Better Version of the Song.

This song should be a indication as to how my new year has started off. My lack of hardcore working has started to defiantly take its toll as several campaigns got the axe in december thanks to my good friend Google. I would stop using the fuckers all together but many of the sites I advertise on still have google placement ads. many of these sites to small to have their own advertising options or operate on only a CPM basis, which would be fine if it wasn’t for the insanely high CPM prices.

December ended up being the worst month of 2009 for me making half of what I pulled in the month before. Sure some SEO sites pulled in some extra cash from the shopping rush but my PPC campaigns are what brings in real money. As I had mentioned a few posts back I am trying to get enough SEO sites going that they will provide the majority of my income but as of yet I have not been able to get enough established sites going to offset the PPC income.

I have many projects that I am planing on working on and PPC campaigns that I need to give a booster shot. Hopefully I will be able to pull out some better numbers and recover from the December of Doom.

Incase anyone had missed it, bb_wolfe has offered to give out free and/or discounted copies of WFReview for charitable donations. As far as I know everyone who donates will not get a free version of WFReview but who knows its pretty much up to him and how generous he is feeling at the time. Other people who donate will be allowed to buy WFReview for only $75.00 a major discout from its full retail asking price of $139.00. Read the full details here…

The conditions are

• Has to be a legit charity, the Dennis Yu Legal Defense Fund does not count.
• Has to be over $25 in value. (Hey, it’s a fucking charity, splurge a little)
• The charity has to provide some sort of receipt that you contributed.
• Take out any personal info or financial info from the receipt.
• The donation dose not have to be in their name.

After your donation has been made you just need to forward the receipt (minus personal info) to ILoveJonFisher [@] reviewpluginforwordpress.com. Then you get to wait and see what the WFReview santa delivers to your mail box! I commend and respect him for doing this its not many that are willing to give up their work for the sake of others.

Also if anyone is interested in giving but dose not have a favorite charity I highly recommend Heifer International they have many worthwhile projects all across the globe and also allow the gift of animals.  Every year I get their catalog in the mail and show my support by donating a few animals for myself and as gifts to family and friends. The best part is that the families that receive the gift of these animals agree to also give away some of the offspring to continue the gift.  If one family received two flocks of chickens their offspring could help support entire villages or towns. Its defiantly a cause that is worth giving to.

I apologize for my lack of updates recently, I have been quite busy around the holidays and I started a few non-affiliate sites that have been getting my attention. Every time I think up a new post and I forget to write it down or get side tracked and it never gets done. Story of my life eh…but I am working on it!

Anyway since its Christmas I wanted to post an update but once again I lost it… instead I hope you will all humor me for this post as I am planing on ranting about gift giving as this seems to have become quite the problem for people.

/* Begin Rant

So this Christmas since its one of the first times I have not lived near any of my family they all are going on about what to get me or what do I want for Christmas since they know nothing about me. Rather than ask what hobbies or interests I have currently they are just asking me what I want. Sure this is great if you are lazy, poor, and just want stuff it makes it easy if you just get want you asked for. But I already own most of what I need or want.

It was great when I was a kid, when I would open that box and see the new mario I asked for I would go nuts. Alas now that I am a adult if I open a box and its just what I asked for I am not really going to be all that surprised or thrilled. More just slightly happy that I didn’t have to pay for something. Yaya Christmas! Just how boring would Christmas be if everyone started to do this?

We have become a lazy society with our lack of understanding each other and our gifts cards and other stupid easy ways out gift giving. But not I! I actually spent time looking for stuff people might actually like. I could care less if they wanted it or not, its a gift thats how it works. I buy it since I thought they would like it they get a surprise gift, if they don’t they return it and get something else they did want. While this dose seem kind of mean or insensitive I feel that it shows how much I know a person or how much thought I put into their gifts.

