An Update on My Affiliate Marketing Efforts
November 22, 2009 Posted by Tyler CruzOops. Apparently the last time I gave any update on my affiliate marketing efforts was way back on August 11th when I made my post: My Campaign is Starting to Pick Up.
There are several reasons for the lack of updates, but the main one is that I had been simply posting too much on affiliate marketing which quickly lead to overexposure. Therefore, this post isn’t a resurgence of an affiliate marketing theme on my blog, but rather just an update. I’ll try to give slightly more frequent updates on how many campaigns are going in the future, but not nearly as much as I used to.
Also, affiliate marketing has always just been a small side gig for me; something new for me to try. My main source of income has always come from my websites (I don’t consider my affiliate sites as actual websites…) mostly through private ads, so it’s very misleading to classify me as an affiliate marketer because I am not. At least, I don’t do affiliate marketing for a living.
Surprising Number of Fails
I promised myself that when I returned from my trip to the Philippines that I was going to give PPC affiliate marketing another try and really try to push myself. I had made a bit of money in the past, but nothing substantial. My goal was to work hard and really see what I could do.
I’m happy to say that for about 3 weeks I was working my ass off. In fact, I hadn’t worked that hard on the computer in years, if ever. I was working around 12 hours a day, which is a lot when you consider that I typically work an average of 4 hours a day.
I got a lot of work done and launched about 3 sites, but only one was getting anywhere. I then took a bit of a break to recover, and let it run for a while. A couple weeks or so later, I went back to work, nearly as hard as before, and pumped out another 3 or so campaigns. This didn’t take nearly as long as the first time since I had a system in place and roughly the same format on my websites, but writing good content and ad copy still takes quite a bit of time.
Unfortunately, all of those sites completely tanked, save for my original one. That was a bit of a blow since I was actually quite optimistic on one campaign in particular as I thought I had discovered a “goldmine” keyword during my initial research on the niche. While the keyword did prove to be awesome (brand name, 6 million clicks a month, $0.05), it didn’t convert at all, which was completely surprising to me considering the keyword.
I let my main campaign run another couple weeks, all this time slightly optimizing it (purely on keywords) once a week or so, and then tried a different line of attack. I ran some stuff (mainly rebills) on Facebook, AdBrite, and a couple other sources, which didn’t pan out. This actually cost me close to a grand unfortunately.
So in the end I tried a lot of different offers, all of which failed save for my original one (figures…). This month in November, I pretty much just let my one campaign run quietly, only optimizing it slightly twice. This was partly due to needing an emotional break from affiliate marketing, but mainly due to focusing on the big Movie-Vault.com revamp, and even more recently, my RobotWarz game.
New Daily Profit Record: $233.39
This week I saw a nice string of revenue. My campaign has quite heavy variance, meaning that it’s common, in fact normal, for me to have a couple of days in the green (black) and then a day or two in the red. This is mainly due to the fact that the offer I’m running is in the higher-paying range and therefore more susceptible to variation. For example, 3 leads can make a big difference since it’s over $100.
On November 19th, I set a new affiliate marketing personal record, netting a profit of $233.39 in a single day. As you know, I love breaking records so I was pretty happy about that.
I had expected for the weekend to drop in the low 2-digit figures, or even the red, but yesterday (Saturday) still made $76.78 and today as of noon, my campaign is currently at $67 profit.
This makes me wonder if this is just another string of positive variance, or possibly due to the Christmas season. The thing though, is that the offer I’m running is totally not the type of thing you’d give as a gift… then again, there are a lot of bad gift givers out there.
I’ll just have to wait and see how things progress.
If I Can Do It, So Can You
During the past 6 days, I generated a total of $1,270.50 at PeerFly. This works out to an average of $211.66. If we assume that I average that from November 1st to December 31st, that would total just shy of $13,000.
That would place me easily into the $10,000.00 – $19,999.99 VIP Tier in PeerFly’s Wonderful Winter Competition held at PublisherChallenge. As a result, I would have won a Canon Rebel XSi 12.2MP Digital SLR Camera… for doing nothing different other than simply running my campaign.
Unfortunately, I’m not eligible to compete in the competition due to an obvious conflict of interest running PublisherChallenge.
My point is that it’s really not that difficult to walk away with a great prize from the competitions held by PeerFly on PublisherChallenge. I consider myself a newbie affiliate marketer, but I still would have won an awesome camera.
Even if you only do $40 a day gross, you’d still win an 8GB iPod Nano. And of course we have huge prizes for affiliates that can do huge numbers.
I won’t go into this anymore, but just want to show you how easy it is to win a prize… remember, I’m only running one campaign that I barely touch.
