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How often do you check your stats? If you’re anything like me then the answer is probably more often than you should! But it gets worse, for anybody making money online the 1 stat that interests us more than any other is “how much money have I made today”. We’re not even really checking anything meaningful, all we want to know is how much money have we made!
You can call me a chicken if you like but I’ve ended my experiment into affiliate marketing via PPC early this month. I initially set aside $500 in a slush fund to “give it a go” and see what happened but at around the $420 down mark I’ve decided to call it a day. I’ll admit that there are a few things I’ve learnt from it so it hasn’t been an all bad experience, in fact I’ve treated it very much as a gamble, don’t bet with more than you can afford to lose and you can’t get too upset!
First of all I’ve learnt that for the same ad spend Yahoo Search Marketing can deliver more clicks for your buck than Adwords. I was also using the Microsoft equivalent but in the end the traffic amounts were so low that I gave up early. I started of doing what I though was the right thing with Adwords, high bids, reducing as the quality score (and CTR) increased and I did get my bid amount down from $0.75 to $0.12 for the same position. The trouble was that for $0.07 I was getting a much larger number of clicks with YSM. The real problem I faced with this was going from clicks to conversions, obviously clicks cost money and conversions generate money. I figured before I started that because people were searching for something specific, dropping on a page with what they were searching for would have a higher conversion rate than just creating a link on a page and relying on organic traffic. It didn’t really, conversion rates from my PPC campaigns and “normal” website traffic was about the same. The end result was that as each conversion from one of my sites was profit, a conversion from the PPC sources was just a dent in my loses.
The next lesson was that no matter how much people tell me, I can’t get any joy out of squeeze pages. Rather than creating my own landing pages I was happy to dump the PPC traffic at a pre-existing squeeze page for each product. Personally I hate those bold on yellow excuses for web pages but I went with it anyway. In the past when I’ve used PPC marketing for clients I normally put them on a relevant page within the context of a professional looking website. Conversion rates have always been high using this approach. I just can’t get any decent conversion rates out of squeeze pages. This was where my whole plan fell apart, if you can’t get enough of your traffic to convert then no matter how low a price you are bidding you’re still going to lose money.
The final lesson I could take from this was the time involved. I so desperately wanted it to work that I was micro-managing everything. It ended up taking up so much more of my time than I’d initially planned to spend on it. This was as much a reason for calling it a day early as the money side of things.
So I guess the question is what next? Being a sucker for punishment I’m going to start over fresh next month. Same slush fund, but this time I’ll be creating my own landing pages and doing my best not to nit pick too much. I’m convinced that there is money to be made with this, it’s just going to require a little more experimentation and patience.
I’ve just read some news that really pisses me off. Google are changing the rules (how often have you heard me say that recently?) for Adsense referrals. This means for existing Adsense publishers in North America, Latin America and Japan they will go from earning:-
* If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $5 within 180 days you get a payment of $5.
* If you refer someone to AdSense who makes $100 within 180 days you get $250
* If you refer 25 people who make $100 within a 180 day period you get a bonus payment of $2000
to the old way which gives you $100 for each person you refer who makes $100 in Adsense earnings in 180 days. If your referral doesn’t make that money they you get sweet F.A. I just can’t understand this decision, are Google short of money or something?
It gets worse though (much worse), for publishers outside of those regions the Adsense referral program will now cease to exist. Yes it doesn’t matter where the people you refer live, this decision is based entirely on where you live. To date I have referred several hundred new Adsense publishers that make christ only knows how much money for Adsense and this is how they reward me? Nice. Not only will I lose any potential future earnings from Adsense referrals but it also means I have to go through hundreds of web pages removing any Adsense referral code, that is a couple of days work. I just can’t understand the thinking behind this decision, I’m small fry but other people like Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) have referred thousands of new Adsense accounts not to mention the huge exposure he’s always given them (all from his base in Australia). I feel even more gutted for him than myself, to have preached the message of Adsense with such conviction only to be betrayed must be more than a little painful .
This makes me question my whole relationship with Adsense and whether to carry on or not, I haven’t said anything about this but my Adsense earnings in the last month have started to crash. I’m getting the same number of impressions and the same number of clicks (CTR has always been consistent for me) but the amount I’m being paid per click is drastically down. I wonder if this is because of where I live too, if it’s not happening already then how long before Adsense start changing the percentage they give to publishers depending on where they live? This has got me worried, replacing my Adsense earnings is going to be a big job but I guess it’s time to start looking for alternatives.
Although it doesn’t appear to be advertised anywhere on the Kontera website they do actually run an affiliate program for publishers. I wish somebody would have told me about it earlier because I’ve been referring new publishers from here for several months now!
In order to join their affiliate program you’ll have to be an existing Kontera publisher and be able to meet the following 3 criteria
1 – Publisher must be in good standing with Kontera.
2 – Publisher has to run our Content links for at least 3 months.
3 – Publisher revenue of $100 or more each month.
I don’t think I’ve ever had any problems with Kontera, using their ads has been great for me and I certainly pass points 2 and 3 without any problems. Once you’ve been signed up the Kontera affiliate program pays out 10% of each referrals earnings for the first 12 months. That’s seems to be quite a standard affiliate deal these days and with the amount of money it is possible to make with Kontera I can’t imagine it taking too many sign-ups before you can earn a nice wedge with this.