How to lose money and look like an idiot. Or “being broke and dumb sucks”
So, before I started setting up my first site for my installment of “affiliate marketing: 101” I figured it would be a good idea to make sure I knew how to set up the site, build my adwords campaign and actually buy some traffic. Mostly just so I knew what steps I needed to document for the series when I wanted to post about it.
I also wanted to see if I could grab a small piece of the Christmas rush even though it was a bit late.
Well, even though I completely screwed up the adwords campaign (like having 3 thousand keywords all in the same ad channel) and not knowing how to track anything important I did end up getting some traffic out of it and actually even had some conversions. I’ve learned a lot about setting up keywords and such since so hopefully I will be able to show that in my next post about this.
Beyond not really knowing what I was doing, I was also on a pretty tight budget. With Christmas, being paid only once a month and still trying to adjust to that and just being broke in general I didn’t have a lot to work with. And that is where the comedy begins…or at which point you can point and laugh at me for being a dumbass.
I won’t be real specific with stats but here is the general info for the “campaign”:
I figured I’d try to get some of the traffic that was looking for Nintendo Wiis for Christmas and since there was a short supply in general there seemed to be a decent amount of traffic for finding Wiis. I set up a site similar to the one I posted earlier using the ebay/amazon affilaite plugin for WordPress. I was hoping that there would be a lot of hungry buyers ready to jump on ebay to grab up what was available.
Surprisingly, even with my noob errors and getting by with my blindfold on I was filtering traffic and making sales. Of course not knowing how to setup adwords correctly, not knowing how to optimize my keywords (or even organize them) and not knowing how to know if I was making money or losing money the whole time I wasn’t sure if it was working or not. CJ not having updated stats and ebay not reporting being the best made it worse.
Over the course of the campaign I earned:
$563.57 through CJ for the ebay commissions
$171.74 through amazon for the sales commissions
For a gross of:
$735.31
Not so bad for a noob. Now lets figure out the net…
My adwords charges for the month came out to:
$652.36
Wow, an actual “profit”! If my math is correct I ended up with a positive difference of $82.95! And that is with an obvious non optimized campaign, probably overpaying on keywords and pretty much not knowing what I was doing beyond paying to filter traffic through my site.
So, did I actually profit? Well that is where bing a broke dumbass comes into play and reminds me of what a noob I really am. Being a noob and not planning well, I didn’t know when Google actually charges for adwords fees. I remembered from small promotions in the past when I was just trying to get traffic to various sites that I had been billed (automatic debit/bank draft) after the first of the month for those charges. So I assumed that even though I had a limited budget that I wouldn’t be billed until after the first of the month which, by then, I would have gotten more funds in. Well I was wrong and was billed in the middle of the month a few days before my funds came in! Because I use my debit card for EVERYTHING I had a ton of small pending charges waiting to go though. Things like $5 snacks at the gas station, $8 domain registration and a few small stocking stuff purchases I had made. Well since I didn’t know Google was going to charge me, I didn’t have enough to cover those purchases and the adwords bill at the same time…after all, I was expecting the adwords bill to come after the end of the month.
So I ended up being overdrafted and since my bank chrages per item overdraft, I ended up with 5 overdraft fees at $30 each! They dropped it down to only charging me for 3 of them as a “courtesy” so in the end, my bad planning and lack of funds cost me $90 in band fees.
So let’s do the math and find out my net results…
$82.95 profits from the campaign
$90.00 bank overdraft fees for being a moron
= -$7.05
Yes, I lost money but even so I am pretty happy that in reality my campaign was profitable. Even without fine tuning and optimizing I was able to make it profitable. Was it worth spending $652.36 to bring in $735.31 and only end up with $82.95 (pre dumbass surcharges)
? I don’t know. Profit is profit I guess but it’s not the most efficient method. And of course overspending my budget (even if unintentional) isn’t the smartest thing to do obviously.
So there you have it. My first “real” campaign and the results of being an idiot. Hopefully in my “learn along with me” affiliate marketing: 101 series I’ll be a bit more prepared and be able to show what I have learned. I’m excited to see how much of a difference optimizing and fine tuning will have.
Anyone have any obvious tips on how to avoid being this dumb?
