Mini Crisis

I'm going thru a bit of a hard time. Basically I'm discouraged by the campaign that was making sales. I though all Ihad to do is put it up for content network bid $0.9 a keyword and the sales will come pooring in. Well guess what. They didn't. And I spent a lot of money on the campaign.

I feel overwhelmed with what corrections to make in order to properly sale. The worse part is that traffic is so damn slow on this campaign thru the search network that it drives me nuts!!! Well, I learnt a lessons now didn't I.

I just realized another mistake...this campaign has an alternative ordering method. i.e not thru cc online but thru money order. I think I need to stay away from those since they do not give me an authentic number. If I evenr go the SEO route it can be a good idea.

I might take a little break to start over again fresh. I think I will pause the campaign and maybe come back to it.

Good luck

Hello? Stop Changing Your Mind

So, I just want to update here where things stand.
Based on a recommendation from pjs I decided to focus on my selling niche and try and drive more traffic and increase sales. Adding the campaign o MSN was not and is not really adding much traffic, since the search volume there is much lower. So I went the Content Network route taking Felix's advice to start on high bid. I'm now out $220 on this campaign. I would like to try and anlyze my steps and see why they might have been wrong.

This niche has received only 330 clicks and 4 sales. I think I really do need it to get to 500 clicks to know the persistnecy and correct conversion rate. Only then I think I can afford to move to content network and justify the high bids. I need also more capital to work with, and that I will have only when I'm doing better. Another issue is: This niche is moving really slow. Not getting much impressions. So it might not even be worth the time altogether. Well I'm still learning.
So to sum it up:
- Make a budget for each campaign. Once passed - dump it!
- Put up 10 campaigns at a time
- Once selling, bring it to a positive ROI before starting the content network.

Hope I do better next time.

Good Kick in The Butt

Today pjs wrote a very good post about choosing your clickbank products. He ends off saying how he can't stop stressing the 10 niches statistic.
This is a good kick in the butt for me. Because I think I was getting lazy (and I will explain why soon) and making myself all these excuses why I need to take it slower. So yea, it did take off pressure. But it also took off me working. I need to get back into it. And if 10 niches mathod works. Heck I'm going to try it.

The reason I could not handle 10 niches was because just the thought of it made me cross eyed. It takes me FOREVER (10-15) hours for each campaign. Now, if I was doing this full time that's one campaign a day. But I don't have all day!
So I realized something. There is a niche that is selling. And all niches are getting impressions. And at the end of the day these are the pretty common keywrods that are selling. The ones that have high numbers on google for both search and compatetion. So what I need to do is majorly lay off the keyword work. The initial stage is a trial. You simply cannot put your guts into something that might fail. I have a good example from life. I put in hours and hours on a niche. I segmented all my keywrods. Heck I even made seperate campaigns and landing pages for the various groups. And what was the return on this hard work? between "poor" and "ok" QS on my keywords!!! Can you believe it??? That's an example of working your butt for possible nothing. Although I'm also learning now, so it wasn't a complete waist of time. Plus, if I improve and optimize it I might be able to do very well.
So, action items for myself:
- Pause all campaigns besides the one selling.
- Get 5 more campaign from Clickbank going
- Do all this by Sat night (inclusive)

Self Loyalty

Wow do I have major issues with keeping my promisses to myself!! This might be a big problem with this journey. But it's nothing I do not have control over.

I keep setting myself borders and limits and I keep breaking them. I said I will post more often and yet it has been a week since my last post. I promissed myself no blogs and no forums un till I finish 2 campains and yet I do not keep to it.

To succeed in this business you need major self disciplent.

Anyway, back to business.
I found myself a fellow AM beginner which we share thoughts with. I think this is an important part in AM or any business. Having some one to consult with on your level so you can leatn together.

Secondly, I'm taking the campaign that has sales and trying to optimize it. These are the steps I took:
- Moved the non-selling kw into their own adgroup.
- Started an MSN campaign with the selling KWs. (might expand further)
- Created a content network campaign with the selling KWs theme.
- Added about 1000 misspelling keywords to the selling ones.
- Added domains containing the selling keywords.

I will keep you posted on the results.

The Right Goals

I've decided to start posting more often. I need to be able to back track my thoughts and why I decided to do what I'm doing.

