It all started in early 2008

In April 2008, I was still doing ppc marketing at $20 a day budget making $10 or less a day. I was trying hard to make this one campaign work with this small budget and really didn’t have the courage to up my budget. One day I come from work frustrated and decide to just put an end to my only campaign and stop doing PPC. Not sure what happened, I decided to instead let it run for another day. I add more keywords and somehow got the courage to increase my daily budget to $50, just to see if my luck will turn around (we all live on hope.). Next morning I woke up to see I made $50 (my highest earning everrr a day) from $50 spend. Fast forward to September, I was making well over 17k+ a month.

In 2008 I saw my $100k as an affiliate. This is not my first year in affiliate marketing but certainly the BIGGEST. Congratulations to me…..hurrrrray!

What I’ve learned in this time

Doing PPC marketing for almost a year, along the way I learned a few things about myself:

1. I’m passionate about affiliate marketing but lazy at the same time (I need find a lazy affiliate marketing formula…hmmm that could my goal for 2009)…lol.

2. I’m passionate about making money but don’t crave to earn millions of dollars from affiliate marketing.

I prefer building few solid “easy to manage” campaigns bringing consistent income from month to month.

3. I really don’t like to promote shady offers. I’ve certainly tried few of those offers in the past but never went through with them.

4. I don’t like super affiliates with their hyped up products and eBooks. All they do is fill your inbox with junk followups with those junk referral links to other junk products from so called other super affiliates.

Everything you need to learn about affiliate marketing, PPC, SEO or whatever is available for free. Ever since I started, I only bought one eBook.

5. I’m also not big on following so called “industry standards” told by these ugly looking super affiliates, or going to affiliate summits and partying. I just like to do my own things and I’m really happy with that.

6. I also learned that Google keyword tool is the only tool you need to start making your first $100 a day. No need to spend your money on tools that promise to send you to the moon.

Goals for 2009

So, in 2009 my goal is to just work quietly to set foot in some more niches, creating solid campaigns which will bring return for months or even years to come. For the rest of the time, I going to chilax, update this blog and do other things (my full time job…lol).

I’ve no desire to quit my day job and do affiliate marketing full time. At least I don’t see this as goal for 2009. In few years when I need a break from my day job, I may consider.

Happy New Year!
-G

So you start a new campaign and you wonder how much I need to start my bids at in order to profit from it? Without putting too much thought into it, you just take an educated guess and start bidding without knowing if it’s too much or too little. Well, I usually bid randomly too when starting out but recently I sat down and came up with a way of determining how much my initial bid should be for me to earn profit. Actually it’s too not bad knowing what the bids should be to be making profit because you need to figure it out anyway. Why not without dumping money into it, we figure it out before hand

Note: This post is just for sharing some stuff I came up with. This is by no means should be a rule used on your PPC campaigns. (I thought should say this before you guys start pointing fingers at me… )

Now that’s out of the way, let get into some details.

Every 2 weeks I get an excel sheet containing “top” offers by revenue and EPC emailed to me from my affiliate manager. If you’re an affiliate with Azoogle (click here to apply) or CX Digital (click here to apply), you probably get the same sheet emailed to you as well. This report basically contains a list of offers with their network wide conversion rates, EPC and payouts. If you pick any offer in this list, using these three pieces of data, we can come up with an average bid for any offer.

Before we start with an example offer, I’m going throw some formula out there for you to see.

Conversion Rate: # of leads/# of clicks

Profit = Revenue – Ad Cost = (# of leads x lead payout) – (avg. CPC x # of ad clicks)

We’re going to assume that # of ad clicks and as # of clicks to the offer page are the same. In other words, every person that clicks your ad and lands on your landing page also goes through to the offer page. Basically, I’m saying, the CTR from your landing page to the offer page is 100%. We have to make this assumption since, we don’t know what the actual CTR from your page to offer page is going to be.

Example:

So, now we can get into some practical math stuff. (Do you like math? I kind of do sometime. Only when I know what I’m doing…hehe ).

Moving forward….In my previous offer report I got from my AM, I saw an offer which had a conversion rate of 20.42% and the payout per lead on the offer was $5.30.

