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.
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…
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.
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…
So, you are putting up campaigns after campaigns and can’t seem to generate a lead or more than few leads every time? One good rule of thumb is, you should do your keyword research before you do anything else…
These steps might help…
1. Compile a big list of what I call different “root” keywords. These root keywords are one to two words keywords from which you can compile a sub-list of 100s or possible even 1000s of more keywords.
Example: Say you are running a credit score/repair offer. You should have a list of all possible related and lateral “root” keywords like…
credit check
credit report
credit score
credit repair
credit help
credit fix
credit consulting
credit management
credit problems
no credit
poor credit
bad credit
etc
Amit Mehta of superaffiliatemindset.com has a more detailed process of how you can build this keyword list. Check it out here.
2. Take each keyword in the list (as your root keyword) and generate a list of keywords off of each keyword. Now each sub-list becomes a separate ad group in your campaign.
Hint: No, you don’t need any paid keyword tools for this. The free Google keyword tool should be enough for now.
3. Now create your customized landing pages related to you adgroups you created.
4. Create at least 2 ads for each adgroup.
5. Plug your keywords and ads in adwords or YSM.
6. Important: Set your bids higher than normal. Depending on the niche, when starting out always set your bids high.
If you don’t set you bids high then most likely half or even more than half of your keywords will NEVER show up on the first page, resulting in low impressions, low clicks and eventually poor quality score.
By bidding high, you are knocking off all the people on high positions. This gives you room to test your keywords, ad copies and landing pages. You accumulate enough data quickly to know what combination of keywords, adcopies ad landing pages are working. And that’s name of the game. Test Test Test. If you don’t bid high and lose money initially, you’ll never be able to figure out why things didn’t work.
7. Once everything is setup, let your campaign run for few days.
Advice: Stop checking your stats every 5 minutes. Forget about your campaign for few hours and find something else to do. When you check your stats every 5 mins. you are setting up yourself for disaster. Every time you see yourself losing money, you’re going to let your emotions/fear take over your brain. STOP altering your campaign like lowering your bids, deleting keywords or adgroups all together and messing up everything before you even have any stats to analyze the results. So let your campaign run for 4-5 hours on the first day before checking in. It is better to actually let it run at least 2 days before start altering anything.
8. Once you have enough data, clicks, leads, etc. go though each ad group one at a time. Look at the keywords that are costing you money. Do you think those keywords belong to another adgroup, may be those keywords need a separate ad group and separate landing pages. Try doing this before deleting those keywords.
9. Now look at the keywords that are making you money. Do what with them? NOTHING. Just leave them. With the combination of your ads and landing pages, they made you money for the first 2 days, chances are if you leave them they will stay keep making you profits. So you don’t have to do anything with the “good” keywords. What you should do is, compile more keywords similar to your winning keywords, create separate ad groups for them and test them the same way.
Final words…
So, now you tweak your campaign one adgroup at a time, weeding out bad keywords and expanding on winning keywords and keep testing. The whole process may take you one month, 3 months or more. My advice never, never rest, keep improving and expanding. Think of ways you can get your ROI higher. Nothing is instant, everything needs time so have be patient and do things the right way form the start and you’ll do fine.
Hope this was helpful.
Nothing gets you more angry then some doosh-bag taking your landing pages and coping them word-to-word and starts running them beside your ads.
This happened to me recently. I came home from work one day and saw my eCPC dropped drastically. At first I didn’t know what happened. I literally froze for few seconds. I quickly fired up my browser, opened my YSM and adwords accounts to see what was going on. I saw nothing had changed from yesterday except the conversion rate, which had gone down dramatically. For the first time in 2 months after launching my campaign I was losing money. It just didn’t make sense. I knew something fishy was going on.
I saw one of my adgroups which had always performed well was doing really badly. I quickly went to Google ad-preview tool to see if my ads were running fine. What I discovered just blew me away…
I saw a similar ad above my ad worded almost exactly as mine with a similar looking domain name, only the order of the words changed. This was the highlight of my day. I don’t know how long this guy had been running his ads like this but it was really pissed off to see what I saw.
Next, I went to his site and just couldn’t believe what I discovered - this guys basically downloaded my landing pages and uploaded them on to his server under his domain. It was an exact copy! With exact keywords, ad-copies and landing pages as mine, this guy was taking a big chunk out my revenue. I was absolutely furious as I should be.
So you ask, what do I do when someone steals my stuff? You simply report to your affiliate manager or the network right away. I called my AM @ Azoogle, had a chat about what was going on and sent him his domain name shortly after. My AM immediately shut his affiliate link and in few hours his ads were down.
Networks will work with you to rectify situations like these because they don’t want to lose your business. First of all, this is a fraud - someone copying your sites is the stupidest thing they can do. They are asking to be shut down. No affiliate is going sit ideally and let this happen and networks will take action.
You can also report them to Google. I didn’t have to do that in my case because he ads were taken down without me raising the issue to Google. But I would imagine they will also take this seriously and shut his ads down.
Apparently copying and stealing stuff outright is very common in the affiliate world but I think you can take few steps to prevent this to happen to yourself…
1. Don’t append keywords to your landing pages. In another word, don’t use PHP conversion tracking where you append the keywords to your URL using PHP code for tracking purposes. Instead use keyword pixel tracking. It’s fast, efficient and safe.
2. Avoid naming your images same as your keywords you’re bidding on. I can run a keyword search say “online dating sites” on http://images.google.com and get links to literally 1000s of landing pages. Your landing pages are sensitive data. Don’t let other affiliates see that.
