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.

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 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.

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.

I often get hit up with PM’s from new people to the business about how to get started in affiliate marketing. Today while talking to someone I mentioned to him advice I hadn’t really thought of before. Avoid the herd.

I found a guys blog today who is taking tabs on all of the blogs he has found. The guy makes note that all of the pages look the same, have the same comments, and images. Mothers of 3 are now pushing their google cash stories with comments still unchanged from the weightloss blogs. He has a massive list of domains and names used on these pages.  Our industry is becoming filled with lazy scammers and he points that out.

It started with acai, moved to grants, and now has taken over the work at home scene. This massive herd of idiots is copying landing pages, images, even ads. Like a large herd of dumb cows they all blast out the same crap totally destroy the niche after making some quick cash and move on. Are they making money? Probably.

But what are they really learning about the business? Nothing. Do they know how to write copy? Nope. Can they make a landing page? Nope. If you are new to the business its going to be hard to avoid all the idiots publicly talking about their EPC in chat, like a big pissing contest of who is the bigger bull in the herd. But what you should make note of is that no one that really dose affiliate marketing as a living is doing this.

I don’t see nickcakes or ajon in there talking about how google cash payout was lowered and now they are screwed. Nor will you see them talking about how yesterday they had a $5 EPC but today is only $1. The real money in affiliate marketing is not doing the same thing as everyone else.  When people say to follow the money they mean the offer not the landing page. If you find something that is making you money you want NO ONE else on that offer. That’s the whole point.

I have campaigns that I have had running for a year now that are still pulling in a profit everyday. If you are just starting affiliate marketing you need to stick to the basics.  Avoid this herd of crap and learn how to make money with out depending on others. 

So in my never ending quest to find new traffic sources I decided to go out on the line and try a small classified ads! I mean if it worked for that guy on tv its got to work for me! 

So here is the low down… after finding out about NationWideAdvertising.com and for the first time actually seeing how much these things cost I figured what the heck. So I set aside some testing cash and dug threw their site and their listings. My target was to capture old ladies that like coupons so I decided to advertise in the Penny Saver. For $250 I was going to have my little ad in 3 million of these bad boys.

The offer I picked to promote with this idea was the Cash4Gold offer at Convert2Media. Old ladies, coupons, money for old jewelry… it all seemed like a perfect match.  I wrote my ad, which was pretty simple ‘Domain.com – Do you have old unused jewelry? etc etc’ you get the point.

I went cheap with the idea and just bought 1 domain that was really short and redirected it to the offer page. No phone number was in the ad but the domain name was listed twice.  So ive got my ad, ive got my lp, all I needed to do was wait for all of the people that read penny saver to find my ad and get their gold pack!

Well…its been 2 weeks since the ad ran. I was told it was going to run for a week in all mid west penny savers and get me my 3 million prints. The results for sure are now in!

1 Click. That’s right. With my $250 my domain in my text ad got 1 click. I don’t even know if the click came from the penny saver ad or from a reviewer at the company. But it didn’t convert so it doesn’t matter anyway.

So what happened? Well it seems no one really reads the penny saver. I had assumed anyone who did in that small 5-10% of them would be the perfect target but it seems they were not. Also I realized that most of these people were problem not big computer users. So just having a website probably wasn’t the wisest choice.

Lesson learned?

• Don’t do print with out a phone number. 
• Pick a paper that you actually get so you have proof your ad even ran. 
• Pick a paper that more people read or even pay to read. 
• Its not easy to make a million dollars in small print ads.

Good luck if your planing to try it. Ill stick to people already at their computers.

So here you go, I am giving out ANOTHER free niche that you can try or use as an  example. I am losing possible $ giving this out so you better learn something from it!

I was dicking around on eBay looking for some thing to show this dude that weird food crap that I used to see years ago. Like food shaped like shit. (No this is not the niche) While digging though the weird shit section of eBay I kept finding funny shit to post in the chatroom and then I came across a product that claimed to restore your foreskin if you had been circumcised. Item linked here. Ok so now we have a weird ass contraption that is going to stretch your penis to give you foreskin again. What a fucking joke.. or is it.

