Innershell Affiliate Empire » Chatter Box

Making Money Online, Keeping It Real Simple

Melvin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:12:09 +0000

It has been almost a year since I made my last post and for good reason. First, life has been busy, but second, I have not been happy with affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is TOO MUCH work. I know, I know, you have to work hard for your money right? But not all of us can afford to sit in front of the computer all day monitoring internet traffic, PPC campaigns, tweaking, tuning, optimizing click through rates, chasing after the hottest affiliate campaigns, tracking, and trending all this information. If you want to get serious at affiliate marketing, you must make it a full time job. The one time where I let my campaigns run a few days mostly unattended, I have lost nearly $600 on weak campaigns. But what can I do? I had no time to check my campaigns because I also have a full-time job. So my search began for a new strategy to make money…

I don’t actually need to make hundreds of thousands of dollars online. My full-time job pays me well, very well in-fact that I don’t need money from online marketing. But, I love making money and it doesn’t hurt to supplement your income to afford other unnecessary toys. So after months of research and talking with friends and co-workers, I have decided to build an online business that requires very little effort and cash so that I can keep my full-time job and have time to enjoy life and family. An additional income of $500 per month is more than satisfactory for my needs. How many of my readers are in the same boat? I am sure there are many.

My new strategy for making money is returning to the old-fashioned content and revenue through Adsense. I like Google’s Adsense revenue stream because it is significantly less effort than a PPC campaign. But that also means equally less revenue comparably. Let me get this straight: I will not build a website, fill it with content, and then sit back and rake in the Adsense revenue. Instead, my website will be built with “just enough” content and “just enough” polish to start bringing in NO MORE than $10 per month and good amount of visitors. Once I have reached this pinnacle goal, I will flip this website. Say wha? Like I said, I don’t want nor do I have the time to put a lot of work into websites. My personality prefers to work on projects in the short term and then quickly move onto something else. So once I’ve built a site that is PROVEN to generate revenue, the website will have enough merit and potential for somebody more dedicated to take it to the next level. I will sell the website for 8x to 10x its monthly revenue and move onto my next project.

For an example to use in this blog for my readers, I registered EpicFailHumor.com to compete with the other top-notch fail blog websites. Fail blogs are in a very competitive niche, but I want to show you that I am not here to compete with the big boys. I just want to make $10 so that it can be sold to somebody else who is more capable of marketing it into something that will be a strong contender and a big revenue generator. This website was designed simple with a plain theme, but fully equipped with SEO and Adsense. The potential buyer will see that the website has room for improvement, the content is strong, there is interest on the site by visitor count (i.e., Google Analytics will be installed), and the topic is familiar to him/her. These are all things that makes the website sellable.

So, let the journey begin. Please follow my website development and look at what I’ve done. Most of the work is behind the scenes, which is what you really want. I will periodically post my visit count and Adsense revenue. I will also post the price that this website sold for. If anybody is interested in buying this website, it is for sale.

March earnings summary.

Melvin — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 05:11:35 +0000

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.

Mid-month March update.

Melvin — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:23:06 +0000

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.

1-Percent CTR on the content network is easier than you think.

Melvin — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 06:39:05 +0000

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.

My first Google PPC campaign.

Melvin — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 07:34:02 +0000

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 January accomplishments.

Melvin — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 06:01:10 +0000

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.

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.

My 48-hours Facebook advertising summary – 269% profit WTF?

Melvin — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:32:58 +0000

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 24-hours Facebook advertising summary.

Melvin — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:51:17 +0000

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%.

Launched my first Facebook ad.

Melvin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 08:02:33 +0000

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.

Where do I start with affiliate marketing?

Melvin — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 07:53:18 +0000

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:

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

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.
Setup a path for my campaigns. I will use sub-paths instead of subdomains because it looks better?.
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.