CPA for beginners - my first successes

108 replies
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!
#beginners #cpa #successes
  • Profile picture of the author Wayne Davis
    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
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    • Profile picture of the author 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!
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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    See How I'm Making Money Arthur Peterson

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    • Profile picture of the author 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

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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author Riz
    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
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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    • Profile picture of the author 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
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    • Originally Posted by Kenster View Post

      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.
      Which one in your opinion works better and why? Review sites, News Articles or Pre-sell? I was told that blogs work just as well, but I guess you can consider those review sites right?
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      • Profile picture of the author tserraf
        Hello ,


        Unfortunately , I 've lost all my data on my computer ( terrible virus ) and had to format my PC . Could you please let me know how can I get again your method .


        PAYPAL TRANSACTION # : 0FK430070L426615M

        Thanks in advance

        Thierry
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        • Profile picture of the author Kenster
          Originally Posted by selfmademillionaire View Post

          Which one in your opinion works better and why? Review sites, News Articles or Pre-sell? I was told that blogs work just as well, but I guess you can consider those review sites right?

          It really depends on the type of offer you are promoting. Blogs work absolutely amazing with some health offers but pretty crappy with others. In general, all landign pages are pre-sell pages, you are designing it to warm the visitor up and get them mentally to have purchased the offer before they even see the offer page. So there isnt a necessary better one

          Originally Posted by tserraf View Post

          Hello ,


          Unfortunately , I 've lost all my data on my computer ( terrible virus ) and had to format my PC . Could you please let me know how can I get again your method .


          PAYPAL TRANSACTION # : 0FK430070L426615M

          Thanks in advance

          Thierry
          are you talking about my WSO?
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  • Profile picture of the author makingmoneyagain
    For us noobs here, what exactly is scaling and how does it relate to ppc?

    Greg
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    • Profile picture of the author 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.
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    • Profile picture of the author T.R. McCarroll
      Originally Posted by makingmoneyagain View Post

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

      Greg
      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
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      • Profile picture of the author makingmoneyagain
        Originally Posted by Thom McCarroll View Post

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

        Greg
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author Fox30
    great write up...thanks for the info. I even picked up some tips that I hadn't thought of.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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!
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author Kenster
    Yes action is the key to success in IM.


    I think its said enough but not followed enough!
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    • Profile picture of the author 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.
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      • Profile picture of the author 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
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      • Profile picture of the author zehron
        Originally Posted by thailanddave View Post

        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.
        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
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        • Profile picture of the author jcraig
          Originally Posted by zehron View Post

          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:

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

          Good luck, Z
          Thank you for posting a link to our site and file. It seems to have helped literally hundreds of people, at least based on the amount of times it was download.

          We're also capable of installing prosper202 for $25 per install if anyone gets really stuck.

          All The Best,

          Jason Craig
          BlueLayerMedia
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          • Profile picture of the author searchnology
            Just a quick note...I manage a 6 figure a month spend PPC account across 5 search engines and can tell you that you CAN'T assume that the margins you see on the shoestring budget is scalable. As you increase your bids you will see a DRAMATIC decrease in margins. Why? well it's because most of the top ads are run by product owners who have more margin to work with. Or by large affiliates who monetize all of their PPC leads. As an affiliate you are only getting half of the margin but taking on all of the risk and I would guess that you are not monetizing so your profit potential is purely tied to the affiliate payout.

            If you want to scale, your only other alternative is to run shoestring programs across multiple niches. A lot more work to keep track of but it is more realistic for small guys.

            I hope that is helpful
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            • Profile picture of the author talkingsmith
              Originally Posted by searchnology View Post

              ....Or by large affiliates who monetize all of their PPC leads. As an affiliate you are only getting half of the margin but taking on all of the risk and I would guess that you are not monetizing so your profit potential is purely tied to the affiliate payout.
              What other way to monetize PPC lead and squeeze more profi than just affiliate payout?

              I read that building an email list, what else may help?
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              • Profile picture of the author searchnology
                Yes, building a list is what enables monetization. The big players have very sophisticated email marketing systems for squeezing the most out of their lists. Well beyond the capabilities of systems like Aweber.

                Originally Posted by talkingsmith View Post

                What other way to monetize PPC lead and squeeze more profi than just affiliate payout?

                I read that building an email list, what else may help?
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  • Profile picture of the author ex9to5guy
    NICE THREAD
    Is PPC the best way to promote lead generating stuff instead of SEO?
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author Saj Gupta
    Originally Posted by thailanddave View Post

    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.
    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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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 ?
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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    • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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    • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author 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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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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?
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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  • Profile picture of the author billaaa777
    Good luck Dave, from Pattaya.

    Kenster ROCKS, he always makes great post and I like reading them.
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  • Profile picture of the author Blarian
    Inspirational post!
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    • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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"?
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    • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author Rick Meza
    Originally Posted by thailanddave View Post

    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.
    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
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  • Profile picture of the author J Bold
    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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    • Profile picture of the author 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.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      Originally Posted by keithoz88 View Post

      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
      I think its a great program but I havent bought any others to compare it with. He has it over on the WSO area I think. He does go through how to pick a program, how to build a landing page and how to navigate google and yahoo. I spent 2 hours today trying to figure out how to upload campaigns from a spread sheet in Google. He's got a whole video on just that. (I'm through with Yahoo for a while because of the crappy partner network).

