Happy New Year!
It’s half january already, so it’s really getting time to write the december report!
But first, I’d like to wish all affiliates best wishes for 2009. Make 2009 A Great Year For Yourself. Don’t get distracted, losing motivation is something which happens to everyone, the real art is getting back on the same track after that. Don’t start on other things, don’t think things over too much, just take action and you’ll get there!
In December, I made 44 sales for a total of $1,052.42 , Even though revenue doesn’t really mean anything, I’m still quite proud of that. I still had some losses, but I’m really beginning to feel that I’m getting the hang of this. My major frustration in december was a campaign that was profitable in november, all of a sudden, even my most profitable ad groups started losing money, which was quite frustrating in the beginning. But after some testing and redoing of the campaign I relaunched the campaign, and that certainly improved it.
Where I still lost $162.92 in the first half of december, my campaign broke even (-$1.22) in the second half of december!
In january, I’m focusing again on launching more new campaigns, because that’s the only way to go forward!
What are your plans for 2009? Let me know in the comments! Good Luck!
First of all, I’d still like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! Hope your campaigns are going well!
Last week, I received my first clickbank check!
It was for $262.61, which is not that much, but still it feels great to go to the bank with the check! Hearing that it will cost you 13 euro (80 USD) to cash the cheque and willtake over a week doesn’t feel too great, but guess that’s part of it.
I’m looking forward to clickbank’s weekly direct deposit payment after I’ve received 3 checks though! That will save me a lot of time (about 7-8 weeks between making the sale and receiving the money at the moment) and money.
December 26th, 2008 in
General |
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In the PPC Classroom forum, and other affiliate forums in general, I often see comments like this:
“I just heard about this new program that will teach you how to make money online!”
OR
“Hey! This new tool was just released that does all this work for you!”
And then everyone becomes interested and (judging from the comments) many people end up purchasing it!
Well, I’d like to suggest that the next time you’re looking at one more tool or program and you’re taking your credit card out, you ask yourself whether you really need this? Have you used the tools and programs you already have to their full potential?? I think in a lot of cases, the answer will be “no”.
I’m not saying you should never again buy another tool or another ebook, I just think that many people do this as an excuse for NOT taking action. (“I don’t know how to build a landing page, so I will first purchase this ebook about building landing pages and THEN I will take action“),and after that product there’s yet another one and so on… And the only people making any money are the guru’s! :) (I know I was like this before)
The same goes for tools: Yes, there are some great tools, but I’m currently launching new campaigns and making some nice profits without ANY paid tools. I think you first need to be able to succeed without the tools, and only after that add the tools to the equation.
Maybe, if I ever get the feeling I have really understood and applied 100% of PPC Classroom, I’ll start looking at something else again (List Building is a subject I’d like to look into in the future) , but until then every single email with the words “Closing in 24 hours” or “Free Report” or “$97″ gets sent to my spam folder immediately!
Good Luck!
December 22nd, 2008 in
General |
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December’s here, so it’s time for my monthly update:
Wow, what a month! in november, my affiliate business really took off: I made 37 sales, totalling $860.60. I’m around breakeven when substracting my advertising costs.
80% of my sales came from my very first campaign, about which I said last month:
I’m still tweaking this campaign at the moment and my clicks are slowly increasing, but this one is still really slow.
So, what did I do? I found out that I had received a google slap for search, and content network wasn’t going too well either. So, I deleted the campaign and started again from scratch. Especially the content network is working very well now, with about 15 ad groups. (and, following the 80-20 rule, 80% of my sales come from just 1 ad group!), and I made $100 profit from this campaign (which is not much , but I really didn’t expect to have a profiting campaign so quickly!)
Reinvesting
Before I started my first campaign, I had already decided that I would immediately reinvest any profits I had. This makes sense off course, because if you want to become a Super Affiliate, you can’t just rest on your laurels enjoying the $50 a day profit from one profitable campaign. You have to set up more campaigns, to make even more profit!
