Up until today I was really happy with my affiliate manager at Azoogle, but the fact that it took him 3 days to tell me why the link stopped working is really unacceptable. I know, I know, I’m still a small fish. I brought in less than $1000 last month so why should he care about my problems, right? Regardless of size, I think he should have been more responsive.

So, lesson learned. Read and understand the terms of service fully before spending money on a campaign. I don’t think we’ll lose any money other than the money we paid for clicks for a few days, but other than that we’ll be in good shape.

What did we get out of this lesson?

1. Pay attention to the fine print. The campaign’s terms and conditions clearly told us not to use a domain name that contained their name. We ignored that and did it anyway. Our mistake. I don’t think it was worthy of an immediate ban but I guess that’s just how they work. No sweat. We won’t lose any sleep over this. There are plenty of other campaigns out there….it’s their loss, ultimately.
2. Check your campaign links every day. We could have saved a few click dollars if we had checked up on our links every day. It tooks us 4 days to realize that our link wasn’t working, and therefore we lost out on PPC dollars. This money, ironically, was our first attempt at scaling this campaign so we were bummed when we found out our link was dead. We didn’t lose all of it, so we’ll find another campaign for sure.
3. Stay on your feet. What happens when you get tossed a curveball? Do you let them throw you a strike or do you swing for the fences? Stay on your feet, keep your eyes open for new campaigns, and have a backup plan in case of emergency. Davey Z and I have talked things over and we’ll meet tonight to hammer out our new plan just in time for the weekend.
4. Learn to move on. Don’t let little setbacks like this keep you down. Sure, we were only running 2 campaigns. This one was our “big” one…it generated most of our income last month. Oh well. Big whoop. We’ll find something else and kick our strategies up a notch.

I learned a few lessons this past week about affiliate marketing. I hope you can learn from my mistakes so that you don’t face the same problems that I did. Remember to stay on your feet, pay attention to your campaigns, and most importantly, don’t ever give up!

a

It is now 5 days since my last update on the search engine marketing campaign that I’m running with my friend Davey Z, and I have another brief update. We’ve doubled our sales since then and have made over $220 after an initial investment of only $30. We found out yesterday that we made 4 more sales during last week, and we are anxiously anticipating the results of our weekend campaign.

Since Davey Z is a numbers guy, we decided to ramp up the campaign by raising our bids on our 4 main keywords. This moved us up quite a bit in the search results and therefore increased our click through rate significantly. Since we don’t yet have the results from the weekend, we have lowered our bids once again and are craving data to analyze and inspect. If things worked well this weekend, we will double our efforts and try to make even more money next weekend.

While running this SEM campaign has been a successful experiment, we are not yet done learning and still have quite a ways to go in understanding more about how the whole process works. In the meanwhile, I have learned a few things that I would like to share.

• SEM is Not Easy. Whlie Davey Z and I have been able to succeed with this campaign and we have learned a lot in these last 2 weeks, we still have a lot more to learn. Secondly, SEM is not something that you can “set and forget”. Sure, you can do that for 3 or 4 days at a time but in the long run you will not make any money if you think that this is the kind of thing you can do once and forget about. Although the “set it and forget it” attitude is working (little by little) with my eBay websites, the approach just won’t work for too long in SEM. SEM is very dynamic; competition changes, prices change, trends change, and consumers change from one minute to the next. You need to be on your toes if you want to be successful.
• SEM Requires Patience. In case you haven’t read about my frustrations with affiliate programs and their reporting delay, SEM requires patience. Although you’ll generate a lot of traffic rather quickly, it takes a few days (3-5) for you to see the results of your efforts. This can be a costly period or a period that wasn’t as profitable as could have been if you had real time data available. Also, you need to stick with SEM for it to work in the long run. If you fail, try again! Don’t give up. If you’re determined and have your facts straight, you’ll succeed.
• SEM is Not Rocket Science. As I mentioned above, SEM is not easy. However, it’s also not “rocket science”. I now believe that anyone can make some money from SEM. Even though I have not yet achieved my goals, I feel as though I am now armed with some valuable information that will go a long way to helping me reach them. No offense to the super affiliates. Although they are making much more money than me, they are not all that brilliant. Sure, they can run campaigns that have been working very well and they have fine tuned their SEM machine, but I think that anyone with the time and knowledge can make it happen.