I didn’t need to call them and ask what they want, I didn’t ask them what their hobbies were. I already know this stuff. I mean they are friends and family I have known them for years. Even if I didn’t know what new hobby they are into I still at least know what they like and dislike in general. I am just at a loss how so many people seem to be getting caught up in Christmas that they seemingly forget everything they know about people. Are we all really that busy? I did 99% of my shopping online and had it all shipped free to my door. It really only took a few hours digging around and most of that was finding the best price. What’s the big deal?

So that’s my rant, I don’t see how I am so imposible to shop for. I can think of tons of stuff I think would be cool. Heck I am sure the world if full of interesting stuff id love. Why must I find it all my self?

Also one final point, this isn’t just shopping for me. People have asked me for advice for other family since they didn’t know what to get them. Wives, Brothers, Grandparents, Dads etc. How is it no one knows what to get each other?!

End Rant */

Anyone else having a similar problem?

This week I received word from PepperJam that they will no longer support the ebay affiliate program because they could not accommodate the new quality click pricing that eBay has launched. If you missed this e-mail from them then you have until Oct. 5th to move your sites/links over to eBay Partner Network. If you already did not have a EPN account before this change I don’t know what to tell you. eBay has become a real bitch on who its letting join its network. My only advice is to build a good looking legit website and apply with that. DO NOT apply with a bans or phpbay site! Make something like a collectible site that talks about model trains or some shit. Its got to look like your not trying to push people to eBay but that your ‘loyal readers’ are going to click on the link to visit eBay.

Once your in though you can ditch all that shit and get to making phpbay autoblogs, bans stores, review sites anything you want.  But should you even bother now that eBay has launched quality click pricing. Well for some they have seen payout increases and others have seen some big drops. Not to mention that no one know how they are figuring out this pricing structure works. eBay is pretty much going to make up any number they want and pay you that. I still have not seen how this is going to affect my eBay sites but I will continue to make sites for EPN.

Why? Because eBay is easy. Most of the sites I have I made over a year ago. I did a little seo made them look pretty and forgot that shit. They sat around on the net and found their own traffic. Giving me a bit of extra income that is totally hands off. Spend a few hours make a few sites and see how it goes. After this month I will see how my sites do with EPN since I have had to spend the time today moving them all from PepperJam to EPN. Here is hoping for some more extra cash.

ASW Press Pass!

It seems my plan has finally paid off! After my last trip to ASW and meeting several new bloggers with press passes. (I am looking at you ppc.bz) I told myself if they could do it than I could. 1 Years later and 51 posts later and I was finally able to secure my press pass for affiliate summit west coming up at the beginning of the year. So congrats to me! and thanks to all my readers who have helped me get a pass for this years ASW!

CommentKiller

This was the first digital product I have ever made so I was hoping to see some better results. I had a lot of good feedback and lots of people telling me they would love a plugin like this. But even at $5.00 ($5 Off Coupon Code: B1541ABA40) I have been unable to generate a single sale. But I really had intended on only using it myself for my own sites so my plan was basically to break even and then maybe sell a few more. Perhaps I still will some day, but as with any online venture there has been a lot that I learned from this and a lot I did not expect. For one I had no idea that so many bloggers actually signed up for askimet for all of their blogs! I mean this blog has it. But there was no way I was going to register every time I made a blog.

Ebay

I was not planing on doing any eBay posts since I had been hiding out with pepperjam for awhile now avoiding EPN and its crazyness. Well this month I decided to check out their new cost per click thing they just launched. My revenue with pepperjam had already fallen horribly low so I didn’t think I had much to lose. Well after a months of traffic I can say I was wrong. After a full month of traffic eBay now reports I have made a whopping $75.00 with them for September! I am so going to retire now. But since this is only my first month with EPN I have not given up on this system yet. Perhaps it is just to soon for me to really see results since they have no account history with me. I have also confirmed that pepperjam will soon be also switching over to this quality click pricing so there is really no way around it. They only thing left to do is step up my eBay game and find new niches to dig into to make up for the loss of income with this switch over.