Super A-List Celeb Review of little ol’ me? What a waste…
So as some of you may have seen, I won the very cool “free John Chow Review” contest that was on WinningTheWeb recently. I assume many people that took part would have chosen to have their blog reviewed by the almighty chowder man himself. After all, the “chow effect” has become legendary and could give a blog a real nice jump start. Thing is, my blog sucks! I haven’t been blogging very long yet and don’t have many post to really give anyone an idea what this blog will be like and beyond a few basic post showing some of my personality, there isn’t enough to go on to really give a review let alone come check out after reading a review by John. I hope to change that as I get used to this blogging thing and have more to post about but it seemed silly to have this blog reviewed at this point. So what am I having reviewed instead? A super duper product to launch my affiliate career, or course!
A while back I emailed John asking if he could do product/service reviews for the paid reviews and, of course, he said yes. I didn’t have the cash to pay the crazy hourly rate that a super A-list blogger charges but it was right about that time that fate stepped in and I found the contest on WinningTheWeb. Now I just have to figure out how to bribe John Chow to give a really great positive review and make it all worthwhile!
Want a sneak peak at what I am having John review for me? Well I’m going to tell you anyway…
A while back I signed up for an affiliate network I read about somewhere that seemed a bit different than the usual networks called MoreNiche. After signing up and checking out what they had to offer I noticed rather than having a huge listing of offers they only had a small selection of products and most of those were related to either diet pills or penis extenders of all things. What set them apart though was the amount of resources and help they offered with these products for their affiliates. Each of the offers had a HUGE amount of creative material including all the usual banners and such but also PLR articles, websites and even PLR ebooks that you could edit and distribute. There is also a huge library of help files and how-to ebooks making it almost as much of an “e-course” on how to be an affiliate marketer as it was a network pimping their products.
Although I was very impressed with the amount of support and materials made available, I didn’t have many sites or traffic that would have benefited much form penis extension and the like. Not that that is a bad thing, of course, I just didn’t think my Journeyman fan traffic was really the most targeted for an extra inch or two. Then again, I guess you never know…
Well thankfully, MoreNiche has been busy building up their catalogue of offers and products and expanding into many other very cool niches…you could say MoreNiche was getting into “More Niches”. Or not if you aren’t into stupid obvious puns.
Although there are a few of their new products I am excited about, one particular service really got me excited (no pun intended at all here, seriously). Not just because it could be a good money maker if it converted but also because it is just a really kickass new service, especially for internet marketers who like to know what their traffic is doing. Forget just having analytics. Get over just studying your heatmaps. With ClickTale you get to see exactly what your users are doing on your site with VIDEO. Meaning their actions are all fully recorded while on your site. It’s as if you are looking over their shoulder while they browse your site and you get to see where they hover, what they avoid, what they click and how long it takes them to click and pretty much everything you would want to know about what users actually do on your site. Short of being able to ask them why the hell they aren’t clicking on your ads/offers in person, there isn’t a better way to learn how your users use, or don’t use, your site. It’s incredibly powerful to actually be able to SEE the problems you have and be able to fix them based on that feedback. Sure, analytics are still important but when you are laying out your landing pages or trying to improve your usability there is nothing like being able to actually see how your users get around.
Best part is you can actually try it out for FREE. After signing up at TryClickTale.com you get a free 100 recordings a week for two URLs! Even if you never decide to upgrade, with that much free time you should easily be able to see and learn enough to make some huge improvements to your sites and landing pages.
Yeah, of course I’d like to hype ClickTale because it is an affiliate product but to be completely honest, of everything I have every promoted, ClickTale is by far the coolest and one I actually use and believe in. It really is a huge advantage to be able to learn how users use your site by actually watching them. In my case, I learned that I suck at setting up navigation and regardless how slick I thought I was with my ad integration, I learned my uses were much much smarter than me and avoided a lot of the ads in the beginning.
So, if you want to check it out before you see what John Chow thinks, go ahead and sign up for your free trial at TryClickTale.com. Please let me know what you think of it as well because I really am looking forward to seeing what others think of it.
And if you think it is something you’d like to promote, MoreNiche has some pretty impressive payouts on top of their great support. You can sign up for MoreNiche at JoinMoreNiche.com. Definitely let me know what you think about their network as well. Maybe it’s because I am so new to affiliate marking but I was blown away by the amount of resources they make available for their affiliate.
Now, bring it on John!
