Affiliate Marketing Update

I have been a busy bee lately – therefore lacking in providing updates to this blog. For one I have been working on my accounting and bookkeeping stuff to catch up. This September I will make my first voluntary quartlery income tax payment installment using EFTPS. So far I have been able to use my day job for my tax payments. I did adjust the deduction to match my business income, but it is getting to a point where I would have to expect that I will need to send more money to the IRS. And I do not want to be subject to a tax penalty owing more than $1,000 when filing my taxes. So, I rather send Uncle Sam some money now (September).

I have been busy with affiliate marketing as well. I spend time building another site in a niche where I have seen some good conversions. All my websites are build with SEO in mind and so I am making each website unique. I found a good content writer who – besides the low price he is asking for – really provides quality work. He is not from the US, but you just cannot tell from how he writes about specific topics. This allows me to concentrate on other things and as my available time for the business is currently very limited it allows me to work more efficient. I also did outsource some SEO work – with mixed results. We will see in a few weeks how that is working out.

It is a little quiet on the PPC front for me. For one the new website I am working on will also be a target site for PPC traffic. To avoid a Google slap I am putting extra efforts in to have a high quality website up and running to receive great quality score ratings. I have ordered a new landing page from someone highly recommended to me. Next week I will fully concentrate on preparing a large scale PPC campaign. I know that the product I am going to promote converts. The organic traffic I am sending them has been small, but actually showed great conversion rates. So, I am so optimistic that I want to  try PPC traffic as well.

My plan for August is to redesign a few websites and to optimize websites inside my network. I think I am at a point where I cover enough niches and can now pick the ones that offer most financial benefit to me and expand accordingly. Expanding means trying to a) do more SEO work and b) to match the traffic with more optimized product offers. If the PPC traffic works on the existing project I will also expand there or go back to the drawing board to look for a different approach.

{Knocking on wood} So far my increased efforts in affiliate marketing seem to show prmosing results. My business would be limping for a bit, but at this point I could almost survive without the 4-digit Google Adsense check (direct deposit of course). Like I said, there would be some limping for another month or two, but I think it shows me that I am on the right track. My biggest problem is time to work on the business – I know too many excuses on my side with family, full-time job, etc.! I knew that having a baby would make things more difficult and slow me down, but I am in it for the long term and giving up is not one of my core strengths.

Short Note here about the latest Google Page Rank update. I’ve stopped tracking page rank for a while now – especially since I am mainly concentrating on affiliate marketing. I noticed one of my long-time PR 5 websites is now a PR 4 and another internal page on this blog that was PR 5 is now PR 4 as well. Since both targets have a huge number of on target inbound links it seems like Google is raising the bar for a PR 5 even higher. I have not seen any traffic changes to the worse, rather have seen an increase in traffic. So, stop worrying about PR.  

What is my IP Address?

Of course I know what my IP address. It has not changed in 2 years. But hey, today I could no longer log into several of my Wordpress-powered websites. I am using .htaccess controls based on my IP address to protect the wp-admin directory. Well, it seems like Comcast has changed the DHCP scope on the network segment I am on and I now got a completely different IP address. What the heck …

Ubercamp – Where is the meat?

Ubercamp – highly praised and promoted on certain websites, it caught my interest. Uebercamp is supposed to be for the advanced Internet Marketer who needs a little help to get up to the next level. Exactly what I needed (and still need). I had signed up for Ubercamp and was accepted easily. $199 later I had access to an almost empty forum, but it began to fill up with good content easily. The first week was very interesting and a lot of good info surfaced. However, since then the content flow is decreasing and overall I have to say: Where is the meat?

Paul, the uber affiliate is not really delivering that much value one would expect for that price tag. He started a case study on how to build an affiliate PPC campaign from scratch. Some information he provides is great, other pieces you have to pull out of him or guess since he is not communicating much info in between steps. Overall he is not as often in the forums as one would expect (in my opinion). I’d rather have the impression that he runs the forum as a second level project while doing his main business first. That would be Ok for a free forum or low-priced solution, but if you charge a premium I think you have to provide a little more value. Here are some bullet points that I see as an issue.

• Unprepared: The whole project or business model seems to be lacking preparation. Things look more improvised and stiff. He is reacting to customer input, but there is no pro-active initiative
• Cheap: If you provide a premium service, why (as an example) settle for cheap tools like phpBB – the most unsecure forums software that also lacks in features. If you charge $199 per month from a customer and accept 80-100 customers, is $180 for a quality product like vBulletin too much? Provide tools and samples – share what you promised to share, don’t let other affiliates do your work.
• Dedication: If you open for business with a new business model, show presence. Don’t expect you can dedicate the same amount of time to your other projects + run a high-profile premium service at the same time without running into resource issues. If you expect to see the premium service to take off long-term, dedicate enough time to it and show presence.
• Uber: Uber Affiliate and Uber Camp. If you promote “uber” as the standard, provide uber service. Don’t go for standard or average.

 

Now, you might think that I am whining and complaining, but this is not the case. I don’t expect to get the secret to affiliate marketing delivered for $199 per month. But what I expect is that if a product separates itself from other coaching programs or training programs like Uber Camp (thinks it) does, that it also lives up to that. There are a lot of smart people at Ubercamp (as paying customers) – they show much more dedication and willingness to share knowledge than the owner of Uber Camp does. I did not expect a perfect start or a huge knowledge base right from the batt, but the lack of “meat” coming from Paul put into consideration with the price is what makes me feel that Ubercamp is way overpriced and not living up to the expectations. There is also not that much activity in the forums as one would hope to see. Sure, part of it is use paying members to be active, but I would also expect the business owner to be more visible.

Some brownie points for Paul though. The case study he is doing has some good information and the money he spent for it was real. There was some good learning stuff in there. Provide more these things and the membership price might be justified.

Conclusion: If you are in the market for a coaching program, sign up for maybe the Click Consultants forum and the PPC Coach program. For less than $100 a month you get a good set of solid information. At the current price Ubercamp is overpriced – even though there is some solid information available. I canceled my membership …