Now, say you want to know how much I need to bid in order to profit with this offer? That’s easy! But how much profit are you talking about? Give me a number? K. So, again, we’re going to assume few things. Say you want to drive $100 profit a day. For this example we’re going to assume you drove 50 leads to the offer. That’s $265 (50 x $5.30) in revenue. Now to drive $100 profit from 50 leads, we just take the numbers we have so far plug ‘em in.

Going back to the formulas above, we had above…

Profit = Revenue – Ad Cost = (# of leads x lead payout) – (avg. CPC x # of ad clicks)

=> $100 = (50 x 5.30) – (avg. CPC x # of clicks)

But wait, we don’t have # of clicks. How do we come with this number? Well, we can figure this out using the conversions rate (which is roughly 20%) and plug it in the formula as shown below.

Conversion Rate: # of leads/# of clicks

=> 20% = 50/# of clicks

=> 20/100 = 50/# of clicks

=> # of clicks = 250

So, to drive 50 leads at 20% conversion rate, we need 250 clicks to the offer page. Now that we have the # of clicks, let’s plug this back into the above formula.

$100 = (50 x 5.30) – (avg. CPC x # of clicks)

=> $100 = (50 x $5.30) – (avg. CPC x 250)

=> $100 = $265 – (avg. CPC x 250)

=> - (Avg. CPC x 250) = $100 - $265

=> - (Avg. CPC x 250) = - $165

=> Avg. CPC = $0.66

Finally, the average click per cost is $0.66. Now you have a good idea as how much need you bid at roughly to get it profit. This is enough is useful before actually dumping money into a new campaign. Now without taking a random guess your can you bidding at roughly $0.65 to $0.75 range. From there on, you adjust bidding as your gather data.

Hopefully this post was somewhat useful. Even if it wasn’t, I hope I got you to at least thinking about doing some affiliate math….hehe

Did I mess up anywhere? Let me know if you spot anything weird.

This month I had my campaign die out. I started a new one in a different niche shortly after. I ran it and tested it for a week. Spent close to $2000 dollars but ran a loss of -$1500 at the end. My goal was to get bids low enough in a week to start turning profit from the campaign. But I couldn’t get the bids low enough to profit. At the end, I lost 1.5k. It’s not a bid deal because I learned quite a few things about the offer and the niche itself.

1. Bidding on high traffic obvious keywords is not the way to go. Bids are high and competition is fierce.

2. Conversions and eCPC was low. Turns out, it is like that for all affiliates. Even the ones doing four figures from it. But they must be doing something different…hmmm.

3. The offer itself is good but converting is trickier.

So, after all this, I’m going try to do something unique, which is, send high volume cheap traffic to the offer and hoping even with low conversions I will hopefully be able to profit a bit.

Basically, the idea is to pick a unrelated niche where clicks are cheap and somehow enticing the user to convert to the offer. I’ve seen affiliates do that with a lot of different offers in lot of different niches. Ring tones is one of them where people will bid on keywords like Rhianna or Usher or TV shows like American idol and send traffic to ring tones offers. It worked in the past but don’t try it now. People have caught on to it and it’s not profitable anymore.

Neil is making pretty good money with facebook ads. Without sharing his exact numbers (which I think only few people know and I don’t know if he would like me telling others here), he is making four figures a day on facebook. That’s quite huge. His ad expenses are half, so he is making 80% ROI if not more.

Neil runs a blog where he shares his own tips on marketing on facebook. He has got some video tutorials as well. So check ‘em out at neilsweb.com

Little update

It’s been while since I updated the blog. Given I enjoyed writing but just didn’t find any time to write. I’m deciding to write more often now. I’m thinking updating the blog more often will keep me motivated and active in my affiliate business. And of course, readers (you) will have new material to read and intern keep them (as in you) motivated and active.

Lots of things happened in between the time I was away. Offers died out, I started new offers, revenue jumped then dropped and so forth. But one unfortunate thing that happened was, I was cheated on by one of my advertiser and that’s the topic of today post.

Dark Side of Affiliate Marketing

So you work your butt off creating a new campaign. Spend 100s of dollars testing and tweaking it. When finally you turn it profitable, it dies. Wouldn’t that suck? I can tell from recent experience, it blows. It really blows. You just feel so crushed at the end.

