thailanddave

Ive been a lurker here for a while. I had my first CPA successes this week that I thought I would like to share with everyone. Mainly Im picking you folks cuz none of my friends would understand.

Let me tell you a little about me first just to bore you. Im 52, well above the average age of most of you guys. I have owned a couple brick and mortar businesses, some failed and a couple successes. One of the success stories was that I saw the Internet taking off in 97. I started looking for opportunities. I was trying to buy my girlfriend a used car at the time and spent time driving from car lot to car lot. I decided to start an Automotive Portal 3 years before cars.com or autotrader.com got in the business. I taught myself basic HTML and hired a salesperson. I did 23 of the 55 car dealers first websites in San Diego. We offered to list their used car inventory on our site for $500/mo if we did their website. When I started doing webpages, we would have to convince the dealers they needed one. By the time I sold the company, they knew if their website was down for more than 10 minutes. I was able to sell the company AFTER the dotcom bubble burst for low 6 figures in 2001.

My point of telling this story is that I do know a little about HTML and running a business.

I have been playing around with adsense and SEO for the past couple years without much luck. I spent time on the blackht sites and a lot of time here. I had very little success, I make about $100/quarter but I don't spend a lot of time working it.

I started reading the CPA/PPC threads. One of the things I came to realize was that most IMs want to make money without making an initial investment. They spend a lot of time writing articles and doing back-linking not knowing what the success ratio is going to be. You can spend literally months not knowing if the time you put in is actually going to pay off. Then you have to keep adding more time and articles to keep it ranked high on the search engines if you ever get there in the first place.

If you start a brick and mortar business, you will have a minimum of $5K invested before you open the doors.

I read through Sajnish Gupta's posts and decided to invest in his Adwords Reinvented. He claims he quit his 6 figure/yr job to focus on PPC marketing. His course is a solid foundation. Im not flogging his stuff. In reality, you can find about 80% of it on the forums but I wanted something that was organized and step-by-step. I was not disappointed. He also had some insights that are invaluable for someone starting out.

Most of the posts I read about PPC successes immediately ask how much the poster had to spend to make money like its some negative aspect. In any business, whether you are selling shoes or cell phones you have an investment. If you are selling groceries, you are lucky to get a 5% profit margin. If you can get a 30-40% return, you'll soon have so many competitors that you will see your margins fall. I know, I owned the largest independent pager company in San Diego in the 90's. Competitors would constantly come in, undercut prices, screw up the market and then go out of business.

Ok, here are some basic tips for CPA/PPC I have gleaned for a complete newbie.

1. Don't use Google. Its too expensive for just starting out.
2. Yahoo has a free $60 coupon just for signing up. Minimum to open a Yahoo account is $30. So you can start your business with $90 in the account, $30 from you, $60 from them.
3. Set your daily spending limit at $10. Yahoo automatically debits your account for 3 days budget ($30) anytime you fall below 3 days of budget. This means you can test for up to 6 days without danger of Yahoo automatically debiting your account for another $30. If you say you are going to budget $50 per day, they will take it in $50 chunks and you will probably hit your limit on the 2nd day.
4. Set your keyword bid price at the absolute minimum of 10 cents. When you load your list of keywords, most will come up with "bid too low". They will tell you what the minimum bid is for each keyword. Some of them will show up at 10 cents tho. I adjusted mine up about 5 cents over the minimum. Let the campaign run for a while. It will show you the number of times your ad was shown (impressions) and the approximate placement. You can then adjust your bids up if you want to placed higher but remember YOU DONT HAVE TO BE ON PAGE ONE TO GET CLICKS. Im testing in a highly competitive industry. I got the most clicks on a keyword with my average ad position of 20.8. I'll bid this one up and take some notes. If I get more hits at a higher position, I'll pay more. If not, I'll drop my bid back down
5. Test Test and Re-Test. Don't make just one ad, make 3 or 4. Yahoo will rotate them evenly for a while and then start using the better converting one. You don't have to make big changes. If your ad reads "Instant Approval, 5 line form" make a second ad with the same title but reads "5 line form, Instant Approval". You'll be surprised how much a small change can affect click through rate. I have two ads that are virtually identical except the order of the features. One gets twice as many clicks as the other. If you are using landing pages, make 2 or 3 and see which one converts better.
6. Join a couple different CPA networks. I have been with CJ for a couple years. I ran my first CPA ad with one of their advertisers. It was supposed to convert on finishing a 9 line application. I sent them over 50 clicks but no conversions. I called the affiliate manager. He told me "we dont consider it a conversion unless the loan funds (payday loans). We would go out of business if we just paid for aps". Rather than arguing with him, I switched to another network. I sent the new affiliate 20 clicks today and earned $50. Not a lot of money but considering it only cost me $7.34 (36 cents each) I think its a great victory.
7. Research - Read every post in this forum about CPA, join other forums about CPA/PPC. Most times you will get nothing, only arguments and boasting but every so often you'll pick up something you can use. Sign up for everybody's newsletters. Create a separate email address to get the loads of junk mail but as above, every so often you'll get a golden nugget you can use. Go to Youtube and search for CPA marketing and watch all the vids. When you pick a market, go read every ad from your competitors. Don't read it as a competitor, read it as a shopper. Who's ad would you click on? Copy it if you have to and make a minor variation. Then click on the ad and see where it takes you. Are they using a landing page or directly linking to the advertiser. Take notes. Steal all the info you can.
8. Tracking -Track everything. When you find an ad that doesn't work, pause it but don't delete it. You may end up forgetting what didnt work and make a similar ad in the future if you delete it. If you pause it, it will always be there to remind you what doesnt work. I signed up for a free report from Gauher Chaudhry. Good info. Then he sent me a free tracking spread sheet thats excellent. I may end up buying something from him because his tools so far have been great.
9. Dont give up. For me it is happening very quickly but remember, I have a lot of real life business experience and advertising experience. Your learning curve may be a little steeper than mine but the fact that I am seeing success in the first week tells me this is a gold mine.

