Archive for December, 2008:
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 eCPC 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, eCPC 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.
