I’ve been doing affiliate marketing now for a couple months and have had some limited success. I guess just the fact that I have pulled positive profits means I’m doing something right, but I’m certainly not going to get rich pulling $200/month. I want to be making at least $10,000/month. I would be completely happy in life if I could pull that off, that would make most of my dreams at least within the realm of possibility. $120,000.00/year surely isn’t unheard of, but thats all I want.

Up until this point I have really been tippy toeing around affiliate marketing, but I’m trying to get more serious. The first step I’m taking up the affiliate ladder is to setup a site that I can hopefully use for years to come to generate a stable affiliate income. I have decided to take on the “online dating” niche.

I know what your thinking…”Are you crazy?”. Maybe. Probably. I don’t know, crazy people don’t know their crazy. Now I don’t plan on just throwing up a direct linking adwords campaign and hope for the best, I’m taking this one on for the long haul.

You cant do that, your not “Super”!

Now I’m obviously not going to try and break into the “general” online dating niche, that would be affiliate suicide. Even if I was the most brilliant internet marketer to ever touch a keyboard, I simply don’t have the monetary means to do something like that. So what’s a poor affiliate marketer to do? Hit the niche at the corners.

Within the online dating niche, there are all kinds of different, target sub niches. For example, there is Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Interracial Dating, Black, Latino and even Big Beautiful Women! All of these have affiliate programs through NeverBlueAds with moderate payouts at around $5.00/lead. This is where I’m planning my attack, on these smaller areas.

Registering the domain name

The first thing I did was register the domain name. Because I want to target a bunch of sub niches separately, I needed a fairly general domain name. I wanted a .com, and I wanted it to have the keywords “online dating” in it. I went on over to GoDaddy.com and started searching. Do you know how hard it is to find a domain name with the keywords “online dating”? Its like trying to get tickets to the superbowl. You either get them really early, or you pay $1000s of dollars for them.

I eventually settled upon http://www.online-dating-blogger.com, since I was already planning on this being a wordpress blog site, this was the best I was going to get. I proceeded to install wordpress on my server and got a “relationship” or “love” style wordpress theme up and running. I then filled the right sidebar with a variety of different offers from NeverBlueAds. I haven’t decided what I want to do with the sidebar for the long term, but this will work for now.

I suck at dating

It just so happens that I have been in a healthy, happy relationship now for the better part of six years, so you can imagine that its been a long time since I have been looking for a “date”. Even before I was in a relationship, I was terrible at dating. I’m a pretty socially awkward guy to begin with, so add in attractive females and I become borderline retarded.

How does a guy like me write blog content about online dating? I dont, I let someone else do it, and there are two ways to do that.

• Outsource
• Paraphrase

Since I know nothing about outsourcing right now (although the “4 hour work week” gives a great explanation of the process), I decided to start with the latter option (paraphrasing).

There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of articles about online dating on www.ezinearticles.com. Now I’m not going to promote copyright infringement. In fact, you should do everything you can to create unique content. However, true paraphrasing is not illegal, at least to my knowledge.

By true paraphrasing, I mean writing something in your own words, 100%. This can sometimes be hard to do, but I have found a pretty efficient way to do it. I start by reading the article full through to get the entire gist of whats going on. Next I dissect the articles paragraph by paragraph and start paraphrasing. Its often difficult to read something one way, and write it another, but here is a good trick: Copy the paragraph into your text editer, and read it through once or twice. Next, delete the entire paragraph so that you cannot see the sentence structure. Finally, write down what you remember. Doing this will ensure that you don’t copy the exact sentence structure, or use the same words as the original paragraph. You might miss a few things here and there, but thats fine because often you can include words or phrases from your own experiences!

I have paraphrased about three or four articles so far, and you would be hard pressed to notice it! Iv changed words, sentence structures, and even the order of paragraphs. I’ve probably spent just as much time doing this as I would have if I wrote the original content. The only reason I haven’t written original content is because I simply don’t know much about the subject. Plain and simple.

Making the money

My money making plans for this site are to use the various dating CPA offers that can be found on NeverBlueAds and other affiliate networks. Each blog post will act as a specific landing page for each of the various online dating niches. I have already completed my landing pages for online Christian dating and online Jewish dating, so take a look and tell me what you think!

