Since everyone else on the face of the blogosphere is posting up their earning reports for the past month/year, I guess ill be the nerdy kid who is trying to fit in and copy them. So here goes!

Drum roll please….

Commission Junction (Christmas Dog Outfits + BANS store):

Clickbank (BANS referral ):

NeverblueAds (need to work on this one!):

Other Affiliate programs (HID headlights):

Adsense (from www.digmyhonda.com and www.hondoogle.com):

Grand Total: $162.40

What? They why is your meter only at 4%, it should be at 16%! Well, unfortunately that is gross profit. There were obviously some expenses to go along with this profit. Here are the expense totals:

Google AdWords:

Notice I am not posting my expenses for the BANS software ($97.00), nor my web hosting ( $98.00). This is because I consider them one time expenses (yes, my web hosting plan is a one time expense, i never have to pay again) and I’m not going to worry about them in my monthly report. Technically they should be included, but lets try and keep morale up a little bit, shall we?

Grand Total Expenses: $110.41

Total Net Profit:  $51.99

Im not sure what to think of that. I guess it could have been worse, and it definitly could have been better, but thats what it is. All thoughts are on the future for 2008, which hopefully will be a big year for me. I’m going to make a post tomorrow outlining my goals for the coming year, so check back!

The past couple of days I have been almost addicted to getting my BANS store PageRank upgraded. Im no SEO expert, but from what I have read the best way to get higher rankings is to have good, unique content and to have a lot of links from high PageRank sites.

For those who might not know what page rank is, Its a scale from 1 to 10 that Google uses to measure how “important” a web site is, and ultimately determine how close to the top that site will be in search engine results. While no one really knows for sure, most people agree that it is a logarithmic scale, which means that its much harder to go from a PR6 to a PR7, for example, than it is to go from a PR1 to a PR2.

Getting links

I have recently hired a…”secretary” to help me with my affiliate adventures.  She is super hot, works very hard, and works for very little money. Her name is Valerie, and she is my girlfriend of 6 years :-}

Seriously though, I have been teaching my computer illiterate girlfriend all about things like affiliate marketing, link building, etc etc, and she has really been doing a great job with helping me. She has joined somewhere around 20 new forums and put a link in her signature. Some of them have been removed and she has been banned from a few, but overall it has been working out really well. So far she has not been taking PageRank into account, which is my own fault. With all this stuff going on, I have forgotten how the basics work.

Many of you probably know that getting a link from a PR6 site is like getting hundreds of links from a PR1 site, so I really need to start re-thinking things and taking that into account. The old adage “work smarter, not harder” applies here. Most of the forums she has been posting on are PR2, with a PR3 thrown in here or there. I found a pretty good tool that allows you to quickly check the estimated page rank of web sites,so I have been trying to find some PR6+ forums, or other sites for her to go on a linking spree.

I have noticed however, that even the most respectable automotive forums like www.honda-tech.com and www.vwvortex.com are only PR4, which isn’t bad, but we could do better. The biggest problem is that most of the PR6+ sites are not “community” sites, which means they don’t necessarily have any way for their visitors to discuss things or interact in message boards, which makes it harder to get links. Im talking about sites like www.cars.com and www.vehix.com

Getting content

The other part of the equation aside from link building is getting valuable, unique content on your site. This one is a breeze for me, at least in my niche. As you might have already noticed, I am extremely passionate about my car, so I could go on writing about it all day and all night. In fact, over the past 5 years or so that I have been active on automotive message boards, I have probably written enough valuable content to write my own ebook. I have actually had people suggest I make some of my DIY forum articles into ebooks and sell them for like $1.00 or something. If I had the same “make money online” mentality that I have now back then, I would probably doing ok for myself just writing “How Tos”!!.

Don’t let that fool you though, its not hard at all to become an “expert” on just about any subject this day an age. You don’t have to really know anything about a niche to create great content, most of the time you can get it for cheap, or even free! Outsourcing content writing is one way to do it, but simply re-writing existing articles in your own words can be just as effective (its cheaper, but its more time consuming).

Here is an example of a nice juicy aritcle I just got done writing. Its mostly stuff from my own knowledge, but has little parts of other articles chopped up and thrown in as well. It took me maybe 0.5 hour, which isn’t too bad. Hopefully Google will like it!

http://digmyhonda.com/store/accord/Store/Honda-Accord-Aftermarket-Exhaust

Just for the sake of conversation, my BANS store made another 3 sales today. Wooo hooo.