Getting lucky can be hard work. No, not that kind of “getting lucky” you perve…
I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it. ~Thomas Jefferson
I love quotes and some of the most inspirational for me are ones dealing with “luck”. I may win really small lottery tickets here and there and I seem to be super lucky when it comes to email since I get winning sweepstakes notifications all the time but overall I’m not all that lucky with the odds type thing. That being said, I often win contest and competitions that I take part in and although I’d like to think “talent” has a bit part in that, most of it comes from actual work.
For example, I recently won Gyutae Parks’ very cool pre-paid John Chow Review Contest. Although it took a bit of imagination to figure out, I actually spent a good amount of time and made an honest effort to win. Meaning I spent time each day racking my brain for possible solutions, researched various post on Gyutaes’ site looking for clues, researched various post on Johns’ site for clues and I even went as far as watching to see the usual time Gyutae made new post so I could set my alarm and get up to see what the new letter of the day was to get an early jump at new guesses. That alone may have been what gave me the winning slot as soon after I made my guess there were quite a few people who figured it out and posted as well without noticing my post. I don’t know how many total hours I put into it but I did put in a good amount of time. Sure that might negate some of the value because I used up my time and depending on the total hours spent I may have made less than minimum wage lol, but I really wanted a John Chow review (had actually recently emailed him about it) and definitely didn’t have the cash to put down on it.
Another example could be the “write our funny customer reply email” contest that DealDotCom.com used to have on the weekends back when they first started out. I happened to win the only two they did and although part of it was because there weren’t many entries, I also did spend a decent amount of effort coming up with and writing funny replies. I tend to be funny and sarcastic naturally (at least in my own head) but even for those I didn’t just spit out post and hope I won. The post I made had multiple drafts, which alone would show there was some effort, before I made my post. I’m still waiting to see the results for the t-shirt contest they had which I put even more effort into ;).
Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t seen anyone claim that I won only because I got lucky and in fact it has been the total opposite in all those cases where the other people taking part have been very supportive and generous. But I have been wanting to write about people complaining they don’t get anywhere because they are unlucky and this seemed like a good stepping point.
I’ve seen quite a few different blog post and forum threads with people saying how some super affiliate or “guru” just got lucky and basically saying that is the only reason they got anywhere. Although there may be some small piece of luck with various parts of their success, I would be willing to bet that the majority of their success comes directly from the effort they put into their work and what they learned because of that. In all actuality, odds are they are unlucky much more often than they are lucky because they have likely failed at a lot of the things they tried and lost a lot of time and money getting there. But as they learned and worked harder their “luck” improved and they make their success look so simple that it gets confused and credited with lucky breaks.
That all sounds kind of preachy and can be annoying but for all those that write off all the “winners” as just being lucky a-holes, if they took the time to become lucky they might see it in a different light.
I still don’t expect to win the lottery any time soon even though I will probably try. But I have a lot of confidence that I will get lucky as I advance more and more in this “affiliate marketing thing” because I am going to make that luck happen ;).
I’ll end this with a few more quotes that I like:
Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent.
~Langston ColemanIt’s hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you’ve earned.
~Frank A. ClarkThe only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
~Harry Golden
PS A huge thanks to Gyutae Park for sponsoring the contest. If you haven’t checked out his blog you really can learn a lot, including how to “win” :). Also wanted to thank all the other cool people that were taking part in the contest. And of course, thanks to John Chow in advance for doing the review even if you are doing it only because you got paid to…you lucky bastard! >;)
Affiliate Marketing 101: bootstrappin’ myself.
Ok, first I should specify that “affiliate marketing 101″ in this case is not a course where I teach you all the tricks of marketing affiliate products. Instead it is a series of my own learning as I go, and take you along with me…hopefully learning something as well. Or maybe even contributing and teaching me something.
There are tons of blogs and sites out there telling you how great affiliate marketing is and how much people can make, how much they make and how much they can teach you how to make for a one time low fee of xx dollars. Even the open and honest bloggers will give tips and offer up help but rarely share the real meaty details. Those bloggers are appreciated but for a complete noob to affiliate marketing, like me, it doesn’t answer the silly little questions that come up and even the most open and helpful blogger seems to never share actual sites, landing pages and campaigns they are doing. One exception is Zac Johnson (my hero!). His “Super Affiliates Guide to PPC marketing” is a collection of post showing tips and ideas with detailed information which makes actually learning and grasping this stuff a somewhat reachable goal. Really open and genuinely looking to help people. But even he doesn’t post actual sites and landing pages or real specific details on live campaigns ;). His series is the inspiration behind this noob series of mine.