      You can save tons of time with a spreadsheet because of cut, paste and copying. I uploaded a second campaign that only took about 20 minutes. One of the things you will learn early is PPC advertising is its a very time consuming process to set up your campaigns. Lots of repetitive tasks. Automating as much as possible will keep me (you?) from dreading the tasks necessary to put my ideas in motion.

      I've got a lot of ideas from reading this forum but I was missing some of the basic steps to implement them. For a newbie, its a great course. Its PPC related, nothing on other traffic sources.
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  • Profile picture of the author 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.
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    • Profile picture of the author J Bold
      Originally Posted by billaaa777 View Post

      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.

      Where's the "no thanks" button? Ha ha, only kidding. I have every right to give my two cents on any forum topic, and so do you. I am not going to go knock myself out on some of those threads just because you said so. I agree it's a great thread but at the same time when I used to read a thread from this point of view (PPC as the way to go) I was thinking the only way to succeed was to invest money in something like PPC, even when I did not have that money and it discouraged me. I agree this guy is showing how you can succeed on little money but at the same time I do not see any overwhelming success here. Looks like he has lost money in net, if I am right. But it is very nice of him to give all this advice, and I have no problem with that. The reason I spoke up I think, is clear as I already said it.

      So, read his advice and enjoy and leave me to my comments, thanks.
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      • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
        Originally Posted by redicelander View Post

        Where's the "no thanks" button? Ha ha, only kidding. I have every right to give my two cents on any forum topic, and so do you. I am not going to go knock myself out on some of those threads just because you said so. I agree it's a great thread but at the same time when I used to read a thread from this point of view (PPC as the way to go) I was thinking the only way to succeed was to invest money in something like PPC, even when I did not have that money and it discouraged me. I agree this guy is showing how you can succeed on little money but at the same time I do not see any overwhelming success here. Looks like he has lost money in net, if I am right. But it is very nice of him to give all this advice, and I have no problem with that. The reason I spoke up I think, is clear as I already said it.

        So, read his advice and enjoy and leave me to my comments, thanks.
        I agree with pretty much everything you have to say. I fiddled around with ppc a couple years ago and lost a couple hundred bucks and quit. The only thing that got me interested again is CPA. I tried BH for a while but its not sustainable. You are always racing the law, so to speak. I started into SEO/backlinking a few times but ran out of steam every time because you have to do so much on faith. You work a long time before you know if its going to work. Tough learning curve for a new guy. If you make the wrong assumptions up front, you waste months of your time.

        Im impatient. I like to see results right away and tweak the program. When I opened my first brick and mortar biz, I was freaking out the first day because I didn't have customers.

        You are also right that I am losing money at this point. I didnt list the free $120 that yahoo gave me and I have put in (as of today) a total of $210. Much more than the $100 I planned to start with. I havent had a huge success with this. In fact, I've never hit a home run right away with any business I've ever started.

        On the other hand, since I started last month, I should get my first check tomorrow. It wont be much, hardly enough to spend a night on the town but its symbolic. Not my first check from Internet stuff, I get one every 3-4 months from Adsense, but it will be the first check from this new project.
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  • Profile picture of the author billaaa777
    2. What CPA educational resource can you recommend for newbies like me? Without spending thousands of dollars for something like Arbitrage Conspiracy.
    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.
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    Acid Reflux Diet - A GREAT product, mega-huge market, poor to no competition, low cost PPC words.
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    • Profile picture of the author Bujoi23
      Originally Posted by billaaa777 View Post

      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.
      Thank you!

      Anybody else has experience with PPC Coach?
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    • Profile picture of the author blesslane7
      Hi Dave,

      Just wanted to tell you thanks for posting enough details to give a newbie a little more insight than most of the post targeted for experienced Internet Marketers.

      Best Wishes For Your Success,
      Glenda
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    • Profile picture of the author ManuelGonzalez
      nice post i enjoyed reading it.

      I like hearing good things when people invest in kits/guides.

      Those are some good profit margins. When you get all set up, if you can keep that ratio... WOW!!!
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      www.affiliatecashpile.com
      Get paid, No Network Shave. High payouts. No Net 30, No more waiting months. Get paid Fast, on time, all the time.
      www.affiliatecashpile.com
      (To staff this is my site, I Have read the sig. rules. I am not an affiliate I am the owner
      )
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    • Profile picture of the author mjbiel
      I have one question- Where on Yahoo can you find how to post links like google adwords does. I don't know where to look but it sounds like something I'd like to try. Thanks again for the info
      Signature

      ==> Free (No Optin Required) Complete Solo Ad List With Over 150 Solo Ad Vendor's, their email address, their skype address, their website and the lost cost they charge - Enjoy

      http://www.instanttrafficideas.com/s...urce-thankyou/

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    • Profile picture of the author laganja
      This is by far better than any ebook, dvd, mentoring courses I never paid for.

      Seriously, I wish someone had just told me those things way earlier in the game.