The next step is to make at least 10 more landing pages, add in some non-landing page content (like “online dating tips”, or “how to stay safe while dating online”). Id like to be getting around 100 organic visitors per day before I even think about hitting AdWords on this one. This will more than likely take months, and some serious link building to accomplish, but Im willing to give it a try. At least that part is free!

So thats all I have so far, I’m hoping to get the rest of my landing pages up and to start building natural traffic soon. It will be an on-going learn process, so we will see how it goes. Unfortunately I have started school full time for the semester, and my course load is pretty crazy. Hopefully I can find some time to not only work on money making, but to blog about it as well. Ill do my best!

So its been a couple days since I last posted, but I have been super busy with online money making. I have been trying a variety of different things, none of which have really paid of yet, but iv learned a whole lot. I have also been reading the “The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss, which is a fantastic read. It gives a front row seat to the life and mind of a successful entrepreneur. I would highly recommend buying this book, it will change your whole outlook on business and life!

Started with Microsoft AdCenter

This is something I have been avoiding up to this point. There is no real reason for it, Iv just been trying to focus my attention on mastering AdWords, which seems to be a life long process. I decided it was time to expand my horizons, so i signed up to AdCenter with a $100.00 click voucher. This would allow me to really practice PPC without loosing any money. Good deal.

The first thing I did with Microsoft AdCenter is copy over my Superbowl Campaign to see how it compared to Adwords. I made a bunch of changes to the landing page, which you can see here:

Vote for your team in Superbowl XLII.

Major changes to the landing page include adding some graphics above the fold, converting the page to PHP from HTML to track keywords and track the actual voting results (using MySQL), and added a pie chart using the Google Chart API to display the results to the voters. I also changed the offer banners from three horizontal leaderboards to two side by side square banners. We’ll see how it goes.

Changes in the PPC campaign were pretty big. I reduced my keyword list from around 25 to three. (Superbowl, Superbowl XLII, and Superbowl 42), which actually increased my quality a little bit, and hence gave me more impressions. Sometimes less is more! (This was on adwords)

My first impression of Microsoft AdCenter is a little divided. On one hand, the traffic converts very well compared to Adwords, however the volume of traffic is close to non-existent unless you bid like a rock star. I also noticed that AdCenter is extremely sleezy! They love to trick you into taking your money, here is why:

1. I signed up with a $100.00 voucher, and when I started getting clicks, they were charging my account anyway! I will have to call them and find out why I haven’t received my $100 voucher yet.

2. They have something called “incremental bids”. Maybe I was just to retarded to understand it, or I was not paying close enough attention, but they really screwed me over here. Incremental bids work like this: You set your ordinary bid for the search and content network, but you can bid up to 100% more (2X) based on demographic. For example, in my superbowl campaign I might want to spend twice as much for males between 18 and 50 than i want to spend on 50+ year old females. Its great that AdCenter allows you to do this, but It would be nice if they could explain it a little better. When I first saw this, I was convinced that when I was bidding 100% on 18 year old males, I was bidding 100% of my standard bid, and not 100% MORE than my standard bid. This really made me loose big time.

Once I figured out that I was bidding twice as much as I originally thought, I quickly disabled the incremental bid option, which in turn quickly brought my impressions to zero…literally. Bummer.

This was a bummer because had I been bidding what I thought I was bidding, I would have actually made some PPC money! Unfortunately, most advertising costs far outweighed my conversions, and I was back in the red. Let this be a lesson to you.

Out of these 40 clicks, I got around 9 conversions at an average of an dollar each. Thats a 17.5% conversion rate, not to shabby!

Another pet peve I have with AdCenter is that it is a pain in the ass to use. Its slow, and half the time the pages time out and I have to redo everything Iv done already. I found that this was only an issue with Firefox. I switched over to IE as an experiment, and everything ran smoothly. I wouldn’t doubt that Microsoft does this on purpose.

Yahoo Search Marketing

Since I was starting with AdCenter, I figured I might as well start with Yahoo Search Marketing, which I also had a $100.00 voucher for. I really don’t have any statistics to measure the performance of Yahoo, but I do like their interface a lot better than AdCenter.

The downside is that I have had the same superbowl campaign running for over 24 hours and I haven’t got a single impression, never mind a click. I’m not sure why, but I’m going to let it run for a few more days before I make any real judgments.

