Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

If you’re an advertiser then it’s a pretty good time to be involved with Pay-Per-Click advertising. My own personal experience is that I’ve seen costs coming down since the beginning of the new year and that’s always a good thing. On the other hand if you’re a publisher then times are not as good. This is what I want to talk about today, I know I’m suffering but I wonder just how much everybody else is suffering as well?

Back in January I decided that I’d start 2008 with a bang by throwing a bit of money at the world of affiliate marking using Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). I rapidly managed to go through nearly $500 in clicks with very little in the way of a return. In my daughters words “awesome”, it was not.

Then in February against my better judgement I decided that I’d have another go but with one major difference. Initially I’d started this using the pre-packed landing pages of ad networks like NeverBlueAds. I wasn’t really doing any of my own pre-selling, I was actually being very lazy. In my defence I’ve read plenty of “gurus” spout of about how easy it was to turn PPC traffic into affiliate sales without any real effort so it was at least proof that however you decide to try and make money online you will need to put in some work! Anyway, I digress, this time around I decided to concentrate on only 1 affiliate deal for 1 product and to create my own landing page. In fact I used a blog post from this here blog to promote the deal I was pushing and channelled the PPC traffic to it. I was much more focused on having this work.

So after 1 month how did I do? Well I didn’t make the mega bucks I was looking for but I did make a nice bit of profit. My Adwords spend (I stuck to only using Adwords for this) came to rather tame $98. From that traffic I made a nice but not enormous $318. My maths isn’t great but I reckon that’s about $220 in profit. When I first started it for a few days I was making just a little bit more than what I was spending but then I got a bit of luck which allowed me to get a very good ROI.

It’s That John Chow Man Again
The offer I was promoting was for those Peel Away Ads that you use in the corner of your website. I was actually dropping of the PPC traffic on my Peel Away page. I was showing people how to get those ads for free (from which I was still paid a commission, Trial Pay is awesome) and I also included a link to a ClickBank seller of the script. Where I got lucky with this was that John Chow decided to start using that type of ad and made a point of writing about it. Of course where John Chow goes many thousands follow and the number of searches for free Peel Away Ads and the like increased significantly. This brought many more people to that page via PPC, decreased the bid amounts I needed and resulted in better conversions. What was surprising to me was that just as many people were prepared to pay for the Peel Away Ads script as get it free?! Either way the end result was the same and a nice profit for me. I’m sure if John Chow wouldn’t have starting using Peel Away Ads then I still would have made a profit, just not as much. I got lucky!

What this has done is renew my faith in this type of marketing, I’ve just got to try and find another offer that’s worth promoting now.

Ever since I can remember the lowest bid you could make on a single keyword with Yahoo Search Marketing was $0.10. Whilst the price you paid may have been lower than this, $0.10 was the low bid amount.

Yahoo Search Marketing have just changed this though so that there is no limit on how low you can bid for a particular keyword. When I was putting some money into affiliate marketing via PPC one of the things that put me off using YSM long term was the fact that I had to bid this high amount for keywords that sometimes had almost no competition. I was able to get lower bids and higher traffic amounts using Adwords. Hopefully this change by Yahoo will resolve that situation, I’ll certainly go back and have another look at them.

As part of the e-mail that announced this change, YSM also pointed out that having a higher “ad quality” would result in you being able to bid lower amounts. All of a sudden this sounds very much like Adwords.

How To Improve You YSM Ad Score
1. Use a landing page that has been specifically written for the keywords you are targeting
2. Include your keywords in both your ad title and content
3. Write ads that are appealing to visitors, a higher CTR will help your quality
4. Keep your ads up to date, change them regularly

If you’re an existing Yahoo Search Marketing user now might be a good time to go back over your campaigns to make sure you’re getting maximum value for money from your bids.

As part of my big experiment on PPC/Affiliate marketing I also setup an advertising account with FaceBook. I purposely didn’t write about it in my review because as an advertising network it was so different to the others I’d tried.

Forget Keywords, Think Demographics
The big difference between FaceBook and Adwords, YSM etc is that instead of targeting keywords and phrases you’re targeting a demographic. Select a location, sex, age range, education status, political views and even there relationship status and your ad will only be shown in front of the group of people you select. I’m sure you don’t need my help to point out what sort of potential this has for dating adverts and things like that, it’s also no coincidence that so many of the adverts on FaceBook are dating or education related.

Why Google Have It Right And FaceBook Have It Wrong
I started of only bidding $0.10 for my FaceBook ad, this is where it is cool though, even with such a small amount (I ignored the $0.30-$0.40 recommendation) I was getting 5,000 impressions plus a day. Not bad considering I was targeting a quite small amount of people as well. The problem was though that my CTR was almost non existent. This is where Google have things right and FaceBook don’t. When somebody enters a search into Google thy have an intent, they are actively looking for something. When you sign into your FaceBook page, you’re not actively doing anything. You can have all the ads in the world but if the person isn’t looking for that product then your CTR is going to be very low. This is a large part of the reason why search related traffic always converts so well compared to direct type in or referrals. FaceBook ended up costing me very little (it’s pay-per-click after all) but also returned very little as well.

Where Would I Use FaceBook Advertising
Where I think this has huge potential is for gaining exposure, not so much selling but for getting a name out there. FaceBook receives huge amounts of traffic (that tend not to like clicking on ads). By creating a carefully crafted advert it’s possible to get almost free advertising for a website or product of your choice. You might not directly get the clicks but it’s putting a name or website in front of a lot of people.