Origionally I thought I need to take to the approach of putting up 10 campaigns at a time to test them.
Since I'm very limited on time, I can only afford to barely post 10 campaigns a month. So That is going to be my initial goal. Every month 10 campaigns!
After I put up a campaign and time passes and I move on to new campaings, I will still monitor old campaigns. On these campaigns I will make sure:
- I'm getting enough clicks to reach 500 clicks within 2 weeks.
- Quality Score on all keywords is "Greart".

My game plan is: Stop everything I am doing to and go back to that compaign and make sure it complies with those requirements.

Another important decision that I'm making is that I'm dedicating my first 10 campaigns to properly study Affiliate Marketing and try and get to a comfortable level of working mwthod. The main benefit of this decision is avoiding all o my dilemas if to invest time in a campaign that might not be profitable. This way I'm not investing time for profit but rather for study, and it is well worth the time. Another side affect is that I will be able to tell in the future if it's worth investing in a campaign.

I'm going to take this plan as it goes and probably have to change and modify it along the way.
I'm going to set a deadline for when this "study" time is over.

I'm also thinkning it will take off the unncessery pressure to just post a campaign. It allow me to take all the necessery steps to optimize the campaign.

Good luck!

April Report

It has been a while since my last post (I seam to be opening a lot of my posts that way. I should probably stop)

It's not because I quit but on the contrary I have been very busy with my campaigns. Before I elaborate more on my work I would like to post the report for the month of April.

So expenses were:

Adwords: $113.31

Income:

Clickbank sales: $44

So the month of April I'm in a loss of a total of -$69.31

My origional goal was profit of $100 from at least one campaign.

So I would like to dedicate this post to try and analyze the month of April.

So first of all the reason I did not reach my financial goal is because I only ended up putting up 2 campaigns. It simply isn't realistic to make money from your first two campaigns. The fact I even made sales is probably very uncommon too.

Another issue is keeping to my tasks. I set myself some tasks for the week of Pessach. I did not complete even one of them. I keep giving myself dealines, aultimatimus and restrictions. And I always end up breaking them.

I would tell myself:

No blog reading until I put up 2 campaigns- FAILED

No movies until I put up 10 campaigns - FAILED

I origionally set a financial goal of $10,000/mo by Oct '08. The problem is, it's just not real enough. I don't know what it means to make $10,000/mon. I don't have a plan to acheive this goal because I don't even have solid statistics to work with.

I therefore have to set a new goal which is not fonancial at all. I need to decide on a method of work. A routine which I can follow for every single campaign.

For every campaign I need to set a maximum amount of time, after which I golive with what I have. Each step of the campaign creation must have a time limit and definiton. When I say definition I mean borders. A good example is keyword research. How wide do I actually go.How many keywords do I start with. and son on...

I will try to make a post containing awork plan.

Then once I have a work plan and real statistics to work with, I can actually have financial goal.

Good luck to us all.

New Goal

I did not check the Hebrew dates of the upcoming Affiliate Summit. Unfortunately it falls out on the 9th of Av. This is a very sad day for the Jewish people. The destruction of our temple occurred in this day, so we fast mourn all day. I therefore will not be able to attend the Affiliate Summit (priorities man).

So my new goal is:
$10,000/Mo within Six months.

I want my Oct 30th report to reflect a profit of at least $10,000!!!
It’s going to take hard work. But I am up for it and will do it with G-d’s help!

Good Luck to us all!

Work the Read/Learn

I want to talk about a very big problem in Affiliate Marketing. I find myself too many times just reading and reading and reading blogs, forums e-books, websites etc. etc. This is a very big problem and prevents many of us to just start. And even when we start it slows us down a lot!!

So what's the solution? I'm trying this "trick" on myself now. I will let you know that outcome.
What I told myself is like this: After every two campaigns that I put up to run I "treat" myself and dedicate a whole evening to read material. This way I get work done and satisfy that need to read.
Another great advantage is that you get to experience the steps of Affiliate Marketing and then when you read about various work methods you can more easily decide if they apply to you and you won't have that "info overload" problem. If you have a higher tolorence that I do then I would say to even try and put up three or four campaigns beofore allowing yourself to read.

Good luck!