I hope this helps someone. I havent made a great deal of money but my stats are what has me excited. Today I made $50. I paid out about $8 in clicks. Yesterday I spent about $10 and didnt make anything. The day before I made $20 on an investment of $6. Do you see where Im going with this? Once you (I) get a solid track record, I can increase my income by increasing my spending to $20 or even $200 per day. Or I can move over to Google. My costs will be higher but I should get 10 times the traffic. I have never had a business take off so quickly with these kind of margins. You can test CPA/PPC for less than $100 to see if its for you. I can already tell its for me. Good Luck!

wtd1010

Welcome Thailand Dave

I just turned 49, I'm a retired Navy guy with a couple years of successful car sales under my belt. I'm happy to read that I am not the only person over 40 on the forum.
Though the internet and IM is not new to me, the CPA biz is a more recent challenge. So far, so good.
I will look forward to reading your posts and following your success.
Again, welcome to the forum and continued success in all your endeavors.
Regards,

Wayne

mrenish

Thanks Thailand Dave, You just got me excited to try CPA. To be honest I have going through lotsa pdf's downloaded from this forum about IM but I'am confused where to start off from.

CPA seems to be interesting after reading your post. I have downloaded a CPA manual on step by step procedure on how to get started.

wish me luck!

Art Peterson

Thanks ThailandDave. I love the fact that you pointed out margins of 5% is not unusual for big business.

So when I only get say 15-30% margins on my cpa stuff I dont feel so bad, but there is always room for improvement.

Great post.

makingmoneyagain

TD,
I'm a youngster at 46 on this thread. I like to read the stories of what other noobs are doing to get started. The best FREE advice I can give to others: just keep reading this forum. Your head will spin after a while but there is a ton of good free info here.

Greg

NickR06

Thanks for this post Thailand Dave. I'm 48, like yourself I have run several offline business ventures. I'm amused by the reluctance of people to spend money on advertising. One of the problems is that the cost of entry to internet marketing is so low. Going the article/SEO route still costs in terms of time. I would rather set up mini ppc campaigns and fail fast in order to discover what converts. When you find winners you can scale up and go down the seo/article marketing route with the knowledge that valuable time will not be wasted. As I get older I value my time far more than money.

Thanks

Nick

RA123

Nice post Dave - wishing u more success with CPA/PPC.

The advice given here is solid - start small and test test test. It's the only way to stop your pockets burning out in the ppc business.

Riz

Kenster

You hit some solid points in your post.

Scaling: The great thing about ppc to cpa is the ability to scale quickly. The difference between making 50 and 500 per day is not that much at all.

Testing: This is in my opinion the key to making thousands per day. You must test and test and test and continually try and optimize campaigns. You start more general such as testing types of landing pages such as review sites vs news article site vs straight up pre sell. Once you find the best overall site type then you work on site design and structure. Then you test copy and then colors and titles and graphics etc. You may easily start out in the red but throughout this process you work the campaign into the black by always split testing. Eventually you have an optimized campaign and you can sit back, do some monitoring, and watch the money roll in passively.

And the great thing about all this testing (which isnt easy and takes a lot of hard work and time) is that you now havea great foundation for future campaigns. I have optimized landing pages and used that same landing page for completely different offers and done very well right off the bat. So, its a lot of work in the beginning but its work that will pay off.


Tracking is the second most important point in my opinion that you touched on. Tracking down to the keyword level is absolutely critical. Naturally a great majority of your keywords are not going to get good margins and will lose you money. Thus, if you arent tracking, almost every one of your campaigns is going to sink. But, if you are tracking down to the keyword level and weeding out bad keywords and expanding on your good ones, you will eventually have a campaign with all break even or profitable keywords. Be diligent about tracking and set up parameters as to when you will dump a keyword. For example, for every keyword, if I get x amount of clicks and dont get at least y conversions for that particular keyword, I will dump that keyword. Monitor your campaign activly and once you hit that point, dump the keywords. This is how you weed the bad ones out.