In practice however, this can be quite hard. I personally found it quite frustrating that I worked weeks and finally made $100 profit from one campaign, and then set up another campaign and lost all my profits (and more) in 2 days. But that’s a decision everyone has to make for himself. I’ve decided that I will not be happy with just $50 a day, and will gladly reinvest every cent I make from this.
Cash Flow
One other issue I’m having at the moment is Cash Flow. Even though I’ve now made over $1000 with clickbank , I haven’t seen a single cent yet. Clickbank calculates the total every 2 weeks, then they wait 2 weeks before sending out a check and then it will probably again be 1-2 weeks before I receive the check. As a result, if I make a sale today, it may take over 6 weeks before I get the money. In addition, clickbank keeps 10% from this check to protect them from refunds , …
A lot of people have sent me messages asking for help on setting up a landing page, so I’m planning to write a couple of posts on that in december.
So, how was november for all of you? Let me know in the comments!
December 3rd, 2008 in
Monthly Reports |
7 Comments
*UPDATE: This problem was solved apparently. However, I think that the least they could do is create an announcement / …. to explain what happened. O well, glad it’s solved I guess*
This morning, I posted my first “success story” in the PPC Classroom forums because I’ve made 25 sales so far (more on that later), and thanked PPC Classroom for the great system! 
When I wanted to check replies a couple of hours later, I was baffled, stupefied, thunderstruck, and flabbergasted when I saw their way of saying “you’re welcome”:
Now, I hope this is just some kind of technical error, and I especially hope they will fix it quickly. I’m constantly trying to help others with technical questions on the forum.
The only thing I can think of right now is that they once asked me not to use affiliate links in my signature, even though:
- Their rules say you’re allowed to have an affiliate link in your signature
- I did not have an affiliate link in my signature (it was a link to this blog)
I’m really enjoying PPC Classroom and have had success with their system (and have paid a lot of money to learn the system 
).
Adbrite Review
For an offer I’m currently promoting, I decided to try out Adbrite: Adbrite can be compared to the Google Content Network. Through Adbrite, you can advertise on websites like digg, yahoo, and millions of smaller websites. According to their frontpage, they are now serving 365 million impressions a day on 87,383 sites. One of the advantages of Adbrite is that you can often get much cheaper clicks than with Google Content Network.
Also, instead of messing around with keywords, you can select your target group by category, age, gender,…I’ve created a short video to show you how easy it is to set up a campaign:
Sounds great, but in Affiliate Marketing, there is only ONE number that matters: conversions!
The Result
I got 1,935,177 impressions (feels kind of cool to show your ad to 2 million people) , got a CTR of 0.038% resulting in 737 clicks with an average of $0.09 CPC. However, only 8.5% of those people clicked through through the merchant site, and I got…… 0 sales!
Conclusion
SUCCESS!! I’ve found one more thing that doesn’t work For the offer I’m promoting, Adbrite doesn’t seem to work. However, I think that when you have a campaign that appeals to a larger audience (fat loss,make money online , …..) you can have a lot of success from Adbrite and profit from the low CPC.
I will certainly try it out again the next time I find an offer that is successfull on the google content network. This time I spent $60 and made $0, but once I find a campaign that works with adbrite, the potential profit is a lot more than that $60!
Good Luck!
I haven’t posted on this blog for a while, because I’ve mainly been busy with setting up new campaigns and I’m glad to say that I’ve already been having a bit of success, but more on that later!
Today, I’d like to review one of the keyword tools recommended in PPC Classroom: KeyCompete.
On the website, KeyCompete is described like this:
KeyCompete is an online keyword research tool that identifies the keywords your competitors are using in their pay-per-click campaigns. KeyCompete also identifies the competition that is bidding on your keywords.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Knowing which keywords your competitors are using gives you a great advantage when doing keyword research!
In theory, it sounds good, but what’s it really like?
Read the rest of this entry »
Today I got inspired by a post in the PPC Classroom private forum about new affiliates sharing services.