In the following few weeks, I will be posting more about what I’ve learned about search engine marketing. I believe that it’s an area ripe for the picking and am doing my best to reach out there and grab some of the money hanging from the search engine trees. Although it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do, I believe that anyone can do it. Want to learn more? Sign up for my RSS feed and stay tuned!

a

Man, I’m excited. Davey Z and I found out last night that we made a cool $100 over the weekend! How cool is that? 4 sales, more than $100. A spend of less than $20.  After a long and arduous waiting period to see if our targeted strategy worked, we were rewarded by seeing 4 conversions.  Big deal, you say?  It is for us!  That was our proof of concept.  The concept worked, so now we’re in business!

A few days ago I talked about how frustrating it was to wait up to 4 days to receive notice of sales and conversions. While the frustration still holds true and the wait is more like 4 or 5 days, I’m now excited to see that our targeted low volume high quality advertising on search engines is indeed working! We are now re-invigorated and have talked about expanding by trying out new campaigns and figuring out how to scale our current campaign to get more targeted volume.  Since this proved to work, we’ll use our low volume strategy on other programs that pay out big.  We’ve got our gloves on and are ready to fight for our chance at some SEM bucks.

As for yesterday’s campaign, at first I didn’t really know what was going on because we had 0 impressions since setting it up yesterday morning. Although the Yahoo! estimate was about 120 clicks per day, we weren’t even seeing a single impression. After a little digging, I found out that our ad was still under review.  I’m not sure why they have this process but at the same time I can see that it’s a good precaution to cut down on SPAM. Even though we’re happy with Yahoo for now, I just know that with Google we’d have many more clicks and I think we’ll try out Adwords in the near future. There’s no stopping us now!

So, Davey Z and I are going to have a board meeting tonight and decide where we’ll go with our newfound $100. We’ll reinvest it and hope to multiply it. We will go through a lot of different offers and programs, then decide on something that we hope will give us good return on our investment. Davey Z has come up with a totally sweet Excel spreadsheet that gives us break even costs, profit projections, and other things that I don’t understand yet. Good thing he likes data. We’ll be crunching numbers, making sense of data, and looking forward to learning more SEM. Right now we feel like we can conquer the world. We’re both excited and ready to scale things up. Our proof of concept worked and our business plan is solid. Stay tuned and we’ll teach you how to make money online!

a

Quality versus Quantity

We have done several things since starting out on our original campaign.  At first, we had some really big, over arching keywords that were cosing us substantially more than other targeted keywords.  We decided to stop “bleeding” from those keywords and as a result saw our clicks go down dramatically.  Our hope was to exchange quantity for quality of clicks.  So far, we have not seen any conversions but with Azoogle’s 4 day delay, I’m not sure if we have a complete picture yet.

Our hope is that, although we are sending only very few hits to our program every day, most of those hits would convert.  It makes sense in theory, but it may not work like that in real life.  To better illustrate our goal, look at this simple graph:

Our aim is to increase quality if we are able to increase quantity.  We don’t necessarily want 10,000 clicks per day if those clicks aren’t contextual or relevant or lead to any conversions.  What we want to do is hit people when they’re ready to buy, and because of this strategy, the quantity of our clicks is very low.

So Now What?

Our attitude of quality clicks hasn’t really paid off at all yet.  I agree with the strategy but also agree with the law of large numbers.  I would rather see a more action than less, so we’ve decided to try out another campaign.  This new campaign is supposed to convert better, but it is also a campaign whose payout is significantly lower.  Paying less than $1.50 per action, we hope to be able to find cheap keywords that give us a lot of traffic in return.

