Affiliate marketing first caught my eye back during the summer of 2005. Reading about driving traffic to websites for pennies on the dollar, I thought how hard can this be?? You know those ebooks that make it sound so easy … or maybe you don’t

My first campaign

Anyways, so I went over to clickbank to find a good product. (That was the only place I knew at the time, or so those ebooks told me). The first product I chose was Auto Lawn Sprinklers. Since it was the summer, I thought it was a good idea. (You can still promote this by the way, owner is a decent guy from what I remember).

After reading Perry Marshall’s adwords book, I gathered about 100 keywords, stuck them into some adgroups and turned it on. The impressions were coming but the CTR was abysmal, I think around 1%. I remember I thought I was a genius when I started placing question marks in my ad titles. This boosted my CTR to around 3-4% … I considered writing an ebook on that 1 trick alone but said “nah I’ll wait till I get some sales under my belt”

Not much luck

I made a handful of sales, but it was a slow bleed. I didn’t know about tracking or managing bids so I just stopped the campaign, one of my top 5 affiliate mistakes - not tracking. Anyways the rest of 2005 and 2006 I dabbled off and on promoting random clickbank products. Nothing really successful, but didn’t lose too much either. I couldn’t devote much time to affiliate marketing during these 2 years because I was finishing grad school, living in China, and preparing for my wedding in the fall of 2006.

My first Profitable campaign

In late 2006, I was now married, graduated, and living back in the good ole’ USA. I held off finding a job for the sole purpose of trying to earn a living from home. Affiliate marketing was actually a side project of mine, I was really wanting to trade the markets for a living.

How I got my first profits was really an epiphany. I had moved away from clickbank and was promoting more retail type products. This was new for me, so instead of bidding on the obvious core keywords I was bidding on their typos and phonetic misspellings. These clicks were extremely cheap .07-.08 a click. You can check out my keyword typo tool under the toolbox tab.

Paydirt!

1 keyword in particular was getting a nice return. I remember logging into my account 1 day, seeing $320 in commissions having only spent about $15! How’s that for a nice ROI?! This opened my eyes and I have been now doing it full-time for over 1 year. BTW, I still have that 1 keyword running, it’s not as cheap anymore because competitors have moved in, but it is still profitable.

It wasn’t until I moved away from clickbank and started developing my own landing pages that I began to see a good return in my pay per click campaigns.

After this, I began to join more affiliate programs, and test more offers. I currently have around 15 campaigns running, and now it seems it’s only a matter of testing around until you find something that works. You will lose money though, as risk is part of the game. Take it slow in the beginning, if you’re just starting out, don’t try to upload 10k keywords and let it loose in one shot, you’ll most likely quit in frustration. Build your campaigns out over time …

I hope this encourages you guys, just wanted to share my little story with you

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For those of you who don’t know, just recently Google announced that Load Time would now be factored in to your landing page quality score. This is good for us who take action, as most people won’t bother doing anything. Check out what Google says about this:

* If graded Page loads slowly -> Quality Score = negatively affected.


* If graded No problems found -> Quality Score = not affected.


* If graded No problems found and marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region -> Quality score maybe positively affected.

See that? If your site loads above average, you may get a quality score boost! You can find this info on your keyword analysis page, the magnifying glass next to your keyword. Here’s a screenshot of one of my quality scores with load time included:

Not Just Quality Score

Having a speedy load time can also help your conversions. Yes, you may be blazing along the internet with your T4 connection, but not everyone is like you. When someone lands on your site and has to wait more than a few seconds to load, I can guarantee you will lose some visitors. Even I do this. If your site takes too long to load, bam I’m outta there. You can see how load time is evaluated here.

What causes slow load time?

Multiple redirects, multi-second meta refreshes, and large images/animation are the main culprits. Get rid of any redirects you may have pointing to your lander as well as those meta refreshes.

New Tool on PPCfool

AS for the large images you can check out my new tool. It’s under the tab Toolbox called the Load Time Analyzer. Just enter the URL and it analyzes your site for speed and tells you how big your images are.