Yay! I think I made a mistake

All the pros talk about learning from your mistakes. It always bothered me that I don't think I learn from my mistakes.
I'm excited today because I think I found a mistake and I think I learnt something from it. I decided to go with the approach of waiting for 400/500 clicks on campaign to asess it's profitability. I put up two campaigns so far. One of them has 120 keywords. Since April 8 I got 150 clicks on this campaign with a CTR of 2.5%. It's just taking forever to reach that 400 clicks goal.
So I think when I start a campaign I need to set myself a goal for a minimum amount of keywords. That amount should be significant - Say 500-1000. I'll have to look into this.
A way to do that is to follow Amit's advice to start with breadth keyword research.
I'm getting the impressions so I need to improve CTR:
- By making sure I'm higher than the 8th position
- Perhaps Improving ad copy and the like (not sure about this one yet)

These steps should probably help me reach that 400 clicks goal much sooner.

Good luck

How Much To Bid Part II

In "How Much To Bid Part I" I got a little side tracked, but the information I spoke about were important none the less.

So how much to start the bid with?

So you already know - from Part I - that the initial stage is research. You have no idea what keyword will bring in the sales. In order for you to be able to give all your keywords a fare chance you must make sure they all appear on the first page in Google. So practical steps:
- start off with a unified bid for all keywords. Pick any amount (usually around $0.20).
- Wait 2 days and check the avg. position for the keywords.
- Increase by %20 - %30 all the keywords with avg. position 8 and lower. If some of the keywords are really showing up in high number positions then consider even doubling the bid for those keywords. I would like to just clarify: At this stage you are

Goal: Affiliate Summit East

I haven't really set myself a long term goal yet. I set a goal to make $100 by April 30. Well we'll have to see if I meet that goal.

My "long-term" goal is the affiliate summit taking place this Aug in Boston. My goal is to attend it. I'm going to need $1000 for a ticket + $949 entrance fee + spending money = $3000. So I need to be making an extra $3000 by Aug.

$3000/Mo by Aug 1st!!!!

Good luck

Holiday Game Plan

Since the holiday of Passover is coming I would just like to make myself a game plan. It is custom not to do any work during the holiday. Our sages tell us that any work done on Chol Hamoed will not be fruitful.

I will take the next week to learn. I want to read up on some topics that will help me with my business. In addition it would be a good time to learn the various environments I work with.

So here is my game plan for the next coming week:
- Try and finish Robert Kiyosaki’s book - 6 Hours
- Learn Google Analytics and become an expert – 5 Hours
- Learn the various reports available from Google AdWords – 2 Hours
- Deepen my knowledge and options available from AdWords – 2 Hours
- Learn the art of Pre-Selling
- Review some blogs and forums to learn, learn and learn – The more the better.

And of course enjoy the holiday and have fun with my family.

No peaking

I decided it's important to keep track of my actions, so once again I will write apost eventhough I said I am taking a break.

I checked my campaigns performence today. I did that because I raised the price last night and wanted to evaluate the impact. So far can't really tell.

I'm beging to gain some clicks on one of the campaigns. 52 to be exact. Of course I could not control to check my sales status...so I login into my clickbank account just to see that big ugly $0. The clicks cost me $23 already. But 52 clicks aint gonna cut it. I was very discoureged for a moment. Felt like "what am I doing here" and negative thougths like that. Well my friends, here's the real test for Affiliate Marketers. Dealing with things like that. The absurd part is that 52 clicks is no where neer enough to evaluate. My goal is 400 - 500 clicks, remember?
It's taking so damn long but that's because I only put up one campaign at a time. So another reason to go the multiple way.

So conclusions:
- Do not check sales status before 200 clicks!! Period!!
- Bulk launch of campaigns
- Focus on CTR

I will be putting up a post of my game plan for the next coming week. Since it's holiday I'm can't really do work. I will have to tkae the time to learn some important info and read helpful books.

Work Strategy

I know I said no post for a week. But I have got to organize my thoughts and actions.

So first, I have two live campaigns. At first I was getting barely any clicks. I implemented a simple tip I read on Felix's blog. And shebang the clicks started coming in. I will elaborate on this method another time.

I started off one campaign at a time. This was a good way to start since I needed to just move my butt. But I think it will be more fruitful to work on 10 campaigns simultaneously. Meaning, research and choose 10 niches, do keyword research on all 10, write ads for all 10 etc. There are a few reasons this is better:
1. You master one skill at a time. Better (I think) than scattering all over doing different skills.
2. After all the hard work, you have 10 campaigns running at once. One should hopefully be a good one. Also by doing one at a time, I find my self "peeking" way too many times at the campaign.