Family

This Friday I received a call from my father who was at the hospital. It seems on Thursday he checked him self into the emergency room for shortness of breath and chest pains. many of you can now see where this is going. It seems he was on the verge of a major heart attack but was lucky/smart enough to seek help and was able to dodge it. He has been in the hospital for two days now as they test and monitor him to make sure nothing more is going to happen. Tomorrow he ‘may’ be checked out to my custody for a Sunday at home. After which we will be driving to Miami for him to have a angioplasty and possibly have a bypass or a stint done on Tuesday depending on how the tests go. its time like this I am so happy that I am an affiliate and that I was able to drop everything to fly down to see him today. I will now be in Key West for the best week and a half taking to the hospital and what not and making sure he rests after the operation. I highly doubt I would be able to do this if I had a real job. It looks as though all will be fine after his operations.

Finally I took the leap into making my own product, Comment Killer. I have had the idea for this plugin for over a year but I have finally acted on it and had it programmed. This is my first digital product and I am very happy with how it turned out. I feel that this tool will save bloggers hours if not days managing spam comments.

So what dose this plugin do?  Comment Killer was designed to help purge databases of mass amounts of spam while still doing its best to filter out real user comments.  It does this by filtering pending comments based on number of links in them, which you set in the plugin options.  But not only dose it clean out old comments but it keeps new spam comments from even making it into your blog.

I personally have a fair number of wordpress installs all over then net. Most of which run automatically and only need checking up on every few months.  Well as you can guess these things build up spam like crazy. Some of these sites have as many as 10,000 pending comments. Deleting them 20 at a time from the admin panel takes hours of my time and just mass deleting them may delete real user reviews. With Comment Killer I was able to clean out all of my wordpress blogs in a matter of minutes. I was damn happy I did too, because I found a lot of real user reviews in my review sites that might have been lost with a mass delete.

Since I paid to make this plugin and because I put a fair bit of time and effort into it I can’t just give it out for free. But as make it fair for all bloggers I have priced Comment Killer at only $10.00 to use all you like on your sites.  I mean who wouldn’t pay $10.00 to remove thousands if not hundreds of thousands of spam comments across all of their blogs? Not to mention once installed your spam will be cut down nearly 90% next time you log in. Its been well worth it for me and I hope you will like it too.

Check it out at http://www.CommentKiller.com and feel free to post if it’s helped you out.

Man what a couple of months this has been! Back in the end of June my girlfriend and I had decided we had enough of Minnesota and the horrible weather and winters there. It seems like a good idea last year when we moved from Florida to Minneapolis to “see real seasons” and “play in all the snow” but it was all bull crap. It was fucking cold! So cold in fact that most if not all winter I could not leave my house with out being in pain. I grew up in Key West, Fl and have lived in the tropics my whole life.

Anyway after what was one of the worst winters of my life I managed to convince my girlfriend that moving back to Florida would be a much better idea than another year in Minnesota. So here I am back in Florida! St Petersburg to be exact. I now have a wonderful apartment that is waterfront on Tampa Bay and the rents still cheaper than Minneapolis.

What I did not expect was how much of disaster this move has been. When we first got here everything went wrong. It’s been damage control for the last two months trying to just get settled. Just this week I think we finally got the last box unpacked. The office is still somewhat of a wreck but is usable now as tings are slowly finding homes in our new place.

But what has really has really saved me is affiliate marketing! No other job I can think of would allow me to totally vanish from work and all work related responsibility for 2 months and still get paid! Seriously I haven’t done jack shit work related and I am pretty upset that I have lost so much time and that I am now in the mental state I am in. Its hard to just jump back into working when you haven’t for the last two months.

I hope that next week I will finally be able to spend some time at the desk and start damage control on all of my sites and campaigns. Yes everything managed to still run fine but I am sure something horrible has happened. Probably 10,000 spam comments across my wordpress installs too.

I will start posting more usefull stuff again (if I ever did) once I get back to work and start making more sites and campaigns, and sorry to all of my online friends about vanishing for a few months.

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.