As I have said in one or two of my other posts, I have been creating web pages since I was about 10 years old, when my mom brought home our first computer. I can’t believe I’m actually going to show this to other people. but here is my first ever web page….cringe…..

http://www.angelfire.com/ma/ericmitz/Indexo.html

Looking back at it now, I can’t believe the absolute mess that thing is! When I was 10, I thought it was the coolest thing to ever hit the web. It looks like a 1st grader on crack wrote it! Spelling and grammer mistakes everywhere, crappy animated gifs that i tried to make, and a complete lack of coherent design.

Oh, and in case you are wondering, I was a professional yo-yo demonstrator from age 9 to 16. I had a lot of great times, won a lot of championships, got paid a lot (for a 10 year old), and traveled the word for free thanks to a sponsorship from the Yomega yoyo corporation. I even made a yoyo training video that sold over 100,000 copies in the U.S. and Japan. Those were definitely the best years of my life.

Ok…So what?

The reason I posted all that is to show you just how passionate I have been about web development from an early age, because I was recently offered a freelance web design position to redesign http://www.dunbareurosports.com, which is a Ducati and BMW motorcycle dealership. They are looking for a complete overhaul of their web page and asked me to do it. I was referred to them by my future mother in law, who currently works there and told her boss that I was “into computers and web stuff”. My beautiful girlfriend Valerie also used to work their, so I am pretty familiar with the company and the people who work there.

The point of this post is because I am kind of stuck in a dilemma. On one hand, I would love the opportunity to design a web site for an established company, but on the other hand its obviously going to take a good amount of time to do. As I have grown older, my time has become more valuable, and I would hate to waste even a minute of it doing something that is not worth while.

I really have to sit back and ask myself if doing this will be a good use of my time, or should I focus my free time on other things that may be more worth while (like affiliate marketing). Lets go through the pros and cons of taking this job.

Pros

• Guaranteed money. No risk.
• Can dump the money made into Affiliate marketing
• Great for my online resume.
• I enjoy creating web sites.
• Could lead to future freelance jobs if i execute correctly

Cons

• Going to take time.
• Less time to spend on Affiliate marketing
• Its not an small or easy job (the current site is a mess!)
• Will be starting school again on the 3rd of January, which means less time.
• Already have a “9-5″ job which takes up a lot of time.

I have pretty much decided that I am going to take the job, but there is still a little bit of doubt in my mind about not being able to do it well because of school, or worse, not being able to finish it.

Secret squirrel script

One good thing is that as I develop this web site, I can continue to work on my “automatic landing page” script that I have been working on the last couple of weeks and kind of kill two birds with one stone.

I havn’t really said anything about this script to anyone, but basically I have been developing something very similar to BANS, but rather than using the ebay affiliate program, I plan on making it 100% generic and plugin based so that you could use Ebay, or Amazon, or whatever affiliate API (or no API at all) that you want. It is 100% XHTML compliant and built from the ground up with SEO in mind.  The ultimate goal is to make something that is highly dynamic and can deploy multiple landing pages with different keywords very quickly. I do plan on releasing it to the public when I am finished with it, probably free of charge. So keep an eye out for it! maybe I’ll release Alpha versions of it as I develop it.

I dont have a whole lot to say today, but I will tell you that things are going well. Today (two days ago really, since ebay has still been delayed almost 48 hours for me), I had my highest number of sales to date on my BANS store. I sold 10 items yesterday alone for a total of $11.39, which is not my highest daily earnings (that would be $44.46 from my BANS referal), but its good to see the number of actual sales increasing!

I was going through my earnings for each day today looking at what people are buying, and the BANS sales are actually extremely targeted. In my Christmas Dog outfit campaign, I think I sold only one item that was actually related to my ad, the rest were completely off niche. With the BANS store, just about every single sale so far (except one) has been Honda related.

Another cool thing I saw while going through all the sales is that I actually got whats called an “advanced lead”  from ebay. What that means is  someone signed up as a new Ebay member from my affiliate link, but has not yet won an auction or bought anything on Ebay. If they do place a winning bid, or buy a “buy it now” item, within the next 30 days I get another nice $25.00 commission (I’ve got one already!).