My latest brush with a successful campaign turned ugly is nothing short of bad. Going for doing 150+ leads a day to ending the campaign puts frown on your face. This time it wasn’t the Google slap or the offer expiring, or the lead quality issue. It was basically a case of me being stupid and opening my mouth and trusting the advertiser and everyone else.

Why my profitable campaign died?

I started a new campaign about a month ago for this new advertiser, who at that the time was extremely happy with my traffic. I was making good profit too. They promised to work with me while offering me exclusive payouts and an exclusive landing page to promote. Few weeks later, they ditched the idea, took all my keywords I was bidding on to drive traffic and now doing direct marketing themselves right there beside me.

Long Story

A over a month ago, I discovered a new offer which gave me 2x the profit with my some old keywords I was running. After 2 weeks I hear praises from the advertisers for discovering a new source for highly converting traffic (something what the previous affiliates failed to do as they said). While on the phone with me, my AM and his manager, and the marketing guy from this advertiser company promises exclusive payouts and an exclusive landing page to increase conversions. They asked me the keywords I was running and I told them. BIG mistake

We (or I) waited for this new page and new payout to start for a week, when I heard they want Azoogle to do the page instead. Azoogle took another week to make the page when week later I accidentally (while investigating why my traffic and conversions almost stopped converting) saw their own (advertiser’s) ads with custom landing page above my ads. They were not advertising on these keywords before. They basically took over my campaign for all the keywords I’m bidding on. I didn’t think they would do that. Now I don’t know  who to trust. I emailed my AM and his manager right away and after they told me they’re not happy with the advertiser and might be cutting them out of the network.

Since then I have forgotten about the incident and moved on. Yes, my affiliate earnings went down the drain. I’m actually starting from scratch, finding new offers and testing new things now.

So who is this “evil” advertiser?

Update: I’ve removed the advertiser’s name because I don’t want people to be running reverse keyword search on the advertiser and try to figure out what keywords they were. I just simply don’t want to share anything more than I already have. Trust me, it always comes to bite you back. I’ve learned that from this experience already.

Final words

The purpose of this post is not to bash the advertiser or cry about this recent experience. The purpose is to make other affiliate aware to avoid this advertiser at all cost. Because you don’t want to get something going, making a nice profit on their offer and then finally see the advertiser itself running their ads beside you out of no where, basically cutting out the middle man (you) and putting you out of business.

I’m going to give you two different examples of a campaign and you will clearly see which one will NOT die out and which one will.

Examples 1:

The first example is running one ad group with 50 or so keywords and with a budget of $30 a day.

Ad group: “online dating sites”

Budget: $30 a day

Example 2:

The second example is running more than one adgroup with 1000+ keywords. The budget is set high enough to test things quickly.

Ad groups:

dating sites
singles dating
online dating
dating personals
internet dating sites
dating websites
on line dating sites
dating single
dating services
dating service
dating website
singles sites
on line dating
internet dating
find a date online
dating online site
dating websites online
dating web sites
dating web site
online dating profiles
onlinedating
online dating web site
online dating website
online dating review
dating singles online
best online dating
top dating sites
single dating sites
dating cupid
free internet dating
online dating guide
single online dating
new dating site
herpes dating
free online dating
free dating services
free dating site
free online dating site
on line dating site
online personals sites
free on line dating
online dating service
online dating services
free online dating services
men seeking women
free online dating service
singles dating sites
online dating personals
best dating sites

Budget: $150 a day

The Difference?

Well, beside the number difference in these two campaigns, the difference you will notice after few days you run these two campaigns is that, campaign 1 with one ad group may or may not work. That’s because one ad group is NOT enough to test the niche. Even if you make that one ad group work, your profits are not high enough and you need to scale things up if you want to make more than $100 a day profit.

On the other hand the campaign 2 is bound to have few ad groups that may have less bidding and less competition and start to show some success after few days of testing. Reaching $100 profit will be quicker and easier in campaign 2.

