Okay, firstly, sorry for being inactive. A few people have asked for monthly updates. I’ve been hesitating to do this because by telling you how much I made or lost, really doesn’t help anyone make money. However, thou, I do realize and you probably feel the same way as well that when seeing others talk about making money online, gets you motivated to do so as well. So for that reason, I’m going to post my January results.
January has been the highest earning month for me so far. Will this keep up? I’m not sure. Experience have showed me in affiliate marketing everything is short lived.
Total Revenue: $34,242.90
Ad Spend and expenses: $14000 – $15000. This is a very rough estimate. It is hard to track expenses with media buys.
So there you have it. Any thoughts about if you like this post or you would like to see other posts, please let me know?
With a day job, I don’t get much time to update this blog, so if you guys gives me ideas about what you like to learn about or what you like me to talk about would be helpful.
-G
Knowing what happened in Haiti and what people must be going through there, not knowing where yours loved one are, whether they are alive or dead, is really heart wrenching. I just want to get a quick word out that if you’re thinking of helping out, please don’t wait. Help out the people in Haiti so they can rebuild.
If you’re like me and don’t trust half of these know charitable organizations, the let me recommend you yele.org. yele.org was setup in 2005 by Wyclef Jean, a known musician in the US. He is of Haiti decent, which is why I would rather donate to someone who has roots to the country then a 3rd party organization.
How to make donation for Haiti earthquake relief?
Through Yele.org
About Yele.org
http://www.yele.org/about/index.html
About Wyclef Jean (Founder of Yele.org)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyclef_Jean
His interview on CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/01/13/yele.wyclef.haiti.relief/index.html?eref=rss_latest&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+Most+Recent%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher
Anyway, I donated $100 this morning through yele.org. If you’re thinking of donating for the relief efforts in Haiti then don’t wait. Just trying to reach out as many people as I can through this blog.
-G
Some of you have asked for monthly reports. I apologize for skipping monthly reporting for the past few months. Ever since I moved away from search marketing, I have stopped tracking my earning on daily basis. I use to keep track my ad cost and revenue on excel sheet before, therefore, making it easy for me to report my earnings. With media buys it is sort of different because you pay the total advertising cost upfront as suppose to in adwords where you pay as you go.
Someone asked me if I’m still doing search PPC. Although, I’m not doing search PPC anymore but I still have my Yahoo and MSN accounts, so I may get into it again. But for now I’m focused on media buys. Lately also trying self-serve contextual media buy platforms like adbrite. So far with the one campaign I’m testing on adbrite, it seems not so solid. I may be wrong. Anyone advertised with adbrite before?
Speaking of media buys, my highest daily earning actually came yesterday through media buys as suppose to search ppc.
These earning are pretty much focused in one niche, which obviously makes me nervous because if one of the offers happen to go, my earning and ROI % will drop, possible killing my entire income base.
I had the same problem when I was on search marketing, which was, I never put the time in diversifying my earning in different markets. I should learn from my mistakes. Although, I made a goal in the new year to make couple web properties (websites) making 20k/mo from organic traffic. Having both content websites and paid advertising campaigns and having earnings coming from both organic and paid traffic is the ideal situation an internet affiliate marketer should be in.
-G
There are about 50 or so big advertising networks like the aol ad network http://advertising.aol.com. Doing a media buy as a DR advertiser with an adnetwork can be tricky. Not only they require huge budgets but certainly you must know what you’re doing right from negotiating your buy to running it.
Recently I did a $10,000 buy with a big network with a reach of 5 billion impressions a month. I had a good tested offer which gave me consistent conversions on direct media buys and my banner very pretty optimized. Despite using my ad tags and tested campaign and targeting the ads to specific age group and gender, I still lost $2k without making a conversion.
Doing a media buy with ad network can work but it is risky. Part of the reason most ad network are not transparent. What that means is, they won’t tell you what sites they are running your ads on. You can specify all sort of targeting such demographics, gender, geo targeting and even channels but your ads will appear on 1000s of sites and most will be duds. I have heard it takes about 3k-5k to optimize a campaign on a big ad network. That means you will be spending that much before you start to breaking even.
In my case, after spending 2k I didn’t see any return and so I had my cmapaign paused. Now I’m trying get rest of my money refunded. I still don’t know what I did wrong and how I should attach ad networks. Perhaps, I should have test out multiple offers (which could take even more money to and work) or maybe try specific channels.
In case you were wondering about those big ad network. Here is the list.
Top 50 advertising networks
Wouldn’t it be nice if for every dollar you spend, you get back $11. Possibility of this happening with paid search marketing is almost slim to none. However, with media buying these numbers are a reality.
