I don’t actually need to make hundreds of thousands of dollars online. My full-time job pays me well, very well in-fact that I don’t need money from online marketing. But, I love making money and it doesn’t hurt to supplement your income to afford other unnecessary toys. So after months of research and talking with friends and co-workers, I have decided to build an online business that requires very little effort and cash so that I can keep my full-time job and have time to enjoy life and family. An additional income of $500 per month is more than satisfactory for my needs. How many of my readers are in the same boat? I am sure there are many.

My new strategy for making money is returning to the old-fashioned content and revenue through Adsense. I like Google’s Adsense revenue stream because it is significantly less effort than a PPC campaign. But that also means equally less revenue comparably. Let me get this straight: I will not build a website, fill it with content, and then sit back and rake in the Adsense revenue. Instead, my website will be built with “just enough” content and “just enough” polish to start bringing in NO MORE than $10 per month and good amount of visitors. Once I have reached this pinnacle goal, I will flip this website. Say wha? Like I said, I don’t want nor do I have the time to put a lot of work into websites. My personality prefers to work on projects in the short term and then quickly move onto something else. So once I’ve built a site that is PROVEN to generate revenue, the website will have enough merit and potential for somebody more dedicated to take it to the next level. I will sell the website for 8x to 10x its monthly revenue and move onto my next project.

For an example to use in this blog for my readers, I registered EpicFailHumor.com to compete with the other top-notch fail blog websites. Fail blogs are in a very competitive niche, but I want to show you that I am not here to compete with the big boys. I just want to make $10 so that it can be sold to somebody else who is more capable of marketing it into something that will be a strong contender and a big revenue generator. This website was designed simple with a plain theme, but fully equipped with SEO and Adsense. The potential buyer will see that the website has room for improvement, the content is strong, there is interest on the site by visitor count (i.e., Google Analytics will be installed), and the topic is familiar to him/her. These are all things that makes the website sellable.

So, let the journey begin. Please follow my website development and look at what I’ve done. Most of the work is behind the scenes, which is what you really want. I will periodically post my visit count and Adsense revenue. I will also post the price that this website sold for. If anybody is interested in buying this website, it is for sale.

Now onto the guide itself. I purchased the guide last week and had a chance to read through the steps to creating a killer niche store. I will be honest and tell you that the information that is authored into the guide is commonly available information that you can find yourself through hours and hours of research and brushing off inaccurate information on the internet. I found that the content put all the information accurate in a single location and tailored it specifically to building a niche store using either BANS or PhpBay.  I think the guide is well worth the money if you are trying to be successful at building a niche store. When I started BANS almost 3 years ago, I had such a tough time gathering and filtering all the information. Wish I had this guide then.

Review sites are a great technique for promoting CPA offers. The goal is to “review” various products/services from the same niche and recommend which is the best. When punters come to your review sites, they are seeking an authority figure to provide them with information about the product/service to assist in their buy decision. A person looking for a product/service review is in buying mode and just needs a trigger to push the button.

A successful review site is one that keeps the landing page design very basic and simple. I would ensure that the all the offers on the page has a rating, like the yellow stars used by Amazon, and a brief commentary about why it deserved that star rating. It is my opinion that there shouldn’t be more than 5 offers on a review site to ensure that all the offers can be displayed on the page with very little scrolling (i.e. keep all reviews above the fold). At the same time, I would not have fewer than 3 offers on a review site either.

Also, the review site needs to rank the offers, showing which one is the best and worst in the niche. Ideally, you want the offer with the best conversion rate or the highest payout to be the one ranked as the best.

Sometimes, you may find an offer in a niche that does not have any competing CPA offers. In this situation, just find any competitor (non CPA) and showcase them on your review site. Just ensure that they are not the most recommended offer on your review site and the punter will never click on it. You need to have multiple offers for this review site technique to work. A review site with only one product is a testimonial and requires a different marketing strategy.

The last thing I would like to add is do not sound like a salesman when writing your review. Keep the review genuine and honest. Finally, ensure that you mix and match your ratings. Don’t give every offer 5 stars! Make it look realistic.

For more landing page ideas, please visit: http://ppcbully.com/blog/?p=431

There are two approaches of using quizzes to promote a CPA offer:

1. As a reward: In this technique, you let the punter go through the process of performing the quiz and then reward them with “a chance to win” something from your CPA offer.
2. As a reality check: In this technique, the quiz is used to ask the punter how much he or she knows about a particular topic. After completing the quiz, you tell them that they should buy/purchase your product so that their life can benefit from it.

Let me try to explain with an example for each of the techniques above.