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.

…is turning into a massive mistake. It’s been a bad day all around so no real time to post about how bad things are in detail, will do a propper update tomorrow. In the meantime here’s a stupid monkey with more balls than brains (a little similar to how I decided to tackle paid click affiliate marketing)

With a new year comes new impetus for most of us, this means getting of our back-sides and reviewing what we’ve done whilst making plans to help us do better. During my review of last year I realised that from about September onwards I’d started to stand still and was actually investing very little back into my online plans. Sure the time was there but in terms of pumping some money back in I just wasn’t doing it, the problem with standing still is that in reality and relative to inflation you’re not still but going backwards. Time for a change, so this year in order to try and boost my earnings to the next level I’m starting with a shot at PPC affiliate marketing. It’s very important for me to never lose site of my overall goal here, financial freedom. I’m not fussed about being a millionaire or any other sort of status tag, just to earn enough online to be financially free.

What I’m trying to do here is promote affiliate deals (the sort of offers you find on Commission Junction, Never Blue Ads and ClickBank) by paying for clicks through the various PPC networks. To get things of to a good start and with the idea that I don’t mind losing a bit of money I’ve jumped straight in with Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsofts AdCenter and FaceBook. Whilst I’ve run these types of campaigns for clients before I’ve never used this method at all in order to create an income for myself so it’s all new to me.

Having some amount of common sense I did decide to read up quite heavily before I started, a couple of the blogs I regularly read are very into this type of marketing. MSDanielle, GoogleLady and Zac Johnson are all big experts on this type of affiliate marketing so who better to learn from? If you’re also considering giving this a go then I suggest you go and read through their archives before spending any money. Even so I’m well aware that I’m bound to lose until I get my feet properly wet.

So how does this all differ from what I’ve done in the past, I’ve made money from affiliate deals before? Up until now I’ve made all my money promoting affiliate deals using free traffic. In order to do this I create a website, pour out new content and then when an affiliate deal matches I use that website to promote it. All the traffic is coming from the search engines natural results so any sales I make are all profit. The problem with doing things this way is attracting enough people to make large (or even decent) amounts of money, at best natural search traffic is only going to be partially targeted so conversion rates are traditionally quite low. PPC is different, you can absolutely target your affiliate offer to the exact phrases that you think people will be searching for, you can also use GEO targeting to make sure you’re only getting your offer in front of eligible eye balls. The downside is that you have to pay for this traffic, because of this it’s all about maths and percentages.

Say for example I decide to bid $0.10 on a keyword and that $0.10 is how much each click costs me (in reality your bid price and what you pay will most likely be different), in 1 month that keyword attracts 10,000 clicks on Adwords. My Adwords spend for that month is $1000. I’m promoting an affiliate deal that pays me $25 for each new member I get, in order to cover my costs I need to sell 40 memberships. Lets say my campaign receives an average conversion rate of 1%, so out of the 10,000 people that clicked on my advert 100 will convert, this gives me a total income for the month of $2500, or put another way $1500 profit. Nice, if only it was that simple. What happens if my bid of 0.10 isn’t actually high enough anymore, other marketers have discovered my niche and now I’ve got competition. In order to get the same ad position I’m now bidding $0.30, my monthly spend on Adwords has now gone up to $3000 and I’ve lost money ($500). Go back to my original 0.10 bid scenario, what happens if the conversion rate changes? The market is now full of my offer and so conversion rates have dropped, my conversion rate for that keyword has gone from 1% to 0.65%, instead of 100 new memberships a month I’m now getting only 65 or $1625 of income ($625 profit). As long as it doesn’t drop below 0.40% then I’m still covering costs but is it really worth all the hours for $625?

The way I see it

if (Income – Expense >= Time And Effort) then I’m onto a winner.

The above is a very simplified example of just what PPC affiliate marketing is all about involving only 1 keyword, in the real world for each product you would ideally have several campaigns with each campaign containing multiple keywords. It’s quite a robotic way of making money online and requires a lot of discipline and some amount of money to get started but for those masters of it the rewards can be huge. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a month can be made by those with the right approach, for me my goal is to be able to make $3000 a month profit using this method by the end of June. As it stands I’m 5 days in and about $70 down for the month, looks like I need to do some more reading!

Well I said this industry never stands still, looks like 2008 has brought some bad news already.

WidgetBucks are changing some of their terms very soon, if you haven’t already got an account with them then January the 15th is going to be your last chance to sign-up and get the $25 bonus they give to each new account. They are also using that date to alter their affiliate program, instead of the 10% for 12 months they currently offer they will be decreasing that to 5% for 12 months. When taken together these changes seem to indicate that WidgetBucks are content with the number of publishers they have and are in no hurry to recruit new webmasters, the incentive for webmasters to recruit new WidgetBucks users is now almost entirely gone.

The only good news is that I received my second payment from WidgetBucks yesterday although in all honesty this will be the last of my big earnings with them. The payment yesterday covered November and it was halfway through that month that they changed the rules and stopped paying out for non North American clicks. At the point my earnings took a hit although the change to pay-per-impression for some countries traffic has made a slight difference. WidgetBucks have been good to me but they seem intent on making life as difficult as possible at the moment, I’ll stick it out for now but I think that at the next “change for the worse” I’ll bail and try something new.