Lastly realize that there is going to be a lot of work if you are doing ppc to cpa and most of the work will be for nothing. You can put 30 hours into a campaign and that campaign may still be unprofitable with little hope at turning it profitable. You may do this 10x before you find that golden campaign that makes 2k per day. You have got to put in the work and keep pushing or else you may never find that golden campaign.


Best of luck. With your business experience, I am confident you will have the dedication and general business and marketing acumen that will help you succeed in this business. Be patient, work hard and the "green days" will be not far off.

makingmoneyagain

For us noobs here, what exactly is scaling and how does it relate to ppc?

Greg

thailanddave

Im getting lots of positive feedback, so first let me say thanks. Keep in mind, I am a complete noob at this stuff and Im bound to make mistakes. I see that a few of the people looking at this thread are very experienced, so if I make a wrong assumption, hopefully they will correct it. That will help me but also the other other noobs who are trying to learn.

Part of what I am trying to do is to prove you can start this business on a shoe string. So far, I have invested a total of $30 plus the cost of the educational material. I am not going to count the educational material in my ROI because to me, education is so invaluable, it does not need to be amortized. Education stays with you forever and will have many applications in the future. OK, enough for speeches.

I have been trying to figure out EPC for a while. It is one of the simplest things, yet I wasnt applying it correctly.

Yes, I know its earnings per click, but how can you apply it? First, we have to look at how they calculate it. Its rather simple. What ever the merchant pays you divided by the number of clicks it takes to get a sale.

Earnings/clicks = EPC

As a newbie, I just looked for the highest EPC. But lets look a little further. If I have a merchant who pays $15/lead and their EPC is $1, I know, on average that for every 15 leads I send them, I should be able to get 1 conversion.

Earnings/EPC = clicks.

This also gives me my ceiling for keyword bids. Why would I spend $2 for a click on a keyword if Im only going to get $1 back?

I started a campaign with about 50 or 60 keywords. I set the minimum bid at 10 cents and Yahoo tells me which ones I can get for 10 cents and the minimum bid for the others. Now I can tell which words are worth bidding on for my campaign. Anything over $1, and I'd be losing money. There is a minor exception tho. I have noticed that I rarely pay the bid price for a click. Usually its half to 3/4. Your bid is the most you would pay. If the next highest bidder below you is 50 cents, your ad will run at 51 cents so you do have some room for error here.

I also read somewhere to always bid an odd amount like 51 cents instead of 50 cents or $1.01 instead of $1. Most people bid round amounts. So if some big company is bidding $1 and I bid $1.01, I'll end up with a placement above their ad because I am a higher bid. If I only bid $1, their ad will probably come before mine because they, most likely, will have a higher quality score because of their history.

Some of my keywords are obviously converting at higher than 1 out of 15 so they are better earners and I could stretch their bid price to higher than the $1. The problem is, which ones are they? My yahoo stats only show the number of clicks and the cost. My neverblue account only shows the number of sale and the number of clicks. To know which are the best converting, I need to see which keywords are converting. More tracking is necessary.

Many of the affiliate companies (neverblue, Commission Junction, etc) provide a way to track this. Its called a postback URL. When ever you get a sale, they will send info back to you that tells you which ad sent the business. They can also tell you which keyword was used.

Its all kind of confusing. I found a free program referred to on this forum called prosper202 that will do this for you. Their videos are very easy to understand. I'll be implementing that next. From there, I should be able to tell which keywords are worth bidding higher and which ones I should delete or change their ads until I find the combination that converts.

I threw in another $30 in my Yahoo account this morning. I have $60 in my account now, so my initial learning curve was paid for by Yahoo's $60 credit. I havent spent any of my own money yet and have made a total of $64.50. Without the credit, I would only be breaking even. Still, as I mentioned, I have had several small brick and mortar businesses in the past. I have never recovered my initial investment in any of them in less than 6 months. I am already breaking even on this one.

steve m

Now come on guys your making me feel old....!

Glad that it's all going well for you Dave. I have been looking into CPA for the last few weeks now, just reading threads on the hole concept. I think its something that I will have to look into.

I own my own business offline in the building trade also, I can tell you now that it took me a while to make my initiall outlay back.

Keep picking away at it and good luck!

Steve M

'Earn Money at Home with a Real Internet Business - Free training' PM me for details....

Mike Anthony

Thailanddave,

Some of the best posts I have ever seen coming from someone new to the forums. Keep this back to the basics where people live approach and you will be a rarity in IM. No hype or Guru lobbying just a step by step how to do it mentality.

Globe_Trotter13

TDave,
Welcome to the forum and thank you for your very detailed and informative posts. Indeed some of the best posts I've read in this forum. Keep up the great posting/work.

Cheers,

Payman.

Susan Stones

Thanks Dave,

These are great posts. There is a lot of useful information in them, and its clearly and logicaly stated. Perfect!

I am new to Warrior Forum, but notice that there are bogs as well as forums for our use. I wonder if your posts would gain more runtime as blogg posts.