I’ve Been Naughty

I’m not usually one to do or condone blackhat marketing  tactics, but I have to confess that I have tried one recently.  As many of you probably know, one of the best ways to increase your search engine ranking is to get a lot of respectable (high PageRank) backlinks to your site.

I started off as a good little boy getting backlinks by placing a link to my BANS store in my forum signatures. I have been a member of Honda message boards since 2002 and have built myself a pretty good reputation, so I didn’t think this was going to be a problem. I wasn’t forcing sales on anyone or spamming my links in every post, I simply had a casual link in my signature.

It turns out that forum admins don’t like that so much. I was temporarily banned from 2 forums (which I have been a long time member of) and have received private messages from admins on around five other sites asking me to remove the link in my signature. I guess I can understand why they would do this, they need to protect the value of their paid advertising space and i respect that, so I removed the link from my signatures where needed.

However, the whole point of putting the links in my signature was not to get people on forums to click on it (though thats a great bonus), it was mostly for Google to find and get me some quality backlinks. So I took it upon myself to do some bad things. I decided to create a 1×1 pixel transparent .gif image to put in my signatures and in all my posts. I would then wrap my www.digmyhonda.com/store URL around that image, and I have an almost completely undetectable link. I knew the link was there, and it still took me a good minute or two to actually find the right pixel in my signature.

This kind of thing doesn’t really hurt anyone, no one even knows the links are there. However I do still feel kind of sneaky and slimy doing this, so I might end up removing the invisible links soon, but first I am curious to see if it will actually work. I would really like to keep a clean image in this business and i don’t condone anyone do this kind of thing. Its simply an experiment.

As if all the great software features BANS has to offer weren’t enough, the real power of the tool is in its members forums. If any of you are current BANS users, you know that the member forums are full of all kinds of great info that you don’t usually find in many blogs.

I was searching through the forums today looking for some new ideas to bring in some extra traffic to my BANS store when I came across a great idea. Use craig’s list to promote your BANS site. Its really a brilliant concept because its free, the traffic is very targeted, and its pretty simple to do.

The basic idea is that you choose a product that is being offered on your BANS site, find out where the item is being sold from, go over to craig’s list and make a regional ad for that item with a link to your BANS store (or better yet, a custom landing page)

I have not done this yet, but I am actually going to write this post as I go through the process for the first time. So lets get started, we’ll do it together.

Find a product to sell

Before we can create a targeted Craig’s list ad, we need something to sell. Since I already have an adwords campaign up for a Honda exhaust system, I will choose the same thing for consistency’s sake. I did a quick search on my BANS store and found this item that I think people would be willing to buy:

The item is fantastic quality (I have owned one of these exhaust systems personally) and it is in a very good price range (not too expensive, and not too cheap), so the buyer gets a good deal, and I get a bigger commission.

Next, go to ebay and try to find the same product by using the search box. This should be pretty easy to do by just copy and pasting the title of the item into ebay search. You want to find the same, or very similar item that has a lot of time left on the auction (more that 4 days or so would be you’re best bet).

I was able to find this exhaust on ebay and the auction does not end until December 31st. Another point to mention here is that there are “10 Items available” from this seller, so this craigslist ad can work for more than 1 buyer. Thats a little bonus.

Here is a link to the item on ebay

Setup your landing page

Another great feature of BANS is that you can setup what are called “content” pages. These content pages are basically just a blank canvas that you can use to put whatever content you want on them, and still have them blend into the site. They are usually used for SEO purposes to provide content to your users (and Google). For the sake of our little craig’s list experiement, we are going to use the content page as a landing page for this specific auction.

First I went to the ebay auction for the item and downloaded the images to my computer so I can upload them to both craig’s list, and our landing page.

Next, you will want to copy some of the auction information from the ebay page and put it on your new landing page along with the images of the item. It doesn’t have to be anything spectacular, and remember this is NOT a PPC campaign, so dont bother with keyword spaming and everything that goes along with it. Just write something short and sweet. Click here to see the quick landing page I created.

Create the ebay affiliate link

The most important thing you need to do is to make a big visible call to action link with your ebay/cj affiliate id in it. To do this, simply grab the URL to the orignal auction and head on over to http://affiliate.ebay.com and use their “Flexible Destination Tool”. This tool allows you to convert just about any ebay.com url into an affiliate link very quickly. Put the link somewhere on your landing page so that your buyer can get to the auction (I also made the images links to the auction as well, people like to click pictures).

