Once again The Great Google has reared its ugly head upon the masses. Not only do we have to deal with the epic battle of seo results with them but also the paid traffic has taken a turn for the worse.

This week I saw a big chunk of my income vanish due to Google now enforcing a quality score on content network ads. This applies to image ads as well as text ads.  I have confirmed from this post that I am not the only one who has seen this happen.  Now none of this has been announced or even shows up in adwords and talking to Google will get you nowhere.

If this week you have seen your content network impression drop to zero then your account has been manually flagged for review. Every campaign you try and setup will now have to be check over by someone at The Great Google. This has all been done to enhance user experience and to make Google tons of money.

First the user experience bit, Google has flagged all of these accounts due to your site not meeting their standards. If you ask what their standards are you wont get a reply so you basically have to guess.  One thing we are finding out is Google is out to kill the whole landing page/middle man business model. If you have a site that gives users info and then takes them to another site you are considered unfit for Google users and can expect to no get anywhere advertising with them.

So how is this going to make Google tons of money? Well they have learned that instead of taking your advertising money and getting a small piece of the pie they can just cut you out and be the only middleman. They only want advertisers that link to their sites and keep the user there to sell the product.  This will of course lead to advertisers willing to spend more money on advertising since they don’t have to pay affiliates. Cost per click will probably sky rocket as competition for ad spots disappears.

This is going to affect affiliate marketers, online marketing firms and anyone else who are helping struggling business with out in house experts. If your business is helping others get sales you’re going to be out of work soon, at least with Google. The future of marketing is going to be very different in a few years and only those who can adapt will survive. Hopefully I will be one of them.

While on IRC today I did my social service by helping some guy with his zip submit campaign on Facebook. He wanted to know if it was time to stop the campaign and give up or what he needed to do next. The poor guy had already spent $400 on advertising and had made about $130 from it.

The problem is that he hadn’t tweaked his landing page at all until I mentioned it. He tweaked it ads to get the CTR high enough that facebook was now giving him 0.08 clicks but nothing else. He didn’t really do any of the math in his head and he just expected it to ‘work’ after he set it up.

Here is how I broke it down to him. The very basics.

With 1,799 clicks on his ad he said that he had 83 conversions. (pretty bad) I didn’t get the info on how many clicks made it to what pages of the lander. But he had gotten 0.08 clicks which is good enough for a zip submit/poll landing page.  Getting his click cost made this much easier.

At a 1.30 payout and 0.08 a click you would need 1 person in every 16 to complete the offer for you to break even. Which I told him should be his goal. I recommended he send about 100 clicks per change that he made to the landing page to test if helped. Which means he is going to spend $8 per change which is much better than $400 before any changes.  If you need 1 in 16 and 0 in 100 don’t do it odds are that if you sent 200, 300, 400 not much will change. You will not magically become profitable unless the offer deals with time. Like after 3pm for school kids, or after 6pm for the people getting off work.

Now this is all very basic because he is dealing with a zip/email submit type campaign. Things get much more advance when dealing with a higher payout and a multi page lander. You always need to figure out what you need to be profitable first. If he had known from the start that he needed 1 in 16 to breakeven he would have never spent that $400.

In pay per click you need to watch everything like a hawk. This is AM for guys that love numbers. You need to know every detail for every ad, keyword, and what the visitors are doing.  With enough data and number crunching you could make any campaign profitable. If you only have 1 keyword that gotten any conversions and the rest suck up money pause/delete the lame ones and instant profit. If its not enough for you add more keywords, tweak more. Work should never stop until your happy.

Test, test, test, and test more.  Get your am to place tracking pixels, use p/t202, use the adwords/yahoo conversion tracking. Use anything you can to pull as much data as possible and then figure out how to make that data work for you. Its not rocket science, just basic math and intuition.

I recently joined Motive Interactive about two months ago thinking I wouldn’t do much with them. Boy was I wrong. I mainly work with very few networks so I don’t bother to really sign up with new ones. I signed up with Motive because Tyler Cruz was having another contest and they were hosting it.  I had nothing to lose and I doubted I would do much with them anyway.

I got all setup with Motive and Ryan was set as my AM who is a great guy, btw.  We talked for a little while and I figured I would give a few campaigns a go. Motive matched what I was getting at my other networks so payout was not an issue. As it turns out my first month with Motive I did over 10,000 in revenue and was setup on weeklies after 1 week with the network.

Not many networks are willing to hook you up with higher payouts and faster payments after a week but Motive did. Which ranks them pretty high in my book. It proves that they are willing to work with affiliates and that they are on your side not the advertisers.  These guys are a top notch network! If you are not working with them let make sure to sign up.

