My Life As A Fun Loving Internet Marketer…

This year has come and gone in a blink of an eye lid and its my 1 year anniversary! It was almost a year ago when I first got into internet marketing. In this year alone I believe I’ve achieved what only most struggling newbies can dream off. I quit my day job, earn many times more that what I earned at my day job, sit at my desk overlooking lush greenery, work whenever I feel like it and best of all, I finally got rid of that darn alarm clock! Am not saying this to brag but to tell you that it can be done and I’m a living example. Did I have a lot of cash to lay down? NO Did I have any IT knowledge whatsoever before I started? Barely..yes i could answer emails and chat on MSN but that was it! How did I get there? I would sum it up in 2 words - Learn & Action…

Learn - I devoured information. I read blog after blog, ebook after ebook and invested my hard earned cash what little I had on internet marketing courses. I still remember the first course I ever bought was Derek Gehl’s Internet Marketing Secrets!

Action - I tried any and everything from selling electronics on Ebay to Studio Traffic (which is now no longer due to its pyramid like scheme). After attempting all kinds of business models I settled on PPC affiliate marketing and selling digital products on Ebay. It took me at least 6 months to see some profit and loss some money in the process.

A year later my PPC affiliate marketing business is the main profit center and my Ebay ebook business helps pay for hosting, software, ebooks and courses.

Here’s a quick run down on what I’ve learnt in 2007 in relation to PPC affiliate marketing  :-

1) Landing pages are the way to go. I do not have a single direct linking campaign. All my campaigns have landing pages and I’ve found that altho some may argue that a landing page creates an extra hop before the buying process it adds value to the customer and has worked really well for me. I’ve tested this and found that landing pages in general converted better for me than directly linking to the merchant site.

2) Create super tight ad groups in Adwords. Its very easy to be lazy and just dump in a whole load of keywords in an ad group and I myself am guilty of that. I’ve had to rebuild tens of campaigns thanks to the Google slap. I’ve finally been able to stabilize my campaigns by building tight ad groups with not more than 10 keywords. Everything is super relevant and altho I may not get a Great quality score on all my keywords I’ve found that they’ve at least been spared the slap.

3) Analyze competition & beat them at it.  70% of my campaigns are in very competitive markets. I’ve found that this really works for me. I go head to head with the big boys and profit by being just a little better than them. E.g I create better landing pages, write better ads, tighter ad groups etc you get the picture.

4) Test & Tweak.  Ok now this is the bane of my life. I am not a very detailed person and tweaking and tracking does drive me up the wall. It IS a necessity tho if you wanna squeeze every last profit out from your campaign. I always always run two ads against each other and keep the winner. I also on a monthly basis review keywords and bid prices and tweak non performing keywords accordingly.

Here’s a list of what I’ve tried in 2007 and failed…kinda

1) Adsense blogging project. I created a self hosted word press blog and scraped article content from ezine directories. I also plastered a couple of Adsense ads on the blog. Traffic started out good at ~200 unique visitors a day and just tapered off to 10. I suspect it was due to the lack of unique content. Surprisingly tho traffic picked up this month and is back at 200 visitors per day. My profit from Adsense is very small at say $1 a day so potential is definitely there. I just gotta find some time to work on it. Heck I may even just sell the blog.

2) Article Marketing. I know this works (based on success of others) but I can’t seem to get it to move tho. I hired a ghost writer to write 50 articles and submitted them to Ezine Articles. I get quite a bit of traffic from these articles but they don’t seem to convert. Perhaps its my article content or the lack of creativity in the signature. I haven’t quite looked into that but to date despite quite a bit of traffic I have yet to make a sale with article marketing.

3) Domain Parking. I got a course on this not too long ago on how to purchase domain names, park them and make money via ad click thrus. Problem is..I couldn’t get any free search engine traffic. I purchased 5 domains, parked them at NameDrive and waited. No luck! It works if you happen to find a domain name that is searched on but as with all things this takes time and effort and whole lotta experimentation.

I’ll write a bit more in my next post about my plans for 2008…in the meantime - Merry Christmas and a Happy Happy New Year!

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