After seeing such a stupid ass item I popped it into wordtracker. The results can be found here. Amazingly enough there is actually search volume for this shit!  470 search for this one keyword example. You can guess other ones… foreskin, circumcised, shit like that. I bet you could come up with a pretty good KW list with some decent search volume.

Now we go to Google and check this stuff out our selves. Holy shit the ad block is full! Some are shit ads like eBay and Amazon but that is a sure sign of cheap ass clicks. I wont give the link out but I even found a few landing pages. Now this is to great… how the hell has this gone unnoticed! Oh I know…because it’s a fucking niche!

Yes that’s right THIS is a niche,  wii is not, cameras is not, electronics shit is not. All that stuff is lame as shit and is only good for noobs wasting money. You need to go deep people!  I have an uncle that has a factory that makes plastic buckets for chirst sake and he is loaded.  This is truly what a niche is make note of it!

Now I just gave out a perfectly good niche that I almost decided to run myself due to its awesomeness but I need content for the blog and im busy with other shit. So now that you have this great niche with little competition and cheap clicks.  But now you need a product to promote.

Well from looking at the current ads your options are to find these contraptions, use eBay, or do what they are already doing. I noticed the guys already there are selling ebooks so I hit up clickbank which is famous for shitty ebooks and guess what.  There it is, the same damn ebook they are selling with a $13 payout! See the ebooks here.

So you now have the niche, the keywords and the product. There is currently probably about 3 people in this niche judging from the ads. Lord only knows how long they have been chilling there banking on this obscure shit. For you 3 guys already in there I am sorry. I hope you are not counting on this paying your rent.

Now go make money and find real niches, they are everywhere.

I wonder how much that guy lost….idiot.

The Target:

Bump N Chuck.

Background:

I did this as a joke because I was bored and engimabomb in #cakes kept talking about how people were trying to buy this toy for Christmas even though he wasn’t selling it. After a little research I found that no one had the damn things in stock which shows there was a need for the product. I spent a few more mins and found a site that had them in stock and had a affiliate program through Commission Junction that was going to pay 10% (It costs about $30 so $3 a sale). This means if I could just sell 3 of the damn things I would break even.

I bought the domain, tossed together a landing page in like 5mins and put that shit online. http://www.bumpnchuck.com was born. (Note: Its on a shared host with a thousand other domains and has a private whois. have fun.)

Method:

I hoped into adwords and made a campaign. Ad text.

Bump N Chuck – In Stock.
Bump N Chuck In Stock And Ready
To Ship. Get Yours Before Christmas

I added like 10 or so keywords on broad match which I made up since no tool had data on such a weird niche product. Keywords were

bump and chuck
bump and chuck rc bumper cars
bump and chuck remote control bumper cars
bump n chuck
bump n chuck rc bumper cars
bump n chuck remote control bumper cars

I set the budget for $10 a day bid 0.20 per keyword and went to work on other shit.

Results:

This is a case of giving the user exactly what they want where they want it. But it resulted in 0 sales and lost me 8.81 for the domain and about $5.84 in ppc costs. The campaign resulted in 781 impressions and 130 clicks in adwords and had 78 clicks to product its self while running for 10 days. It ended up costing 0.04 cents a click which was nice of google considering no one in their right mind would be bidding on these things.

Anyway..I can not count how many times I have seen requests for case studies on ppc and shit like that. Well there ya go I gave out an entire campaign, ad, keywords, landing page, all of it. It wasn’t profitable but it really should have been. If your a ppc noob there is a ton you can learn from this if you are just getting started or totally don’t understand the process. I thought it was all rather funny.

Now I didn’t just write about how im doing.. but I wanted to mention that a lot of affiliates keep holidays and seasons in mind when doing campaigns. I knew damn well in Nov-Dec that diet season was comming up and that I had to get somthing up and running before it started so I could take full advantage of the diet rush. I plan on doing the same shit for valientines day, mothers day, and other key points in the year when stupid shit like online flowers suddenly kill for a week or two.

Get out your guns and go hunting boys they wont be around for long.