Fox30

great write up...thanks for the info. I even picked up some tips that I hadn't thought of.

DannyLucas

Dave

It seems that I have seen many similarities to myself while reading this thread. Thanks for your posts - and sharing your previous offline life before going online. It is an encouragement to know that you don't have to be a 20 something to make it in the techie world!

richierich

thailanddave

You really inspired me of taking action on CPA, I bought a course before about CPA but didn't took action, but with your success it inspired me to go over the course again and take action.

Thank You

Richie

Know more about me

Kenster

Yes action is the key to success in IM.


I think its said enough but not followed enough!

thailanddave

Yesterday was a bad day. I didnt make any money and spent $20.75 in clicks to Yahoo.

I am running two campaigns now. One is a direct link and the other is with a landing page. I fully intend to move up to Google when I strike a decent mix, but because everything will likely cost more, I want to do my fine tuning at Yahoo. Plus Google require a landing page. The display URL must match the destination URL.

About a year ago, I was investigating making money from adsense. I bought 170 pre-made websites for about $20. I bought 50 .info domain names for 89cents each from godaddy and a hostgator reseller account for $25/mo with unlimited website hosting.

The only thing I did was register them using googles webtools. I made a small tweak to them that I learned on a blackht site. I usually upload sitemaps of about 500 pages (from approx 100 long tailed keywords) and google indexes, on average 200-300 of the pages. These accounts were pretty cool because they were php based. I dont know php but they don't require any html knowledge to work. They are article sites. You go to an article directory like ezine or goarticles, copy down an article and paste it into an admin section, the program builds the new webpage automatically. Its sprinkles newsfeeds about my subject into the pages so there is constant new content even if I never touch the sites. These make me about $50-$100/quarter, which just about pays for my Hostgator account.

I had a website about one of the campaigns I am running. This is where I made my landing page. Because I used the template already in place, my landing page has newsfeeds, links to outside "authority" sites as well as links to other pages in my website. Supposedly this is the mix google looks for.

One of my unintended circumstances was that some people are reading more pages from my website AND CLICKING ON THE ADSENSE ADS. This income is offsetting my Yahoo costs. Yesterday my Yahoo costs for this campaign were $8.56 but my adsense income was $4.01. (The other $12 in Yahoo costs were from a direct link campaign that did not convert at all yesterday).

I made a tweak to my landing page yesterday that also did not payoff.

First, when I originally made the landing page, I used a text link to go the the offer. This hardly worked at all. So yesterday, I found a button I liked and put the additional link on the page. I also typed in big red letters "Do it now before time runs out!" and put a timer on the page that counts down from 5 minutes. I got several clicks but no conversions. My CTR was way down too.

I decided last night that maybe the big red call to action was a little obnoxious. I pulled out the verbage but left the countdown timer.

Low and behold this morning I got 1 click that turned into 1 conversion. 100% success rate! My cost per click was $1.11 but it turned into an $11 commission.

My ctr rate is way down because I pulled 2 of my ads that had low conversion rates and made 2 new ones. Being the weekend, Yahoo hasn't gotten around to approving them yet, so I am slugging along with a 1.49% ctr rate. I don't know what it should be for ads in 6-10 position but Im trying to get it higher before I raise my click budget. Since the CTR is a measure of the number of times yahoo displays the ad vs the number of people who click it, I'll be testing a couple new ads today to see if I can get the CTR up a little.

On a positive note, I have one keyword that is a common mispelling. I am only paying 10cents per click and it is in 1st position. When people do misspell the search word, which happens about 3 times a day, I end up in 1st position. I get nearly 100% CTR rate on this one so it shows the power of being in 1st position. Hopefully when I move it up to Google, more people who cant spell will be searching. Since I havent implemented the Prosper202 program yet, I don't know if this is a keyword that is converting or not.

BTW, I spent 4 hours last night trying to get prosper202 to work on my hostgator account. I finally found a blog that says it doesnt work on Hostgator shared host account and provided a work-around. That didnt work either immediately. I gave it 5 more tries before I noticed tracker202 is a free program by the same guy and it is already hosted by them. That worked immediately, so I'll use that program for conversion/keyword tracking.

I can see already that my limited budget is really making this difficult. I have no room for error and I am using extremely small sample sizes. The problem is I may get 2 or 3 conversions in a row and then go for 100 clicks that don't convert. The 100 non producing clicks could wipe out my budget. Its very easy to get frustrated like this. I spent $20 yesterday with no results. Would it have changed if I had been spending $200/day? I would get more clicks and probably more sales but I don't have $6000 a month to lose. Even $20 per day is tough. (I have two campaigns running now, one at $15/day and one at $10/day. I also put in another $30 because Im spending money faster. My total outlay to date is $90 but I have $75 in income if there are no chargebacks. I'll keep slugging along.

TE2

Go Dave, Go!

You have discovered the real "secret to success".

For those who haven't figured out what it is, here you go...

