TylerCruz.com: An Internet Entrepreneur’s JourneyThe journal of a young web entrepreneur on his journey to wealth.

Affiliate Marketing Challenge 2: One Week Left!

Paid Advertisement

We are down to the final week of the Affiliate Marketing Challenge 2! While the clock is certainly ticking (…literally! Check out the Affiliate Challenge widget on the top right of my blog), there’s still time to register and earn your way to a prize (or prizes).

If you haven’t entered yet, I highly recommend you do. MarketLeverage has put up so many great prizes that it’s certainly worth your while to try to compete for them. I’m actually very envious of you guys and wish I could compete in my own contest!

For those of you who have signed up, but are having trouble making any leads or sales, keep working at it! Part of the great thing about this competition is that it really pushes and encourages you to make more money through affiliate marketing. I know of a few contestants who have surprised themselves by raking in a lot more dough that they thought they could, simply due to the nature of competition.

Prizes

Before I get to the rankings, here is a reminder of what is up for grabs. Full details of the prizes and contest details can be found at the original contest page.

Top Grossing Affiliates

• 1st Place: Dell 22″ Widescreen Monitor with Built-In Webcam
• 2nd Place: Sony PSP + Secret Agent Clank
• 3rd Place: Mino Flip Video Camera
• 4th Place: iPod Nano
• 5th Place: $100 Prepaid Rewards Card
• 6th Place: $100 Prepaid Rewards Card

Top New Affiliates

• 1st Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 2nd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 3rd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 4th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 5th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen

Random Blog Draws:

• 1st Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 2nd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 3rd Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 4th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen
• 5th Place: 2.0GB USB Storage Pen

Current Rankings

Here are the latest rankings as of August 6th, 3:10pm Pacific time.

I’ve now referred a total of 83 affiliates to MarketLeverage, 24 of which signed up during this current competition.

Together, during this competition thus far, they’ve generated a total of $22,661.75 in commissions. The current leaderboards are shown below:

CD8470, aka “The Behemoth” as I prefer to call him, has continued to show his complete and utter dominance in the competition. He must really want that 22-inch monitor

However, “The Newcomer”, entering into the competition a week late, is a force to be reckoned with as well, having secured 2nd place with nearly $5,000. From the pace he’s set so far, it doesn’t look like he’ll be able to catch The Behemoth, but anything can happen within the span of a week…

CD9050 seems to have sneaked into 3rd place somehow. It may have taken him sometime to get his campaigns moved over to MarketLeverage or get things set up, but he’s doing quite well now.

CD8137 has continued to play out his role as “The Tortoise”. He’s never been flashy, but he’s consistent and solid.

CD8346 dropped down another spot due to CD9050. He’ll need to be careful in order to stay in 5th place since there is a lot of competition looking to bump him off.

CD8036 is another “slow and steady” competitor, however he will need to try and ramp up his campaigns in order to continue to stick with the pack.

For the new affiliates, we see “The Newcomer” easily securing 1st place and CD9050 easily securing 2nd. A number of other new affiliates seem to have put in some effort as well, and there is now a lot of competition in the $50-80 range.

Blogging Entrants

So far, a total of 12 people have blogged about this competition. That means that as it stands right now, if you wrote a blog post about this competition, your chances of winning a 2.0GB USB pen would be 42%. Those are pretty good odds for taking 20-minutes to write a blog post! 

Competition Goals and Thoughts

It appear as though I’ve already met and surpassed my goal of having the competition generate a total of $15,000, however it doesn’t appear as though I’ll reach my goal of also referring a total of 100 affiliates. So sign-up and help me reach that second goal!

There are still 7 days left for this competition, so if you haven’t signed up yet, come on and join the fun! Even if you don’t place in this competition, you’ll be all set up and ready to go for the next one.

Plus, what better way to get your feet wet into affiliate marketing than to join a contest?

I’ll be declaring the winners in a week from now: I hope to see you as one of them!

Affiliate Marketing Plunge: I’M IN THE GREEN!!

Paid Advertisement

Man, what a ride.

I first started my foray into the world of PPC affiliate marketing a bit over a year ago when I lost $1,000 in just under a month. I then decided to try my hand at it again a couple months ago, and finished June $400 in the hole.

I kept at it, since I kept seeing improvements in my average ROI, and it seems to have paid off since I managed to finish July IN THE GREEN! I know the correct term is “Black” and not green, but it’s not easy been green, and my spreadsheet shows my profits in green

Let me tell you, it’s a most wonderful feeling seeing yourself progress. It’s a great challenge, and when you succeed you get a huge high. Here is my affiliate data for the month of July:

As you can see, I finished with a profit of $26.29. While this amount may seem ludicrous, especially considering that I had to spend $885.71 to make $912.00, the fact is that I finished with a profit.

