Affiliate Marketing Plunge: Day 10
May 3, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzHowdy, thought I’d give you guys another update on my trek into affiliating marketing.
Boy, it sure is time consuming. I think it’s more time consuming right now though, because I’m so new. Thus, there is a lot of waiting involved. For example, I only got approved today to an advertiser I signed up for from CJ nearly two weeks ago. I’m also waiting right now for MSN Adcenter to approve my new campaign.
Another thing that has really been aggraving me lately is that MSIE keeps crashing. I believe this is related to the AzoogleAds toolbar I installed. However, it’s hard to tell if it’s worth the crashes since the toolbar really is handy since it gives live reports of clicks, leads and payouts, which saves me time from having to keep logging in and refreshing.
This brings me to another point. I find myself wasting so much time having to keep dancing around so many different sites. For example, when I’m working on my campaigns and keywords, I’m logged into: CJ, AzoogleAds, Copeac, AdWords, and now MSN Adcenter and Overture as well. What’s worse is that most of these sites (Not Copeac) have very short session timeouts, which means I have to keep logging back in when I refresh.
There’s not really much I can do about this, but I can guess that in the future I won’t need to do so much logging in and testing. At least not as frequently as I’m doing now since I’m so new.
In other news, Azoogle messed up again and couldn’t find my W8-Ben. I sorted this out with them though, since I had kept meticulous logs; I was afraid something like this might happen so I had a bunch of diaries and logs to prove to them I had sent it before. This is just another example of crap that’s been slowing me down.
I finished adding most of the offers on my 3rd niche site. This one is interesting since I found no shortage of advertisers for this area, which is great. My site for this one though has several pages so I’m not quote done with it yet, so once I get my keywords going for it I’ll see how it fares.
That being said, with my first and main site, it’s mainly one specific keyword that is performing. Virtually all of my clicks and leads come from this one keyword. Unfortunately, it is pretty competitive. Fortunately, though, I’ve got the CPC down a lot from what it used to be, and the QS for it is very good at minimum of $0.03! I’m in the top 10 for it, and paying an average of $1.22 for it now, which is half of what I was paying for it before.
However, I can’t profit if I keep paying that much for it, so I need to find a way to lower it some more, but I don’t really know if that’s possible. What do you guys think about this?
So, when I thought about this, I decided it was a good idea to sign-up on MSN Adcenter and Overture, and try bidding for this keyword cheaper. My assumption is that it’s a bit cheaper there since I’m guessing most people use just AdWords.
So far I’m hating Overture and Google. My overture campaign has started, but my max bid is at $1, so I’m getting no volume, but I did get 1 click for the keyword so far. I’m still waiting for MSN to approve my campaign or something; my status says “Submitted”. Sigh, more waiting.
I’ve been adding more keywords slowly but steadily. Earlier today I added a bunch of really good long tail ones after finding a few more offers which opened me to more keywords (not company/branded keywords don’t worry). But again, it’s this 1 keyword that is really doing all the work. If only I could find a way to both get volume on it and drastically lower the price for it. It’s very targeted and just a great keyword…
Anyhow, without further adieu, here is an update on my ROI pic as I’ve always been treating you to:
Yup, $663.07 in the hole. Have your laugh, haters. Tyler is going broke, ha ha ha. I don’t care. Anyhow, I did reach my goal of averaging (by average I’m just taking the total ROI average, and right now the sample is so small so it will be a lot harder to reach my goals in the future) an average of -80% ROI. Today was my ‘best’ day to date with a -49% ROI. Obviously I can’t make any money staying down here, but wait… is this… progress I’m seeing?
My new goal is to average a -70% ROI. Pathetic, yes, yes, old news. Let me try at least. Who knows what this incompetant newbie might be able to pull off…
Did you get the refund you were expecting?
Not yet, I had to sort out the w8-ben form before they’d look into it. My AM now says compensation should be sorted out tomorrow. I’m assuming I’ll get around $40.