We started this campaign today with the bare bones bidding price of 10 cents per keyword.  We estimate that at the end of the day, between 30-50 people will have clicked on our ads and seen the intended page for them to take action.  If 20% of those 50 people take action (that’s  10 people), we would have made roughly $15 while spending only $5.  That’s a 3:1 ratio of income to expense.  Even if only 10% of clickers convert, we still see a profit, albeit a much smaller one.  However, profit is profit, right?

So, with a new campaign active as of this morning, we will monitor clicks and trends for the next 4 days as  Azoogle receivs the data back from the programs.  Our expectations, I feel, are quite humble and I hope to report good news in the next few days!

a

One of the biggest hurdles that we are dealing with right now is delayed reporting from Azoogle. Our campaign manager says that it takes about 4 days for programs to report their earning to Azoogle. 4 days in Internet time is an eternity! I wonder why it takes so long with Azoogle? It seems to me that Commission Junction does a much better job at reporting things nearly real time. If not real time, then at least it seems like they report daily on my activities and commissions.

The thing about having to wait 4 days to see a report is that we don’t really know what is working and what isn’t until we get data to interpret. When we are forced to wait for 4 days, if something isn’t working then it means that we’re losing money and don’t even know it. This is a huge problem and I wish there was a way for the affiliate program to provide more up-to-date information for their publishers…especially newbies like us. Veterans don’t necessarily benefit from same-day reporting as much as those starting out do because they already have an idea of what works and what doesn’t. I believe that we would have a much better chance of success with quicker access to our conversion data.

Learning how to deal with this delay has been somewhat nerve wracking…and somewhat discouraging. Since we’re doing such low volume targeted advertising to get the most for our bucks, we see the click counter updated rather quickly but the money meter always stays still, or so it seems. I know that in the grand scheme of things “traffic is the new gold” and the more traffic we send to the affiliate programs the more money we stand to make. I think about adding a few more targeted keywords and see what kind of difference that makes…in 4 days.

I will keep you posted as we struggle through these challenges. I believe that tomorrow we will start seeing results from our last batch of changes. Regardless of tomorrow’s outcome, I hope that a solution is presented soon to address these reporting delays. After all, if we make money it means that Azoogle or other affiliate programs are making money.

a

Last year I read a book called “Affiliate Millions” that really got me excited about Search Engine Marketing (SEM). After reading the book, I plonked down a few bucks and opened up a Google Adwords account. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t really know what I was doing and ended up losing my invested capital in a matter of 2 days. I learned a lesson in those 2 days, however. SEM is not easy.

Recently I have been re-energized about SEM and am doing some research on how to do it right. I’ve been reading a few blogs, keeping an eye on the Digital Point forums, and even looking for random bits of information floating around the Internet as of late. My SEM goal for 2008 is now to learn how to not lose money while conducting advertising campaigns through search engines.

In the past few days I have scooped up 4 new domain names that I will use to test out advertising campaigns. My checklist now includes building the sites, setting a budget, and creating the campaigns.

• Building the websites. This step is trivial for me at this point. I can whip up an OK website in a couple of hours so I’m not entirely too worried about this aspect of the operation. I’m definitely not a graphic designer so my sites won’t win any awards for design, but I think they’ll look good enough to convince people to click through the ads to make me money.
• Setting a budget. This part is a little foggy for me. I have no idea what to expect to pay for keywords nor do I know how long this money will last me. I would like to set a budget that would get me good exposure off the bat, so I’m thinking that I’ll have to pay more to rank well upfront in the first few weeks of the campaign and then I can start paying less per click. As far as a budget goes, I don’t have much. This month has been going well for me (this blog has made $50, my other sites have made about $200) so I can use most of that to invest in this new venture.
• Creating the campaigns. Writing up exciting ads will definitely be a fun task. I’d like to think that I’m creative, and I have some creative friends and I may tap their knowledge bank and experience to help me create ads that will drive quality traffic to my site. I’m kind of looking forward to this stage and think that it will be as much fun to do as nearly any other aspect of this new task.