I wasn’t keeping up with the status of Tyler’s contest since I hadn’t expected much with motive. But I ended up wining first place for the 3rd time awarding me a 13” MacBook. I personally have no need for it so I decided to give it to my girl friend as a 3yr anniversary present.  It’s the base model but still a 1,000 prize for only doing what I normally do anyway. Check out the pics before I gave it to her.

Motive is seriously a first class network. They paid me on time, fast as hell, and worked with me to bump my payouts to be competitive. I highly recommend you sign up with them and see how easy it is to start raking in the cash.

I have always had a strange relationship with money. My mom was always the saver, and my dad always seems to be in debt. I tried my best to get though college with as little debt as possible but it never happens. Most college graduates enter the job market with over 5,000 in credit card debt. I personally had about 8k in credit card debt last year when I graduated and had never missed a payment.

That same year I worked full time and started with affiliate marketing. I did rather well for my self and I paid off all of my credit cards, and half of my student loans. I had just had enough with all the bullshit and wanted to be free of credit cards all together. After I paid off each card I called and canceled them. I did this to 8 credit cards that were my life line for books and tuition in college. I kept 2 $0 balance cards as ‘emergency’ one was at my old bank, the other my American Express.

So since I made myself debt free my credit score should have increased like crazy right? Wrong.

I recently pulled my credit report looking to buy a new home and saw that my score was 666. Which is considered ‘good’ but I know its pretty shitty. So lets play what is fucking me over!

You recently missed a payment.
Apparently I missed a payment on a credit card I don’t own last month. I have no clue wtf this is and I have disputed it but that will take 60 days and they may or may not believe you.

You’ve recently been looking for credit.
In the past year 5 companies have inquired about my credit. So I must be begging for credit cards and not getting them right? Lets see. Comcast, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, American Express, and Bally Total Fitness have checked my credit in the last year. So getting cable, setting up a IRA, opening a bank account, and going to the gym can all have a negative impact effect your credit. Great.

You have accounts showing missed payments or derogatory descriptions.
Once again they point out I have missed payments on cards I do not own. In 60 days ill find out if they believe me or not.

You recently opened a new credit account.
Seems 1 Year and 2 Months ago I opened a card, looks like it had a $0 balance and was canceled 5 months after I opened it. I am not sure why this is a negative but the thing says only cards 2yrs old are no longer negative. Nothing I can do there.

So despite making more money than I have ever made in my life and almost no debt but some 4% student loans. I am still being fucked over by the system. With the current economy I don’t qualify for a normal mortgage, car loan, or special lease offers.  I could buy a new car in cash but I can’t get a simple loan. I have always felt that ‘credit’ was a total scam. Its something that you really don’t have control over even though they want you to think you are. Recent events in the news have brought to light what I have know for years. Credit and Credit cards are a total scam, avoid them at all costs if you can. /* end rant */

Now this is going to be a very interesting debate, and you are probably going to call me nuts but I want to mention some recent observations that have happened to me recently. As you guys know I have been trying to build as many websites as possible. New domains, old domains, anything I have is now in the develop me que to at least make better use of them. I build some what higher quality sites so it takes me about a day to bust out a site.  This does kinda suck since the plan is 1,000 sites but if they are making more than $1 then I am better off as many had mentioned.

Now the problem that I ran into was that all of my sites were getting sandboxed. I mean all of them. I was busting out WP blogs with content I wrote myself, and started link building. I am well aware of link building red flags and I knew to do this slowly so I didn’t fuck myself over. But a new site I made two weeks ago only has 66 links and was still sandboxed. I was starting to go nuts and lose hope for this idea of getting any seo traction for anything. It felt as if I had wasted a few hundred dollars and well over a weeks of time! How did they know to sandbox everything I made? I am in like 40 different niches with different themes, scripts, wordpress, and non-wp sites.. How…the fuck.

This weekend I really started to look into the matter since its going to seriously kill my income if nothing I do can get ranked anywhere. Based on the information I had the only thing I could think of is that Google is either targeting me personally e.g. Name, Addy etc (though most sites have private whois, thanks namecheap), my namesever, or my ip. This is the only way they can cast out this broad net and catch most everything I make.

So assuming Google doesn’t have the power to find my name/company and all traces of my personal info on domain whois I passed this idea up. I am sure they CAN do it, but that’s a lot of fucking work on their end and I am quite a small fish. So if its not my name its my host/ns/ip.