Restructuring Plans
Since I am busy with Movie-Vault.com and RobotWarz, I’m not working on affiliate marketing at the moment. But when I do find some more time and energy, I have some plans in mind for how to scale my campaign.
First, I’m going to try a different a tracking software. I currently use Tracking202 Pro which is good, but it also has its limits. For example, I cannot track on anything other than the “big 3”, and there is vital information that I am unable to see such as country data which is crucially important for my campaign.
I could move down to the free version of Tracking202, but the guys at 202 just announced yesterday that they sold 202 to Bloomsky. I’ve always used Tracking202 largely in part because I trust Wes and the guys there, so I don’t like the fact that it was sold to an affiliate network.
Therefore, I’m probably going to try StatsJunky and see how I like it. Hopefully I’ll be able to track country data then.
Secondly, I’m going to try to port my main campaign over to Facebook. I already tried porting it to the content network, but that didn’t do all that well (it roughly breaks even).
Lastly, I am going to change the way I create and run my actual affiliate websites. The way I have it set up currently, it’s nearly impossible for me to run any split-testing on the landing pages. I am therefore thinking of changing the way I do this, and will commission for a simple script to be made by Interberry where I can easily do this in the future.
I’ve done split-testing on landing pages before, and many people will be very surprised just how much difference the tiniest change on your landing page can make to your conversion rate.
I think that with the above changes I should be able to ramp my campaign to $1,000 gross a day.
I’ll just have to wait until I have the time and patience to do all this stuff (changing tracking software will be a pain, as will changing how my site is coded…).
Hey Tyler,
Nice work on the stats and your record breaking your PB! I’m going to start a few affiliate sites myself in the upcoming months so really looking forward to the challenge.
I’ve given myself some time and space now to really study and take action on what I know already. Excited about it!
Thanks for sharing your stats 🙂
Sarge
I need to run more PeerFly stuff. I’m already in the $1k part to get $50 bucks which will be nice but I’d like to get to the $10k area as the Camera would be cool.
I already have a nice camera but it’s always nice to get a better one for free (in a way).
excellent … what kind of product do you sell on this campaign . affiliate marketing , yeah … i can clearly see a nice future of this program in your hand
I really can’t undertsand why people ask questions like this, surely they know that they’re not going to get an answer? Whenever a MMO blogger goes in to any detail about exactly what they’re doing it impacts straight away on the profitability of that technique/market. It’s why I stopped my regular posts – I’d say “try doing this and this, it’s working for me in this niche” and straight away people would rip off exactly what I was doing in that niche instead of adapting the technique to their market. There are far too many stupid people out there for bloggers to be even remotely specific about what they’re doing.
Here endeth the rant.
Yea, i know what you mean, i mentioned i was doing really well with ‘x’ and kid you not, i have 8 other competitors within next week! it’s almost around 20 now…. i wished i cept my mouth shut about that..
It why MMO is such a crazy niche to blog in. In reality every A-list MMO blogger should probably start most of their blogs with “You Can Make Me More Money By……….”
yes i can
I was wondering when we’d get to read another affiliate marketing update. Congrats on your new daily goal, Tyler!
Sounds like your not doing to bad Tyler. If I had the money I’d give affiliate marketing a try.
thanks for the update. It looks like if you had more available time, you could make these campaigns more profitable.
Great earnings.
Really inspiring.
I suppose you do very good keyword research and find profitable niches.
Anyway your still doing good. Keep up the good work.
Congrats on setting a new daily profit record! 🙂
Wow, those numbers!
You really are raking in money with affiliate marketing. You seem to be doing it so well.
First. I would like to congratulate you on your knew record. I would also like to comment on your pay-per-click experience. Your lost is no surprise to me. I’ sure their are thousands of people who have mastered the art of pay per click marketing, but I am not one of them I tried pay per click marketing but I lost a lot of money so I have turned my efforts to organic seo.
I just had my best month in affiliate marketing. I will continue to read tips from blogs like yours to increase it even more
Thanks for such an open and honest post on your current Affiliate marketing campaigns. Its nice to see an affiliate being open and not just focussing on the big numbers. Congrats on a great post and well done on achieving a new record. Well done
Simon….
good for you.. for me i had stopped doing any aff.marketing since june because of the stupid internship..
Next year probably I would dive into it once more.. 😀
Tyler,
You must have worked so hard for this. Thanks for sharing your experience. This is like a great example for affiliate marketers not to mention that this is also a great post.
