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

PaperCash Affiliate Program Review

The following is a paid review for TylerCruz.com written and reviewed by Michael Kwan. It is completely of Michael Kwan’s opinion and is not influenced by being paid. If you’re interested in having your site or product reviewed, please view my advertising page

There are many industries that you can approach if you want to make money on the Internet. Some people focus on consumer electronics and others work with payday loans, for example. One niche that oftentimes goes overlooked is the field of education, because we all have this notion of the “starving student” in our heads. That doesn’t mean that money can’t be made; you just have to go about it the right away.

A “smart affiliate network” that you may want to consider to this end is called PaperCash and it aims to cash in on a very real need about students: they need things written and they need these things written well.

What Is PaperCash?

PaperCash is an affiliate network with offers that are geared toward the student demographic.

The actual logistics of PaperCash will feel familiar to anyone who has worked with nearly any other affiliate program online. After you go through the standard sign-up process and get your account approved, you gain access to the “Affiliate Center” dashboard shown above. From here, you get at-a-glance information with your stats, your commissions in the last 14 days, the contact information for your personal affiliate manager, and any recent news posted by the network.

The products and services that you can promote on PaperCash are targeted at a range of students from all around the world, but it is focused more on the English-speaking countries and schools. Traffic is accepted from anywhere in the world As with other affiliate programs, the goal here is to send relevant traffic to the vendor’s sites and then you earn a commission when the visitor completes a purchase.

Only Two Sites to Promote

The PaperCash affiliate program is highly focused and that’s why, at this time, there are only two sites in the network for you to promote.

The first is Best Quality Papers, an online service that provides “high quality custom essays, research papers, term papers, case studies, dissertation and admission services.” When a student logs into that site and orders a custom written paper, you earn a commission either based on percentage or a dollar amount, and the level of the commission varies based on the qualified volume that you send. Some people may disagree with such a service on ethical grounds, but that’s entirely up to you.

Payout levels start at 15% commission and go up to a 50% commission with volume. That’s for every sale, including repeat orders. Alternatively, you can opt for the PayPerSale program that ranges from $50 to $100 for one-time payments.

The second site is Resumes Planet, an online service that provides custom resumes. In addition to resume writing, the site also offers resume editing, CV writing and editing, and help with cover letters. The standard commission for each sale is 30%. Paper Cash says that it is highly interested in attracting email affiliates for both programs.

Banners and Other Creatives

PaperCash is quite broad with the types of traffic that it accepts. You can promote either of the above two programs on your own website using a variety of display banners, for example.

However, you don’t need to have your own website in order to work with the PaperCash affiliate program. They’ve done a good job of providing a wide range of ad creatives that you can use with your contextual traffic, CPC campaigns, email marketing, search marketing, and social media marketing efforts. There is code for landing pages, banners of varying sizes, pre-written HTML text ads, and so on. These are all easily accessible from the “My Offers” section of the PaperCash Affiliate Center.

Tracking Reports

As can be expected, a number of different reports can also be accessed from the dashboard.

You can generate reports for campaign performance, daily breakout, sub-ID breakout, multiple sub-ID breakout and creative breakout. This lets you track the performance of your campaigns in different ways, making it easier for you to zero in on the efforts that are working and tweak the others accordingly.

In the daily breakout report shown above, for instance, you get data about the campaign used, the number of impressions, number of clicks, the number of qualified transactions, number of approved transactions, click-thru rate, approval percentage, eCPM, EPC, and total commission earned per day.

Paper Cash also recently added integration with Optizmo.net, providing affiliates with email compliance and suppression list management.

Payment Details

According to the FAQ page, commissions are paid out once a month on a net-10 basis. PayPal payments require a minimum threshold of $100, while bank wire transfers have a minimum threshold amount of $1,000. You’re on the hook for any fees that may result.