Other stuff in the works

I’ve decided that this “find a campaign, throw some keywords together with a direct link and hope for the best” thing is getting old, so its time to take some real decisions. My new approach is to take approach PPC from a high level Niche standpoint, and drill it down from there. For example, im starting with “online dating”. Today I registered Online Dating services (little SEO link building going on right there), which I plan on promoting the 40+ Dating offers available on NeverBlueAds. I am going to spend the next month or so developing blog content, and getting it indexed naturally before I create my first PPC campaign. This is going to be a real deal, hardcore campaign. I plan on making targeting posts about Christian Dating, Jewish Dating, Interracial Dating, etc etc. We’ll see how this works!

More on that tomorrow, I have to get to bed so I can start School again at 8:00am!

I recently made a little “spurt of the moment” AdWords campaign that failed miserably, and I figured I would share it with everyone so you can see how much I suck at this game.

Are you ready for some Football?

When January rolls around, and the Patriots are in the playoffs (I’m from Massachusetts, so don’t give me any lip about how much you hate the Pats!), I turn into a huge Football fan. I watch every game, including pre and post game reviews. This season has been even more special than normal for football fans in New England, as I’m sure some of you know the Pats are one game away from doing the impossible, a perfect season.

So after the game on Sunday I decided I would see how Football was for an online niche. With the Superbowl just two weeks away, I know there is going to be a surge in interest, so I figured I’d cash in (easier said than done). I was all excited about this, I did some preliminary Google research on the most obvious keywork “Superbowl” only to find that there seemed to be ZERO competition, not a single Ad showed up. I thought I must have hit a gold mine, I was wrong.

The Landing Page

Right away I started designing a landing page, and I used all of the tricks I have learned over the past few months to try and optimize it for Google’s dreaded quality score. I had keyword rich H1, H2 and title tags. I had Legal disclaimers and Terms of service in the footer, and some unique content I wrote up within the page.

From what I have read, whenever big “buzz” worthy events like the Superbowl emerge, (other examples would be news scandals, like the Michael Vic story), people have really cashed in on creating “Polls” that are linked to affiliate offers from places like Azoogle or NeverBlueAds. The Idea is to ask a question like “Do you think Michael Vic should go to jail?” with a simple “yes” or “no” button. When a user casts a vote, they are brought to a “Thank you” page and are told that they are eligible for a free gift just for voting. It sounds like a great concept, so I gave it a shot.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE LANDING PAGE!

I have recently changed the landing page described in this blog entry. To view the original landing page, please click here.

The offers

This was a tricky part, choosing which offers to promote. Searching through NeverBlueAds, there was nothing related to the superbowl, football, or anything even remotely related to any kind of sports. The closest thing I found was this offer for a Free pack of Gaterade…blah!

I didn’t feel that was a very good offer, so I went out on a limb and chose some random ones, completely off topic. Instead of looking for something related to my campaign, I was now looking for something that converted easily (first page email or zip submit), and paid a decent amount. I definitely wanted the offer to be of the “freebie” variety, so I did some research and chose two more offers which appeared to have good conversion rates and EPCs. One was for a free Iphone (everyone wants an Iphone, right??) and the other was for a $250 grocery gift card (I could sure use one of those!). Looking back now, this was a completely stupid idea and I have no idea what I was thinking. I probably should have used something health related, like a dietary supplement. A lot of guys who watch football probably like to lift weights and do other manly activities to increase their bicep size, but i digress. Here are the other two offers:

Setting up the campaign.

Once I had my landing page ready, I fired up Adwords Editor (By the way, if you havn’t downloaded this, DO IT NOW.) and started planning things out. I created a new campaign called “Superbowl” and started my first AdGroup, which was going to be focused on the generic keyword “Superbowl”. I did a little research on freekeywords.wordtracker.com and found a bunch of related search terms that people were looking for and placed them into my adwords campaign.

Download the keyword List.