Yesterday, I had a very unexpectedly good day in terms of affiliate marketing and media buying. From just $93 ad spend, I made $1,362 in revenue. That is over 1000% return on investment.
Sounds unbelievable? Well, take a look at the screens below.
Nov 13, 2009
You all tried guessing what is the new marketing method that I’m using to promote offers. From the comments, I’m not surprised to see that none were able to guess. This is no fault of yours. This is because this method is not talked about a lot and there is not much about it out there either. But I’m sure you have heard or read about it briefly somewhere. So without further adieu, let me introduce to you “media buying”.
lol..did you just say, “oh I knew that”. I know you did, but it wasn’t so obvious, right? 
So what is Media Buying?
From an online affiliate/media buyers point of view, media buying is when you buy ad space on a website. It could be in the form of text ad, banners, rich media or video ads.
How is media buy priced?
Media buy can be priced on CPM basis as well as CPC basis. But majority of big publishers/websites only allow you to buy ad space on their site on CPM basis.
CPM = Cost per 1000 impressions
How much does a media buy costs?
A typical media buy could cost anywhere from $1k to over $100k. There are two types of buyers in the market.
Branders: These are big companies looking to brand their products. They normally don’t’ care how much they per CPM and normally they have big advertising budgets.
Direct Response Advertisers: This would be us, the affiliates or anyone who wants a direct return on their advertising dollar.
What do you need to get started with media buying?
You need a few things to get started. Media buying is good in way that you’re not competing with everyone in the market, however, you couldn’t start media buying with just $100.
1. So for one, you need at least 3k to 10k of capital to start. Your typical media buying deal as an direct response advertiser would be anywhere from $1k to $10k. Typically, most publishers will ask anywhere where between $5k to $10k but you can find or make a deal with them to do a test buy for $1k to $3k.
2. You absolutely need an adserver. Without an adserver you will be flying blind and most probably going to lose your money. Adserver is used to track clicks, spend, conversions and also optimizing your campaign.
3. You need to understand what an IO (Insertion Order) is and what clauses to ask for in it.
My results so far:
Currently, I’m not making enough with media buying to quit my job. Actually, I’m not even making as much as I use to with search PPC. However, just like with paid search marketing, I can work my way up to make 4 figures a day BUT without the fear of slaps.
-G
That’s correct. I’m no longer doing ppc search marketing. With all the slaps going on, it is getting even harder to have a stable campaign on search engines as an affiliate. Quite honestly, it had become really difficult for me to run anything on Google in the past few months. Pretty much anything I put up was slapped with in minutes. Why should I have to deal with quality score? Why should I have to compete for ad space and have to pay high bids? Why should I have to research keywords? Why should I have to keep tweaking my landing to make Google happy, when we really don’t know what they want. Why should I have my income stripped away from me?
All these uncertainties have lead me to leave paid search engine marketing and look else where for traffic. About a month ago, I stumbled upon another lucrative traffic generation technique which is proving to be solid. No quality score, don’t have to create landing pages all the time, don’t have to research keywords and best of all this method is waaaay more interesting than PPC. After having no income is the last few months, I’m building up my income again slowly using this promotional method.
-G
What happened with my missing payments?
Few weeks ago, I talked about this network which owed me approximately $2800 and my own going struggle for getting that money. To recap and make the story short, basically, I generated about $2800 worth of leads for this offer when suddenly, the advertiser refused to pay the network for the leads I generated. The network refused to pay me until the advertiser pays the them. Everyday, I would ask my affiliate manager when I will be paid, and my AM would reply back to me saying the advertiser is not responding their calls or emails and they have no idea when I will be paid for the leads.
It was such a huge headache running after them and not knowing what the status was, why exactly the story was and when I will be paid. Finally, the network came forward and paid me last week the money they owed. According to my AM, they still can’t get hold of the advertiser and they paid me out their pocket. I will never know what real the story is but I’m happy to be paid.
Most of you guys guessed the network. It is Hydra. I am very happy that Hydra came forward and listened to me and paid me. I did harass my AM everyday about it and I gave them proof of how I was generating the leads. They know I was following all the rules and probably figured it’s better to pay since the payments were only 2.8k. Had it been $25,000 or something in that range, I don’t if they had paid me. But I like to thank my Affiliate Manager Nicole Webb from Hydra for getting the payments to me.
June Results:
Revenue: $14013.38
Expenses: $9303.85
Profit: $4709.53
ROI: 50% approximately
Last month was like a roller coaster. In the first week alone I had done close to $8k already. I was pulling in little over $1k a day in revenue when I was told that I have to pause my traffic due to lead quality issue and will be not be paid for previous leads until further investigation. I didn’t start any new offers either because I was concerned about the money I was owed and just wasn’t in the mood to start anything new.