Conclusion

As mentioned earlier, there are some ethical concerns when it comes to essay-writing services for students, but it is also undeniable that there is a large and lucrative market associated with this niche. A 10-page economics essay — written by staff with MA or PhD degreess — costs $239.90 with a 10-day turnaround. Even at the lowest 15% commission, that’s $35.99. If you get up to the 50% commission rate, that’s $119.95. If the person is in a hurry, the 24-hour turnaround rate for the same essay is $439.90.

If you want to make money in this niche, then PaperCash could be a good fit for you. It is even possible to request a special discount coupon code from your PaperCash affiliate manager that could further improve your conversion rate.

New Affiliate Marketing Record: $7,097 in 1 Day!

Yes, it’s another new affiliate marketing record post…

This record was actually made back on February 3rd, 2013, just 1 day after my previous record of $6,585, but I thought that you guys might be starting to get tired of these posts, so I opted to publish a different post inbetween.

It is very surreal to me to be generating such huge numbers on a daily basis, and just how quickly those numbers have grown. I still believe that going from $0 to $10 profit a day is a lot harder than going from $10 to $1,000+ a day.

If you can get past the first hurdle which is the hardest ($0 to $10 a day), then growing from there is not much different. It’s really all the same mechanics involved, just at a larger scale.

Anyhow, on February 3rd, 2013, my campaigns brought in a total of:

$7,097 for the day!

That’s an increase of $512 over my previous record!

The number still boggles my mind.

I Could Care Less About Gross – What’s The Net?

Out of that $7,097, I ended up spending a total of $4,260.84 in paid traffic, resulting in a net profit of:

$2,835.78 for the day

While this is a new personal record for the amount of gross income my affiliate campaigns generated in a single day, it is not quite a new net profit record.

It fell just $48.11 short, which was $2,883.89, made on January 29th, 2013.

The overall ROI for the day ended up at 66.5%.

Uphill Battle

From here on out, it’s going to be a real uphill battle for me to set another record.

My current campaigns have more or less been scaled as high as they will go, and there has also been a couple of setbacks as well.

For starters, I’ve hit the daily limit of what the advertisers of one of my offers can take. I also had a couple of price decreases on various offers as well.

My main focus right now is to get my "don’t give up" campaign working. If I can get that profitable, then I’ll be able to set new records and reach the next level.

However, I am really behind in my e-mail and other work (not to mention personal stuff). I’ve been spending the majority of my time working on my affiliate marketing campaigns and blogging that I’ve really let other work pile up.

For example, here’s a screenshot of what my Gmail account looks like:

Those are all work-related e-mails too, not personal or junk.

Lastly, I’m currently sick with a really nasty cold that just started yesterday. I absolutely hate being sick because I don’t give sick often and when I do get sick, it’s usually quite bad and lasts for weeks. Hopefully this one won’t stick around that long.

Anyhow, that’s my post. I have no idea when I’ll break this record, but I definitely wouldn’t bet that it is anytime soon. I’ll be happy if I break it within 6 months!

My "Don’t Give Up" Campaign

In my post from last Sunday, I wrote about how I was given advice from a few very successful affiliate marketers who told me to essentially focus and stick with a campaign until it turns profitable.

While my campaigns have been doing very well lately, that could always stop at any time, and because they’ve been doing well, I have a fair bit of extra cash. This makes right now the perfect time to heed their advice and to try to focus and stick with a campaign until it becomes successful.

Below is a snippet of what I wrote last week:

Dr. Ngo and Richard Bonner, two affiliates who both eclipse me and make me look pitiful, have both told me to "make it work". That basically, I shouldn’t give up on a campaign until I make it profitable, and that virtually any campaign can be turned profitable if you just stick with it long enough.

I’m going to take that mentality with me on this next campaign. It will be hard for me though, as I really do give up on a campaign quite easily. If it shows no immediate potential with horrible ROI’s after several angles, I’ll ditch it. So, this will be a good experiment for me to see how long I can stick with a losing campaign. I just hope I’m not flushing good money down the toilet!

One upside is that I know this offer is working. My affiliate manager told me that several guys are doing well with it on Facebook, and so I know that it IS doable, I just have to figure out how. The downside is that I have already tried this on Facebook several times now, with extremely poor results…

I think I just need to suck it up and sit down and work hard on it.

