An Update on My Personal PPC Campaign
November 12, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzMany of you may remember that a few months ago I had decided to take a second stab at PPC affiliate marketing. That is partly why my blog has steered towards an affiliate marketing theme since the summer with my MarketLeverage Affiliate Competitions and related paid reviews.
I believe the last real update I gave when I was still actively working on my campaign was my Affiliate Marketing Plunge: I’M IN THE GREEN!! post. Basically since then, I haven’t touched my campaign, being preoccupied with other projects. I’ve essentially just left my campaign on auto-pilot for several months.
With that in mind, you’d think that my campaign numbers wouldn’t changed much – after all, I hadn’t touched my campaign in months. But campaigns can often improve over time with no work on your part due to the PPC agencies such as AdWords and Yahoo lowering your bids.
Here’s a 20-minute screencast video I just made sharing all of my campaign numbers from an Excel spreadsheet I keep updated. It does not contain any keywords or stats such as CTR, it simply shows my campaign’s overall profits.
Hopefully that will will provide some motivation to work on your PPC campaigns or get started if you haven’t already. I don’t like to promote laziness or complacency, but it just goes to show that once you have a campaign up and running, it’s essentially done and you can reap the profits month after month. It also illustrates just how easy it is to win one of the bigger prizes in Affiliate Marketing Challenges.
I really need to get off my butt and get some more campaigns up and running. There’s just so much money in this that it’s ridiculous.
Gives me motivation to work on my ppc campaigns just sucks losing money lol guess everything has a risk!
Lots of money to made so many affiliate networks out there as well!
There are a lot of untapped niches that fly under the radar.
This is encouraging. I will definately have to try some PPC campaigns when I get the time. At the moment I am doing some writing to earn some money. I can almost make a full time wage now which is great. Gives me more time to do the things I love to do and I can work whatever hours I want.
Hope you love online entrepreneurship as much as me 🙂
Great video. I had be going through day by day like you were until things started to get crazy and with a career and AM my “hobby” I didn’t have the time to spend everyday like that. I can always go back to the network and ads to make sure i’m profiting. Good Luck with PPC it’s like Crack.
I’ll save you 20 minutes.
1. Make sure you don’t have a Javascript that crashes your landing page.
2. Campaigns CPC price usually decrease the longer they are active.
I just saved you 20 minutes and having to hear Tyler take numerous coffee breaks.
Tyler
I got into PPC or at least started to focus on it just about 10 days ago. Like many people I was having problems but not losing money, just getting the offer up and running was my issue.
I knew I needed some help so oddly enough the same day I decided to try and find some help getting going I seen an interview for PPC-Coach who charges 49 a month membership but what you get is all the tools to build proper landing pages, track your leads and earnings. Well, you get everything and personal assistance from the guy “Will, the owner of PPC-Coach in setting things up right.
The goal, or Will’s goal is to have every member able to have 10 campaigns running that are all profiting 100 a day = 1000 a day profit.
I have started my first campaign under his system for an offer I choose from Neverblue and as of today (the campaign is 5 days old) I am at a 171% ROI. I shit you not Tyler and if you want me to send you proof I can, just email me.
For anyone who is interested in getting solid advice and a method of building a ppc business, I strongly urge you to check out the ppc-coach by using the link below. Well worth every penny. There are so many people in the forums as well all helping each other too, I personally think it was the smartest thing I have ever done.
http://www.feedflare.ca/ppccoach
I personally didn’t care for PPC-Coach, mainly due to some of the illegal/blackhat practices he promotes as well as being limited to certain access for how long you’ve been a member…
Maybe it has improved since I last tried it though…
Well I know and understand the reason to only being able to access only certain parts of the program. There is so much information there a person who is looking to get into PPC would be more confused if anything if they had access to the whole site.
As far as black hat stuff is concerned, I have not see anything yet that I didn’t know of before joining the program.
I guess it boils down to, do you want a 15% ROI or a 171% ROI. That really should be a no brainier if you ask me.
Great story for someone who is “thinking” to try affiliate marketing. would you mind to answer some basic questions for me please.
1. Happy to hear about PPC-coach, well what if i don’t know anything about AM. Dp they start from basic?
2. Having what budget should i start AM?
3. How long it takes (in general) for someone to start making money out of it?
1. Yes, but you will need to be prepared to accept some of the illegal/blackhat teachings. I personally don’t do anything illegal or against the TOS so it wasn’t for me. Not all of what he teaches is shady, just some of it. He cetainly has some good tips…
2. The more the better. You shouldn’t be afraid to lose money, and the more you’re willing to put up or lose, the faster you will learn. I’d recommend having at least $500 to put towards it that you are willing to lose.
3. I don’t follow a lot of newcomers to the game, but if I had to guess it would typically be around 1-2 months before somebody finds consistent profits.
I would not go as far as to say there is anything shady going on Tyler. He just knows how to work the same loop holes that others are using but he tells you about it. There is nothing wrong with that and if he did shady stuff he would not ave accounts all over the place willing to work with him. Also I have not read once on the site about how to break the TOS for any program. Actually, I do recall Will stating that you have to follow the TOS of the advisers. I would like an example from you though of what you call shady. I have only been in the program coming up two weeks now so maybe there is something I am missing you can alert me too.