This month I’m not doing much either. I’m in the in the process of looking for a new home and probably will be busy with that.
I’m however reading up a little and trying find out other forms of advertising other than search and content. I want to become less depend on Google and get into display advertising. I’m currently looking into starting off with Yahoo display advertising network. If anyone have any experiencing with it, I would like to hear.
-G
What are the similarities between affiliate marketing biz and a house made up of cards? They can both fall anytime without warning. Yes, it may not take the same amount of time to set them back up because you now know how to but it will still take the same amount of effort to get it back up to the position it was before. And when it keeps falling constantly, it just becomes frustrating.
In affiliate marketing, once your campaign dies, for whatever reason, your income dies. Most times seeing that income dying just hurts. You could be enjoying the day with your family and friends or at work, only come back to see your campaigns were slapped beyond recovery and your source of income was stopped.
Take Google for instance – I was talking to a Google representative over the phone and I remember what she said to me. I called to find out what I’m doing wrong or what I’m not doing that my landing pages are given poor quality scores each time I put a campaign up, no matter how hard I try to improve them. She said to me, “as an affiliate, it is hard to succeed.” On the other hand, Yahoo! told me exactly what I need to do when they removed my ads for editorial issues. Is Google just that cocky or do they really care about the “user experience?”
Google isn’t going to hold my hand and tell me what I need to do to make things better because they have hundreds of advertisers lined up to take my spot. And then there are networks and advertisers. Sometimes your offers will go offline without notice. Other times, the network/advertiser will ask to stop the traffic because it is not banking out for them even though you finally figured out how to make it profitable. Basically, I have NEVER seen the potential of one offer because before I can even scale it up to its full potential, something happens. Either my campaigns are slapped or the offer is pulled. I just hate seeing income disappear so fast without warning!
After experiencing so many hurdles in the last few months, I started thinking about my business model. Is it the nature of offers that I run or is it that I do a poor job at everything because I don’t have much time for the business as I would like to? Whatever it is, it is really frustrating to see the income dying just unexpectedly. Basically, your business, your income and your livelihood is always in someone else hands-be it Google/Yahoo or the networks and the advertisers. They could flip the switch tomorrow leaving you scratching your head in utter confusion and anger.
I know in business things are never smooth. Perhaps affiliate marketing is like that too-a roller coaster. For some reason, I still believe it is possible to create a long lasting campaign and things are not so short living. It would be impossible for me to go full time until I figure out how to make my campaigns last long or figure out what Google wants to avoid constant slaps.
I believe that it is possible to succeed as an affiliate in spite what Google says. I’ve done it and seen it myself. Affiliate marketing has shown me potential and I’m going to continue trying to learn and grow my business.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. What has your experience been in affiliate marketing? Has it been similar to mine? I also want to hear from people who have gone full-time. Share your stories!
-G
When advertisers don’t pay for the leads/sales, do you think the affiliate networks should come forward and do the right thing, that is, pay the affiliates out of their pockets?
I think all affiliates would agree with me when I say, networks are suppose step up and pay the affiliates the money they owe in a situation when the advertiser refuses to pay for the leads that were driven under the guidelines of the advertiser and the network. It shouldn’t be the responsibility of the affiliate to run around after the network begging for the money they owe. After all, that’s what networks are there for, to look out for the interest of affiliates. Otherwise we affiliates can just go directly to the advertiser and deal with this kind of headache directly with the advertiser.
I’m waiting for approximately $2,800 in payments from network-X (won’t say the name just yet) for one week’s worth of leads. The advertiser, who has done shady things in the past with others, now refused to pay the network for the leads I drove until further investigation. They claim that lead quality sucks. Funny thing is, I’ve been driving leads to the offer of last 2 months. Just last week they noticed the lead quality was bad? Why didn’t they say anything before?
Anyhow, I sent my affiliate manager the screenshots of my campaigns, which clearly shows that I’m runny ads for the same keywords they run. So in a way, I’m their only competition so far on search. And in some cases my ads show up before them. I belive, this is the reason why they don’t want me out there since now they have suspended their offer until further notice.
Anyway, I just want to be paid. I don’t care if they stay or not. This advertiser has been jumping from network to network. They were kicked out of Azoogle for stealing affiliates data and now at this new network, they are refusing to pay for the leads.
Affiliate marketing sometimes just gives me a lot of headache. Things haven’t been smooth for me lately. With offer dying without notice, this advertiser not paying, I’ve hardly seen an offer stay alive for more than two weeks in last two months, leaving me to scramble for a replacement offers. This month I did break my personal records and got up to $1400+ a day but it only lasted for 7 days. That was in the beginning of the month. But since then, I haven’t been doing much. I’m taking a break from AM for now. Hopefully I’ll be refreshed next month and start from scratch.
-G
