Niche Affilate Marketting

Affiliate marketing is like house of cards

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

Are you losing money to exchange rate fee?

Where is the money going?

To be honest with you I’m losing 100s and 1000s of dollars with having to do exchange rate and paying conversion fee on my credit card and to my bank. The profits I make are in US dollars. But at the end of the month when everything is said and done, I end up with way less in Canadian dollars than what it says in my book.

Basically, I have a business account in Canadian dollars. The money I get paid is in US. So every time I go to the bank with my cheque or every time I get a wire, the bank charges me 2.5% fee for currency exchange in CND.

On the other hand, I pay my bills In Canadian dollars. I have a business CC in CND dollars, however I make my payments (everything except for Google Adwords) in US dollars. My CC company charges with 2.5% for currency exchange as well. So every time I get billed in US, I get slapped extra 2.5% on top on the amount charged.

Yahoo is pain in the ass. They don’t have billing in CND dollars. So, I end up paying 2.5% extra when they charge me. They don’t have pre-paid billing either. So, I have to fund my account first to continue running my ads. They require you to have 3x your daily limit budget in your account all the time.

Get everything in USD

For everyone outside of US, you need to open a US banking account, get a credit card in USD and get a new Adwords account in USD. Basically, do everything in US dollars.

I recently opened a new bank account in US dollars, applied for a credit card in USD and opened up a new Adwords account in US$.

Can you change the currency setting in your Adwords account?

Unfortunately, Adwords doesn’t allow that. Once you open an account in one currency, you can’t change it afterward. You will need to open a new account in your preferred currency.

Can I transfer my account history to my new Adwords account?

Again, the answer is No. With a new account you will need to build up history again. However, I must point out that, when you transfer your campaigns to your new account, domain history will automatically be transferred over, which is good. I was talking to an Adwords representative and this what he had to say about transferring account history and quality score from old account to a new account.

Adwords support:

It is possible to transfer your account keywords, ad text, etc to a new account. However, it is not possible to transfer account history information…While your quality score will start fresh, there are several factors of quality that will carry over and so will help you in establishing new quality score. These include: the historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group, the quality of your landing page, and the historical clickthrough rate (CTR) of the keyword and the matched ad on Google. Consequently, while factors such as account performance will be lost, several factors of quality score will remain.

Is there a good USD credit card for Canadian affiliates?

The only card which is comparable to my AMEX card is the BMO Mosaik MasterCard. You can get this card in USD. You also have the option to choose either 1% cash back or Air-miles reward miles. I went with air-miles since I had airmiles reward miles with my old card. I basically switched my airmiles points from my old card to this card.

http://www3.bmo.com/mosaik/usd

-G