Affiliate Marketing Plunge: Month 2, Week 3
July 25, 2008 Posted by Tyler Cruz
It’s been exactly a week since I last updated you guys on how my personal plunge into PPC affiliate marketing has been going, so here’s another update.
Unfortunately, I was unable to find any time to work on my campaigns yet again. I’ve just been so swamped lately, and things only look to get busier if anything. In many ways that’s a good thing as it means I have a lot of things going on and growing, but at the same time it means I can’t spend the time I want or need to on some of my projects such as my affiliate marketing.
I believe I managed to work for only 2-3 hours on my campaigns during the past week, with almost all of the time being spent on creating two new landing pages. I analyzed my landing pages and noticed that one was outperforming the others, but just slightly, and so I created the 2 new landing pages which are very slight variants of the one that was performing better than the others.
My change was very subtle on one of the landing pages; all I did was change the photo from a man to a woman. in the other landing page, I reduced (eliminated) busier areas of the page to try to make the call-to-action more apparent. I need more data to see how these landing pages perform, but so far the “woman” landing page has the lowest CTR of all my landing pages, and the reduced landing page has a 10% (53%) higher CTR than any of the other landing pages.
It’s too early to analyze the sign-up rate and EPC since, again, there is not enough sample data to construct a conclusion.
Anyhow, here are my latest numbers as of yesterday:
Wowsers, Batman!
-13.53% ROI! Yes, yes… I know. It’s silly to be so excited about losing money, but I’ve come a very long way and if the trend continues I might just make my goal of breaking even.
My update from last week showed a -19.57% ROI, making the past week a 6%+ improvement over the month’s average ROI.
Here is the progress of my total average ROI, taken after the first week and then every few days thereafter: -57.12%, -53.42%, -43.71%, -36.83%, -31.76%, -25.67%, -19.57%, and now -13.53%!
If you take the data from only the past week, you’ll find that I lost $0.95 which is roughly the break-even point.
I can’t wait to see how my numbers change in the next few days. I have to be honest - I don’t know how much longer I can keep seeing such great improvements each update, and it will probably start to slow down soon, but hey - here’s hoping I’m wrong.
You drove 22 leads at 26.50 each. If you get bumped to $30 per lead, thats an extra 77 dollars right there, which means you are ALMOST breaking even. I’m sure you can find a way to get bumped to $30.
I actually already have quite a good payout on the offer (the max is $30 so the networks are making $3.50 on each lead from me), and I’m not sending them much volume (just 1-2 leads per day) so I can’t ask for a higher rate…
Nevermind. My AM is a beast… gave me another $1 on the offer, which basically gives them a miniscule profit of $2.50 on a $30 max payout.
This will help as it basically gives me around 3-4 free “clicks” for each lead I get now. While it’s a generous increase, I still need to tweak my campaign more…
Also, how come you don’t use yahoo anymore?
I want to maximize my ROI and “perfect” my campaign as much as I can, then I will port my exact keywords over to Yahoo and MSN to scale it which should double the volume.
So, if I can get things up to an average of $10 per day, then I’ll port over to YSM and MSN and bring in $600 a month profit on the campaign.
That’s the plan anyway…
Unfortunately, it hardly ever works like that imo…keywords that perform well on one platform have a nasty habit of being rubbish on another, and vice versa.
You will be profitable in no time! Nice work.
Next stop greenzone
We all wish the same
congrats, you are doing pretty good. I still am terrible at affiliate marketing, my ROI is like -71% last I checked lol. It is inspiring to see that you started at like -90% last year though and now you are on the right track. I think I’m going to try some landing pages soon, but I just can’t understand why they work cause the merchant already has a landing page so it’s like an extra click you are requiring of the customer. I am terrible at design too so about the only landing page I could do would be a review\overview of the product and why I think it is a good product.
As I understand it, there are two main reasons for creating landing pages to direct-linking:
1. Ability to manage and improve QS, thus lower click costs.
2. The ability to presell the consumer.
I understand the pre-sell part, but does the QS part even apply to Yahoo? I am getting decent QS on Yahoo by direct linking.
As long as your ROI is increasing (even if it is still negative), PPC is an excellent way to drive long term traffic.
Some affiliate programs are two tiered, that is one thing you might take into consideration for your ROI.
Nick Work!
Hey Tyler,
I was just wondering if you can share the site because I would like to get ideas on how to do Affiliate Marketing.
If I did then my ROI would probably return to -50%. Unfortunately, PPC affiliate marketing largely requires a lot of secrecy because of how competitive the market is…
agree…secrecy is the best when one is making lots of money like you and I.
One of my websites mentioned above is drawing $$$$$ per mth and no maintainance is needed.
good job Tyler…learn alot from your post
Good info
Tyler, I think you should give up on NeverblueAds. You’re not earning from but losing money, even though you are close to the break-even point. Every businessman knows that they eliminate their products which doesn’t make them money.
I stopped earning with NeverblueAds once I switched all my links over to MarketLeverage
I just keep them in my Excel database so I don’t have to reconfigure everything.
Hey Tyler,
So how can I learn affiliate marketing and know how to set it up and make money?
Watch my screencast here:
http://www.tylercruz.com/ppc-affiliate-marketing-introduction/
austin - stop being such a bitch! the info is out there. Many people have learned how to do this and did not have some one hold there hand. grow some balls and learn it your self there are no short cuts!
Awesome to see a lot more green going on. Congrats on continually bring your ROI up! And great that you realize that even though you are losing cash right now it is a very well priced lesson that will translate on all your campaigns in the future.
Your running series helps people realize that affiliate marketing isn’t as simple as picking an offer and paying for traffic. Though then again, that usually helps keep some of the extra competition out of the game lol.
Keep it going though…shouldn’t be long until you are in constant green and/or hit that one major campaign that makes up for the last couple months in a day
Wow Tyler! You really answer all the comments here.
Yeah, thats a good point, Tyler also doesnt speak bS like others, wont name them..
You’ll be in the green with overall profit in no time! Keep up the hard work.
NeverBlueAds never made anything ? Isn’t it good ?
[...] updates, but even then, you can tell that they are well thought out. Take for example, the post “Affiliate Marketing Plunge: Month 2, Week 3.” This post details his experiences with PPC affiliate marketing. In addition to basic content, [...]
Small goals are important. Although you are still in the red, your progress is encouraging!