I have been using a old hostgator account for like 5yrs for most new projects since it was easy to just addon new sites. $10.00 unlimited domains and SQL it was a nice setup. I think I had about 200 domains setup in that account and like 50 subdomains from various projects that I have done over the last 5yrs. Could they actually be the problem? I did a IP neighbors check on one of my old sites to see what all else was in there. What I noticed was a lot of garbage. Pure garbage everywhere… It seems everyone loves these $10 hosting accounts and just uses them for affiliate sites and spam. I didn’t see 1 legit looking site on my entire server with them. After seeing this it kinda made it seem as if I was not as crazy as I thought. I mean if you knew of a server ip range that was known for bullshit why not flag it? Its not like google cares about your business or anything they can do whatever they want.

So last night I had enough and did a full transfer using cpanel from hostgator to a new hosting account. (Btw, that transfer tool in cpanel is amazing.) I changed over all my info with my registers and went to sleep. If I woke up in the morning and my sites didn’t work id know something went wrong… After waking up and going about my business I made sure the transfer went alright and checked that everything was in order. So when will i know if I was right or not?

Well 10mins ago just out of curiosity I checked the serps for a keyword I was targeting. The site I had made got to like page 5 and then was removed from the first 20 pages.. that thing was long dead and gone. So I check the keyword.. and WTF!!! My site is now ranked #1 for my term overnight. A few other things happened to this domain so its hard to tell right now which one caused my site to go from sandbox to #1 but I think it was the hosting move. It is way to early to state the facts, nothing happens overnight. But this site having such a drastic change in its rankings has made me kinda wonder.. Ill continue to moniter things and see what happens and post a update at a later date to see the out come after a longer period of time.

Slight Update 4/6/2009:

The site that I mentioned in the post now holds the #1 and #2 positions for its keyword. So its gone from no serp ranking to 1 and 2 overnight.

This month I had to kill one of my very best campaigns. Conversions dropped EPC dropped and the way it was running it just couldn’t be profitable anymore. It’s sad to see it go since it was a large part of my income. Which is leading me to a problem I have been having recently with affiliate marketing. Offers.

Every network I am a member of is pushing the same stuff. (so it seems) When I look at my options all I see is Grants, Work At Home, Teeth Whiting, Acai, and Wrinkle/Anti-Aging. All of which are negative option billing offers, which seems to be becoming the way of things now a days.  From what I can tell there is some serious money behind all of these offers which is why they are so huge now. But I just can’t seem to bring myself to promoting them.  I just can’t seem to motivate myself to sell these products and I am having no moments of inspiration on how to promote them.

So I have taken it upon my self to go back to my old niche finding ways and promote the weirdest shit I can find. I want the offers that no one else is on! Or at least not millions of herd blogs. This should make things easier for me with less competition for traffic should mean a larger share of the profits. But I am just not seeing the same diversity that I used to when I first started in AM over a year ago. Where am I going to find these offers?

Which brings me to today. This morning I thought to my self what if I just had 1,000 websites that made $1.00 a day? That’s 365,000 a year – 10,000 on domains, and say 1,200 on hosting. Leaving me 353,500 in cash at the end of the year.  Well shit that sounds easy enough…. If I was to attempt this crazy but simple idea I could make my websites about anything I want. Heck even adsense ads could result in $1 a day per domain.  So any cpa offers or other ads/links I could earn out of it would be more cash. Even better is if 1 site goes nuts and makes like $50 a day!

Now this idea is sounding better and better in the back of my head. I already have a lot of domains…many still unused and many not even making that $1.00.  Now I want to know how I am going to undertake this somewhat massive project…

Ive decided to use a few of the tools I have acquired to help out. Namely WFReview (WFReview Coupon), BANS, and PHPBay. If I could send enough traffic to eBay and adsense and pump out these sites uber fast using these scripts this just might be possible! I can pump out 1-2 full sites a day using these tools with out much of a problem.

So each day this week I have started upon this nuts idea and I have built 6 new websites.  Its going to be hard going over so many niches and I highly doubt ill get to 1,000 sites but if I keep going it should get easier and easier as I stream line the process. Wish me luck as I think I may have gone insane!

After a month of waiting I finally got my embody chair from the factory.  Now that’s is all together I am thrilled with how it turned out. Check out the pictures below.

The desk is a ‘Paper Clip’ desk from Blu-Dot and was one of the last 3 they had. They are a local design firm so I was able to order it from a boutique and pick it up at the warehouse my self. The desk would have cost me $500 bucks but because of a contest I was in with Tyler Cruz and Amped Media they ended up buying me my desk instead of another ps3. So special thanks go out to Amped Media for buying me my desk.