      Please sticky this thread.....seriously it's the best.
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    • Profile picture of the author jayalaxmi
      Banned
      you have said the truth.any way thanks for sharing your thoughts
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  • Profile picture of the author rajuthan
    Dam what would have happened if you kept the site
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  • Profile picture of the author mghowell
    Its nice to know that I am not the only person starting into this after having a previous careers.
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      I remember a quote from Forrest Gump "Shrimping is hard". I keep getting that feeling on this PPC/CPA stuff. On the other hand, I have had sales on every campaign I have tried. Not always profitable, but sales. That reinforces that there is a ton of money out there.

      Here are some thoughts I have had, in no particular order. Stuff that may seem obvious to many, but I didnt realize until they came up. Maybe it will save someone else some time and money.

      There are 3 basic components to a campaign. You can control 2 of them.

      1. The Yahoo/Google ad.
      Can you get someone's attention long enough for them to click your ad? This is where the first part of testing comes up. You may think you have a great ad copy but people may not click on it. So you should make up 3 or 4 or even 10 different ads. Make some of them the same but change something small, then make a couple completely out of left field. The nice part about this is Yahoo/Google will rotate them automatically and give you stats on them. You then can focus on eliminating bad ad copy and fine tuning good ones.

      Make sure your ads aren't deceptive. You'll just lose money cuz they wont convert. You can get a lot of clicks saying "Collect $1 million by submitting your email addy" but nobody will fill out the form and even if they do, the affiliate will drop you for fraudulent traffic.

      2. The landing page.
      I have been making webpages and face-to-face sales calls forever. I tend to get too wordy in my landing pages tho, so my click through to the advertisers page suffers. Nobody wanted to read my drivel.

      I stumbled across this website last night. He gives away a simple landing page. I tried it, it rocks. I went from a 2% click through rate to about 20% today. This guy is supposedly a super affiliate.

      I tried to post this guys website but the forum tells me I don't have enough posts to make a link, so do a search on zac johnson to get the landing page stuff.

      Im in the process of changing all my landing pages to this format. Next step is to make a bunch of them for each campaign and rotate them to see which one works best. Lots and lots of work.

      3. Advertisers page
      You can't do much about that so the answer is to rotate advertisers to see which one converts. More work.

      Insights
      Here are a few insights into PPC/CPA I've come up with. I don't know for sure if I am on the right track or not, so if I have made some wrong assumptions, somebody shout out.

      I think PPC is good for seeing if an offer is viable. As I said before, I have made sales in virtually everything I have tried. The problem is, most of them aren't profitable. If I am paying $1 per click and the payout is $15, I need to convert about 1 in 8 to make reasonable money. I tried an email submit gift card that paid $1.10. I was paying only 15 cents per click. I ran a campaign where I ended up making $19.90 but it cost me $18.70 in clicks. Hardly worth the effort.

      So now the idea is I know people will sign up, but I need to get my click cost down to 5 or 6 cents to make it worthwhile. So how can you do this.
      1. Organic traffic - This goes back to the SEO theories, article writing and back linking. At least I know there is light at the end of the tunnel if I put in the work because PPC showed me there is a market. Getting to the top 3 in Google means you will get tons of free traffic. Anything that converts will make 100% profit.
      2. PPV - havent tried it yet
      3. Social Networking (facebook, myspace, etc) haven't tried it yet.
      4. Videos on Youtube - havent tried it yet.

      I need to try all of these. But again, lots more work

      It occurred to me that the big boys capture the low hanging fruit. They have the budgets and they get higher margins than I do. So the idea is to micro-target my customers. The Internet is so huge, even a very tight market may have a couple hundred thousand people in it. Here is what I mean.

      If I was trying to sell baby shoes, I would automatically think of targeting 18 to 35 year old women and doing keyword research on baby shoes, baby clothes, etc. But what about a smaller demographic?

      I like to watch McDonald's commercials. They do a great job of segmenting the market. Some of their ads show a man with 2 or 3 kids going to Mickey D's. Who are they targeting? Single divorced dads. When a divorced dad sees the commercial, he sees himself taking his kids to McDonalds on his visiting day. The kids look like they are having fun and they love daddy for taking them to McDonalds. If its good enough for McDonalds to segment the market, its good enough for me.

      So lets take a look at my baby shoe store. What is a smaller demographic I can focus on? Lets say unwed hispanic girls 18-25. (I live 10 miles from the border so this one comes to mind. I am not working this campaign). How can I get ads in front of 18-25 year old hispanic women? What are they looking at on the Internet? How about popular singers like Shakira or Lil Kim? My quality scores will probably be low, but I'll be the only one in the market. This is the kind of stuff I am exploring now. The nice thing about this is if I am wrong, I don't get any clicks so it doesn't cost me much except my time. If my testing shows this to be viable, the next step is to move my campaign over to the content network. Clicks that used to cost me $1 each now fall to 10 cents each and I have the market to myself. Now I have a lot more room, since I can get 100 clicks for $10 instead of just 10 clicks for $10. Then I go back to testing ads, landing pages, offers, etc.

      The Internet makes targeting these micro markets very easy. If I am trying to target 18-25 year old hispanic females. I can just enter that info into a google search and see what pops up. If there are ads appearing, I click on them to see what they are selling.

      Again, I am not sure this is the right way to go, but it seems to be working so far. I am no longer in the black while I test these theories. Hopefully somebody with more experience will comment on this and let us all know if this is a good strategy.