So currently this is what I am doing:
I already chose my 10 niches. I did not do a lot of market research. I chose the products from Clickbank. Based on good gravity, above $20 commission per sale, and relatively interesting topics to me personally.

I'm at the Keyword stage now:
- Search the general term of the niche in Google's tool. Save to a spreadsheet all the words.
- Search for synonyms. And enter them again into this tool. Save to spreadsheet.
- Repeat for all niches.

Right now I'm searching and dumping. I'm not sorting through the keywords I find to sift out the non relevent ones. After researching all 10 I will then sift through each nichs. I will have to see if this method is efficient, or is it better to fully research and sift out right from the begining each niche.

Eitherway, after I finish keyword researching all the niches I am debating if to:
a. Further research keywords by:
- Read the sales letter
- Use more keyword tools
- Brows around the net
b. Just go to the next stage of segmentation

It might make sense not not sift thru the keywords at first, then do option a above and at the same time sift out and learn new words. Reason being, I do not know enough about the niche to just sift out keywords.

We'll see.

A Little Break...Do Not Worry

I'm going to focus this next coming week on getting up as much campaigns as I can. So I will have to take a break from posting here, since time is not something I have much of.

See you in a week or so.

How Much To Bid Part I

An Affiliate Marketer must realize that the initial stage of a campaign is really testing the waters. In this first stage you are trying out the market. And when you think of it, this is one of the greatest advanteges of Affiliate Marketing over a regular online business and even a bigger advantage when comparing to a land business. The worst that could happen when a market isn't right is, that you lose a few buck. All you have got to do is move on to the next market.



So, as I was saying...This is NOT a stage where you are looking to be profitable. You are spending money on PPC at this stage to test the market. No matter how much research you do before starting a campaign you don't really know how it is going to work out for you. The results can differ from your intial research in a good way or a "bad" way.



You can research a market and see that there is great demand and reasonable competition. But then when you actually start the campaign it just does not work for you. The flip side is, researching to find out it is a tough market, then you find out you are very successful with it.



As a "newbie" Affiliate Marketer it is very crucial to not spend days weeks and months on research. If you do that you will never really start. In the begining you need to follow some general guidlines that the pros talk about and just go with it!!! In this business you have to fail so you can learn how to improve. Reading all the books in the world simply will not cut it. Once you become a proffesional Marketer then you can afford to really research and test a market. Simply because then you'll know how to research and what to look out for.



There is another reason to just go with it. I will bring a personal example:

I was looking around on clickbank for a product to promote. I came accross one that looked good. I then did a quick keyword research on the general term. It wasn't that great in terms of demand and competition. I decided to give it a chance. So I started reading thru the vendors sales page with an open Word document to take notes, to identify more keywords. And I did.

This post will have to be continues

Tools: AdWords Editor and Xconversions

Today I would like to recommend two very powerfulL tools that I recently started using.

The first tool is free and provided by Google: AdWords Editor.
If I am not mistaken a tool with similar funcationalities was/is being sold. It's nice to get a free tool from google. Just so you realize the power of this tool:
Multi-editing. I was able to double the amount of my adgroups in a matter of minutes. I think the tool can use some enhancements, but considering the fact it is free it's great as is. I still need to use it much more to REALLY utilize it and know how to interact with it the best way. If one thing I am learning in this business is that time is money. The more you get the techincal things out of your way the more time you will have to focus on what is important: Market research, analyzing reports, etc etc

Another tool I would like to recommend is Xtreme Conversions. This is a paid tool. I don't know how I was able to do affiliate marketing without this tool in the past. In fact I remember back in the days, I ran a "Diet" related campaign. I actually was getting sales and lots of them, but abanded it because my costs were exceeding my income or breaking even. I had no strategy. I was paying for many keywords that were being clicked without having the slightest clue which keywrods were bringing in the sales. If I only I knew what I know today :(

So anyway, the conclusion for this post is:
Try to always look for ways to save TIME. Even if it means parting from a "few buck". If you focus on the important side of your busines, you won't only be more profitable, but I believe you'll enjoy the business much more too.

Good luck

Mark This Day April 8, 2008

Well folks, it's official. My business is live! This is a day for celebration. I took action.