Setup the Craig’s List ad

This is actually my first ever Craig’s list ad. I have never used the service in my life, so bare with me here.

The item I chose does not have a specific city or region in the auction, so I don’t have any particular place to target (craig’s list is split up by city, for those who don’t know). Instead, just pick a large city that gets a lot of traffic and post it there. I chose Los Angeles because there are a trillion people who live there, and the street racing scene is about as big as it gets.

Find the proper craig’s list regional site, and click on the “post to classifieds” link on the left hand side of the page. Next, craig’s list will ask you to narrow down your ad by category. I am selecting “for sale” items, then “auto parts”, and then I just picked a city at random.

Craig’s list will now ask you to create your ad. The interface is pretty straight forward, they ask you for a title, description, price and your email address. All I am going to do for now is enter the same information i have on my landing page, and use the same images. Be sure to include a link to your landing page. I forgot to do this at first, but I fixed it.

Here is a screen shot of my craig’s list ad.

Just a special note here. notice that for my email address I used “+civic_ws2″ after my gmail user name. For those who dont know, this will allow you to filter incoming emails in gmail and put them into specific labels (gmail folders). This makes it easy to track where emails are coming from.

You can now submit your ad and Craig’s list will send you a confirmation email letting you publish  the ad and make it live. Here is a link to my craig’s list ad.
Thats about it! People on the BANS forums are going very well with this method and you can even scale it to use other free classified sites as well (there are thousands of them). This will get you very targeted traffic!

Yesterday I posted about how frustrating and depressing my affiliate experience has been thus far. Things really havn’t been going very well, and I came to the conclusion that I need to just sit back, clear my head and start over.

So of course, because I posted that yesterday, fate would have it that I log into Commission junction and see this:

My biggest day of profit thus far! I just made over $70.00 in the last 24 hours or so, WOW! This first screen shot is obviously my commission junction/BANS commission. The second screen shot is my clickbank account, and that commission is from a BANS referral. Aside from these commission numbers, I also had a good day with adsense making another $3.50 from that on www.DigMyHonda.com! I guess I need to start complaining a little more, things start to happen when I do!!

Most of the commission junction commission you see there is from a new Ebay signup referral, but I also made 3 sales on Christmas eve with my BANS store. Not bad considering the store was only indexed by Google today! (that was some more good news)

Honda Campaign picking up speed

Remember those two campaigns (here and here) I started with adwords for my BANS store? Well the second one I started up, which was the more general campagn of the two (Honda CivicParts) has really picked up some momentum. check out this screen shot of the ad copy performance. (click to enlarge)

I went from a CTR of 0.01% to a high of 0.23%! Thats pretty good. In fact, my first campaign did the same thing, it started really low (close to 0.00%) and as time went on it went higher and higher, eventually peaking at somewhere around 4.00% the week before christmas, so hopefully the same thing happens with this campaign and I can get the same $0.03 clicks I was getting with the first, that would be fabulous!

The first two ad copies seem to be performing equally well, but the third one looks like it is struggling a little bit. Again, the same thing happened with my first campaign, and what I did was pause the poor performing ads to allow the better performing ones to show more often. I did this two or three times until I had only one really good performing ad running, and thats when i hit the 4.00% CTR. I am going to let this campaign marinate for another day or so and then start filtering the ad copies to try and increase my average CTR.

So it looks like things are starting to turn around, at least for now. I’m sure Ill go through another depressing period, but I’ll definitely keep today in mind whenever I am feeling down about things! Let this be a lesson too you, it only takes 1 day to make a difference!

The Best Part

Before I close up for today, I want to point out the best part of todays numbers. I finally get to update my meter!! I have officially made a solid $40.00 in net profit. So the meter goes up to 4%!

Woah! 30 more minutes and I would have failed at my post for 30 days challenge. That was close! It has been a long, but wonderful Christmas Day, and I am just now getting home and unwinding. I will sleep good tonight! I hope everyone else had a great Holiday as well.

I am teh Suck

The affiliate marketing world is a wonderful and mysterious thing, but I am just having a hell of a time with it. In fact, to be perfectly honest, it is down right frustrating and depressing. I have always succeeded at anything related to computers, and ever since I was 10 years old I have been creating web pages and have had a presence on the web, but this whole affiliate thing is just blowing my mind.