I heart your affiliate marketing updates.. : )
Congrats on the affiliate commissions Tyler. It sounds like you are well on your way to becoming a full-on affiliate marketer. It is a good idea to branch out into several solid income streams. That way there is much less risk overall.
excellent … what kind of product do you sell on this campaign . affiliate marketing , yeah … i can clearly see a nice future of this program in your hand
I suppose you do very good keyword research and find profitable niches.
Thanks for the update, Tyler. I’ve watched your progress on some of your other sites, and also you game development work .. good on you for that, but slow and steady work on the affilate stes is clearly paying off too.
To those who are always asking ‘what are you selling’, I propose a question back to you … what difference does it make? Find a niche that _you_ like and that _you_ would feel good about promoting, and go for it. Copying, even the most successful entrepreneurs, at best can only make you an also ran.
All you have to do is look at services like PeerFly and see the thousands of ‘merchants’ out there literally ‘begging’ with money in their hand for someone to get busy and sell product … or generate leads for them (CPA often pays more)… and pick something you have enthusiasm for … and then do it.
Good point Dave. You don’t have to copy exactly what others are doing. In fact, you will be more successful if you instead concentrate on a niche that genuinely interests you. You can make money in virtually any niche, but a niche that interests you actually allows you to excel.
good for you.. for me i had stopped doing any aff.marketing since june because of the stupid internship..
Next year probably I would dive into it once more..
I suppose you do very good keyword research and find profitable niches.
Hey Tyler,
Nice work on the stats and your record breaking your PB! I’m going to start a few affiliate sites myself in the upcoming months so really looking forward to the challenge.
I’ve given myself some time and space now to really study and take action on what I know already. Excited about it!
Wow my friend seeing your success in affiliate marketing makes me wonder why I haven’t tried that game yet. Eventually when the time is right I know I will.
Till then,
Jean
Way to much money still to be made 😉
Are you the member of PPC-coach.Where did you learn to market online.can you plz explain.
Hey Tyler, seems that you have really good experience with affiliate marketing. I’m new to affiliate marketing and am trying to get into now, hope to learn something from your guidance. 🙂
Cheers,
Lee
You should start now. It is really profitable
Hey Tyler, is the chart above manually typed in Excel or some sort of websites or software that can keep track of income and cost? Thanks.
I use Tracking202 Pro for analysis, but I keep my stats in Excel (which I manually update) for a 100% accurate and total comprehensive bottom line of what’s going on.
Affiliate marketing is the new wild west
you can make a lot or little money
all about how much work you put into it nad how good you are
Dang, nicely done on your earnings. Thanks for posting some of the data as it gives us affiliate underlings hopes!
-Jack
I just had my best month in affiliate marketing.
I suppose you do very good keyword research and find profitable niches.
Really great stats! Congratulations!
This is big motivation for us! I guess you make an action for your each affiliate marketing campaign don’t you? I myself always start with proper plan.
Thanks
Fast Article Writing Software
is peerfly only for United States? Its letting me enter my Canadian address but for some reason, the country is only set to United States and I cannot process my app without the US information.
Hey there, it’s probably because your IP is a US ip. Do you live close to the border or something? Go ahead and join with the US as your country and send me an e-mail: Chad@PeerFly.com and I will take care of it for you.
thanks for the update!
great post thanks alot
Way to much money
very good. much money
very good articles.
I just started testing a new campaign and my results are a little bit worse. I am losing a tiny bit of money each and can’t figure out what I need to do to push myself into the black. Frustrating!
ı glad to read this article. thanks
thats really good, thank you so much.
I appreciate your work followed
Wow those are nice stats, congrats on your new daily record.
thanks for the update
Great earnings. Thank you 😉
i wonder my friend is doing… because his ads spend is 10K per day… i know his doing great money and so you do..
Great work on the new PB Tyler!
thanks for the update. It looks like if you had more available time, you could make these campaigns more profitable.
You must have worked so hard for this.
Another great informative post – I have run some campaigns with facebook but have not seen the ROI that you have yet
Everything takes time, I am sure you will find your way to the top!
Would love to see an indepth post about PPC on your blog, maybe you could cover an old and retired campaign for us? Like a masterclass?
[…] 13, 2010 Posted by Tyler Cruz Paid Advertisement It’s been close to 2-months since my last update on my PPC affiliate marketing efforts, so here’s an update on how things have been […]
ive actually set up a blog my self, im going to need some help. getting into affiliate marketing is something i have been looking into for a months now but i dont know how to get started, if i could learn to make profits like that everyday i would quit my job.
As far as affiliate software, you can’t go wrong with Omnistar Affiliate
Everything takes time, I am sure you will find your way to the top! (:
Everything takes time, I am sure you will find your way to the top! 😉
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