Some of you might be familiar with my BANS from scratch series which I shamefully never finished. The case study in that series is a site called Project Cars For Sale.

Well, Project Cars for Sale has been running for a little bit over a month, and has brought in a total of around $150.00, which isn’t bad at all considering the time I’ve put into it. This site doesn’t make as many consistent sales as my Honda Parts Store, but the commissions are WAY higher. I’ve had 2 $50 commission sales from this site (cars sold). The rest of the money has come from some “off niche” (unrelated items people have bought).

The real reason for this post is to show that with Google’s recent PageRank update, project-cars-for-sale.com now has a PR of 2. The great thing is, I did VERY little link building with this site. I put a link in my signature on ONE forum, and got a PR2. imagine if you put a little actual work into this?

On an unrelated note, Poll Factory has sold its 25th copy since its launch on CashTactics this past Friday. Thats $1400 or so in a 4-5 days. Looks like Mr. Graph needs an update! (by the way, i haven’t updated that since February. Its not that I “stopped” making money).

I have recently hinted in some of my comment replies towards the fact that I have been hitting the PPC game pretty hard this month. Aside from the fact that I have spent a good amount of money, I have learned so much about PPC its not even funny! During my PPC experiments I have been using wordpress blogs as landing pages, and have had some pretty good success (in my worst case I broke even). There are a couple of compelling reasons to use wordpress for a PPC landing page, they include, but are not limited to:

• Fast, easy to setup
• Google QS bot loves them as much as the Googlebot web spider
• You can write FAKE comments/testimonials

This is great and all, but there is one thing you will find is very difficult to do using this method: Tracking keywords.

When you create your own static/HTML/PHP landing pages, you can include any kind of server side code in them you want. This is how many people track which keywords are converting and not converting. However, with wordpress, the software does not let you enter in PHP code directly into the posts, so its very difficult to track keywords using the /?keyword=example method. So whats an affiliate to do?

To solve this problem I started searching for a plugin that was made to specifically track keywords, and while I did find one, it just wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Eventually I decided to just search for a plugin that would let me write PHP code directly into my wordpress blog entries, and I found just that with the PHP-EXEC for Wordpress. This plugin lets you enter working PHP code, right in your posts.

What do I do with it?

I’m going to go ahead and make the assumption that you have never written a line of PHP in your life, so hopefully you can follow this if you ever decided to use Wordpress as a landing page anytime in the future.

• Install and activate the plugin. There is documentation on the plugin’s page to help you through this, its pretty simple.
• Turn off the visual wordpress editor. To do this:
  • In the Wordpress admin panel, click “Users”
  • Select the user you use to write blog posts
  • In the upper left corner, untick “Use Visual Editor When writing”

Write a New Post, and insert the following code:

<?

$keyword = $_GET[’keyword’];
if($keyword == “”){
$keyword = “none”;
}

?>
Now you can write your affiliate URLs like this:


http://www.myoffer.com/blah/blah/?subid=<? echo $keyword; ?>


Thats it! Now you can use your affiliate networks subid tracking to figure out exactly which keywords are converting, and get rid of the ons that aren’t. If you are confused as to what all of this means, please see an example of how I did this HERE. Take note of what the URL says when you hover over a link!

Bonus!

As a sweet little bonus, you can also use

echo $some_text;

anywhere in the post, which means your can insert dynamic content based on the keyword the user entered, right inside of a blog post. Score.

Anyone who has read my blog in the past, might notice that I have completely changed the theme I was using. I got a few complaints about it being somewhat hard to read, and I agree that it could have been better. So I found a new wordpress theme that I liked and made a couple of personal customizations to it.

As you can see on the right hand side (thats over there —>), I have replaced my experiment progress meter with  a line graph showing my Profit, Expenses and Net Profit. So far im up to over $200 in net profit, which is about 20% of my target $1000!!

How can you cash in?

Along with the new template, I have added six new 125×125 advertising spots (there were none previously). Since I dont get nearly enough traffic here yet to actually charge people for ad space, im going to give them away for FREE until further notice. All you have to do to get one is to make a post on your blog about the $1000 Afilliate experiment and leave a comment under this post letting me know you did so. The first FOUR people to do so (Two of them are taken already), will get at least a months stay in my ad spots. If you are unfamiliar about what the experiment is all about, read up on it here.

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!

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.

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?

Reporting delays

If you have read my previous post about my first PPC campaign, you will notice that I decided to switch affiliates on one of my ad copies to test a theory I had. I ended up switching my affiliate link from www.jakesdoghouse.com to www.ebay.com because jake’s dog house would not let me link to specific products and i felt this was driving conversions away. After a disappointing day of almost 150 clicks on the ebay ad (more on this on my official update of the campaign)  and zero conversions I have gotten a bit discouraged. There might be a glimmering light of hope however, because I just received an email from the Ebay affiliate program

Dear Eric:

The ebay.com Affiliate Team wants to notify you that we are experiencing an ongoing reporting delay of up to 48 hours, affecting both Transaction Reports and Performance Reports.  The effect of this delay may be seen in Transaction Reports in the lag time between Posting Date and Event Data of daily transactions.  In Performance Reports, the delay may be seen in incomplete data for “Today” and “Yesterday”.

A small subset of our publisher base may also be affected by a separate reporting issue, which results in a delay in the calculation of the final value fee of a number of Winning Bids/BINs.  As a result, you may temporarily notice reduced revenue commission amounts for successful transactions that posted within the first few days of the month, and again at mid-month.  Note that this issue DOES NOT affect ACRU commissions or counts.

These issues are surfacing as a result of the surge in traffic tied to the holiday shopping season.  While reporting may be distorted during these specified time periods, please rest assured that tracking and recording of transactions remains fully functional, and publishers will be compensated correctly for all commissions at month end.  These reporting issues are expected to continue through the holiday season and possibly into early 2008, but we are working diligently towards a fix.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you in the meantime.

Thank you for your understanding and continued support of the program.

Sincerely,

The ebay.com Affiliate Team
ebayaffiliates@cj.com

So i wonder if there have been conversions made that just havn’t been reported yet?! Ill keep some faith, but I wont hold my breath. Either way i have only spend about $8.50 on the campaign, so no real harm done.

By the way, I’ll have a big update on the “dog christmas clothes” campaign later tonight, and an update of my next campaign ideas tomorrow! I will be including links to my landing page, so be sure to check back!

1kX