Take those large images and shrink the size down. There are a handful of image shrinkers out there, I’ve been using this one. Let me know what you guys think …

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Well my prize from Market Leverage arrived. It was from a recent contest I won over at Jonathan Volk’s blog. I got second place which landed me an Ipod Touch

They were also kind enough to send me a sports bag, 1 pullover shirt, 1 golf shirt, and a 2GB USB pen.

The Networks

Hmmm, I guess I should go and check them out, as I’ve yet to sign up for them. There is definitely no shortage of networks, offers, and affiliate programs that any person wanting to jump into ppc marketing can join. Some of the other networks that I’ve signed up with:

• Copeac
• NeverBlueads
• AzoogleAds
• Revenue Loop
• Xy7
• ModernClick
• Flux Ads

There are also a handful of smaller private networks as well as individual affiliate programs that I’ve joined with. I don’t recommend signing up for any and every network you see. That will add to the mass information overload, as everyday you will get new programs emailed to you, and the affiliate managers hounding you to promote their offers.

Start slow and start small, join 2-3 and check out their offers and pick 1-2 you like and go with it.

Incentives

I just got an email recently from FluxAds offering a $10,000 bonus if you can meet their criteria for 100 days. You might want to check that out. Also Zac Johnson, posted Market Leverage’s incentive this month as well, their double and triple play payout bonus.

So the networks are there, the incentives there, what else do you need?
Have a great weekend guys!!!

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Yes, it happens, I’ve gotten a few emails in the past, and just got another recently so I wanted to let you guys know. I received an email from [googlealerts-noreply@google.com] asking to renew my account or it would be deactivated.

Never click on these links in the message or sign in to your account through an email. I’ve heard of some stories where people’s accounts got taken over and all their campaigns stolen and traffic redirected. Trust me, you do not want that to happen. Take a look at the email below:

Notice how they politely state “Please remember to input your Adwords username and password correctly NOT your email and password.” How kind of them. Take a look at the URL that you would be directed to:

Here is Google’s response to these attempts. They also have a Phishing Form you can fill out. Bottom line they state

Please remember that Google’s AdWords team will never send an unsolicited message asking for your password or other sensitive information by email or through a link.

Just wanted to give you guys a heads up…

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I love following the markets (another bloody day today), and if you have ever studied finance or the stock markets you are most likely familiar with the term A Random Walk. It is a theory that stock market prices evolve randomly and cannot be predicted. It was coined popular when Burton Malkiel a famous Princeton Professor wrote A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

Random Walk and Affiliate Marketing

So what does this have to do with affiliate marketing and conversions? While I don’t agree that the markets are 100% random, there is some truth in that. Day to day conversions can at many times display randomness, they go up and sometimes they go down. Granted you may have an overall 3% conversion rate, but how you get there over the course of a month maybe somewhat of a roller coaster. Don’t freak out from day-to-day conversion highs and lows.

The Summer Doldrums

Now that we are in the peak of the summer, you may notice that you’re conversions are taking a dip. Looking at my campaigns, some of them have slowed down a bit, while others have actually done a little better than average. It’s all part of the game, it is the summer, people are on vacation, the economy is slowing down, your offer is seasonal, etc… If you haven’t promoted your offer for over 1 year, you really don’t know the seasonality trends of your product. Like the market they fluctuate. At times sales come in bunches, 200 clicks and no sales, and then the next 100 clicks, BAM 4 sales.

A Simple Test

Ok, so I wanted to have some fun with this in excel. They have a RAND function that let’s you display random numbers at your choice. Assuming an average 3% conversion I took a sample of 30 ‘days’. Below you see the results:

Notice the 3 days circled in red, less than 1% conversion for 3 straight days. That would get anybody down … but the average for the whole month is still 3%. I know this is not real life, but it’s the principle that I’m trying to get across.

When I first started out, I would always be checking stats and when I had a bad day I knew something was wrong. Changing bids, tweaking ads, copy, etc… was really kind of pointless. Unless you are doing a valid split-test, you will be better off focusing on something more worth your time, like creating more and more campaigns.

Hope this encourages you guys