      I ran a campaign like that today. If I wouldnt have had a cap on daily spending, I would have been bankrupt. My ads had 168,000 impressions. I was paying 15 cents per click and got about 50 clicks. Tracking202 showed that 80% were clicking on the offer from my landing page but I got NO sales. I clicked through the trail from my yahoo ad all the way through to the advertisers page. It was then I discovered my tracking202 code was putting the browser into some kind of loop. I didnt get any sales because the people weren't getting to the advertiser. I had tested the links last night but they didnt work today. So I had to rework everything.

      I raised my click cost to 26 cents. Then I started getting clicks every 4 minutes. Got 56 more clicks. Still no sales but great click through to the advertiser. So tonite Im switching to a new advertiser.

      Luckily I caught it right way. My offer pays $50 and the clicks are costing me 22 cents so I have a lot of room for error. One sale puts me back in the black for the day.

      I will say that starting with $100 is nearly impossible. I wouldn't recommend anyone starting with less than $500-$1000. Even if you do make sales, it will take up to 6 weeks to get paid unless you hit a home run.

      Good luck to all of you who have contacted me personally. Since Im new on the forum, it doesn't let me reply directly (I need 50 posts) so send me your email and I will respond from there.

      Im having a ton of fun doing this, but I am a nerdy computer guy.
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      • Profile picture of the author TE2
        Originally Posted by thailanddave View Post

        I ran a campaign like that today. If I wouldnt have had a cap on daily spending, I would have been bankrupt. My ads had 168,000 impressions. I was paying 15 cents per click and got about 50 clicks. Tracking202 showed that 80% were clicking on the offer from my landing page but I got NO sales. I clicked through the trail from my yahoo ad all the way through to the advertisers page. It was then I discovered my tracking202 code was putting the browser into some kind of loop. I didnt get any sales because the people weren't getting to the advertiser. I had tested the links last night but they didnt work today. So I had to rework everything.
        Hey Dave,

        I'm not sure if this is your exact scenario you refer to but the following can cause exactly what you describe...

        Make sure that your T202 destination URL ends with /?subid=

        If you don't conclude the URL with it, you will get an "Offer Not Found" error page from the CPA Network.

        Regards,

        John
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        • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
          hmmm, supposedly yahoo doesnt require this, it puts in the keyword automatically. with google you are supposed to end it with subid={keyword}

          is that what you mean or am I missing something?
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          • Profile picture of the author TE2
            Originally Posted by thailanddave View Post

            hmmm, supposedly yahoo doesnt require this, it puts in the keyword automatically. with google you are supposed to end it with subid={keyword}

            is that what you mean or am I missing something?
            When you get your link from P202/T202, make sure you add /?subid= to it. My experience is that if you don't - it will test fine from 202 but not from the actual live path.

            Too many times I only tested using the test buttons/links from P202, MT, etc... only to find the live link did not work.

            The best way to be sure is to always test your live links.

            Regards,

            John
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            • Profile picture of the author FredFarnes
              Today I received a special email from Google, about my email and zip submit sites.

              "
              Your Google AdWords account has been disabled"


              What next?
              Signature

              So, you want to sell me another way to easily make "X" dollars in "X" days? ROFL too funny! IM success requires hard work and lots of time. Most newbies do not survive the steep learning curve. Anyone who says otherwise is probably selling you a fantasy.

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              • Profile picture of the author Bujoi23
                Originally Posted by FredFarnes View Post

                Today I received a special email from Google, about my email and zip submit sites.

                "
                Your Google AdWords account has been disabled"


                What next?
                I don't believe Google likes direct links to those type of landing pages. Your page has to be relevant.

                Adwords isn't the only PPC network out there...try others or create a landing page with more relevant content. Although I don't see how you can do that with just email and zip submit sites...I guess it's just a matter of being creative...

                Sorry can't offer much help
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  • Profile picture of the author Shane Hale
    Awesome Read!! I have been thinking of moving off Google and going to Yahoo for awhile. I just received a $50 credit for Yahoo. Definitely I will be keeping up with this post! Thanks for the information.
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  • Profile picture of the author talkingsmith
    thailanddave : thank you for sharing the info.

    I have tried yahoo search once,on dating offer, but I quitted that after $10 or so,because too many clicks from those yahoo partners. I know you ran into similiar problem and you blocked them. So after you blocked clicks from these sources, did you see traffic from yahoo dropped too much? and how is the conversion after that (i supposed it improved)
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    • Profile picture of the author wkly10k
      Great info, inspires me to give CPA a try......
      THANX!!
      WKLY10K
      Signature
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      Originally Posted by talkingsmith View Post

      thailanddave : thank you for sharing the info.

      I have tried yahoo search once,on dating offer, but I quitted that after $10 or so,because too many clicks from those yahoo partners. I know you ran into similiar problem and you blocked them. So after you blocked clicks from these sources, did you see traffic from yahoo dropped too much? and how is the conversion after that (i supposed it improved)
      This has happened with every campaign I run. Unfortunately, they have so many partners, I usually end up spending the first $25 of my campaign identifying them. The partners that show up for one campaign are not the same partners that show up for another. It really irks me but yahoo says they will have a way to turn off the partners (as google already has) after the 1st of the year.

      On the 2nd day of a campaign, my traffic usually drops, by the third day I am getting about the same amount of traffic from yahoo search that I did on the first day but it is cleaner without the partners.