Next up was writing the AdCopy. I’ve said in the past that I really hate this part of Adwords because I am simply no good at it. I never know what to say! This time was especially difficult because there were no other competitors to “borrow” ideas from, I was all on my own. I ended up creating five different ad copies that I planned to split testing, and thought they were fairly decent. Check them out below:

Setting Bids

For this campaign I set my daily budget to $100.00 and my maximum search bid to $0.20. I opted to enable seperate content network bids, and set those a $0.10. I was a little worried that I was going to get a surge of impressions and clicks (you know, because this was the best idea ever) so I was very conservative on my bidding, in fear of getting owned by “curiosity clicks”. This was probably one of my bigger mistakes, looking back at it now.

With the Ad Copy written and my bids placed, I was ready to upload my campaign to AdWords and watch the money roll in. This was going to be my big break, I could feel it.

The First 20 minutes

The first twenty minutes this campaign was up and running, it looked like I was right on the money. I got 20 impressions almost right away, and my first click. I was sure this was going to be the one, and I shutdown my laptop for the night and went to sleep with dreams on wads of cash in my NeverBlueAds account.

I woke up the next morning a little late, so I had no time to check how the campaign was doing. It wasn’t untill about 2:00pm that I finally got a chance to check the status. To my dissapointment, I only had a combined total of 40 impressions, and my lonely solitary click from the night before. What a bummer that was! Looking into the issue further, I found that every single one of my keywords was marked as “inactive”, and i was slapped with a poor quality score across the board, yeilding $5.00 and $10.00 minimum bids. Dream shattered.

What Did I learn?

Even though, from a profit stand point, the campaign was (and continues to be) a complete failure, I did learn a few hopefully valuable lessons.

1. Using Exact match keywords will get you search impressions.

One thing that I have been unsuccessful at in the past is getting search impressions. I think I have only gotten a handful of them in all the campaigns I have tried thus far. Everything has come from the content network. This campaign was a little different. 98% of my impressions came from the search network this time, which was cool to see. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to capitalize on it.

2. Inactive keywords still yield search impressions

This was something I wasn’t aware of previously. Did you know that even if your keywords are marked as “inactive for search”, you can still get search impressions? I’m not sure exactly how it works, I’m hoping someone can fill me in, but i would assume that Google throws you a handful of impressions here and there just to see if your CTR is high enough to bump your quality score. That is just my uneducated guess though, so who knows!

3. Quality score is a bitch

Pardon my French, but I can’t really express it any other way. Quality score appears to be even more difficult that I had first imagined. I honestly thought this landing page was going to at least give me an “OK” quality score because I had done everything everyone said to do. I’m still not sure what I should have done differently, I guess there just wasn’t enough content, or enough “pages” on the domain for Google. Better luck next time!

What is the campaign doing now?

I actually let the campaign continue to run, especially since I wasn’t getting any clicks, and hence it wasn’t costing me any money. Each day the number of impressions grows a little bit (im up to about 200 impressions per day), but I still have only that 1 click, and of course zero conversions. I’ll probably let it sit until the super bowl is over. Im going to modify it and remove the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers from the vote, since they will obviously not win the superbowl. Other than that though, I think im just going to take a hit on this on and focus my attention on Valentines day. Vday seems to be quite a bit bigger, and I have a couple ideas Im going to try.

Even though I stopped updating my blog, I certainly did not stop trying to make money online. In fact, I hit it double time, and it really paid off! Since January 1st I have Grossed $169.00, with only $25.00 in expenses, yielding around $145.00 or so in net profit as of last night. Want to know how I did it? Read on.

Build a Niche Store

If you haven’t purchased a Build a Niche Store license yet, you are simply missing out. Plain and simple. I know there has been a bit of controversy over the software, but I can tell you from personal experience that it is worth every single penny. The more you use it, the more you realize just how powerful it can be. I only have two niche stores setup, and they have yielded 98% of my profits for this month. BANS has paid for itself almost twice over already, and iv only had it running for less than a month. If you havn’t tried BANS yet, BUY IT NOW!

Some of you have already seen my first BANS store (check it out here if you haven’t). Its a store focused on Honda automobiles and the Honda Tuning scene. There is actually a small network of BANS stores working together there, where each Honda model has their own separate store. (Civic Store, Accord Store, s2000 Store, etc). This has really worked well for me so far, and it integrates very well into my existing site at www.digmyhonda.com

I have also created a new store since I last updated my blog. Long ago (back in october) I was on a domain buying spree and I had purchased the domain www.tire-depot.us, in hopes of using the www.tirerack.com affiliate program (which is run through commission junction) to start some kind of PPC site. Unfortunately I got wrapped up in other things for a while, and the domain name was just sitting and collecting dust. About a week ago I decided to do something with it, I did pay for it after all.