Anyway, the point is that I think I need to take a step back, clear my head and start from the beginning. I am obviously doing something wrong, and I need to analyze myself and figure out what it is, or I’ll never make any money in this business. So I have made a list of things that I think I am doing wrong or I could be doing better. Observe:

Afraid of losing money!!!!!!!

I’ll start with my biggest and most important flaw. I’m scared. The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, right? Well, i fully admit that I am chicken shit when it comes to this stuff. I am seriously worried about spending money, and i really think this is the main reason that I am not having any success. I really thought setting my budget of $250 would help me with this problem but It hasn’t. All i can think of is “oh no, I just spent another $5.00. thats another $5.00 out of my budget, so i better cut back and start spending less”. What I should be saying to myself is “I only spend $5.00 today, how am i going to make thousands of dollars a month by spending $5.00 a day? I need to spend more!”

In order to solve this, I really need to start finding a new mindset. I once read on StevePavlina.com (good writer, although I think a lot of what he write is complete bullshit) that if you want to be a millionaire, than you need to live and think like a millionaire. So I am going to give this a try for a while and see how it works out. I’m going to try and train myself to be an affiliate “baller” and move away from these $3.50 per day campaigns and step it up a little bit. This is going to be very difficult for me, so we’ll see how it goes.

Bad Niche

I have always read that you should stick to a niche that you know a lot about, and hence why I have chosen the Honda tuning niche. What they fail to tell you is that some niches just suck and are without hope. I am starting to thing this is one of them. People are so stingy and just don’t buy anything. So I am going to try and reach out into different niches and try them out to see if some of my poor success can be attributed to a stale niche.

Some other niches I am thinking of entering are designer purses and bags (a friend of mine just bought his girlfriend a tiny little Coach bag for like $500 and she looooved it). I saw some R.C. Helicopters at the mall the other day and people were all huddled around and buying them like crazy. I also saw an interesting post on JohnChow.com entitled “the Passionate blogger” which is about a guy who created a blog about a future electric car from Chevy, and is doing really well for himself. This reminded me of an article I came across a while back about a hydrogen powered car being be released by Honda in 2009 called the “Clarity”. I did a quick search on Google and there is VERY little adwords competition for this car, and wordtracker says there is a good amount of search volume for it. I think I’m going to try and see what I can do with that idea, especially because I own a relevant domain with the word “Honda” in it.

So Those are the big two problems I think I am having. I’m going to start here and see how things go. I may end up loosing a lot of money, but I need to keep reminding myself that its not a big deal. If i can turn $1000 into $1001, its better than nothing. That is the mindset I need to keep!!!

Recap from yesterday

Before I go on about my second campaign (which will be running in parallel with my last campaign, and many others to come), ill show you guys the results from the last 20 hours or so. If you read my last post, you know that I started an extremely targeted campaign sforthe “Apexi World Sport 2″ exhaust system for the Honda accord. It’s a product that I have personally owned in the past, and I know for a fact its very popular in the Honda world.

So anyway, Here are the stats for the campaign. (click to enlarge)

If you remember from my last post, I was pretty worried about not getting any impressions. Well, that was not the case! I actually got more impressions than my Christmas dog outfit campaign was getting per day, which is unexpected! I think the reason for this is that I tried a secret little experiment with this campaign. Instead of setting my daily budget to $100 like i have been doing, I set my daily budget for this campaign to $10,000. I was able to do that because i know that there was no way I was going to get $10,000 worth of clicks overnight, so I wasn’t really worried about losing my life savings.

Impressions are great, but its clicks that really matter, and this campaign is doing pretty crappy with clicks so far. My click through rate was a whopping 0.02%.

I’m going to let this campaign run another day to try and get some more clicks and some more stats, but it looks like I will need to reword my ad copies a little bit, they are apparently not very enticing for prospective buyers (either that or no one is looking to buy that product).

Also, in regards to my Max CPC, I felt like spending $0.40 on a click was just not worth it for this campaign (i would need something like a 30% conversion rate for that to work), So I basically said screw you too the search network, lowered my bid to $0.15. I’ll try my luck on the content network for now.

Today’s campaign

With a 0.02% click through rate, I’m going nowhere fast. So it was time to try the other side of the spectrum. Instead of making a super ultra mega targeted campaign I’m going to try and make this campaign a little bit more general.