      One way around this is by hyper segmenting your market. Here is what I mean.

      I tried payday loans because they pay so much. Yahoo partners pretty much own this segment for your usual keywords like "online payday loans". Most of the partners have set up a page that only shows payday loan ads sort of like "made for adsense" pages. Traffic is lousy and doesn't convert worth a damn. I blocked over 60 domains on this one campaign and I still got more partner traffic. One company, Bardon Advisors must have at least 40 or 50 of these websites alone. No matter how many I block, they keep popping up. (read the privacy policy, it will tell you the company who made the website). I tried to do a search on Bardon Advisors to find all their domains but they hide their registration info, probably for this exact reason. the only way around it is to use non-traditional keywords they haven't thought of.

      Changing the keyword list to something they havent thought of does the trick. think of the typical person who would use a payday loan. Figure out what else he is looking at on the internet and use those keywords. This was my major epiphany that prompted the above posts.

      Oh, by the way, I now have enough posts to post links. The free landing page can be found at Super Affiliate Tips from Super Affiliate Zac Johnson - Let the Reign Begin!. This thing works like its on steroids. I was getting about a 5% click through rate from my landing page to the advertiser. As of this morning (2 day trial), I am getting near 50%.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jayson L
    Dave,
    Great information! I really have to start tracking my ads more. I am probably getting taken advantage of and wasting money by not tightening down on the clicks.
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  • Profile picture of the author babywarrior
    Hi Thailanddave

    just read your post and yes i am promoting one of the same offer and yes i am in the same situation as you are right now =)

    let's catch up every now and than and keep each other updated to boost our moral yeah?
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      Hi,
      Thought I'd leave an update

      Here are the results from my first full month. Nothing stellar but then I didn't expect any home runs. Remember, I was trying to start with $100. I am looking for something steady and sustainable.
      Campaign


      Campaign #1 would have been slightly positive but I made two massive keyword errors. I used wordtracker for 100 keywords. I didn't inspect them and there was a very high converting word but unfortunately it didn't have anything to do with my product. I lost about $28 on it. I also had a 2nd keyword that straddled two industries. People from the "other" industry clicked it to the tune of $24. I would have been profitable without these two keywords. I also lost at least $20 from Yahoo's crappy partners. This campaign would have been solidly in the black without these mistakes.

      I left adsense ads on a couple of my sites, but not the landing pages. People clicked through to the site and I made an unintended $50.

      Campaign #2 was a payday loan campaign. I ran into Yahoo's crappy partners. Cost me about $50. Again, the difference between profit and loss.

      Campaign #3 was a zip submit. I factored in the $1.07 I paid for a .info keyword. Without that I would have made money.

      Campaign #4 was a foreign campaign. I made up the adwords ads in a foreign language and did the whole site in a foreign language. This is the one I am concentrating on this month. I plan to expand it to several other countries.

      Methodology: I am breaking a lot of rules initially. I set up a multi-page website using a php program that makes a website of hundreds of pages in a few minutes. These are called doorway pages using only 1 keyword per page. I can usually get 100-200 pages indexed in google in a matter of days. I then create a simple landing page and link it back to the original site. I also put a link on each page to the landing page. If someone finds the site through organic search, they might end up on the landing page. If they end up on the landing page from an Adword's ad, they might click through to the big site and I usually end up with some Adsense clicks.
      With Google's crack down on 14 day free trial offers, I decided to read up on their TOS. They specifically state they don't like sites made mechanically and of course they don't like negative option sites. (Sites that automatically sign the people up for more product). So now that I know I can make money, I am re-doing a lot of my sites. Unfortunately they aren't as profitable with the offer buried two or three pages back.

      I found a free list management program called PHPLists in the Fantastico scripts I get with my Hostgator accounts. That's next. I was going to open an Aweber account to build my mailing lists but my main money maker is in a foreign language. Aweber's recorded stuff is all in English so I'd have to write the pages instead of using the pre-recorded messages. I can write the confirmation pages with PHPLIst, so why spend the money with Aweber? I'll experiment with PHPlist and see if I can get it to work properly. I'll keep you posted.

      I have been using tracking202 but it seems a little slow since they got bought out. I am trying to get prosper202 to work so I can keep everything in house.
      One of the most exciting parts of my day is to get up in the morning an look at the "spyview" section of Tracking202 to see how many people clicked through my websites. After that I look at the networks to see if I made any money.Then its on to Yahoo/Google to see how much I spent.

      My main goal last month was to learn the business and not lose too much money. The estimates on this forum say most people lose a couple thousand bucks before something hits. I didn't lose money last month and I learned a lot so I feel fortunate. It was extremely intimidating to get started in this field. I really had very little clue as to what I was doing in the beginning. I find things are starting to click, I understand a lot more of what the other posters are saying. I thought I understood it before, but really didn't. This might be a good reason for newbie to actually get your feet wet before hiring a coach. You could hire Bill Belichick to teach you how to be a football player but if you didn't understand how to play football, you'd be wasting a lot of money for him to teach you the basics.

      I would say its fairly easy to make sales in CPA but its pretty hard to make profits initially. You folks waiting on the sidelines should jump in. The hardest part of most jobs is to make the sales at all. Here they come pretty easy. Then you fine tune what you are doing to make them profitable.