My ROI finished with an average of 2.97%. Notice how there isn’t a negative sign in front anymore?

Here is the progress of my total average ROI, taken after the first week and then every few periods thereafter: -57.12%, -53.42%, -43.71%, -36.83%, -31.76%, -25.67%, -19.57%, -13.53%, and now +2.97%!

Soon, I will begin to put less emphasis on the ROI and more on the net figure. After all, you could have an ROI of 100% and spend $50 to make $100, or you could have an ROI of 50% and spend $500 to make $750. I’d rather make the $250 than $50.

If you take the data from the last 7 days, you’ll see that I actually profited $116.14 with an ROI of 62.32%. This would work out to an average of $16.59 per day, or $497 a month. If I created 19 more campaigns just like this one, that would turn out to be $10,000 a month profit.

Unfortunately, the past few days have shown very poor results, but hopefully things will pick up again soon. I also have a huge surprise that I’ll be unveiling within a few days so be sure to stay tuned for that.

Premade and Custom Landing Pages

Paid Advertisement

The following is a paid review and is completely of my own opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having me review your site or product, please view my advertising page.

This site I’ll be reviewing goes along nicely with the affiliate marketing theme my blog has focusing on during the past couple months.

Landing pages are a huge part of PPC affiliate networking, especially as more search networks are starting to disallow direct linking. While PPC affiliate marketing landing pages have never been known for their top quality design, they’ve always been a vitally important factor in the success of any campaign.

The purpose of a landing page isn’t meant to win any artistic awards or even be all that informative and helpful. The purpose of a landing page has always been to (a) pre-sell the visitor and drive them to your offer, getting them interested in the product or service, and (b) to obtain a good quality score.

While landing pages don’t require the highest designing or coding skills to create, the fact is that they take time. A PPC affiliate marketer should be spending their time optimizing their campaigns by adding/improving their keywords, split testing, etc. It should not be spend designing landing pages. It’s just not a cost-effective use of their time. Not when there are services like LPCreations.

LPCreations.com sells pre-made and custom landing pages catered to affiliate marketers. Here is a breakdown of their services:

Pre-made Landing Pages

LPCreations sells premade landing pages which you can purchase right away. Unfortunately, there are currently only 8 different landing pages to choose from, although I was told that there will be new ones created in the future. Each of the 8 landing pages is for a different category, or niche, such as Credit Rating, Health Insurance, and Ringtones.

Each landing page costs $29, or you could add a custom/unique article to your order for another $10 at $39. In either case, the PSD and fonts are included as well.

With only 8 landing pages to currently choose from, I cannot foresee many sales of the pre-made landing pages being made at the moment. LPCreations needs to get busy and provide at least 20-30 to cover most of the major niches out there, and preferably provide at least 2 different landing pages per niche.

The very idea of selling pre-made landing pages is a controversial subject as well. Many purchasers of landing pages are concerned with duplicate content penalties, or simply having a landing page that is already too saturated in their niche. For example, if 30 affiliates buy the Free Health Insurance landing page and are all competing in the same niche, a lot of visitors may have already seen the exact same landing page before and not click through.

This issue would be relieved, however, by simply offering a large amount of landing pages. By offering only 8, there is a 12.5% chance the next customer will buy the exact same landing page you just did.

The landing pages themselves are pretty good. Again, as stated in my introduction, landing pages aren’t award-winning designs, nor are they meant to be. If you’re on a very tight budget and have decent design skills, then you could probably make these landing pages yourself.

However, for most people, $29 is not a lot of money, and in my opinion the time saved is definitely worth the small price. I consider myself a half-decent designer, but I’d still much rather pay for a landing page than make one myself. It would probably take me a few hours to design one landing page and code it, and to me, 2-5 hours is not worth saving $29 (that’s a wage of $5.80-$14.50/hour. Considering I average between $50-70/hour ($100,000+ made in 2007, average of 4-5 hours per 365 days), this would not be an effective use of my time.

Therefore, it’s worth it to buy a landing page.

One thing I’d like to recommend is for LPCreations to change how they’re currently showing their portfolio of pre-made landing pages.

Currently, in addition to a medium-sized screenshot on the front page, there is a Live Demo link for each landing page. This links to an actual working HTML page of the offer. To combat people from simply stealing the images, the HTML is ran through a Javascript encrypter to ward off any potential thieves.