To start, we’re going to switch to the Honda Civic instead of the Honda Accord. The civic is about 100x more popular in the tuner world than the Accord will ever be. The only reason I chose Accords for my last campaign is because I have owned two of them myself, but its time to move on. Just moving to the Civic alone would open up a lot more possibilities, but I’m going to take it one step further and promote general “Honda Civic parts” instead of a single brand name exhaust system. This will be interesting to see how the two campaigns compare as they run side by side.

New Ad Copies

With a new campaign comes new ad copies. I have found that I really hate writing these stupid things (mostly because I’m no good at it). I feel like I always run out of allowable characters before I say what i want to say. To try and help me out with this, I did a little sneaking around. I went to Google and did a search for my top keyword, “Honda civic parts” (which I’ll get to in a minute). I took a look at the top 3 or 4 campaigns and tried to replicate them the best that I could. Here is a screen shot of the Google search results:

And here are my ad copies for the campaign:

This whole looking at other people’s ads idea was extremely helpful for me, and is something I will definitely be doing in the future. We’ll see how these ads perform.

Keywords

I decided to go with a longer list of keywords for this campaign than my last, and of course being a more general “niche” there were more keywords to choose from. I was able to think up a bunch of them in my head, but I also went over to http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com and did a search for “Honda Civic Parts” which gave me a bunch of new keywords that I hadn’t thought of. You can download my keyword list HERE.

Thats it for now! If you are wondering, I am sending this traffic directly to the front page of my Honda Civic BANS store, there is no special landing page for this one because I am just not worrying about the search network for now, I can’t seam to wrap my head around how to get impressions on the search network.

First BANS Sale

I am also happy to report that my BANS store made its first sale on the 22nd (Ebay just updated the commissions for it today). This was actually BEFORE I setup my campaign for the store, so the traffic must have come from the links I put on www.DigMyHonda.com (the links are on the right hand side). Its also interesting that this purchase was actually WITHIN my niche! Instead of selling exotic Furbie looking dolls and exercise machines, I actually sold a part for a Honda Prelude. That must be a good sign, right?

Since I found out that my last campaign was actually against the Ebay TOS I cut it short a few days (I was going to leave it running through christmas). With that campaign dead, I had nothing running, and with nothing running, there will be no money coming in so it was time to get started on a new campaign.

First Landing Page

I finally got around to setting up my first landing page! Its not great, but it’s a start…I guess. I decided to take an extremely targeted approach on this one, probably a little too targeted, but this is a learning experience, so we will see how it works.

The product I decided to promote is again in line with my Honda tuning hobby, and is a product that I actually purchased and used on my old Honda Accord, so I have a lot of personal experience with it. The product is a specific exhaust for the Honda Accord called the “Apexi World Sport 2″. I used to loooove this exhaust when I had it because it was nice and quite while still allowing the exhaust to flow, and I would recommend it to anyone.

To create my landing page I started with a nice blank BANS page and did some research online for some content. I went to the apexi site and found a nice little blurb about the World sport 2 exhaust that I kind of reworked and put on my landing page. I got a picture of the exhaust from Google images and put it on the page (probably copyright infringement, but screw it), and did a very specific search filter for the page to only display that model of exhaust for the Honda Accord. Here is a screenshot of the landing page, or you can visit the real deal at http://digmyhonda.com/store/accord/Store/Honda-Accord-apexi-Exhaust

Keywords and optimization

I will first admit that the landing page is not fully optimized and I will probably end up reworking it a little more tomorrow, but I needed a foundation to build on. My target keyword for this campaign is going to be “Honda Accord Apexi Exhaust“. Its a pretty long tail keyword, and honestly doesn’t show much traffic on wordtracker, but i know for a fact that this is a very popular exhaust in the Honda community and people are always looking for it, so I decided to take a chance on it.

The first thing I did to try and optimize for this keyword is to set my HTML title tag to the exact keyword. Along with the title tag, I also put the keyword between my first <H1> tag as well. I went through the little article I had and plugged in a few keywords like “Honda Accord” and “Apexi Exhaust”, and even bolded  some of the keywords because apparently google really looks at the formating of the text within the landing page.

Luckily the Ebay auctions for these exhausts are already extremely keyword rich, so that adds a lot of keyword content automagically!

The adwords campaign.