This was a perfect candidate for a niche store! I threw together a quick, cheesy header image, tweaked the BANS store colors and added some Ebay categories related to tires. All of this took maybe a half hour of work (including installation), and the store was ready to roll. Within two days I was indexed in Google and I had already made my first sale with it! It was only around $5.00, but for something that took so little effort to get started, that was pretty good! I have since added some content and made things a little better, so hopefully Ill start ranking for some good keywords. Check out discount tires at the tire-depot.

Link building is important!

This is something I have really come to learn over the past couple weeks. Of all the SEO methods I have been trying to learn and implement, link building is by far the most effective. I was able to get www.tire-depot.us indexed in Google within 48 hours because of some simple, but strategic link building. For example, I have been using my stealth forum linking method, but in a more strategic method than I had been in the past. Instead of just posting links on any forum I could find, I have targeted my link building to high PageRank forums which allow both links and images in your replies. The best example I can give is the forum at www.nbc.com, which is a PageRank 7 site, and does not use “nofollow” tags.

That last part is extremely important. If you are trying to get backlinks, make sure the site you are posting in does not use nofollow tags. The easiest way to determine whether or not they use nofollow, is to simply look at the HTML source code and search for other, existing outgoing links. Check to see that the anchor tags are nofollow free, and you should be all set to start posting.

As I said, I was posting links over at the members forum on www.nbc.com, which in turn has sub forums for each of their shows. I happen to be the biggest “Scrubs” fan on the face of the earth (I have all 6 seasons on DVD), so I fit right in under the Scrubs sub forum. I would post something relevant to the thread, but include the following code.


[URL=http://www.tire-depot.us]
[IMG]http://www.digmyhonda.com/store/images/blank.gif[/IMG]
[/URL]

blank.gif is a simple, transparent 1×1 pixel gif, which is just about impossible to see. This is the exact method I used to get the site indexed so quickly.

Google Adsense

Although my BANS store was the biggest earner, I am also having a record breaking month with Google AdSense. I have already matched my December AdSense earnings, and it seems like I am doing better with it every day. The thing that has really attributed to this is a steady increase in organic google traffic to www.digmyhonda.com and www.hondoogle.com. It seems that the longer these sites are online, the more traffic I get. I have also tried to do a little bit of link building for them as well, which has probably been the cause of the increased traffic.

The moral of the story is that if you havn’t purchased Build a Niche Store yet, you really need to do it today. The longer you wait, the less money you will make. Focus on SEO and link building, and you will be on your way! In fact, I’m challenging all of you to surpass my earnings! (If your already a successful affiliate marketer, you don’t count!)

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.

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%!

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!

Today marks the start of my ‘post-for-30-days-straight’ challenge. Alan from www.AffiliateConfession.com (great blog by the way, i would highly recommend subscribing to his RSS feed) has issued a challenge to his fellow bloggers to make at least one interesting post every day for 30 days. Now that my final exams are over (as of 10:00am this morning!!!) I will have a ton more free time to focus on affiliate marketing. The fun really starts now.

Earnings update

I know its been a while since I posted anything about my earnings, but really there hasn’t been a whole lot to say about it. At one point last week I finally hit a positive net profit, but that was quickly turned around when conversions on my campaign shot through the floor (almost overnight!).

As you can see, I was doing ‘OK’ until December 16th, and sales just completely stopped. My first thought is that this is due to the fact that the online “get it before Christmas” shipping deadline hit hard and people just stopped buying stuff online for the Holidays. These earnings that you see are 100% from my “Christmas Dog Outfit” campaign, but I have other earnings from Adsense and some other small affiliate offers.

I am now getting about an average of $0.04 per click and peaked at a 4.2% CTR!! (i wish I would have got a screen shot of that) and have been spending an average of about $3.50 per day on this campaign. You really can’t beat $0.04 clicks, especially with the Ebay affiliate program because their cookie lasts 7 days, and there is something for everyone on Ebay.