      The biggest change for me has been going from playing on-line poker 4-5 hours per night to making webpages and researching Internet Marketing 4-5 hours per night.
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  • Profile picture of the author bakers
    Thanks for this post. I hope some cpa are available in my place.
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  • Profile picture of the author plester
    thailand dave,

    Thanks for that very informagtive post.

    I'm new to CPA and i'm very interested in real and useful info and your post contained both!


    Thanks,

    Paul
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  • Profile picture of the author Bryan Green
    Thanks for the write up I am also the same age trying start a program similar to yours. Use to have an ad agency. How did you find the landing page that had multiple offers on it work or did you find it better to have a separate landing page for each offer? Seems like you'd be going through a lot of landing pages in a month or year

    Thanks for your time
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      Originally Posted by BG48 View Post

      Thanks for the write up I am also the same age trying start a program similar to yours. Use to have an ad agency. How did you find the landing page that had multiple offers on it work or did you find it better to have a separate landing page for each offer? Seems like you'd be going through a lot of landing pages in a month or year

      Thanks for your time
      I have been making websites for years, so it doesn't take me a lot of time to put up a landing page. My biggest problem is I dont have much artistic talent so I steal a lot of ideas. When I was doing automotive websites, I would look at the manufacturer's site and copy the style. Another idea is to look at the really big websites like ESPN and see what they are doing. Obviously they pay millions of dollars to make sure their webpages are cutting edge.

      I have noticed that we as affiliates spend a lot of time and money on really pretty websites with stunning graphics. The big boys websites are usually extremely simple and let the content draw in the visitors.

      Take a look at the Auto Mfgs sites. They do a lot of "look at how happy or successful these people are. You could be one of them if you buy this car". They don't talk alot about the products, the details are buried in the back of the website.

      I have paused all my campaigns for the moment. This new Adwords ban worries me. I have made the decision not to do CPA with any products that con the customer with free trial offers and then bill their credit card without their knowledge. I had an **** page that was doing well but its not worth losing the largest advertising network. Im sure there are other methods, but I like to leave all avenues open.

      Here is another trick I stumbled across for keyword selection. Do a search on your subject. Take each of the top URLs and enter them in Alexa.com. (I know you old pro's know this but Im a newbie. There seems to be a lot of us here). Alexa will give you the site ranking vs other websites. A good ranking is less than 100,000. That means they are in the top 100,000 websites in terms of traffic.

      Take a look at their website. What are they doing? Can you improve on it? What would you as a visitor do if you came upon their website? Would you order? Incorporate as much of the good stuff as you can into your own.

      Now here's the real bonus. Click on the keyword section of Alexa. It will tell you which keywords are being used to get to this website. This is incredibly valuable information and its free.

      I found several keywords that I wasn't using that actually pull 10x the number of page views as the words I was using. They actually cost less than the top ones I was using. I got so excited I bought another domain name that has the #1 keyword embedded in the name. Im going to basically duplicate my current website layout with new graphics and change some of the verbage. My plan is to compete against myself with 2 different websites.
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  • Profile picture of the author J Bold
    Good but I hear a lot of people say instead of Alexa, use quantacast. They say quantacast is more accurate. I'm not expert on that point but you have the right idea. You certainly can use Alexa but there's also other options like quantacast and even other sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author jonhmatter
    Nice post Dave - wishing u more success with CPA/PPC.
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  • Profile picture of the author GSX Enterprises
    Whoa! Killer advice this is great. I've always snuffed PPC because of its difficulty to break into. This may have me rethinking it!

    -Safe Travels
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  • Profile picture of the author firstdandy
    Congratulations for your success Sir. I was trying to figure out how to be success in CPA. I have tried some ways but still failed. Hearing your success makes me want to be success as You
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    • Profile picture of the author thailanddave
      I haven't been in this section too much lately. I have been retrenching.

      I have been buying WSO's like crazy trying to figure out the biz. I kind of shied away from ppc for the moment. I made a couple of big time errors and shot my budget. It was a learning experience.

      So now Im off to learning the SEO side to get the leads without paying for them. Here are some things I have learned that may help others.

      If you are looking to make a million dollars overnight, play the lottery.

      Most of the WSO's say about the same thing when you get right down to it. On the other hand, I haven't seen one that I couldn't find at least one nugget that made the course worthwhile. I have bought about 10-15 so far and haven't asked for a refund yet.

      Nearly all SEO plans involve backlinks in some way. Its either from Web2.0 sites, articles or just creating backlinks from blog entries. Other than that, I can see no real special secret information.

      Since it takes a month or two to get something solidly on Google, the best thing seems to just create, create, create. You also increase your odds of finding a winner. Some stuff wont work no matter what you do and its easy to get frustrated if you hit a couple of these in a row.

      I have spent a lot on tools too. Here are a couple I highly recommend.

      SENuke - Awesome. Expensive. But creates 25 Web 2.0 websites with the push of a button. It will then ping them and turn them into rss feeds. Also has a section that will create profile links on high pr websites that they provide. The reason I use it is I get frustrated with the amount of work that needs to be done and never get it done. No frustration with this product. Just push a button and watch it work.

      Market Samaruai - Can turn 8 hours of research into 8 seconds.