With my landing page ready to go, it was time to setup my Google adwords campaign. For now, I have decided to leave the campaign running on both the Search and Content networks, but that may change. I will keep you updated.

I setup my first ad group and called it “accord apexi” because I plan on expanding this campaign to the civic and prelude very soon, so I wanted to distinguish it. Next was setting up the ad copies, which I actually have a bit of trouble with, so if anyone has any pointers let me know! I setup three ad copies for now, but I may add more in the future depending on what the CTR on these is. here is a screen shot:

Keywords

The last thing to do to setup my campaign was to enter in my keywords. Like i said above, wordtracker wasn’t much help in this area, so I had to resort to thinking of keywords myself. In the past I have used a pretty large number of keywords, so this time I wanted to try my hand at a “laser targeted” keyword list. In fact, my keyword list is so short, I can include them all right here in this blog entry:

Thats it! only 10 keywords for now, but I will almost definitely need to increase the number in order to get any impressions at all. I am hoping that because this campaign is running on the content network that this will cause my ad to appear in exactly the right places. I have also heard that adding as many negative keywords as possible can really help, so I will be doing that tomorrow as well.

As you can see, my quality score is pretty bad. This is the first time I have delt with quality score, so I am really pretty lost. Reading about it on other peoples blogs doesn’t give you a sense of just how difficult it is to please google! They have be set at$0.30 to $0.50 minimum bid, which really sucks! I ended up setting my minimum bid to $0.30 cents for now because I remember reading on www.uberaffiliate.com that setting your bids higher at first will allow you to test out your CTR and conversion rates while at the same time letting Google figure out if your campaign is worthy (or not worthy!)

More tomorrow

Thats about it for now, the campaign is up and running, so now all I can do is wait! What better way to pass the time than to catch a movie with old highschool friends who are in town for christmas? We are going to go check out “Sweeney Todd”, which is the new Johnny Depp movie. Im a huge fan of both Johnny Depp and and Tim Burton, so im hoping this movie wont dissapoint!

I will have an update on how the campaign did tomorrow, and start to test and tweak it. You guys can follow along and maybe even give me some pointers along the way! My biggest concern for this campaign right now is that im not going to get much traffic because its so narrowly targeted. Time will tell!

If its free, its for me!

Some great news to report today, I was able to score myself some 100% FREE advertising for my BANS store! How? Well, as I have said before I am really big into the Honda tuning scene and have been a member of Honda message boards since 2002. One message board in particular, www.cb7tuner.com has grown to be my online home away from home. www.cb7tuner.com is a site strictly dedicated to the “4th generation” Honda Accord, which are Accords between the years 1990 and 1993 (Talk about a Niche!).

I have owned two Accords in my lifetime, one was a 1989 (my first car) and the other was a 1992 (my second car). I joined www.cb7tuner.com back in 2003 and have been an active member ever since. In 2006, I sold my Accord and purchased a 2001 Acura Integra, but I never left the www.cb7tuner.com web site. In fact, it wasn’t until AFTER I sold my accord that I became a moderator there, and more active than ever. I also became the sites dedicated “IT” guy, who wrote scripts and fixed server problems (volunteer work, not paid).

Blind leading the blind

Me and the owner of the site became good friends and have met up in person a couple times. I have been talking to him lately about making money online, and he is starting to get interested. www.cb7tuner.com currently gets somewhere around 28,000,000 views per month, and he is STILL paying $120/m for hosting, and making ZERO profit!!! He is sitting on a gold mine and doesn’t even know it.

Obviously he was intrigued with what I was telling him about how people are making big bucks online through affiliate marketing, and asked me to show him the ropes (The blind leading the blind, I know). In exchange, he has offered me FREE ad space on cb7tuner.com which I can use for whatever I want. So I whipped up a banner ad for the Honda Accord store I created through BANS, and will be getting somewhere around 28,000,000 impressions per month! Talk about a sweet deal!

Its all in who you know

This brings up a great point about the power of networking. My best friends father, who is a manager at the local Midas muffler shop has always said “Its not how much money you have, its who you know”.  He was of course talking about modifying cars, but this is really a profound statement that everyone should really think about. I’m not sure how much 28,000,000 would cost through something like Google, but it goes to show that if you know the right people, you can really make out like a bandit! Now I just need to make more friends in the affiliate world…that would be nice!

here is a screen shot of my free ad real estate (click to enlarge):