2008 – Dedicated to Affiliate Marketing

Earlier I wrote about how I am dedicating myself towards affiliate marketing to reduce my dependencies on Google Adsense. Google Adsense is still my main money maker bringing in low 5-digits ($$,$$$.xx) per year. I was also making good money with YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network), but Yahoo just does not get it and I removed it from all but one website due to laughable performance. Their ad targeting was just a big joke.

So, 2008 is half-way done and I checked to see how my affiliate marketing efforts are doing. I know I could have done better with more time on my hands, but under the circumstances (full-time job, family, etc.) I am pretty happy with the results. These are not the final numbers, but it comes pretty close. The screenshot does not show any income from Google Adsense or other sources of income that my online business has – these numbers are affiliate marketing only.

 

So, the second half of 2008 is upon us. My goal for the next 6 months is to meet and exceed the numbers of the first half of the year and to add an additional 50%. If I am able to do this than my income from affiliate marketing will cover my entire monthly business expenses (web hosting, domain name registrations, cell phone service, Cable Internet Access, etc.) easily. My fixed, recurring expenses hover around $500 to $550.00 per month.

Most of my affiliate marketing income is NOT coming from PPC marketing efforts, but rather thru SEO and organic traffic to my websites. In late September I will attend a 2 day PPC training class (PPC Summit) and I hope that by late October/early November a big push will follow accordingly. I am doing some PPC marketing here and there, but for the next 3 months I am mainly concentrating on building up websites that can be used as the foundation for PPC marketing. With the knowledge and skills I hope to gain from PPC Summit I want to use those websites as the foundation for my PPC marketing. Landing pages are easy to order (outsourcing) or to customize (I have several base templates ready for customization) and with the existing websites I should be able to get a few campaigns going fairly quickly. Since I build all my websites with SEO in mind as well, these websites might already be making money at that point, too.

Why am I waiting? Well, as said I am already doing some PPC marketing – but with very mixed success and I hope that the training class will finally push me over the edge to more consistent results. Until then I pre-stage several pieces, plus refresh my cash balance to be able to jump right into it. By the time late September comes around I have a solid foundation in place. If my PPC activity becomes more successful before then I would not mind either.

Google Quality Score – Beat it up

I was playing with a new PPC campaign last night. I had designed a new landing page and was confident that I would get a good quality score. Man, was I wrong. The results were so disappointing that I deleted the entire campaign right away. I made a few changes this evening and boy, did that change things. I think the findings will help for sure to improve future landing pages and quality score ranking for me. Here is what I changed:

- DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion): I have been using DKI before, but now I doubled the number of how often the keyword would be displayed on the page.
- Keywords in Ads: I broke down my Adwords campaign into smaller chunks and now every ad group had keyword matching ads. I was too generic before.
- I added about 10 unique articles to the website as before the website was build from a CSV based data feed from the merchant (= duplicate content)
- I made the landing page load 2 seconds faster by manipulating the header image file size.

After these changes I re-uploaded the campaign and the quality score across the board is “great” with a majority of my minimum bids being $0.03 and $0.04 and only a small fraction being $0.05. Using SpeedPPC helped to make the changes to the campaign extremely painless. So, I am quite happy with the results. I think the 2 items that pushed this campaign up were the unique content the ads containing the keywords whenever possible.

Mozilla Firefox 3 – Still Memory Leaks

I was hoping for the best, but after a night of leaving Firefox 3 open doing nothing memory usage has grown from around 41 megs to 99 megs. I guess the memory leaks are still not fixed. Very disappointing!

Workload

Currently I am working hard on several affiliate marketing related projects. I hope that the next 5-6 days will shows some really interesting results. I am really looking forward to this. I have done a lot of keyword research and are now building a website for this product I am trying to promote accordingly. I got a great landing page ready for testing and I hope that this project will be able to bring in some great cash-flow.

How do I build my websites? I use Wordpress and the revolution themes. I do have a licensed copy of the developer pack and therefore have great options for almost any niche I am tackling. I build all my sites with SEO in mind as well and therefore spend about 2-3 hours customizing a website before loading the content. So, even if a PPC project does not work out as anticipated, often SEO comes into play and the websites start generating a small cash-flow 3-4 months down the road. They also gain some value that I could use and sell them on the open market, but I have not sold many websites lately as I see potential with them for my own portfolio. One thing I know and I am pretty sure about it, is that I will go back and revisit certain projects over time and that I have several websites where monetization started working 6-12 months later. One of my goals is still self-employment and I know once I have enough recurring income going that I will also have better resources to re-vitalize some projects. At that point I have aged websites that represent a great infrastructure.

Even if I would not become full-time self-employed, these website represent value which I can sell at one point if I wanted to. Currently my portfolio of websites is probably worth somewhere between $40K and $50K – maybe $10K less or maybe $10K more. You get the idea.

PPC Summit

A week ago I registered for PPC Summit in Los Angeles. PPC Summit is a 2 day training seminar and I am looking forward to this. I had already played with the idea before, just could not find any decent reviews about it. Since I did not know anything about it, I waited and waited. Giovanna from SEO Book (Aaron Wall’s website) wrote about it and since I have certain trust into Aaron’s website and the stuff they write about over there, I decided to take the plunge. So, I am booked for PPC Summit in Los Angeles – September 25 and September 26. I am very excited and hope to learn a lot that will take my PPC skills up to the next level.

I was able to use the early bird pricing + I found a discount coupon for an additional $100 off. Can’t beat that + Southern California in late September – I am looking forward to that, too. If you are going, let me know and maybe we can meet up for some networking.

Testing Wordpress Pages as PPC Landing pages

I tackled another affiliate marketing website yesterday using one of the Wordpress Revolution Themes that I purchased. Initially it looked a little daunting, but once I started working with the template it was very easy to modify the site to my needs. A total of 4 hours later I had a modified template and several pages of content on a new domain. The Wordpress installation is modified for basic SEO and there are only a few tasks left to make the website complete. I already pushed out another page of content this morning.

Once I had the basic site running last night, I setup a few PPC campaigns in Google Adwords. For one I wanted to see if Wordpress pages qualify enough to be actual landing pages for PPC campaigns. Time will tell depending on the number of clicks my ads will get to drive traffic to the site. I am also interested to see how far can you modify a standard Wordpress blog post or page so that it gets a high quality score in Google. So far I am seeing the standard $0.05 per click price and “Great” quality score. If you do PPC marketing with Google you know that this is actually not really a great quality score and it is just a matter of time before these $0.05 per click turn into 10 cents and a “good” quality score. With some keywords I was able to get a 4 cents bid minimum which gives me hope. I’ll probably separate those out and then work with the other keywords – writing new pages and ads. The offer I am promoting does not require a “normal” landing page where site navigation has been removed (at least in my opinion). We will see how this turns out.

Next Page »