The secret is A-C-T-I-O-N

So again I say, Go Dave, Go!

Regards,

John

futuremills

NICE THREAD
Is PPC the best way to promote lead generating stuff instead of SEO?

Kenster

PPC is probably the fastest way but best...it all depends. PPC can be expensive, particularly if you are new.

People all have their own sweet spot. Some people dominate using only classifieds, some facebook, some ppc, some organic, some media buying, etc So I dont think there is a best

Thom McCarroll

Greg,

All "scaling" means is increasing your efforts ... through yourself or preferred by outsourcing ... see if you did .... a + b + c today .. do it x 2 tommorrow and on and on ... then all of your dreams can come true LOL

Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race - Calvin Coolidge

makingmoneyagain

I'm a noob so I'm not up to date on the lingo. Thanks for the info.

Greg

zehron

If you're still interested in getting Prosper202 working with Hostgator, I was able to get it working on my Hostgator account using the info at this link:

Installing Prosper202 on Hostgator - BlueLayerMedia Blog

It's not an affiliate link. Just a blog post that tells how to get it working.

Good luck, Z

Saj Gupta

Hi, Sajnish Gupta here.. I'm glad you decided to check out Adwords Reinvented and even more happy to see that you see paying for something to get even more in return is a 'good' thing.

Most of the posts here highly tout free traffic generation methods and do not really focus on the time aspect.. how much is your time worth to create articles, to blog, to do Social Media or to SEO without knowing the results and getting trickle of traffic now and then.

In any case I'm not here to shift focus of this thread, please keep us updated on the progress. Oh I thing, I wanted to say .. I truly did quit my 6 figure salary after doing PPC alone.. that's it .. nothing else.

Watch How I Make 800% Return

3 Free Videos to Start Making Money Today!

amits43

hi thanks lots dave for sharimg such a nice infromation but can you tell me that which of the niche should will be good in ppc .I have some 80 $ ad coupen of google and wants to try the ppc .I am just little confused what niche i should pick up ?

Doug Olson

Awesome insight I will use a lot of this information and appreciate it and you. I do believe you when you say to test and test and test. Thanks again

Doug Olson


Stop snoring naturally in less than 7 days
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thailanddave

Here are some updates. Keep in mind, I have virtually no experience in PPC/CPA so I can't answer questions about which program is best, etc. I have no idea. All I can say is jump in, the water's fine.

First the updates. I decided to can one of my campaigns. It was payday loans. I get lots of hits and send the companies a reasonable amount of leads (25-50/day) but they aren't converting. This was the direct link part of my experiment. When my cash flow comes up, I will try it again but for now $15/day in yahoo costs with only one conversion makes it too expensive for me to continue. Should I just keep slugging it out? With a direct link, there is little I can do except change my ad or increase my costs. Increasing my costs would probably work. The heatmaps I have seen show that people only look at the top 3 or 4 ads. I just dont have the budget to keep testing this category.

I got 2 coversions on my other campaign yesterday for $22 in commissions. I spent $15 in clicks so this campaign continues to be positive. This is the one where I use a landing page. Im thinking I might make a short video and explain what I currently have written on the landing page instead of making them read it. We'll see if it works after I get my cam working.

I added tracking202 to my system. I just clicked spyview, part of the tool that tells you where your clicks are coming from. Out of 18 clicks this morning, only 3 came from Yahoo themselves. The rest came from content matches (my ad appearing on other peoples websites). There is a debate if content match provides as high a quality of leads as search match. Sajnish contends you should only do search match. I thought I had turned this off, but when I checked the campaign settings, apparently I had missed it so I turned it off. We'll see if that helps me convert better. It will drive down the number of leads I actually get but hopefully they will be better quality. Better quality should get higher conversions, less leads should drive down my costs.

The spyview thingie is invaluable in my newbie opinion. This alone more than covers the cost of tracking202. Oops, I forgot, tracking202 is free. Tracking202 is a little difficult to set up and took me a couple hours to implement, but the added info is definitely worth the effort.

Since I ran out of my free credit on Yahoo, I thought I would try to open another account and get another $60 credit. They declined the second one. I sent them an email that asked them to either return the $30 I had used to sign up or transfer it to my other account. I said I am running the first account through my real estate business account (I am a real estate broker)and am also the webmaster at the furniture store I work at (I am, I am also the sales manager and only salesman). Two businesses, two accounts. I also pointed out that I have already deposited an additional $60 in my first account. They sent me a nice email, congratulated me on my success and credited the 2nd account with the $60 spiff.

The furniture store just got a $100 adwords coupon. We don't sell anything over the Internet. We only use our website as a business card to get people to come into the store. I was able to get us in the top 3 spots for organic search in our top categories for searches that include san diego in their search. The coupon says we need to use the credits for adwords for the company website(s).

Do you guys think I should use the credit myself or just let it go? I don't want to screw with google if its going to hurt me later.