It’s understandable why almost no marketers out there show you their live campaigns and live landing pages/sites. If they are actually doing well, posting all the specifics to the open public could pretty much kill your campaign or at the least cost you more with the extra direct competition. Thing is, most people that read blogs and get tips will want to just copy exactly what is working for the other person rather than taking that knowledge and translating it for their own ideas and offers. That is where the learning comes in…anyone can follow a ordered list of steps and just input a given set of variables and probably do ok with a proven campaign. But if they don’t take the effort to use the information on their own projects they will likely never make much money. There are other good reasons why you shouldn’t post your campaign details, your sites and landing pages or give out too much information in general as well. After all, even if you want to help people, when it comes down to it, you are training your competition and showing them all your moves. But since I don’t have any moves or tricks yet and since I don’t have any profitable PPC campaigns I don’t mind sharing as many details as I can. I don’t know if you will learn something from me or not and in fact maybe you will become just a little dumber from reading my tests but regardless I will share the ugly and hopefully positive details for this. I’m very open to tips and advice and I am sure any other readers would appreciate any real advice you may give. So please feel free to add your thoughts to the comments.
This first installment of my “Affiliate Marketing 101″ will deal with the eBay affiliate program through Commission Junction (www.cj.com) since right now is a pretty good time to grab some of the holiday shoppers and filter them through your links. The site will hopefully be good enough to eventually get indexed but because of the short amount of time before Christmas, PPC is the plan…which is yet another specific area in marketing I have no experience at all so you can learn that with me as well ;).
Since I am such a noob, I’m going to go with some of the easiest ways to get a site online and getting my links on the site. So for this site I will be using WordPress and an ebay rss plugin that dynamically post live auctions and links to them using my affiliate link (more on this later). It’s the easiest way I can think of, for someone with my lack of experience, to get a site up and running in no time.
Here is a breakdown of the steps I have taken for my site so far:
Step 1. Find a niche or product to build the site on. Rather than do a generalized “store” site, I am going to choose one primary product to make the site around. That should make it easier for a noob like me to build my adwords campaign around and hopefully get better quality scores and better conversions. Though to be honest, I’m pretty much talking out of my arse since I am still trying to learn how to track actual ROI (return on investment).
So how do I find or choose a product/niche? Promoting a product that you actually like and enjoy is probably a good place to start but isn’t necessary. Just choosing something that is in demand is a decent start. There are plenty of tools out there to find out whats hot right now as well if you can’t decide on something. Holiday seasons makes it easier to consider “gift” type products but we can assume that competition will probably be higher on everything as well. Here are a few of the many great sites to find what has the most hype at any current time:
- Hot products:
- eBay Pulse
- Amazon Movers and Shakers
- Hot Search trends:
- Yahoo! Buzz
- Google Trends
Well looks like an easy pick is the iPhone. There is probably a ton of competition trying to push it but also probably enough demand during this season to offset that and for everyone to get a piece of the pie. At least that is how my little marketing mind works. I assume the extra competition all gunning for the same high demand products will raise advertising cost but I don’t know enough yet to know how to avoid that yet. For now I’d rather find a product that I can easily market and hopefully get easier sales off of than something I have no idea how to sell. If I can get a profitable campaign going that is pushing something as popular as the iPhone then it will give me some motivation to try some other less known offers. If I lose my arse because I don’t know what I am doing and the competition kills me then I can just use that as an excuse and not let it get me down ;). Bad way to do business but I’m new enough to this to not mind too much.
So I decided that my first product to build the site around will be the Apple iPhone.
Step 2. Next I would need to decide on a domain. I’ll assume you know how to register a domain and have hosting and all that. I’ve read quite a few times that having the main keywords in the domain is important. But I’ve also read that domain age can be important for better trust levels with Google and quality score for adwords. Which is true? Or which is more important if both apply? Who the hell knows…that is the type of confusing stuff that there never seems to be definite answers by anyone. So for me, I just decided to use a domain that I already had rather than register a keyword rich one. Maybe it will hurt the campaign or maybe not but I planned to put something on the domain anyway this works.