I’m just starting out myself with some affiliate marketing so I understand what you’re going through. Just stay persistent with it and I’m sure you’ll start to see some success.
For the session issue. Use firefox, install tab mix plus. Have one window just for the sites. Open all the sites in tabs. Then right click and have each site auto-refresh every ____ seconds/minutes. That should keep you logged in forever and make keeping them all open easy.
If any newbie could just slap up some pages and create some adword campaigns and end up earning big bucks… wouldn’t everyone be doing it?
When will people learn that the internet is not the magical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
Sharap is right.
Sure you’re almost $700 in the hole and eventually you’ll have spent almost 1% of your yearly earnings before turning a profit, but you need to be persistent. The more you spend, the more you learn, the more (hopefully) you’ll bank — in the long run.
Tyler Cruz, you’re my hero. Not everyone has the balls to throw away money to L-E-A-R-N.
Wow im suprised you are going for such high paying keywords. I’ll tell you in the most constructive way that in arbitrage you should find a tight niche and go for low keywords.
Lets say you pay 5 cents per click and get 50 percent of those people to click your ads that are worth 20 cents or so. At 5 dollars spent you will have made 10 so you are at 5 dollars profit.
This is where people go wrong, they try to compete with other large dollar bids to make bulk profit.
It’s like gambling tyler. I know you play poker so think of that. Sometimes you want to play smart and bid low.
If you can get about 10 to 20 niche sites its easy to make a few hundred dollars a day off arbitrage alone. With adwords and adsense alone.
Once you start turning profit that way you can add affiliate links on the pages as well and test it.
I’ve used this method and I make good money, but theres a lot more to it and I researched for months. You have to play it safe and slow. Im not saying you can’t make money at high paid keywords but it’s extremely competitive where as low to mid range is not.
Paid Topics Blog
Paid Topix Forum
This is why affiliate arbitrage is not for the weak of heart 😉 Keep up with the posts Tyler! Even though things are a little rocky right now, your complete honesty makes for great blog material.
Tyler, you’ve got to steepen that learning curve to really reduce that bleeding. I’m no internet arbitrageur, but I believe there are only a few guys making actual profits in the affiliate arb any more. Every amateur in the world is doing it now. I think the really competative markets are probably completely unprofitable and being sustained by a huge influx of newbies. This is what sustained the stock market during the dot com bubble. If WallStreetJouranal is reading, here is another rule for businessmen. “Don’t throw good money after bad.” Not only that, it seems highly labor intensive, even if was profitable. I think your time could be better spent developing sites.
Hang in there, but re-think how much you are paying. $1.22 on a product that pays out $6.00 maybe? Way too high. You should not pay more than $0.25 for that if at all.
It took me about 2 months to turn a profit and the 3rd month covered all my losses from before, but it takes a lot of experimenting. I am directly linking to an affiliate and pay to beat “them” in regards to the display URL, but it works. You really need to work on your keywords though.
Keep up your good work tyler, I have tried to use google adword to earn affiliate commission for about 1 year before i earn my positive ROI, i think if you are smart , you can earn a positive ROI within a month, KEEP GOING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I don’t understand why you’ve spent all this money. Overture tells you what the cost of keywords are, so a back of envelope calculation would have predicted this loss.
Seriously you need to stop what you’re doing and get some advice from a dedicated affiliate forum (do a search).
[…] asks in his latest post: I’m in the top 10 for it, and paying an average of $1.22 for it now, which is half of what I […]
This is definitely interesting. It seems like it would be a very time consuming thing to do. Have you moved to this and basically stopped spending money on some of your smaller forums?
How did you prepare for this expansion into affiliate marketing? Sure, experimentation and testing are a large part of affiliate marketing but you need to get some training or you’ll burn through a lot of money. I know because I did before I decided to look for help. I’ve invested in a lot of ebooks and there was only one that really helped me. Take a look at Jeremy Palmer’s “High Performance Affiliate Marketing”. He actually does affiliate marketing for a living (He’s a CJ Performer – over $1 million in commissions), his ebook is around $50, updates are free and he has a forum where you can ask questions and get help from him and more experienced people for free. He also does videos that he posts periodically as well. All free. He also doesn’t hound you with a weekly email promoting other “guru” products or “hidden secrets”.