Your Lesson

The lesson I wan you to take from this post is that, you are increasing you odds of having a successful campaign by having more adgroups and running more keywords. The more you run the faster you will see results and the more money you will make when everything is said and done.

Reference:

Also check out these posts on keywords research.

1. PPC marketing: How to get those keywords to Convert
2. Keyword Research: Go Deep or Going Wide First?

I know I have taken longer than usual to post. I assure you I haven’t forgotten you. I don’t make regular posts usually like the other bloggers. I only write when I have nothing going on and lately I’ve been busy with lot of stuff and I need to put some time on my campigns as well now. I will make my 2nd post in the next week. So stay tuned.

In the next few posts, I’m going to document the steps I take to launch a new PPC campaign. I will try to share with you every bit of information, technique, tricks and steps you may need to take.

What I will Share:

1. Market Research

2. Keyword Research

3. Landing Page Techniques

4. Keyword Groupings

5. Creating Ads

6. Launching Campaigns

7. Tweaking Campaigns and more

What I will NOT Share:

1. My Niches, my offers, my landing pages, etc.

Note: Please note that I don’t claim to be an expert at PPC and what I’m about document are NOT the definite steps to take to launch a PPC campaign. This is just something I found that works for me.

So, now that’s out of the way, let get into the nitty-gritty. Shall we? I’m going to try to keep the posts short and concise.

Market Research

The first thing you should always do before taking on a new campaign is to do some initial research into the market to see…..

1. How much demand there is?

2. How much competition there is?

3. What products/offers people are promoting (CPA, CPL, etc)? The commission on those products/offers to get an idea on the return.

4. What people are doing to promote these products/offers? For example, are they using one landing pages, min-websites, squeeze pages and or something else. Because what works for others will probably work for you. So you should learn form you competition . Don’t try to be different or creative when you are new or starting out.

5 Lastly, Can I easily scale the campaign? Meaning, are there more related keywords or sub-niches I can go into later? This is important because, if you make $100 profit form your main campaign, chances are you can make another $100 by expanding your keyword list or venturing into sub-niches by using the same techniques you used for the first successful campaign.

Finding Demand and Competition.

Demand and competition both go hand in hand. The competitive the niche, the demanding it is. You can simple do a search on the popular keywords to know if the niche is in demand. Also, the number of offers on a network will tell you how demanding the niche is. Look at dating for example; there must be over 50 offers on it on Azoogle.

Picking converting offers?

One sure way of finding what offers are converting in the niche you’re interested in promoting is to contact your AM and ask him to send you bi-monthly or monthly offer report. This report will contains the offers, their payouts, conversion they are getting and network wide eCPC on those offers. This will give you a good indication of what offers are converting better on the network. Your AM can also simple tell you what offer to run.

What landing pages will work?

Again, for this, look at your competition. What kind of landing pages are using for the offer you like to promote. Is it a simple bridge page, or one page landing page with reviews or mini site with articles? Follow their lead and get a landing page done from professional. I recommend elance.com

Scaling the offer.

If you picked a demanding niche then scaling will be easier once you find the winning formula. Scaling an offer is important once you have at least one campaign making you profit. You can simple take the formula that you used to make the first campaign successful and apply it to other sub-niches or offers. For example, from general dating you can go into specialty dating offers.

Final Words.

If you’re just starting out or trying to find your first successful campaign, don’t pick a niche which doesn’t have demand. One way to get a hold of PPC affiliate marketing is to get into demanding niches. Why? Because this way you can test things faster since you have traffic in abundance. Researching keywords will be easier also. Think about it. If you’re getting 100 clicks a day on your campaign vs. 1000 clicks, don’t you think it will be much quicker for you to find out what keywords are converting. Right?

Do you usually get discouraged seeing those nice graphic rich landing pages when you’re probably doing your keyword research or something? You probably say to yourself, “how the hell am I going to make those nice looking pages? There is no way I can compete with these guys with an ugly looking landing page that I have because I can’t never make a landing page as good as that“.

Wait! How do those top affiliates do it? They make their own landing pages? Are they really good at doing eveything?

How the big affiliates do it!

