The challenge begins

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.