@ Sohail – Its helps to have an understanding of what ppc is and how it works. My current budget I am working off of right now is 10 per day, or 300 a month.Which is probably why I am doing good so far, I am not willing to lose as much as Tyler has or is. I have to focus hard on my research to insure when I do lose it is very small.
If you understand what PPC is all about, and have played with it before. It would be a good move to join the coach to help guide you along. Well, I am getting more guidance from the community then the coach but still, all the help I can get is much needed and the community understands that and is willing to help anyone.
My plan, once I get to the level where I can hold my own (maybe another month from now) I will be getting the shoemney tool kit as well to help me really kick things off.
The main thing I remember, Collin, from “Month 1” is Will/PPC-Coach advising everyone to use the AdWords URL by Keyword Level trick in order to send traffic to the advertiser’s landing page instead of your own.
This is definitely against the AdWords policy which Will even states repeatedly in the video(s) but justifies it by stating “I’ve never been caught and never will”.
He isn’t the first to reveal this ‘trick’, and many affiliates already have been doing this, but to encourage it to newcomers and those who wish to make money legally and without violating any TOS is not my cup of tea.
The other examples I can remember were mainly copying/stealing content from other sites and landing pages.
The trick you are referring to is one that he has not been teaching, well not in month one anyways. Your talking about taking someone else’s URL like for example if I were to bid on the term “blogging” and my sites quality score was bad and I wanted to run a campaign about blogging. To help my quality score out instead of me using my sites address and destination URL I would use yours but under the keywords settings use my link to send traffic to my site. That’s the PPC trick and those campaigns get busted by Google with in hours of being live normally. I know this because we tried it on TAC when I was there. And as far as taking content is concerned, if your building a website that is to be indexed then ya, duplicate content is always frowned on. But as far as building a landing site or page I don’t think it matters much seeings how 99% of the traffic never see’s it.
Hmm so thatz OK for me i myself do not like black hat techniques, but main thing is he lets you know if its against TOS so i can always ignore those things.i am planning to start with $500 (budget for a month……$300 for first 20 days and then $200 for last 10 days). If any one of you thinks there are some other resources that i should have a look please post a link.
Thanks Tyler and Collin 🙂
I would read Zac Johnsons site, his older posts! http://www.zacjohnson.com I believe.
Zac’s the man…
Thanks Collin and Tyler
i have just read this http://zacjohnson.com/the-super-affiliates-guide-to-ppc-marketing/ and this is like a whole book. Really cool source, will be reading all his past posts 🙂
sohal, you can play around with adwords by spending OPM “other people’s money”. just google for free yahoo/google adword codes and you’ll find a bunch that are anywhere between $25-200 free. you can also try to register multiple accounts in yahoo to get the free offer more than once, but i wouldnt advise doing it with google because they will ban you.
Wow, Thats some nice numbers 🙂
Too bad IE took most of your numbers 0.0
Good luck on future prospects!
I would think set and forget for PPC could be dangerous. Just like you having Kontera issues lost you money, but you still netted positive; ML could have ended the offer. Now, your paying for traffic for nothing.
I am anxious to get into PPC, and realize I will most likely lose money at first. I also realize PPC is also a very hands-on endeavor, needing constant care and attention.
Hi Tyler,
I’m happy to see your success so far with our offers – keep up the good work! Mike’s away at PubCon in Vegas this week, but I can pinch hit for him in the meantime by recommending other offers that do well with pay-per-click traffic. Let’s help you crank up your profits by several notches this month – thanks Tyler!
-Erick
Congrats, and thanks for sharing. Inspiring stuff!
Man, 20 mins is a long time haha. Ill have to watch it all though. Looks interesting.
Just for the record, I don’t encourage anyone to break adwords tos. I prefer people do things the right way, which is far more long term then stupid little tricks.
I think you should do a review of my site as it’s 14 months old now and has a lot of stuff that wasn’t there when you joined a while back.
🙂
What’s up Tyler?
Thanks so much for sharing your earnings spreadsheet.
I am new to the site and wondering if you had a screencast of how you actually set up the campaign? I wanted to get into affiliate marketing. I realize it’s as simple as getting the offer, running adwords and leaving it.
But I need to know what words to bid for, how much. etc.
I did… here: https://www.tylercruz.com/ppc-affiliate-marketing-introduction/ but unfortunately it got deleted when YouTube banned me and deleted all my videos (under false pretenses!)
If you ask nicely, I’ll try to find the video on my HD if I still have it and upload it to Viddler for you.
I am trying PPC with adbrite but I am not getting results. My budget is pretty low so whats the best way to get started?
Great video, Tyler. My only advice to you and to others would be: don’t look at your daily profit and loss and try to figure out “what went right/wrong.” You probably can’t even find a directional trend in weekly fluctuations with your numbers being so low and running only one campaign. That would be the equalvalent of looking at a stock price day to day and commenting on its volitality.
Now, it is important to make sure your campaigns and landing pages are running properly, but this is not something you need to check everyday or several times a day.
You almost have me motivated to get back in the PPC game. I took a break to develop some sites and do some flipping, but I miss the rigrous number crunching that PPC brings.
I also hate that you have to pay for your advertising up front, but you don’t get your check for 30 days after you hit your payout target.
[…] to believe that I haven’t published a single post about my PPC affiliate marketing efforts since November 12th, 2008. That’s 8 months […]
[…] to believe that I haven’t published a single post about my PPC affiliate marketing efforts since November 12th, 2008. That’s 8 months […]