The chair is my custom made embody chair by Herman Miller. I was going to go with the Aeron until I got to the showroom and had a chance to sit in this chair. The embody is AMAZING it feels way better than the Aeron did so I had to step up and get it. It ended up costing a bit more since I added the polished base to match the legs of my desk but in the long run both the desk and chair were totally worth it and since my embody has a 12 year warranty I know I will be loving it for a long time. Check it out if your in the market for a nice chair.

The file cabinet and accessories I picked up at ikea. No need to go over board on the basics plus I love the lamp and cabinet they totally match the mod look I was going for. Very 1950’s meet the Jetsons. The thing on the left side is a Esterbrook Pen display case. I was a big collector of their old fountain pens awhile back. I found this case to show them off once I dig them out of their box. It all turned out great and I hope it will help me keep on track while working at home now. 

Wow it really does work! You can get paid for simply posting links to google! Check it out!

Ok so not really.. but I figured it would be fun to post another check image since google decided to finally mail me a payment for my adsense traffic over the last 8 months! $123 dollars baby! Mo’ Money Mo’ Money!

Anyway… ive been meaning to post some useful stuff here  but ive run into a personal problem. After several months of my first bitter ass cold Minnesota winter and working from home ive gone crazy. Ive got cabin fever and ive got it bad. The last week and a half has been a total wash. I haven’t even been able to think about work. Like a really really fucking bad case of writers block. I see the offers, I see other people LPs and absolutely nothing pops into my head. Ive opted instead to take a vacation from work in hopes of fixing my cabin fever via the stack of PS3 games ive  got. But it seems that isn’t going to work as well as I thought since its been over a week now and I still feel the same.

To add to my new found crazyness one of my main offers died last week. I bounced around a lot trying to find a new offer that could take its place finally finding one Sunday after several days of losses. Today I just found out that the new offer I found is now dead to! Fuck man. Seriously wtf is happening to affiliate marketing. Its like all fly by day shit thats here one day and gone the next. Once i get back on my game I am going to dedicate more time to more solid shit thats been around for a while. I run a business now, this isn’t a hobby to get extra cash ive gotta work harder on finding solid revue streams to keep up my pay roll. Hopefully spring will be kind and come sooner rather than later so I can go outside!

Anyone have to deal with the whole work at home thing? got some advice?

This is a topic that has been driving me nuts and seems to happen quite often. The question is where is my money? This month I have been doing rather well and I have yet to have a loss this month. So if everyday is profit I should have a good pile of profits heading my way.

But when I checked out my bank account today and compared it to what’s currently on my American express. I find my self trying to figure out where all this money has gone since its not sitting in my bank account. Where is it?

Well this brings us back to network payment terms. Something which I feel is often over looked when you are working on your accounting at the end of the month. Some networks offer weekly payments, some bi-weekly, and some monthly. Heck if your joining a new network it might be even longer to start off with as they don’t know you well yet and are still checking your traffic quality. Then of course there are the weird ones like CJ and PepperJam which use different systems altogether. It can all be quite confusing if you are running traffic on several networks. You also need to note if your going to be paid by Wire, or Check as each option adds or removes time.

My advice to any new affiliate marketers is to make a spreadsheet of the networks you are running traffic with and make a note of each networks payment terms. If you are on a tight budget and are floating costs on a credit card this is extremely important. If american express wants its money at the end of the month and your not getting paid for this months traffic until mid the following month you better have a savings to back it up.

You also may need to limit the networks you work with because of this. I try to only work with 4-5 networks at any one time since I have established relationships with them and I have better payout terms with them. This consolidation helps me cover my ppc costs by having traffic at two major networks with weekly payouts. These 2 networks cover 100%+ of my ppc costs so I am able to pay my bills as they come in with out worry. But this also means that the majority of the profits are now riding on the other networks I work with and their various payout terms. 

So where is my money? Its coming… just seems as though its not here yet. Its best to check these things at the end of the month, just make sure not to lose track of where your money is and when your going to get it.

Last month I joined with XY7 as part of a contest hosted by Tyler Cruz and started running a few offers with them. I wasn’t sure if I was going to win or not. But with the help of Jim my affiliate manager over there and some creative campaigns I was able to win first place and win my self a ps3 and rockband 2. I would have never bought these things for my self so this worked out great. So a special thanks go out to XY7 for this great prize, me and my girl friend have been having a blast playing LittleBig Planet.

If you have not joined with XY7 yet your missing out. They treat their affiliates really well and have tons of gifts and prizes they send out to top affiliates. Sign me up with XY7!