Reward Quizzes

In this technique, you provide a quiz to test the punter’s knowledge about a popular topic such as Britney Spears. You have to create 5-10 questions about Britney Spears and ask the punter to do the quiz to see how worthy of a fan the punter is. You would want to make the questions really obvious so that the punter will get most of the questions correct and then you can reward the punter with some Britney Spears ringtones or a chance to win something for answering all questions correctly.

Reality Check Quizzes

Say you want to promote debt relief CPA offers. Instead of jumping up and down asking the punter to visit your website and sign up for debt relief, you are better off creating a quiz whereby you ask the punter to answer a set of questions to determine if the punter is in control of his finances or if he/she needs assistance with debt relief. After providing responses to the quiz, your landing page would then tell the punter that he/she needs assistance with debt consolidation and then show your CPA offer explaining how your offer can benefit the punter and assist him with his financial problems.

The reason why reality check quizzes are effective is because the outcome of the quiz stirs and emotion close to home that something is wrong in the person’s life and that he needs to find a solution. Coincidentally, you offered a solution at the end of the quiz.

This is as far as I’m going to explain the quiz technique. There are many types of quizzes to implement and many different offers you can promote with quizzes. The possibilities are endless and it is up to you to think-outside-the-box and create some interesting quizzes for your CPA offers.  Give quizzes a try and if you are successful at using this technique to promote CPA offers, please report back and let us know of your experiences. Unfortunately, PPC Coach does not promote this technique, so you won’t be able to receive coaching for quizzes. However, I am sure you will find users there that have tried this technique and are able to give you some advice and direction.

I learnt this technique from Wicked Fire forums where a member had heard about a topic on the radio and setup a poll topic based on that. The key to a successful poll is to catch the internet wave on a hot topic before the rest of the internet catches up and blogs/posts about it everywhere. You want to be first up to the plate with a site about the topic. The more emotion you create out of the topic, the better your chances of having the punter vote and enter their e-mail.

There are numerous sources for poll topics including radio and TV news coverage. But my favorite is using Yahoo! Buzz and Google Insights to see what keywords internet users are actually looking for.

There are too many tips, tricks, and techniques for using the polls method that I cannot possibly cover them all in this post. If you are interested in working with the poll technique, signup for PPC Coach and use their coaching program to walk you through this technique. You can share your poll setup with members and they will coach you through the entire setup to ensure that you have an effective campaign running.

To help you get started, here is an example of a poll site that you should be setting up. I used my own custom built poll site/script, but you can purchase commercially available poll software just for doing CPA offers. Poll Control and Poll Factory are two of the biggest ones out there. Hope this is enough information to get you started. As mentioned above, PPC Coach is your best bet if you need help running through the details of this technique.

Despite my PPC failures in March, I had an incredible return on my eBay affiliate sites. I cashed in $110.89 from just two sites generating traffic purely through SEO. My sites are simple blogs with links to eBay auction listings. Here is a cool graphic showing my clicks to earnings ratio. I know that my numbers are very low and that there is so much more potential to develop these sites, but I am happy with where they are sitting at the moment.

Instead, you want the diet cola ad to show what life is like if they drank the diet cola. You want to show how their life is improved (or how somebody else’s life is improved). You don’t market the drink directly, but you market the benefits of the drink. There are a million ways to illustrate this. Just turn on the TV and watch the ads displayed. This is called out-of-the-box thinking.

In internet marketing, out-of-the-box thinking is vital to the success of your affiliate marketing business. Do not copy what your competitor is doing, though it may work on the short-term. Do not setup an ad campaign that showcases obvious facts of the product to the consumer. You need to sell the benefits of the product or illustrate how the product will improve the consumer’s life. There are a million ways to illustrate the benefits of a product. As an internet marketer, if you can brainstorm some these out-of-the-box ideas on how a consumer’s life would benefit from your product, then you are in the game.

In my experience, the biggest mistake a beginner makes when doing affiliate marketing is trying to sell the product itself. It is the differentiator between a successful campaign and a losing one. If you are having trouble coming up with novel ideas to promote your product, I suggest signing up for PPC-Coach because they coach you with some examples. You can follow their directions to the letter, but remember what I said above, you need to expand on the directions given and think like an internet marketer to be truly successful in this game.

So the next time you setup your ad campaign, ask yourself whether you are showing the benefits of the product, as opposed to selling to the features of the product. Let me know how it goes.