The $15 in payday loan clicks pushed me over the Yahoo limit. They hit my credit card for another $30 this morning. I now have $120 invested in Yahoo with a current balance of $60 in account#1. I have made $84 so far. Im still positive but already over the $100 limit I had set to test PPC/CPA and we are only entering the 2nd week.

daykotah

Thanks for the info ThailandDaveSo I'm the oldest at 56? Hope it's not too late to get started. I'm just at the reading stage and want to jump into it in a few days. I am trying to pick up all the info I can. I had never heard of CPA until joining the Warrior Forum. I was looking for ways to promote my current programs when I came across all the threads about successful cpa marketing. Talk about destiny!! I am so excited.

Denise
Ez9x5.com

akinz

pls i need your help as a newbie.I dont have much investment to start with as i am now.But i would like to know if i can still use wordpress bog to promote offer.And if so,where do i put those promotional code in my blog?pls help me out.
Akinola

rbecklund

Thailanddave-
Great post! Thanks for the info, I've been making some money with adsense and clickbank and thinking ppc is the way to go. I really like how you started.

What you say about the margins with ppc are so true. I've run offline businesses and the margins can be brutal. I was in the health care industry and we felt good with margins of 3%. So to me if I can spend a dollar and know I'm going to make two, that's great.

Robbie

thailanddave

Well yesterday was a pivotal day in my IM career. I didnt make any money and spent $15 in clicks to yahoo. Not a great deal of money but $15/day works out to about $500 over the space of a month. It also screws with my ROI. I had a lot of clicks but no conversions. bummer.

So what happened?

Three different greyhat sites got hold of my content ads. I discovered a whole new way people are making money on the Internet. In reality, it really pissed me off. I now know why they call it blackht.

Here's the deal. I set a budget of $10 or $15 each day for this test for my campaign with a landing page. As I said before, I made the landing page using a php program. I liked it because it built beautiful templated pages as well as automatically building in news feeds. If I had to build each page myself, it would take hours.

I have never hit the daily budget before about 5pm. My niche isnt a big one, at least on Yahoo but it is stable and has been profitable as far as ROI goes. My plan was to scale it up at Google. I figured if I could make $500-$1000 a month on auto-pilot. I hit my limit at 3pm which was real exciting at face value. I upped the limit to get more hits and more chances to make money. I hit the 2nd limit at 8pm, still no sales.

A look at the spyview portion of tracking202 told the story. I had 3 leads that came from Yahoo, the rest came from 4 different sites. I checked the sites. All were "shopping" sites with mulitple categories. The yahoo ads didnt even look like the standard yahoo ads. I looked up the companies alexis rating. They were getting 300,000+ hits per month. What really upset me was I had turned off the content marketing at 11am. I was still getting charged for hits at 7pm. I also noticed my links had a lot of extra stuff attached to them. This could have been from tracking202 or it could have been that they were cloaking my links to the affiliate and getting MY conversions. I shut down the campaign completely.

Later in the day I got an email from clixgalore. I had set up an account with them a couple years ago and never did anything with them. They have campaigns that pay 1 cent per click instead of per action or per sale. The idea is to funnel a lot of cheap traffic to the site who will hopefully click on of the ads or buy something. Its a numbers game. Guess who I found there? One of the companies that was using my ads is also paying 1 cent per click from clixgalore for a flood of traffic. These, obviously, are very poor leads with poor conversions. It looks like I've paid out nearly $50 or about half my budget so far, for this crap. Well, thats why I started small. I didnt get hurt too bad and learned a lesson. I wont be doing any content matching from now on. Im going to have to shut down the campaign or at least re-work it until next week. The site says they update every Monday morning so it looks like they scrape the ads on Monday. Im still getting clicks today from two of them even though I havent run the campaign since yesterday.

The other lesson is you need to track your clicks. If it hadn't been for tracking202, I would have went along fat, dumb and hopeful that some of my clicks would turn into cash. LIve and learn.

jbento

Thanks a lot for your ideas thailanddave. I'm also a youngster of 43. Like you I had some mortar and bricks businesses, the last one was a disaster. I found myself with no money, debts, wife and a teenager boy.
The feeling to restart life when you're 40+ is quite... uncomfortable. Anyway, I start a small business that help pay the bills but I'm looking to start remade my life with internet marketing.
I'm reading a lot for the last few weeks and I'm starting to do something... I don't hope to make thousands in a couple of weeks but I hope to reach some nice monthly income in the beginning of 2010.
I just wanted to thank you for your post and I'm being carried away...
anyway, thanks a lot, you're wright about your perspective regarding investing/profiting and ROI. But I can understand the concern of people asking "how much did you spend?" when you really have to take a decision about money: invest it or pay some bills.

Best success

Jorge

Danohis

DAVE,
Thanks for this great information. definetely work on this. I can see you are determined which is a great virtue in success.
keep the flag up.

Danohis.