Step 3. Building my site. Using cPanel hosting with Fantastico makes it incredibly easy to install WordPress. WordPress is great because it is very easy to get up and going, has tons of great plugins and TONS of great free themes which makes it really easy to make great looking sites super quick. WordPress is also known to be liked by the search engines so maybe it will help me get indexed and ranked later as I have more time to add more content and optimize things. One downside is even with great looking themes it can still look like a blog. That’s not automatically a bad thing but if you are going for the “store” portal type thing it may look less professional. On the other hand if you set it up like a product fan site with convenient links to great deals that you “found” it might build just as much trust. But the main reason I am using WordPress is the ease of setting it up and customizing it and easy of adding my affiliate links.
There are a ton of great free plugins that I can install but the main one I need for this is the one that makes it super easy to add my ebay affiliate links. I used a paid plugin called BayRSS ($37 for unlimited domain use). I bought it a while back but hadn’t used it until now. It makes adding specific, or general, eBay items (as well as amazon) to your post with your CJ affiliate link very easy. You just input your CJ PID and Amazon Associates ID and set the options to what you want (such as how many items to list and how much to make the minimum item and ending time). Here is a peak so you can see how easy it is to setup:
So a quick rundown of what I did:
- install WordPress and find a theme to use that fits my product/niche
- install the BayRSS plugin and decide on the settings
- made a basic post trying to drop keywords and add the BayRSS code below the post.
Here is a how it came out:
Gadger.com - Ipod Deals Online
As you can see in the main post, I added a bit of text and then the eBay and Amazon code with the product keywords I wanted and they are dynamically updated with the BayRSS plugin. BayRSS then adds auctions according to your keywords and settings so I will always have live auction links that have a couple bids and ending soon. I also added an Amazon widget from the Amazon associates center to the sidebar. Lastly I added ad an Adsene block. To be honest, I’m not sure if it is a good idea to have Amazon and Adsense on there or if it would be better to only concentrate on the eBay links. I guess I hope they click on the most profitable links but assume if they at least click on something rather than just leaving it has more potential. I guess that is something I will learn as I get more experience and assume it depends on the types of offers being promoted. Sometimes Adsense may pay as much, or more, over time for some niches. Might help if I knew how to better figure out the ROI and solid conversion levels heh.
I’ve only used BayRSS for eBay affiliate feeds so far but there are a couple others that come highly recommended. Maybe once I get this campaign going I can test out the others and report back on them too. Here are a couple other scripts/plugins build to take advantage of the eBay affiliate program:
- BANS (Build A Niche Store) ($97) - Probably the most popular of the three. This one is not a WordPress plugin but instead a standalone script that builds a whole site/store. There is a rather large and active forum for support and help. If you don’t want to use wordpress this is a good option. BANS creates fully operational standalone store sites.
- phpBay Pro ($39) - Another WordPress plugin that works like BayRSS though it supposedly can also work as a php API that you can incorporate into other types of sites/sciprts.
- BayRSS ($37) - BayRSS is what I used for the project above. As far as I know it is only a WordPress plugin so you will need a wordpress site to use it.
The added bonus of promoting an eBay affiliate store is it has multiple revenue possibilities. You earn commission both when new users sign up and use eBay but also a cut from eBay when they collect fees. That can add up quick and the coolest thing is the CJ cookie last 7 days (30 days for new users) so even if you get someone to stop by eBay to check out the item you are promoting and they don’t buy there is still a great chance they may go back within those 7 days and buy something. Even what they buy during those 7 days isn’t related to your product you still get a commission. That can be very powerful for times of the year like this where there are going to be a lot of people buying a lot of stuff on eBay. You might actually be able to make more just by filtering users though your links to get your cookie on their machine and get a piece of their holiday shopping craze. I plan to run my test campaign for 2 weeks or so. That will give me 2 weeks of direct traffic from my adwords campaign as well as an extra week of cookie action for those that come through later in the campaign. I assume there will be the most sales in these coming weeks before Christmas and then another week or two after where people who got cash for Christmas will be picking out their own toys ;).
That is all as far as setting the site up. I’ll be posting the next installment soon that will go over the actual campaign I will setup and detail how things go. Although I intend to share as much data as I can I need to check the TOS to see if I am allowed to post all my stats or not. I probably won’t post the exact keywords I use either but will show how/where I decide to find them.
Let me know what you think of my “super cool affiliate site” and if you notice any major mistakes I might have made.
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GOOD PRODUCTS
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COOL LINKS
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