      Scrapebox - another tremendous piece of software. Its uses are endless. can create hundreds of backlinks automatically. Most are spammy though and wont stick for the long run but even if only 1 out of 3 stick, its pretty easy to get a few thousand backlinks for your site in about a week.

      Good luck to everyone
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      • Profile picture of the author Kenster
        Originally Posted by thailanddave View Post

        I haven't been in this section too much lately. I have been retrenching.

        I have been buying WSO's like crazy trying to figure out the biz. I kind of shied away from ppc for the moment. I made a couple of big time errors and shot my budget. It was a learning experience.

        So now Im off to learning the SEO side to get the leads without paying for them. Here are some things I have learned that may help others.

        If you are looking to make a million dollars overnight, play the lottery.

        Most of the WSO's say about the same thing when you get right down to it. On the other hand, I haven't seen one that I couldn't find at least one nugget that made the course worthwhile. I have bought about 10-15 so far and haven't asked for a refund yet.

        Nearly all SEO plans involve backlinks in some way. Its either from Web2.0 sites, articles or just creating backlinks from blog entries. Other than that, I can see no real special secret information.

        Since it takes a month or two to get something solidly on Google, the best thing seems to just create, create, create. You also increase your odds of finding a winner. Some stuff wont work no matter what you do and its easy to get frustrated if you hit a couple of these in a row.

        I have spent a lot on tools too. Here are a couple I highly recommend.

        SENuke - Awesome. Expensive. But creates 25 Web 2.0 websites with the push of a button. It will then ping them and turn them into rss feeds. Also has a section that will create profile links on high pr websites that they provide. The reason I use it is I get frustrated with the amount of work that needs to be done and never get it done. No frustration with this product. Just push a button and watch it work.

        Market Samaruai - Can turn 8 hours of research into 8 seconds.

        Scrapebox - another tremendous piece of software. Its uses are endless. can create hundreds of backlinks automatically. Most are spammy though and wont stick for the long run but even if only 1 out of 3 stick, its pretty easy to get a few thousand backlinks for your site in about a week.

        Good luck to everyone

        Great comments. If I can add something here. You are absolutely right that you should buy lottery tickets if you want to get anywhere in this industry. When I first started I had the mindset that I wanted to be a millionaire by the next week. I was dissapointed, very dissapointed. But I am also stubborn enough and have an ego enough that motivated me to work my butt off to make IM work. It was and still is a lot of work, but it got exponentially easier and the rewards got exponentially greater. I remember first starting and I was literally soo lost for weeks trying to figure out what all the acronyms means, nevermind how everything worked. So yes, it takes work but its worth it.

        Also as for WSOs I agree with you 100%. Almost every single WSO out there and most all other products out there aren't 100% new information. But each has its own spin on things. Each may spark an idea in your head. Each may remind you of something you knew but havent thought of in a while. Thats the power of WSO's.

        For newbies, WSO's help significantly shorten the learning curve. For average marketers, WSOs may give some ideas that may spark your own ideas. For experienced marketerers, most of the WSO may be stuff you already know but there may be that one nugget of information that can help you with your current campaigns. The biggest problem is that people think the WSO or info product will magically make them money!

        Thanks for letting my chime in!
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  • Profile picture of the author syedasim786
    Hi thailanddave,

    I just read your thread on your first CPA success and I must say, I am truly inspired.

    I have been reading these forums non-stop for months now, and I have just started my first Yahoo ad campaign promoting a cpa offer. The past 4 days I have received 3000+ impressions and 44 clicks but no commission yet from the cpa offer, I had two ad group s and over 500 keywords. I had a $10 day cap limit and I was bidding .30cents per keyword. I just paused my campaign and now I have been searching for keywords all day, and creating new ad's and improving my ad copy.

    My question is, how many ad groups should one have? And should I be creating a separate ad and landing page for each ad group? From my understanding you should be aiming in the thousands for keywords, and average about 10-25 keywords per adgroup, if those numbers are correct does and if I should be creating a separate ad for each ad group, isn't that kinda tedious or is there a way around this?

    I am creating my Yahoo Bulk excel sheet write now and I must say, it's taken me 5 hours to figure all of this out and I am very annoyed but I hope to see some kind of result.

    I am sending you this message to let you know your thread has inspired me, and would like to know your view on creating successful ad campaigns and ad groups.

    Thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author leri
    Thank you for useful information.
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  • Profile picture of the author cpacall2
    It is an interesting thread and I am new to IM. I am confused. Where do I start?
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    • Profile picture of the author Kenster
      Originally Posted by cpacall2 View Post

      It is an interesting thread and I am new to IM. I am confused. Where do I start?

      By doing exactly what you are doing...learning! Once you feel a bit more comfortable, then start taking action and learning at the same time!
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  • Profile picture of the author conylee
    great write up..thanks
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  • Profile picture of the author missmystery
    Thanks for sharing your success and your method. I will sign up to yahoo.. got to make sure that deal is still going.
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  • Profile picture of the author JOLANTA
    A newbie here and just read some of these awesome posts. I joined the Omega Niche team with Deep Walia recently and am excited about all the training modules offered as well as the mention of Warrior Forum.
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  • Profile picture of the author CPAmojo
    thailanddave one important point that i'd like to stress to the readers is this statement.