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oscarkool

Dave, yahoo is just terrible with their search network. When you shut off content, ads will still run on sites other than search.yahoo.com. I find a lot of the sites are just placeholder sites. I lost some money on these sites as well. I called up yahoo and complained until they gave me my money back. You should do this as well and they will refund you. This is why I won't run on yahoo at the moment. They actually just settled a lawsuit over this and we will soon have the option to only run ads on search.yahoo.com. Until then, no yahoo for me.

Alcoholicarkangel

I've done some reading on these ideas on the internet and really i'd like to try this out I have absalutly no idea where to start does anyone have pointers?

http://payingclub.com/pages/index.php?refid=jayyy111222

Kenster

I have some pointers...

1. keep reading this forum, there are some great threads with a wealth of information.

2. Buy a WSO or two and/or join the War Room...amazing content there.

3. Remember that it will be a lot of work in the beginning, but when things start clicking, you will begin to get a little creative and thats where the money comes from.

4. Dont give up. APproach this business like a brick and mortar. Think longer term and dont quit early on. Would you quit a brick and mortar after 6 months of working it every single day? No. So just put that same effort into IM for 6 months and youll be on your way.

best of luck

kenster

billaaa777

Good luck Dave, from Pattaya.

Kenster ROCKS, he always makes great post and I like reading them.

Gauher Chaudhry - Get his FREE 89 page report here.

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Blarian

Inspirational post!

thailanddave

I've been working hard and learning a lot. Man, the learning curve on this stuff is steep. There is so much info out there its like drinking from a fire hose. So here are some updates.

I tested a direct link with yahoo. Got a reasonable click through rate but my conversion rate sucked. I put this on the back burner for the moment and am getting ready to re-launch it in the next couple days with a landing page.

I am still running my original campaign. It went into the red in the last couple days but it wouldnt have if I had known what I was doing from the start. What am I talking about here? Its the lousy partners that Yahoo works with. I would not have figured this out without tracking202.

About 1/3 of my budget has been spent on clicks from dubious places. The click cost is a little lower but I think their traffic is basically garbage. I found one of them on clixgalore paying 1 cent per view. Publishers Clearing House gives people a free entry into a $1million dollar drawing if they use the search.

The only way to block the partners is to list their domains one-by-one in the admin section of Yahoo. I'm up to 110 so far. They only allow 500. An interesting thing has happened. My cost per click has more than doubled because now all my traffic comes from Yahoo search. The strange thing is I still get the same number of clicks as I did when I was using the partners, except now its all Yahoo. This is without hitting my limit. I get about 20 clicks per day. Before I got 3 out of 4 from partners. I still get 20 per day but now they are all from yahoo.

I ran an International campaign with Google. Google lets you block all countries but one. I used the Google translator to change the ads to the native language. I got phenominal CTRs because nobody is really hitting the market but no sales because the landing page was in English (I think). I I-framed the vendor landing page so basically I was direct linking. I bought a .info domain name but worded it in the foreign language. I ran the campaign over the weekend. I'm still getting hits a week later but no conversions. Im not sure if it got indexed that fast or what is actually happening. Im in the process of translating my own landing page. I'll crank this one up in a couple days with a landing page in the native language.

My plan to put up a made for adsense article site and then make landing pages works pretty well so far. From the landing page, they can click "home" and see the rest of the site. I get some pretty good adsense clicks which covers about 35% of my yahoo budget. It gives me some outbound links, some newsfeeds and of course inner links. Im also writing some articles that I post to goarticles and on the my websites for backlinking purposes. My articles are getting snapped up on goarticles within days.

Terry Kyle mentione that you can put a link right under your title with goarticles. I put a link to my landing pages there and in the signature so I get a couple back links per article. Hppe to create some organic traffic.

Havent made any real money yet. I think Im only down about $30 overall and its been 3 weeks. I am making sales almost daily so its fun to get up in the morning, turn on the computer and see if I made any money while I was asleep. Starts the day off on a good foot to know I have some Internet money in my pocket.

asap

"It's like drinking from a firehose"... ROFLMAO!

Great thread. I feel like I'm doing it myself without any risk!

Did I see that Tracking 202 went completely paid now? No free version anymore?

For whatever it's worth, I had lunch yesterday with a huge affiliate marketer that lives in Charlote NC, and I asked him if he had to start over today what would he do? He said he would concentrate hard on international offers. I'm curious what led you to try an international offer so early in your new "career"?

thailanddave

Why did I go to International? Probably because I don't know what I am doing. LOL. I'm trying to hit and run I guess. I have picked several scenarios.

1. Direct linking
2. Direct linking thru an Iframe
3. Simple Landing page
4. Multiple offers on same page (working a vertical market trying to make my clicks go a little further)
5. International - Pretty simple, I asked an account rep where she thought the biggest opportunity was. I figure limited competition from US where most of the IM hotshots are.

At this early point in my IM career, I'm trying to find a fit. I was surprised at how much help I got from my account rep. She knows I am brand new at this, but I did explain my work history and the thing about the San Diego car sites I did so maybe she thinks it was worth the investment of her time. Or maybe the help is just there for the asking. Anyway I recommend building a relationship with these folks. If I make money, they make money.