However, this is far from secure. In fact, I was able to completely rip a landing page in approximately 10-minutes. The Javascript “encryption” may obfuscate things a bit, but it does certainly does not stop copying. I’m certainly not recommending any readers try to do this, as it would be stealing and it is of course illegal. I just wanted to bring this fact to their attention.

My solution? I recommend removing the “Live Preview” links and simply link to a large screenshot (800×600) of the landing page, and then to watermark the screenshot so people can’t just splice it and code it themselves. I made a sample of one of their landing pages below:

Special Deal for TylerCruz.com readers!

Use the coupon code TYLER-CRUZ when you order a pre-made landing page from LPCreations and receive a 10% discount!

Customizations

LPCreations offers a customization service in which you can request unique changes to any of their pre-made landing pages. The price depends on the type and level of customization, but I’d assume for the fee to be minimal since all the prices on the site are cheap to begin with.

On a side note, I’d recommend for LPCreations to fix the “Customisation” typos on the site. The main navigation bar misspells the word and it does stand out as an amateur mistake. While typos on a site where you’re selling something is never good, when you sell unique articles as part of your service it only makes things worse.

Custom Landing Pages

In addition to pre-made landing pages, LPCreations also does custom landing page design. This is what I’d expect most people to use their service for instead of “sharing” their pre-made landing page with other affiliates. Getting custom-built things in general is almost always a good thing.

Each custom landing page is only $39. This is very cheap for a custom-made landing page that is coded for you as well. The turnaround time is generally 2-3 days, but may take longer depending on the current amount or orders.

Each custom landing page is never resold after being created.

The 3 custom packages they offer are:

• Landing Page Price: $39 (1 Page)
• Review Style Landing Page Price: $59 (1 Page allowing you to review up to 5 different offers)
• Landing Site/Mini Site Price: $99 (5 Pages complete with unique content)

Affiliate Program

LPCreations has an affiliate program which pays out a healthy 50%. This is a paid review so I’m not using any referral links, but if I did, I bet I’d have sold at least 4 landing pages would would have made me $78.

As you can see, their affiliate program is actually something you might want to consider signing up for and linking to so you have something to give someone the next time they ask you “Hey, do you know any cheap/good landing page designers?”.

Summary

If you do PPC affiliate marketing, then you most likely already use landing pages, unless you’re one of the rare ones who run exclusively direct-linking campaigns. LPCreations offers both pre-made and custom landing pages for very affordable prices, although their custom landing pages seem to be a much better value at only $10 for a custom/unique landing page.

If you’re brand new to PPC affiliate marketing or plan on starting it soon, then you might want to remember LPCreations.com for when you do require a landing page.

Blog Earnings: July 2008

Paid Advertisement

They say good things come to those who wait, so who I am to disagree?

I’ve been so busy the past few months, the past few weeks especially. I have my hands in so many different projects that it can be very overwhelming at times. However, this week all my hard work seems to have paid off since I’ve had a number of new records and milestones on various sites and projects. This is one of those new records.

In my previous blog earnings update, I had predicted that July’s earnings would be somewhere around the $1,500-$1,600 range, and that my goal was to set a new record.

Well, July didn’t end up in that range, but I did set a new record. In fact, I completely shattered the old one by exactly $1,000.40 - what a funny number!

My July 2008 blog income came to: $2,746.59

Yee Haw!

My graph now looks like it took a dose of Earnings Viagra - coming to a website near you. (Please consult a guru before using Earnings Viagra. Earnings Viagra may cause extreme happiness, jaw-dropping syndrome, or tears of joy.)

The huge increase was largely in thanks to MarketLeverage. As you should know by now, I’ve been running my second MarketLeverage contest and have so far referred a total of 82 affiliates. They generated $20,292.80 in July, and since I get 5% of whatever they generate, I made $1,014.64.

Now you guys can see the power and methodology behind PublisherSpot.

I also got paid by AdToll finally. AdToll’s payment system is weird in that you don’t get paid until the advertiser who purchased the slot has finished their campaign with you. While the maximum amount of time an advertiser can purchase at once is 3-months, it means you have to wait up to 3-months to receive payment. This also explains why May and June saw no revenue generated from AdToll.

The $140 under the Other category is from a paid review I did via ReviewMe.

The pie chart below has undergone a significant change from prior blog earning reports. The $1,014.64 I made from MarketLeverage referrals in July really stirred things up. If it continues to grow, it will soon resemble PacMan:

For the same reason as above, the following chart sees the Affiliates wedge grow from an average of 18% to 26%.

Affiliate Sources

• MarketLeverage has recently been a great additional revenue source for my blog. In the month of July alone, my referrals generated me over $1,000 in commissions. This is not counting the money I make with them through my PPC affiliate marketing efforts.