’s product through Google (Adwords). 7search, or Yahoo (YPN).
5. Watch the cash roll in.

Hmm, this seems too simple? There is definitely a catch to this, but I am not sure what that is yet. Man, I am in dire need of an “Affiliate Marketing for Dummies” book that will take me through the process step by step and show me how to make that first dollar. Something seems missing before step 4 above.

Goals for tomorrow:

1. Buy a domain name to use as landing page. I am going to pick something generic like http://mybizness.com so that it is agnostic.
2. Setup a path for my campaigns. I will use sub-paths instead of subdomains because it looks better?.
3. Leave the rest for tomorrow (steps 2-5 above). The next step will probably require some website programming knowledge. Time to brush up on those skills.

My name is Melvin Tan. This is my diary on how I am going to setup an affiliate marketing empire and be reasonably successful at it in 2009. I plan to document my every step and thought process of becoming an affiliate marketer. I needed an online diary to keep track of my progress, which is why this blog was born. The blog is written for my own personal benefit, but if you find this blog useful, feel free subscribe to my RSS feed.

I am starting this project now because January 08 is my birthday. I promised myself to be a millionaire by the time I was 30, but I missed that deadline by a mile. My new deadline is to become a millionaire before I die. I think this will keep me away from disappointment. 2009 feels like a good year for me and I have a good feeling about this project.

I am no stranger to affiliate marketing. I have been in this affiliate business for 1.5 years now, starting with eBay affiliate marketing and running several very successful websites. It is now time to branch out and expand on my knowledge and mistakes with eBay affiliate marketing. I do have a day job working as a project/business analyst. I graduated from post-secondary school with a bachelor’s degree in computingscience. I feel that this knowledge will be a natural fit for this project.

My objective is to spend no more than 3 hours per day/3 days a week towards this project. That’s all I can afford without neglecting my family, friends, hobbies, and personal hygene. If there’s anybody out there, thank you for listening.