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 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.

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.