So far I have got sales in #1 and #3. I bought a .info name in a foreign country and tried it for 48 hours. My CTR rate was double anything I ran in the US but no sales. I don't know what a good CTR rate even is. I get about 1.5-2% on my US projects, I was getting 4-5% overseas.

I don't speak the language where I am running my campaign but Im going to build the landing page in English and then just run the whole thing through a online translator. If it looks as promising as I think it will, I'll pay someone to translate it so it flows better. Here is one interesting point. I havent run anything in the country in over a week. I still get 2 hits a day with an Iframed landing page. I cant figure out how they are finding me. I also don't know how to see if my .info domain got indexed in that country cuz I don't speak the language and can't navigate the websites. IM Irony I guess.

I ran my first multi-offer landing page today. I budgeted $25 with Yahoo. I got 59 clicks. 58 of them were from Yahoo partners. Only one was from yahoo search. I looked at the referring websites. All yahoo ads like the old days of MFA sites. Not even any articles or outbound links. One company owned 7 of the websites. Im a little more than pissed that it cost me $25 to find 30 new domains to block. So far I have blocked 136 domains from my two most active campaigns.

What is everyone's opinion of Yahoo partners traffic? Good or Bad?

Tracking202 is still free. Im impressed enough with the free version that I will definitely upgrade to the pay system if I start making money.

My project for the weekend (Mon/Tues, I work a regular job on Sat/Sun) is to investigate CPV and experiment with that.

So far I have charged $210 on my credit card, have $80 unspent currently in my Yahoo account and have earned $174.50 in sales(CPA). I should get my first check in a couple weeks for $65. Not big numbers but Im still satisfied with the results. I have been doing this for 3 weeks.

billaaa777

If I have read everything correctly, you have sales of $174.50, expenses of $130.00 and a profit of $44.50, which would give you a ROI of 34%.

But, you also had a credit from Yahoo of $60, so your adjusted expenses would be $190.00, which would produce a loss of ($15.50)

All in all, for your first effort, not too bad.

It sounds like you are proceeding exactly as you should, not investing too much until you know what your doing.

Testing as you go, eliminating the losers and keeping the winners. Now all you need to do is find one big winner, scale it up and start making good money and repeat the process to find another big winner.

I really like reading your post; I hope you keep them going.

Good luck from Pattaya.

Gauher Chaudhry - Get his FREE 89 page report here.

Acid Reflux Diet - A GREAT product, mega-huge market, poor to no competition, low cost PPC words.

riko3

Nice post, keep up the good work man!
What tracking software-tool do you use?

What do you guys think, what is the best tracking tool at the keyword level out there?

Peace
►Ric

redicelander

This thread is very interesting. But I have to say, article marketing and SEO are not to be ignored, either. PPC can be great and I won't knock it for those who do good with it but I also think it's not for everyone. You come from the perspective of being the "real" business world and realizing you have to invest a lot of money. That's the great thing about the internet, you really do not have to invest a lot of money in the beginning, just have to work hard at some free methods, and then you can build up a budget for paid methods. Again, I am not knocking the OP of this thread and wish him the best of luck. But for newbies out there, with all these threads about PPC do not get discouraged and think this is the only way!

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keithoz88

Hi Thailand Dave,
Thanks for the informative post.
I am about to "retire" t the Philippines and i want an on going income.
Did the program from Sajnish cover non Google advertising, and do you consider this, or one of his other programs to be a worthwhile investment for a newbie?
Thanks mate,
Keith

billaaa777

redicelander, This thread is about PPC. There are 1,000's of threads about articles and SEO. Knock yourself out on them.

This is one of the best threads EVER started here. Detailing how somebody is entering a new business at the very beginning and trying to get it to work on a budget that everybody can afford.

Let the Dude do his thing and we should all be thanking him for spending so much time explaining what he is doing and how he is doing it.

Gauher Chaudhry - Get his FREE 89 page report here.

Acid Reflux Diet - A GREAT product, mega-huge market, poor to no competition, low cost PPC words.

Bujoi23

Thank you for sharing this...I'm a complete newbie and still confused.
There's so much information and I'm not sure where to start but I've taken what I read should be the first step: Sign-up with as many CPA networks as I could. So far I signed up with CJ, Maxbounty, AZoogle and Peppermint Network.

My questions are:
1. Once I sign-up with the CPA Network, how do I know which ones to promote? Any guidelines, tools for selection that you can recommend?

2. What CPA educational resource can you recommend for newbies like me? Without spending thousands of dollars for something like Arbitrage Conspiracy.

Thank you.

billaaa777

I just joined the PPC Coach and I love it. I have been there 5 days and highly recommend it. The best part are the "Success Stories", you can't believe how much money some of these guys are making and they tell you exactly how they are doing it.

Gauher Chaudhry - Get his FREE 89 page report here.

Acid Reflux Diet - A GREAT product, mega-huge market, poor to no competition, low cost PPC words.