The main idea is that new affiliates can help eachother out with their skills, and in return get help with the areas they don’t know much about. I think this can work for everyone, including new affiliates, because everyone’s good at something: webdesign,coding,ad writing, content writing, excel help,…
As a result, I decided to offer help for anyone struggling with creating websites, and more specifically, with PHP.
In addition, I have my own dedicated server, which I only use for about 5% or less of what I pay for. So, I thought it may be nice to share the part I pay for , but don’t use with other starting affiliates.
So, for new affiliate marketers, here’s what I have to offer to you:
Reliable Web Hosting with everything you could need: cPanel, PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Fantastico , … (don’t worry if you don’t know what that all means, you probably won’t need it anyway).
Even better, I’m offering it for free for a couple of months (haven’t decided for how long yet, but I’m not doing this to make money, I’m doing this to help)! So, if you’re still looking for web hosting, feel free to contact me. No strings attached.
Good Luck and Have A Great Day!
November 13th, 2008 in
PPC Classroom | tags:
Web Hosting |
2 Comments
I’m planning to post a report of my progress every month, and here’s the first one:
October is the month I started my own business and got started with Affiliate Marketing, so quite an exciting month!
I’m planning to launch 5 campaigns a month for the first few months. This month I’ve launched 3 Campaigns in 2 weeks, so still on schedule!
First Campaign:
After searching for a while I choose a product in clickbank to promote: One that had a high gravity, but not too high. I set up a landing page, based on the PPC Classroom template with some modifications , and…. I made a sale the second day! I was really excited with this, my first sale! However, the campaign only got about 5 clicks a day. I’m still tweaking this campaign at the moment and my clicks are slowly increasing, but this one is still really slow.
I was surprised by the affiliate manager though, he’s very active and sends out emails with articles, videos, … every few days. Only disadvantage: He doesn’t want to put up a google conversion tracking id, he says if he does this for all affiliates his thank you page will become cluttered.
Anyway, I think that once I get some more sales I’ll be able to make him change his mind. In the meanwhile, I’m setting everything up to track conversions with clickbank’s tid (at 5 clicks a day, there’s not much to track yet).
Second Campaign:
For the second campaign I tried direct linking to a pay per lead offer. However, after getting 108 clicks to a page where visitors just have to fill in one form (name, address and phone number) and getting 0 conversions, I decided that this campaign wasn’t going to become profitable at all. The merchant’s landing page really was quite bad, I have to say. Maybe I could have made some money with this if I created my own landing page, but I think I’d just be making things harder for myself, so … having gained some knowledge and lost some money , I moved on to my thirth campaign.
Thirth Campaign: For my thirth campaign , I chose to promote some software from RegNow.com (and yes that’s an affiliate link, lol!). What I like most about regnow is that they automatically set up google conversion tracking, which makes things really easy!
I already noticed my keyword research and landing page design going a lot better than with the first campaign. Inspired by the PPC Classroom Video Contest last month I even made a short video to promote the product ! I’m quite happy with the landing page I created. After 2 days, I’ve spent $100 on this campaign and made $34 in commissions, not spectacular, but now I can start tweaking the campaign.
Even though I lost money this month, I’m happy with the results, i learned a lot and even got 2 sales!
Now I’m going to take 3 days off, and then go at it for full 200% in november again!
I’m one of the many proud members of PPC Classroom 2.0 , a great course which explains all you need to know to succeed in Affiliate Marketing, and much more!
Even though there were some technical issues in the beginning, I think it’s really worth the money! I’ve really learned a lot of great things already which are really practical, in addition, the videos and the continued education really finishes it off.
What I really like are the bonuses. Before, I REALLY struggled with the basic design concepts. But PPC Classroom gives me access to several example pages AND example graphics (checkmarks, “100% guaranteed” symbols, order now buttons,…) That alone is worth MUCH more than $77 to me, because this has really helped me in taking action.
I’ve finished over half of the initial courses, but I’m not overdoing it, I really want to take the time to understand all the concepts, and it’s already producing some results, as I’ll detail in my next post!
October 24th, 2008 in
PPC Classroom |
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