    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).
    It is imperative that you keep in contact with your AM. Just by talking to them every once in a while will do wonders. They will be more responsive in telling you which offers are doing the best. You can even have them look over your campaign to help you optimize it.
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  • Profile picture of the author ameerulislam10
    Wow, You have some serious gold nuggets for us. Please keep us updated in this thread if possible. I'll keep subscribed here. Best wishes.
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  • Profile picture of the author BigRichLane
    if some people around here would put half as much effort into learning how to make money online as you do into each of your posts their would be a lot more millionaires typing around here. thank you very much for sharing you experiences and story friend.
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    BECAUSE THERE IS A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND

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  • Profile picture of the author arcticmuff
    very inspration story. I love it. just learn and try, testing would be best way to learn
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  • Profile picture of the author MarkMOZ
    I keep stumbling upon interesting threads like this on the forum and I'm amazed.

    That's pretty good information, but Google is worth the money as well. If you have it to get started, I say go.
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    • Profile picture of the author Qrisso
      Wow. The information in here is just pure gold.

      But I have one question, I am a bit confused now.

      Do you advertise on Yahoo Advertising platform, or AdCenter platform (Yahoo and Bing combined)?

      When I try to register on the Yahoo platform, I have to choose my monthly advertising budget, and since my budget is lower than $5000 (the lowest possible selectable option), it tells me that I have to register with AdCenter, because I am too "low".

      Thailanddave, on which platform you're advertising then? Yahoo, or AdCenter (Yahoo and Bing combined)?

      And what about the coupon code you mentioned above? Did you find it on internet,or they just gave it to you automatically when you signed up?
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  • Profile picture of the author marketwarrior06
    Banned
    Great!
    its one of the most informative post in this forum. i am also working with CJ. it is quite good. you have said that to join in several CPA networks. what is the important of this matter? can you plz explain? another thing is that, Google is much better that yahoo. but a bit expensive. if any one get a good money then will it be good enough to join Google adward?
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    • Profile picture of the author Kenster
      Originally Posted by marketwarrior06 View Post

      Great!
      its one of the most informative post in this forum. i am also working with CJ. it is quite good. you have said that to join in several CPA networks. what is the important of this matter? can you plz explain? another thing is that, Google is much better that yahoo. but a bit expensive. if any one get a good money then will it be good enough to join Google adward?


      CJ isn't a true CPA network. CPA networks focus on lead offers and generally have better and a greater variety of offers than other traditional affiliate networks.

      As for Google vs Yahoo...many of the big affiliates DONT play in the google game. Google has a lot of traffic but a LOT of rules and a LOT of competition. There is a still opportunity in google and there will always be pockets of gold, but its easy to get squeezed by google when you start doing well.

      So dont think the big G is the only player in the game. It's not by any means of the imagination and it's not where I personally get most of my search traffic!
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  • Profile picture of the author williamrs
    Great post! Actually, one of the best I've seen this year.

    You're new to internet marketing, but it's not hard to see that you're not new to business. The steps you laid out are very good and your mindset couldn't be better. You are already turning a positve ROI with your campaign and it seems that you have just started working with PPC.

    Your story should teach us a very important lesson: courses can do 10% of the work, the person does the other 90%. You bought just one very popular course and are making money, while some people buy dozens of courses and never make a dime (I used to do this in the beginning :p). I'm sure that thousands of guys have bought the course that you mentioned, but I doubt that 99% of them got to the level that you are now.

    For me, the reason why you're doing well is simple: you took action and implemented what you learned. Most people like to buy several courses, but they never stop clicking the "add to cart" button and actually implement what they learned. Sometimes, it seems that people forget that their goal is sell stuff, not buy.

    You are in the right path, you are working with one (not many) traffic source, you understand how this business works (in fact, it's not very different than any other offline business) and seem to be focused and have goals defined. That's it. Now, just keep going, learn from your own experiences and you will be making a full-time income from this business really soon.

    Thanks for the great post!


    William
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    • Profile picture of the author Kenster
      Originally Posted by williamrs View Post

      Great post! Actually, one of the best I've seen this year.

      You're new to internet marketing, but it's not hard to see that you're not new to business. The steps you laid out are very good and your mindset couldn't be better. You are already turning a positve ROI with your campaign and it seems that you have just started working with PPC.

      Your story should teach us a very important lesson: courses can do 10% of the work, the person does the other 90%. You bought just one very popular course and are making money, while some people buy dozens of courses and never make a dime (I used to do this in the beginning :p). I'm sure that thousands of guys have bought the course that you mentioned, but I doubt that 99% of them got to the level that you are now.

      For me, the reason why you're doing well is simple: you took action and implemented what you learned. Most people like to buy several courses, but they never stop clicking the "add to cart" button and actually implement what they learned. Sometimes, it seems that people forget that their goal is sell stuff, not buy.

      You are in the right path, you are working with one (not many) traffic source, you understand how this business works (in fact, it's not very different than any other offline business) and seem to be focused and have goals defined. That's it. Now, just keep going, learn from your own experiences and you will be making a full-time income from this business really soon.

      Thanks for the great post!


      William

      "It seems that people forget that their goal is to sell stuff, not buy stuff"

      Good quote. I think the main problem is that people are always looking for shortcuts. Software, courses, etc are great and all but when you try finding shortcuts before you understand how the system even works, that's where you get in trouble and throw good money in the hole.
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