3. Lastly, don’t share any info regarding your niche, keywords or domain names with anyone out there. Once they discover your secrets, this will simply copy you word-to-word. Why not? Less work for them. Right?
So protect your work. When you do catch someone taking your stuff, report them to your affiliate manager and your network right away.
I’m going to talk about 2 easy ways you can track your keywords with Google Adwords and Yahoo’s YSM.
When I first started PPC marketing, I didn’t understand the power of tracking keywords, which is why I never got any campaigns off the ground. Tracking your keywords is a must or else you might as well just stop your campaign. Because ultimately without any keyword conversions data, you will not know what keywords are profitable and which ones are not. You need to weed out the ones that are costing you money and expand on the ones that are making you profit. It’s that simple.
Now, let’s talk about how to track your keywords. There are two ways:
Placing your Google or Yahoo tracking pixel code requires you to contact your affiliate manager or the advertiser asking them to place the code on the conversion page of the offer.
Adwords: Login-> Campaign Summary -> Conversion Tracking -> Create New Action -> pick Lead or Purchase from drop down, name your action, enter the commission amount on the offer -> click Save Action and Get Code .
Once the code is placed on the conversion page of the offer, you will start seeing conversion data beside your keywords in Adwords. Now you will know what keywords are converting and which ones are eating up money.
Pros: I like this method better since its easier to setup and involves almost no work on my part. The conversion data you get back is accurate and easy to track.
Cons: It requires to have your AM your place your code on the offer page. If you work with networks like clickbank, you are required contact advertiser directly and not all advertisers will do that for you.
You can write simple PHP code to capture the exact search keywords people typed when they clicked on your ads.
The idea is to put the code in your landing pages, capture the search keyword and append the keyword as a subid to your affiliate URL.
Now let me show you the code and see how we set this up with both Adwords and YSM.
1. In the destination URL of your ad copies, append the following text in red
http://www.your-landing-page-domain.come/?kw={keywords}
You’re telling Google to get the keyword user types and append that at the end like this…
http://www.your-landing-page-domain.come/?kw=blue+widgets
2. Now, we just use the follwing PHP code in our landing page to capture this keywords and append it as subid to out affiliate URL.
<?php
$kw = $_GET["kw"]; //get the search keyword user typed
?>
<html>
<body>
<a href=’<?php echo “http://your-affiliate-url?sub=$kw”?>’ >Get Free Widgets Here</a>
</body>
</html>
YSM is bit different from Adwords. You don’t need to modify you ad destination URL like in Adwords. Yahoo will append the search keywords to your landing page URL itself as long as your have Tracking URLs on.
Turn on Tracking URLs in YSM:
YSM: Log into your YSM account -> Administration -> Tracking URLs -> Select Tracking URLs on -> Click Save Changes.
Yahoo now will append ?OVRAW=<search+keyword> query string to your landing page url containing the search keywords user typed when they clicked you ad. You can learn more about it here on Yahoo help pages
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/screenref/16897.html
The PHP code for tracking keywords with Yahoo:
<?php
$kw = $_GET["OVRAW"]; //get the search keyword user typed
?>
<html>
<body>
<a href=’<?php echo “http://your-affiliate-url?sub=$kw”?>’ >Get Free Widgets Here</a>
</body>
</html>
Pros: With this method you don’t need to run around after your AM or the advertiser to place your pixel code. You can basically track keywords on your end in your advertising network account. Your keywords will showup as subids. For example in your Azoogle affiliate account, you can pull up the sub id report to see the keywords.
Cons: Requires basic understanding of PHP coding on your part.
You know when you’re struggling, everything seems dull in life. Well, I had been struggling to make a dime online for a long long time. Its just recently things turned around for me and now I’m making $250 a day. So, if you’re struggling with this “making-money-online” thing or with anything just don’t give up and keep at it because one day luck will strike you too. Before you know it, you will see yourself in the same position as other successful people you read stories about.
This post is not about PPC strategies, or link-building strategies, adsense or website creating techniques or affiliate marketing in general but more about psychological mindset that sets the successful people apart form the losers. That’s right, its all in your head. If you’re the kind of person who thinks you can’t do it, then chances are you won’t be able to do it even when you try. People who don’t worry about consequences are the ones that get ahead in the game. Sometimes it pays to just STOP thinking and just DO IT.
I want to take this opportunity to share my experience with you, my past struggles in online marketing and how I came to my recent success. It took more than a year for me to get to where I’m now. Honestly, I could have done this year ago but I couldn’t. Why? Because I was not a risk taker, I was not a positive thinker and I was too emotional about failing. If you are one of those people who are struggling to generate even $20 a day online, then either you’re not a risk taker or always worry about failing. Its this worry that “what if it doesn’t work out” always keep you from succeeding and trying new things. Everyone works hard but not everyone works smart.
Turn your bad luck to good luck
One advice I would give everyone is that is to stop thinking and just do it. Sometimes you sit there and think why should I create a new website or why should I try this because I don’t think its going to work. You need to realize that the only reason it’s not going to work is because you’re going to do anything about it. Pick sometime and then make up your mind to stick to it and once you do stick to it, then don’t give up on it until its where you want it to be. That’s how you will break out of bad luck.
The day I stopped worrying about losing money, the day I stopped whining, the day I stopped becoming emotional about my failures, the day I said to myself, forget everything, whatever happens happens, just do it and keep doing it until you get somewhere. It’s when things started turning around for me and before I know it I went from $0 a day from $250 a day in a month.
Chances are if you had been trying to make online for a while you know more than the person who hasn’t tried it. So, you are already way head of the game. So sit down, stop worrying about everything, stop being emotional about your struggles, put everything aside and just DO IT and keep doing it until you find success.