So today I finally finished all the technical setups: website and xconversions. And at 22:30PM I activated my first campaign. This is a special day for me. Eventhough this isn't my first campaign in history, I feel like it is.

Now I know (in my mind) this is baerly the begining. And there is a very good chance (statistically) that this first campaign of mine will not be profitable. I'm hoping I will have the emotional strength to let it go if it fails.

This is my plan:
I have a budget right now of about $1500. Since statistically 1 out of 10 (more or less) will be a successful one, I'm giving every campaign a maximum budget of about $150. This means I have to work pretty hard on every campaign. Because I want to be able to really give the nich a fair chance and the way to do that is by doing a good keyword research, good landing page and good market research. I have to admit that for my first campaign my market research was very basic, but I just had to get this going already. That alone can be worth a lot of money even if it does fail.

So from here on I will try to post my lessons and what I am learning from a live and real campaign. No more speculations and assumptions!!!!

Cheeeeeeeeeeeers.

Time Is Money So Be Patiant

The title might sound contradicting. So let me explain.

I recently purchased a supposedly great tool called "Xconversions". Super affiliates are really recommending this tool, so I decided to get it.
After the installation, which went pretty smoothly, the tool was not working. It simply was not doing what it was supposed to do. The tool creator has a forum and a support system for this tool. So I spent FOUR hours (!!!) on trying to figure out the problem. And guess what, I still did not resolve it. So I opened a ticket, and now waiting for a response.

Let's analyze what happened here:
I was eager to get this tool working already. I saw that others on the forum had the same problem so I figured I can get it working. Aside from that I have a very strong "pull" to figure out technical stuff and why they are not working (like most computer people). This was clearly a mistake. I did not learn much from the whole experience, and worse I wasted valuable time. I could’ve probably had another whole campaign ready to launch when I stabilize all these issues.

So, I have opened a ticket at 9:15 PM (15 min after the problem occurred) and just PATIANTLY waited for a response and in the meantime, did REAL marketing work I think I would have been better off.

There's another underlying issue which I want to bring out. I have these urges to just start already. I have this fantasy as soon as I get that first campaign going, the money will poor in. This usually is not the case. There is no rush in this business. And I need to realize that I need to take all the time I need to do this right.
I do not have to worry about “taking action”, because this is taking action. Reading books and forums all day, that’s sitting on the bars. What I’m dealing with are legitimate issues any business owner might run into. The trick is to learn how to deal with them without losing your cool or motivation.

This brings me to another potential outcome from the above behavior. One can loose motivation very quickly if one keeps wasting time on technical things like the above problem.

The rule of thumb for spending time should be as follows:
If some one else can fix your problem faster, do NOT waste time on it. If you can REALLY learn from this problem, and any time spent now will save you time in the future then take the time to understand the issue and resolve it. Treat it like a learning curve for your business.

Wow, this is a longer post than I thought, but one of the reasons for this blog is to analyze my behaviors and learn.

Keyword Organizing

After detecting a potential niche, the next step is keyword research.

Currently I use some free tools. I purchased a couple of tools several years ago. Being that they mainly relied on Overture's Keyword Tool which stopped it's free services, they aren't very useful to me these days. Once I become a professional Affiliate Marketer and make decent money I will probably purchase a Keyword Discovery or Wordracker subscription, and the I can use these tools again (they rely on KW Discovery and Wordracker APIs).

Anyway this is how I currently perform my Keyword research:
1 . I enter the most general term for my niche into any of the free keyword tools I use.
2. I identify the "sub-keywords" of the niche. For example: If I am searching on "diet". I would identify sub-keywords such as:
Easy, pills, method, free, cheep, etc.
3. I use these words as sub-groups for my master keywords list (I call then "father groups").
4. I head back to the free tools and enter each "father keyword" phrase to get an even more comprehensive list for each sub-group. (I am aware that there are paid tools that do this for me. When I get them, I can skip this particular stage).
5. I create a spreadsheet containing ALL my keywords with filters with the "father groups". This logically organizes my keywords according to groups.

This sets the blue-print for the PPC campaigns I am going to create. In essence these "father groups" will be my ad group division. Since relevance is a big factor for AdWords or any PPC campaign this is very useful way to get that going.

In some niches I would probably have to create "child groups" to each "father group" due to the size of the specific niche.

Good luck