Out with the old

So how far in the hole am I? About $5.00, which if you ask me, could be a lot worse. This campaign was a tremendous learning experience. I learned the ropes of adwords, I learned how the Ebay affiliate program can get you commission for items completely outside of your market, and I learned how Capitalizing a single letter in your ad copy can increase your CTR by 200% or more. I regretfully never got a chance to make a landing page for this campaign, so everything you see here was 100% on Google’s content network. My next campaign will definitely have a landing page! In fact, I plan on making two parallel campaigns with one optimized for search and the other optimized for content. I have learned a few little tricks in that area over the past couple weeks that I can’t wait to try out.  I’m going to let this campaign run  up through  Christmas day (like I said, you cant beat $0.04  clicks, no matter how you are getting them. It’s the cookie that counts) , but after that I will be starting a new (hopefully more successful)  journey into PPC marketing.

In with the new

With the closing of the Christmas season approaching its time to focus on bigger and better things for the future. I’m really having a good time tinkering with BANS, and I just read a really inspirational post on the BANS member forum about people making upwards of $10,000 per month with only 5 BANS sites, thats pretty impressive!

In between school work I was able to finish up my network of Honda related BANS sites so its time start planning my marketing campaign for the next few months. Check out the finished product. I think I’m going to try and build off my already decent search engine rankings for www.DigMyHonda.com and get some incoming links to the store by means of Honda message boards. Once I start getting some organic search engine traffic, then I will start with my PPC campaigns. I think this market is really going to be a challenge because Honda drivers are pretty stingy when it comes to buying things online. We will see what the future holds!

Small personal milestone

Aside from all this affiliate marketing stuff, I’d like to point out something else that is really important to me. There are now 10 RSS subscribers to this blog, which isn’t a whole lot in relation to other blogs, but it gives me more incentive to make posts in higher quality and quantity. So thanks for reading guys, and keep an eye out for the next 30 days as I try to meet Alan’s challenge.

I know I said my next post would be geared toward my BANS store, but to be honest I have finals at school coming up, so you can imagine how little free time I have to blog. I promise I will get a BANS post up by the end of the week. Anyway, on to the great news!

A great day for commission

What a fantastic day I am having commission wise! If you read my last post, you know I made my first $1.38 in affiliate PPC commission. Even though it was a small amount of money, and I have still spent more than I have made, it really made me feel a lot better about my place in the affiliate world. It gave me a much needed boost in ambition to keep going and not give up. Today was an even better day than yesterday, just take a look at the results! (click to enlarge)

Which yeilds my total career affiliate marketing Net earnings:

You can imagine how thrilled I was when I logged into commission junction this morning and saw that! It was a pretty cool feeling.

Checking what Items were sold

Once my little victory dance was over I decided to see exactly what was purchased. I hadn’t had a chance to check the details of yesterdays transaction, and now that I had two more sales I was even more curious.

Finding the actual item number for which Ebay item brought you the commission is a little tricky to do through commission junction. I had to do a little Google searching to figure it out, but for anyone interested in how to do this, Iv outlined the steps below.

1. Login to www.cj.com

2. Click on “Run Reports”

3. Go down to where it says “Pending Commissions” and click on your balance.

4. Again click on your balance, this time for the date you want to investigate

5. Finally, find the dropdown menu in the bottom right corner where it says “download” and select “CSV”(comma seperated values) and then click “Submit”

You will now be prompted to save a text file to your computer. You can either save it, or open it directly in something like notepad. This file contains more report data than is displayed on the cj.com report page, and contains the actual ebay item ID for each of the items in the list. There is a lot of information in the report, but look for the values that are seperated by semicolons rather than commas. It will look something like this:

100599908;290188050249;28111;20071208;20071209;1;59.99;000US;10332283420

You are interested in the 2nd field (highlighted in bold above). This is the Ebay item or transaction ID, and you can copy and paste that number into the www.ebay.com search box. This will tell you exactly which item was purchased.