My apprehension of engaging in this "experiment" was certainly warranted, as you’ll see on day 1, below…

Day 1: OUCH!

I had been doing some basic research on this offer (an offer that I’ve tried several times in the past, never getting anywhere near break-even) for about 5-6 days, and then finally launched it 3 days ago on Wednesday, February 6th, 2013.

I launched 4 campaigns on Facebook for the offer, each with 30 ads for a total of 120 ads. Each ad had a different image with different ad titles and ad bodies, and each campaign had different targets.

I normally don’t launch new campaigns this way – I usually test one thing at a time (images first, ad titles later, etc.) but wanted to try it this way this time around. I also know that running so many ads in 1 campaign will mean that only a few will get all the traffic – but this is fine with me when first launching a campaign as I just adjust the bids down later, which addresses this issue. I can always recreate new campaigns with the well-performing ads again in the future – history isn’t a concern since the campaign is brand new anyway.

I was direct-linking to start, and my bids were $0.80 CPC in 3 of the campaigns and $0.60 in the other.

I always bid high to start, so I knew I would take a hit in the beginning, but didn’t quite expect it to be as bad as it was…

Here’s how the day ended up faring (on this new campaign):

Day 1 Results:

INCOME: $228.00
COST: $1,341.24
TOTAL: -$1,113.24 (-83% ROI)

Ouch! I lost over $1,100 on the first day!

Now, how many of you who want to get started in affiliate marketing haven’t thrown up yet? Hehe.

Now you know why I’m scared to try this "don’t give up" mentality… but I really want to get to the next level, and this experiment is also a kind of test for me. If I can turn this campaign profitable, I believe that I can essentially turn anything profitable if I really dedicate myself to it.

Day 2: Lessening The Hurt

Late on day 1, and throughout day 2, I watched the performance of my "don’t give up" campaign and adjusted (lowered) bids as more data came through.

I was getting a fair bit of traffic, so I had a lot of room to lower bids, especially on targets and certain ads that were performing absolutely horribly.

As a result, I was able to really reduce the amount of cost. The volume slowed as well, of course, but more important was the fact that I really closed the gap in terms of income and cost.

Apart from strategic bid and budget adjustments, I didn’t make any other changes on the campaign.

Day 2 Results:

INCOME: $558.00
COST: $639.52
TOTAL: -$81.52 (-12.7% ROI)

While still in the red, it was a dramatic improvement over day 1, so I was quite content with the day’s results.

Day 3: Tightening the Belt

And we’re now on day 3 of my "don’t give up" campaign.

I did a ton of work today in affiliate marketing in general, but especially on this campaign. The majority of my time was spent on creating landing pages for the campaign, because as I mentioned earlier, up to now I had only been direct linking.

My affiliate manager told me that others were doing well with landing pages on this offer, so I was really optimistic and hopeful that they would do well – or at least outperform direct linking.

I ended up creating 3 very nice and very different landing pages to the offer, and just added them to the mix about 2 hours ago, so I don’t have very much data on them yet.

However, with the data I do have on them so far, which is only 68 clicks, things are looking absolutely awful.

It’s really heartbreaking because I worked so hard on the landing pages and they’re not performing even remotely close to the direct link. It also really limits the amount of "quick improvement" I can foresee with this offer.

More angles/targets will likely be my next step, but the landing pages being so poor definitely hurt any optimism I had going.

A bit of good news though – I got a 10% bump on the offer, which was already bumped previously I believe, so that does help a little… although really not that much since I’m not doing any volume with it.

I should also mention that about 25 of those 68 landing page clicks are "invalid" as I screwed up the tracking on my 2nd landing page, so the links on it weren’t working! Good thing I caught it and fixed it before I sent even more traffic to it.