I plan to start this new phase of my Internet prowess within the next 2 weeks. School is starting to get busy and work has thrown a few projects down my way but I’m really excited about the potential of this project. I’ll keep you all posted as I go along and I hope to share some great news with you in the next few weeks!

a

If you’ve ever had an income stream online, you’ve probably thought to yourself at one point or another that you really should have more than one way to make money, just in case something would happen to your site. These are 5 reasons to do it now:

1. Trends Change

It should be no surprise to learn that we live in a fickle, materialistic society. People want the latest and greatest things at a moment’s notice, especially when it comes to technology. If you have a website that revolves around technology, you’d better be prepared to act quickly and serve those people who may no longer be interested in your product line.

The same goes with many other niches; health, fashion, automotive, etc. If you are sitting still in an ever changing business environment, a new trend will come up and your site will be left in the dust.

2. Competition Changes

Remember the old way we used to obtain music? Going to the store, shopping the aisles, finding the right genre, looking at shrink wrapped packages (On a side note, why do they have to make CD’s so hard to open? I wonder if a music exec has ever had to open one. I doubt it, else they’d realize how dumb that packaging is.), opening up the CD and popping it in to our CD players or portable Discman’s.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, comes iTunes and revolutionizes how we listen to music. Now we can buy individual songs or entire albums with the click of a button. Music executives didn’t believe in iTunes or digital delivery, now they’re crying foul and wondering why they’re not selling any more CD’s.

The same can be applied to your website. Things could be going along just fine, then all of a sudden a new competitor arises. You can do one of two things: Prepare your business to tackle the opponent or sit there like a lame duck and blame others when thinss start to go wrong. I suggest the first option.

3. Google Changes

Google is a business baromter of sorts. They claim that the good stuff shows up first and the bad stuff is not displayed at all. Many web business live and die by the rankings given to them by Google.

If you currently just have one site for one product, then you’d better be prepared for a rocky road ahead. Google’s algorithm changes occasionally and if you are not prepared to take the hit, then you’ll be in trouble when changes head your way.

Google search rankings mean everything to some businesses, and unless you’re really good at obtaining one of the top spots, you’ll have to rely on luck and little else to make money online. Prepare yourself, make good websiteS and have a solid business plan to make you money for the long run

4. Stuff Happens

Another reason to have more than one income plan is that, in all honesty, things happen out there that are beyond your control. For example, if you had a site that was somehow making money selling Enron gear, the day they went out of business you too would have been out of business. If you sell health products and the FDA changes stance on them, you’d better be prepared to take a hit.

5. More is Better

If you’ve manage to stay out of trouble, either through luck or preparation, you should diversify your net portfolio because in all honesty, we’re in this for the money. More income streams = more earning potential. More earning potential = more money in the long run.

Prepare yourself, make GOOD QUALITY websites about your niche products, and stick to your guns. Always grow and learn in order to position yourself ahead of your competitors.

a

Whenever I create a new ad, I end up with this message saying my ad was not approved:

• This ad has been disabled and should not be run again on the site under any circumstances. Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations that have been deemed abusive. Please review our Terms of Service and Advertising Guidelines if you have further questions.

I love the part where it says “Unfortunately we cannot provide you with the specific violations”. What this means to me is “We’re sorry, we don’t really have anyone looking at your ad but our algorithm didn’t like it for some reason. We really don’t know. Try again though, kthx!” If Facebook is serious about it’s super duper ad platform, I think it should want money from affiliates. The law of large numbers says that a little money * a lot of affiliates = a lot of money for FB.

So, Facebook, get your act together and make an advertising system that works, will ya? I’m trying to give you money but you won’t take it! What kind of business is that?

a