Back from Vegas

I spent all of last week in Vegas on a business trip, not related to affiliate marketing. There was no chance to do affiliate marketing while on the road, but I had many opportunities to see how advertising is done in a different region. Since this was my first Vegas experience, it was interesting to see that sex sells and this is flaunted all over the main strip in Vegas. The city definitely does not sleep. Here are some pics I took with my old Pentax dSLR and let’s get to the real updates.

Affiliate Marketing Status

I setup 5 more campaigns before leaving for Vegas and although I got the clicks really cheap on the Google content network, I could not for the life of me get any conversions. This was my first Canadian offer that I tried that can be found in MaxBounty. I have had no luck getting any leads with MaxBounty, despite sending hundreds of traffic to the offers on their network. At the moment, I am not blaming MaxBounty or the advertiser. The quality of my traffic may have been poor and weren’t the kind punters to go submitting lead offers. I have not tried launched any more campaigns since because I got a nice little surprise from my old campaigns.

eBay Affiliate Makes a Comeback

So get this, I log into eBay Partner Network (EPN) and I see >$130.00 sitting there. To my surprise two of my older EPN websites generated decent traffic in the first 2 weeks of March and also resulted in some pretty big conversions. One site was a BANS (Build a Niche Store) site and the other was a Wordpress site running PHPBayPro. So I spent the all my time after I returned tweaking those sites and giving it a bit more SEO to see if I can keep the momentum going. I am really stoked about my Wordpress EPN site because it was my first blog-based site. All my EPN sites had an EPC of $70 or higher. Now that is pretty insane for little to no advertising cost; all organic Google traffic only.

The great thing about EPN sites are that they are great for long-term income. They don’t generate much profit if you don’t do much work pushing and promoting it. It is pretty much setup once and forget it forever.

For the last few weeks, I have been trying my hardest to get into Express Revenue. I had sent in my application, then missed a phone call, and got my application denied. Not a big deal … just call them up and get this sorted out just like every other affiliate network right?

I have attempted to contact Express Revenue numerous times without any success. The toll-free number provided was not serviceable from outside the U.S. Since I am in Canada, I get a busy signal. So the next best thing was through AIM. I installed AIM just for this, sent a message to an affiliate manager that was online to call me back, and still received no calls.

Guys, this shouldn’t be THIS painful. If you run a business and are contacted, I expect to receive adequate response. If this is the way they run their business, how can I trust sending my traffic to them that cost me money? Maybe I can’t and shouldn’t.

If you are an Express Revenue affiliate manager and would like to work with me, please feel free to use the Contact Me link on the top of the page to reach me. Otherwise, I won’t sweat it as you can see that my list of affiliate network is quite long already. Besides, Neverblue rocks!

UPDATE – Mar 19, 2009

I got contact with a senior affiliate manager at Express Revenue. Hope to see what he can do for me over the next few days. There’s hope yet for this network.

Affiliate Networks

I doubled my affiliate networks so now I have more sources for my offer research.  This month, I added the following to my portfolio:

• Wotogepa
• affiliate.com
• Net Partner
• Market Leverage
• Revenue Wire
• Motive Interactive
• Clickbank
• Hydra Network

Campaigns

I launched 10 e-mail submit campaigns in February. None of them were profitable, though I had the most success with Neverblue. I’ve sent many many traffic to other networks including MaxBounty, Amped Media, Wotogepa, and Azoogle. But none of them would convert so the advertiser on those networks were scrubbing me quite heavily. My traffic sources were good quality, so I have stopped using them for the time being and sticking to the few decent offers from Neverblue to promote e-mail submits.

Revenue

This is where February was less than stellar. My total spend on PPC was $150.00, but my revenue was only $27.00. For those lazy to do the math, that’s a $123.00 loss. However, I am treating this as a $123.00 investment in my education on PPC marketing. It was indeed a very valuable lesson if you have been following my blog. Just read all my posts for the month of February to see what I’ve learned along the way. There are so many nuances of PPC advertising that you cannot learn without trying and failing. My mastermind group has been a great help too and they have been motivating me and contributing to the knowledge base in many many ways.

Take a look at my chart from Neverblue (the only network that is converting for me). Boy I hope my revenues will be 1000x higher before the end of the year.

Conclusion

I think February was a good learning month as I analyze and over-analyze the PPC strategy and launch campaigns to learn what works and what doesn’t. I have generated many new ideas to try and with time, these ideas will be vetted to see what works best for me. Unfortunately, there is no better way to learn about PPC than to try it and figure out what works and what doesn’t. The results vary from individual to individual so there is no magic formula that I can write here. The folks in my mastermind group are all trying different techniques with varying degress of success.  So if you are thinking about PPC and have not launched yet, get cracking.