Lastly, I also reduced and "optimized" bidding throughout the day just as I did on day 2. As a result, volume REALLY reduced to a crawl. I wasn’t all that worried about this as I was hoping that the landing pages would improve the conversion rate, meaning that I could increase the bids again in the future and increase traffic, but that’s not looking so good…

It’s currently 11pm as I write this, so these aren’t the final numbers for the day, but they will be very close to them:

Day 3 Results:

INCOME: $112.00
COST: $142.02
TOTAL: -$30.02 (-21.1% ROI)

So while today was the lowest actual total loss so far, landing pages aren’t looking good, my lowering of the bids has really reduced traffic volume down to a crawl, and my ROI actually took a hit since yesterday.

I actually have no idea why my ROI worsened today… it should have improved. It must be due to the landing page split-testing, even though I didn’t send all that much traffic to them. Hmm.

Here’s a recap of the past 3 days:

Day 1: -83% ROI
Day 2: -12.7% ROI
Day 3: -21.1% ROI

Ugh

I’m not liking this "don’t give up" thing. I’m already down –$1,224.78 during the first 3 days of this campaign, and things aren’t looking too good.

How long do I have to stick with this for? Can I actually turn things around? Ugh.

The Good News

I’ll end with some positive news, even though the overall results have been less than stellar so far.

The good news is that I’m getting some decent CTR’s on my main campaign on this offer. The 3-day average CTR across all 30 ads is 0.112% – which is very high for me, and I’m getting 0.14% CTR average on the top performing ad with a sample size of 2,832 clicks.

The 3-day total is shown below:

And the following screenshot is from today:

The top performing ad was actually at over 0.25% CTR for the majority of the day – it just dropped during the evening. And since the price takes the average, tomorrow’s price numbers should drop some more since I’ve been continuing to drop the bids as well.

My next step on this offer is to create 2-3 more campaigns with different interests, all of which will be related to the campaign above, and one will be almost exactly the same but with tighter targeting. My demographic isn’t the largest though so I can’t make it too tight.

Anyhow, there’s an update on the first 3 days of my "don’t give up" campaign. I’d be thrilled if I can make this profitable – even if it’s just $10-$15/day, as that’s $300-$450 month and would be a proof of concept for this mentality/school of thought.

Wish me luck! I’d also love to hear any suggestions and/or advice you guys have for this campaign.

New Affiliate Marketing Record: $6,585 in 1 Day!

I swear to God that I’m starting to get as sick of these "new record" posts as you guys probably are by now, but as long as they keep happening, I’m going to be posting them.

I mean, how frequent can they really be? With 5 new records set last month, and a new monthly record having been published just 2 days ago, there can’t be that many new records on the horizon.

But with a new record having been made 3 days ago, I’m forced to write yet another one.

On February 2nd, 2013, my campaigns brought in a total of:

$6,585 for the day!

That’s an increase of $670 over my previous record, made just 5 days prior!

Wow. What a crazy past few weeks.

The Only Thing That Matters

In the end, the only thing that really matters is of course the bottom line – the net profit.

The reason I usually talk in terms of gross numbers is because that is typically the number that is used to define campaigns and earnings in the world of affiliate marketing. Whenever somebody mentions a number, I always assume it’s gross unless they say otherwise.

Out of that $6,585, I ended up spending a total of $3,707.91 in paid traffic, resulting in a net profit of:

$2,877.50

While a fantastic day, it fell just a tiny bit short of seeing a new personal daily net profit record on my campaigns. $6.40 to be exact, which was $2,883.89, made 5 days ago.

The number is interesting though, because it’s just over the "magic" number of $2,740, which is the average daily amount you need to generate in order to hit 1 million dollars in a year.

This was a record high day for me, and this is affiliate marketing so things can die at any given moment, but it’s still nice to think about because again, this is the net number we’re talking about.

The day ended up with an overall ROI of 77%, which as I’ve mentioned in the past, is really good considering the volume.

At Least One More

The scary thing is, I actually broke this record the very next day. By a lot, too.

I’ll be posting about that new record in another 48 hours. I’m sure that after that post though, that you won’t see another new daily record post from me for a long time. I hope I’m wrong, of course, but it just seems so surreal to go even higher.