Shamwow! Watch this hilarious infomercial that aired last year in 2008. Hello? Do you know what year we are on? Basically if you try and analyze the cost of making this commercial it is going to be so cheap. All you need is rent some high definition (maybe not even) camcorder with a camera man and get your product with the examples such as a carpet and waterbowl. Go use someone’s kitchen and make it look so generic just for the commercials. Then have some noob who does video editing to do it. Bam! I’m telling you that they probably spent less than $1,000. Hell! I can even do that for low cost. The only expensive thing is actually getting the ad on air. Now that one is going to burn a hole.
Its been a while since I actually did some hardcore PPCing. Life just doesn’t get any easier. I earned this “revenue” last summer in one month. Not a bad start right? This is just a screenshot evidence of how people make money online through affiliate marketing. First I ran the ringtones campaign which was very saturated and about 70%-80% of that just came from ringtones alone. The other ones are just random niches that I will not post due to the future. I mean even if a campaign is dead, it can still be brought to life. Notice that I said REVENUE and not Net Income. I really didn’t EARN that as 100% revenue. If you can make that with 100% revenue I give you my respects. That would mean that your web site would be SEO’d. However this is just PAID TRAFFIC and Paid traffic is expensive. Can someone guess what my revenue is? Well lets just put it this way. It was under $1,000 since I had a bunch of keywords that would not convert. For now my plan is to PPC but not like how it was with ringtones since ringtones was always going up and down and it was a very high maintenance campaign. Even though, some affiliate networks such as NBA is promoting ringtones with a payout of $20, I don’t think you can make ends meet.
As an affiliate marketer you need to learn this skill. There is no way you can go far without learning how to make a landing page. Sure people can buy landing pages and premade web sites. A nice way to cheat your way up to professional web design but after a while you start to get problems along the way. Maybe something happened and an image won’t load. Maybe the whole .index won’t load at all. Or maybe you want a new color or theme. You can either buy a landing page for another $20-$100. (jeez..) Seriously people do pay that much for a landing page and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone paid for $150+ for one. Show me the page you want and I can make it without breaking a sweat. I’m still noob at web design but I can probably get the same conversion rate with a $50+ landing page
Just like everything in life, we make bad choices while we think it is better. Earlier today I had a collection of about 2,000+ keywords that I have been waiting to test out. So I was being aggressive because if I wanted to meet my goal this week I have no choice to to let it go. New landing page, new links, new beginnings was what I was thinking. As the day goes by I’m like getting confused. I set out 2,000+ keywords and I was actually thinking, “well if i let about 2,000 keywords go I should have a minimum of 3-5 leads today. My bids were just average and I was going to bid higher tomorrow when QUALITY SCORE kicks in. Remember that if I’m bidding at .50 and I have a higher quality score then you, I’m paying for clicks CHEAPER. So it was average because I’m on a budget. Just about 12 hours pass and I spent a lot of money on clicks already and I was thinking..what!? No leads. I was aware of the # of impressions and which keywords were being clicked. Hmm.. still no leads. Now I see it!! Quickly! Pause all campaigns! . I repeat Pause all campaigns!!
Wow its like 7am right now and I’m hard at work already. I feel that in the morning my productivity rate is at its peak performance. No one is awake and everyone is still sleepy and no one to talk to. The best time of day to manage everything. The hardest part of finding the right keyword is well. . finding the right keyword. If I knew all the answers right now, I would be a super affiliate. But for now I’m not. There are so many keyword tools out there and I have not tried them yet. So far for my niche I am focusing on the long tail keyword.
A long tailed keyword is a chain of keywords that has about 3-5 keywords. For example, if you were promoting acne, you would use :
- How to treat acne
- Best acne medicine for teenagers
- remove blackheads with best medication
- Best medicine to treat blackhead
- free proactive trial
Those are just a few examples. So why wouldn’t you just use “treat acne”, or “acne medicine”. This has to do with the type of customers you are looking for. In PPC you don’t want to waste your money on people who are just researching acne. The customer has to be someone who has a potential of buying the product.
In reallife situations, lets say we go into a car dealership. So I walk in and you walk in with me. I talk to the sales rep and ask him I want that White BMW Z4 in the corner. So simple enough because I know what I want and he has a high potential to make a sale. After I buy my car you talk to the sales rep and ask him “I need a car”. In order for him to help you as much as possible hes going to ask, what kind of car? what color? you want a sports car? do you want 4 doors?. ETC. So now hes refining your search and you have a small potential of giving him a sale because you are not targeting what you want. Maybe you just came there to test drive every single car but don’t buy anything.
In the beginning I had a hard time figuring out what stuff meant. It seems that once people start making money and blog like me, they neglect to know the vocabulary. Everybody just assumes that everyone who is reading their blog knows what CTR means. Well I’m sorry but not everyone knows the meaning. Don’t feel like such a newbie because we all started out like that. Sometimes I read a blog and I still need to google what the term they are using is. This post might be one of my “Useless Posts” but I made it specially for newbies. Well here we go. And if you still don’t understand, feel free to drop a comment or send me an email and I will further explain it. Its all self-explanatory but everyone learns in different ways. Maybe you learn by definition and somebody else learns by demonstration. Either way I hope this post helps at least one person.
Advertiser - The person who is trying to make a few bucks by driving traffic through a web site through promotion. You are promoting an offer and you will get $$ if a customer buys it.
Advertisement – This is seen all around you. It is an attractive picture/video that helps lures the customer so they will buy the product.
Affiliate – This is YOU. Someone who is the middle man. You help get the merchant some customers and you will get a certain amount of commission depending on the product/ offer.
Affiliate Link - This is the link that is specially made for you so if a customer buys the product you will get credit from their sale or lead. There are ways to cloak your affiliate link from the customer and from the publisher so only you know the information.
Affiliate Manger - Once you sign up with a network, you will be assigned an affiliate manager. Somebody who will give you advice and tips on which offers to run. Word of caution, they can even steal all your traffic and commission if they know your keywords and referrer links. Don’t worry there are ways to hide the referrer links.
Affiliate Fraud - The amount of revenue that was obtained illegally under the TOS of the affiliate program.
Affiliate Tracking - These track your keywords so you know which keyword is converting to make you money. There are many keyword tracking software. Some are free and some cost money. I would recommend
Lets see too bad I didn’t have this blog up since I was too busy getting up my campaign and niches. I was told by a friend to start it on ASAP so I had some sparetime and why the hell not right? So I done it. First of all, I got some accounts from affiliate programs. I got approved in a few days. I already had a web site up and I had a host. I had money to burn on this campaign. Now I needed a domain for my niche. I got everything all set up. First I created a landing page. I will NOT lie. It took me about 5-6 hours to make one. I did not have sufficient knowledge to make a landing page. I researched how to do it and by the end of the day I had made my first landing page. Now I linked everything with my affiliate links and i did NOT use tracking. But wait.. shouldn’t I use tracking first?
Bum Marketing is something that I’m not much of a pro because I barely use it for now. However, just like everything on the internet advertisement everyone has to learn it. Bum Marketing is a pretty simple concept. It mainly focuses on SEO traffic. This is very time consuming but in the end your mark on the internet is there forever. When you don’t have sufficient cash to fund your clicks on yahoo or google, this is the way to go. However this approach is not INSTANT unlike PPC when in 24 hours you make money.