Keep learning and tweaking, eventually it will work out for you.
Tyler,
Have you ever considered looking into a program like Keyword Elite or Wordze? These programs can generate 1,000’s of keywords. It’s always helpful to have at least 50k keywords per campaign. Also, I would suggest not bidding over .20 per keyword, especially when starting out.
Take care!
Okay Tyler,
I luv ya man but seriously you gotta listen. I don’t mean to rag on you but at this point you need a lot of help. Please for the love of god ask someone for help! It doesn’t matter who, the guy working the drive through at your local Mcdonalds will even work. Just anyone, whatever they say to do, follow their advice. On that I got two more points. And trust me I do this for your own good not to bring ya down.
1) the blockbuster total access offer? Com’n man! The moment that came out everyone is going after it. It’s bad to learn on. Of course clicks are going to be huge because only ppl with special deals can pull off a conversion and not loose money. I don’t know much about Arbi but please pick another offer 🙂
2) Your making -81.5% ROI. Think about that for a moment. If you are making a 0% return on your investment that means you lost ALL of the money you invested. If you’re making -1% ROI that means you’re either some kind of math genius who managed to loose more money than you invested or that Divide By Zero error actually means something. 🙂
As entertaining as this is for me. I wish you the best of luck. Just don’t start using your credit cards anytime soon.
There’s a “rule” in the affiliate marketing world, which says that you should get at least one sale for every 100 clicks you receive, and that your cpc should be 1% of one sale.
For example if you were promoting a clickbank products that pays out $17, you wouldn’t want to have a cpc higher then $.17.
Why are you trying to have a “global” average of -70%? Since each day you learn something new and apply these techniques, I think you should look at it on a day per day basis. -50% now? -30% tomorrow!
Tyler,
I think you have the right attitude when it comes to testing and not expecting instant results. No doubt, like most business attempts you will lose money before you start to earn money.
However, paying more than say $0.30 per click is not very smart. Particularly when you are starting out and only earning $6 per lead?
Anyway, goodluck and good earnings. 🙂
Hey Tyler,what software r u using to check your stats?
[…] + Roi Guy (a guest blogger) ensure the blog is updated most days. Tyler’s recent project Affiliate Marketing through PPC has not proved as succesful as his other projects such as PokerForums.Org which earns tyler a bulk […]
Tyler…
Thanks for keepin it real!
jigu: Just myself, and hand-updating it in Excel.
Dear Mr Cruz, please give me the password to Movie Vault news so I can update the news a little bit. I forgots it. Also you might as well give me the link to the staff area too, so I can be my sure my bookmark is correct. Thank you, soor.
PS. Thats $700 in the hole! Waaah, Pigsnit would KILL Me!
PLitey Mitey
You freaking nut! Keep at it Tyler – you da man!
Maybe when I finish my Affiliate Marketing guide – I could drop you a link. You look like you could need it. 😉 LOL!
David
Don’t feel that bad. I have no real experience with this other than a minor campaign that had to do with MMA. In any case, from all the research I’ve done, it’s all about experimenting. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Try out various different topics or ad sets. Hope this helps and you’ll eventually find your ground.
Don’t feel that bad. I have no real experience with this other than a minor campaign that had to do with MMA. In any case, from all the research I’ve done, it’s all about experimenting. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Try out various different topics or ad sets. Hope this helps and you’ll eventually find your ground.
Tyler…
Thanks for keepin it real!
Maybe when I finish my Affiliate Marketing guide – I could drop you a link. You look like you could need it. 😉 LOL!
This is definitely interesting. It seems like it would be a very time consuming thing to do. Have you moved to this and basically stopped spending money on some of your smaller forums?