I’m sure you heard of the term “outsourcing” but have ever thought of outsourcing? You think these affiliates actually make their own pages? You would be surprised to know that most top affiliates are NOT tech savvy. What do is, outsource almost all their work to other people who specialize in their own field. They hire designers, programmers, SEO specialists, content writers, etc…basically a whole team of specialists to put together their website. All they are left to do at the end is to do the keyword research and launch their campaign and that is exactly what affiliate marketer should only be doing and that is why they’re are on top. They spend more time doing the real stuff while most other affiliates are scrambling to put together a half-assed looking landing page, scrappy content, incomplete keyword list and the same time worried about how much money they are going to spend this time around on PPC?

This is not how you do PPC. This is a real business. You need to start treating this as a real business, if you haven’t already. You need to start thinking big….yea, just like that guy in the picture here

Elance: The Outsourcing Portal

So you wonder now, where can I find graphic designers and programmers to make me those nice looking landing pages for cheap. The place is called elance.com.

Elance is a site where you find professionals like graphics designers, programmers, content writers and so on looking for work and buyers looking to hire these processional to do their work. Basically, Elance will manage your project and payments with the service provider. The process is simple.

The process in a nutshell…

1. First, you create a project (it’s free) in there, which is quite simple as writing a post.

2. Once the project is posted, people will start bidding on your project.

3. You then choose a bidder and award the project to your chosen bidder/professional.

4. They start the work.

5. When they are done they present the work to you.

6. If you’re satisfied, then you pay them through escrow.

The whole process is easy, safe and secure.

How cheap is outsourcing at Elance?

You can find professionals who will make a good landing page for about $100 or so dollars. This price is nothing compare to the headaches you will be saving. Moreover, you can easily find web content writers for $10 an article. Basically, you can have a landing page done for less than $200 and that my friend is a bargain because you know you would make that back very quickly.

If you don’t like the sound of that or if even that is too expensive for you, then I can suggest another place where you can actually buy already built landing pages. It’s called lptemplates.com. Landing pages here are as cheap as $10. The only trouble is, they are generic and you may end up with the same landing page as the next guy (edit: A single landing page is only sold 10 times and then replaced by another fresh one, which is good). It’s a still a good place if you don’t like to go with a custom solution.

At the end, the success of your campaign boils down to how much time you spent at doing the real stuff, that is, keyword research, niche research and later on tweaking your keywords and campaign for maximum profits. Isn’t that what the affiliate should be doing in the first place rather then spending countless hours learning how to make graphics or trying to understand CSS, PHP and other crap.

Today, I’m feeling extra happy and I want to share some good things with you guys…something that might change your life for good…

My Online Earnings…

Last month I made whooping $17,000+ dollars with my online business. For some big marketers, this is probably their 2 or 3 days of earnings but I’m happy to be at a point where I can now make $17k in a month coming from $0 a month.

Going from $0 to $17000+ a month is a great achievement and let me tell you people, it is NOT hard. YOU CAN DO IT TOO. It’s not hard if you stay focused. Here is a screen-shot of my AzoogleAds account for the month of July. It shows $14k. Another $3k was done with CXDigital.

Why are you sharing this with me?

So, you say, “why are you sharing this? So what you make this much money…how is that any help to me”. The reason I share this with you today is because I want to tell you that I don’t have any more extra skills than you do. You can make this money as easily as I do too. My goal is to make you realize that making money online is not a matter of knowing something. It’s a matter of doing something!

The truth is, I made this money by working hard and staying focused and by actually doing something and that’s exactly what Anik Singal says. Today I’m going to share a video clip of a man, who went from $100 in his pocket to a multi-millionaire. His name is Anik Singal. He is an entrepreneur/marketer who bags in million of dollars a year online. It all started from his small basement.

In his interviews, he said one thing which really stuck with me and that is, the only reason you haven’t made anything online is because you haven’t done anything about it. The key is to do pick something, stay focued on it and be willing to want it at any cost. In other words, you need to be obsessive by nature and aggressive in your approach to whatever you do.

After watching Anik Singal’s interview, I realized, I’ve the ability to actually make 10x what I make now and I’m going actually do something about it and that’s how I will reach that 10x figure.

So, let’s watch his video and I’m sure it will pump you up and make you realize how much potential you have too…