Unexpected Results

All of this is fantastic, but there is something more here than meets the eye. If you have been following this blog, or read any of my previous posts, you know my current PPC campaign is for “Christmas Dog Outfits“. So you might be wondering how I made $17.00 by selling $12.00 dog apparel. Well, I didn’t sell any dog outfits at all. In fact, I didn’t sell anything even remotely related to dog outfits. If you are interested, check out what I actually sold:

$1.38 Commission

$2.43 Commission

$15.21 Commission

Woah! Not even close to anything I was expecting! So how did this happen? How did I get commission for these things, which have nothing to do with dogs? Well, the answer is something that you dont realize at first about the Ebay affiliate program. The way the program works is that whenever someone visits ebay through one of your affiliate links, a cookie is placed on that persons computer. Even if they don’t purchase the item they clicked on, Ebay still tracks that user for 7 days and anything they buy within that week, you get the commission for! The great thing about Ebay is that they almost literally have everything anyone could ever want, so there is a much better chance for you to score a commission. This makes me even more anxious to get my BANS stores up and running sooner than later!

Please keep in mind I realize that this was kind of a “fluke”, and that I wont be getting commission on $800 exercise machines every day, but its that much more money I have to reinvest in more PPC!

But wait, that’s not all!

As an added bonus to this fantastic day, I also generated an extra $7.00 in affiliate commission through another means. I currently run a chain of Honda related web sites which I have started to run affiliate offers on. www.digmyhonda.com is one of them, and I put up an affiliate link to buy HID (High intensity lighting) plug and play kits. Today I finally got a sale on one, and made $7.00! The bad thing about this is that the company that sells these lights is not part of commission junction, so I will have to generate $93.00 more in order to collect. I think over time that will be achievable though, the HID lights are fairly popular in the “tuner” world.

Thats all for now, Finals are coming up next week, but ill try and update as much as possible. Bare with me until then!

Hopefully this post gives some inspiration to people contemplating whether or not to try PPC marketing. Just do it!

Recap of the campaign

If you have read my previous post about my first ever PPC campaign, you know that I went out on a limb and chose a completely random niche to promote (Christmas outfits for dogs) through commission junction and started up an AdWords campaign for it. The affiliate advertiser I chose was www.JakesDogHouse.com, and I wanted to promote their Christmas outfits for puppies.

I setup the campaign (as described in the post) and let it run for a day or two. The results that came back were interesting. I noticed that I was getting a decent click through rate (0.15 - 0.20%, remember this is on the content network only, no search)  for two of five ad copies, and the rest were doing very poor (0.01%). I also noticed that of all the clicks I had received, I had no indication of conversions. I have a feeling this was due to the fact that www.JakesDogHouse.com did not offer any affiliate links that linked directly to specific products, only their homepage.

I knew I was having a decent amount of success with the Ad Copy, so I wanted to try and improve my conversions by changing the affiliate company I was using. After doing a Google search for companies who offered Christmas outfits for dogs, I came up empty handed. None of the companies had affiliate programs! I then remembered I had an Ebay.com affiliate account from a while back, and that ebay has just about everything. It doesn’t hurt that they are one of the most trusted names in online shopping eiher. I did an Ebay search for “Christmas Dog Clothes”, which turned up a bunch of great results that I could point my AdWords ad too.

Results of the changes

The combination of pausing my other under performing ad copies and changing the affiliate link to ebay.com has yeilded the following results (click to enlarge):

My click through rate has shot up from 0.13% to 0.25%, almost double! Unfortunately the good news stops there. I still have no conversions as of yet, but thanks to an email from Ebay.com, there is still hope.

As you can see from the screenshot I have spent $10.32 on 107 clicks. My average cost per click (CPC) is around $0.10.

One thing I am a little worried about with using Ebay is that even though their commission payout is somewhere around 40%, I can’t imagine Ebay would make that much on products selling for less than $20. I’m expecting only a couple of cents  per conversion. So I don’t know how much longer this campaign will last, but we’ll see how it goes.

Upcoming Plans

My plan from here is to let the campaign run for another day or two and see how things go. If I still don’t have any conversions (or not enough conversions) I’m going to setup a  landing page for this niche and see how that works out. I think with a little more targeted persuasion i can convert some of these dog lovers to open their wallets!

Keywords

There was one thing I wanted to add to my original post about this campaign, and that was a keyword list. The point of this blog is to show everything, so check out the keywords for this adgroup here. (I apologize if the file looks funny in Windows notepad. I do not own a windows computer so all my text files have UNIX line breaks. To view the file, simply open it in Windows wordpad instead).

Tomorrow

Tomorrow I will be blogging about a new campaign I’m starting and have setup a landing page for. Be sure to check it out!