Dec 20
Ooh I’ve been slacking work the past month. Just been so caught up with the Christmas spirit that I hardly spent any time on my business. Am gonna give myself a break till next year and then its full steam ahead. Another reason why I’ve been slacking off is because I’ve finally plucked up the courage to delegate all ad group creation work to my virtual employee. It took me awhile to make that decision as I was really worried about privacy issues. I mean think about - they have full access to all your profitable keywords and landing pages etc. All they have to do is duplicate what you’re doing! How did I get around that?
In Yahoo I created a sub account and isolated developing campaigns from mature ones so that my virtual employee only has access to campaigns that he’s working on. I still haven’t figured out if this can be done on Google Adwords but will certainly find out soon. Don’t you just love outsourcing? I feel almost like I’ve cloned myself…my business is also really beginning to flourish and grow exponentially thanks to my dedicated virtual employee.
Back to the title of this post - the 80/20 rule. I’ve done some analysis on my PPC affiliate marketing business and have found that it stays true to the universal 80/20 rule. 80% of my profits come from 20% of my campaigns and similarly 20% of my keywords bring in 80% of my profits (for any specific campaign). I’ve also been given the opportunity to peek into the business (legitimately of course) of super affiliates who make USD1million over a year and I’ve found this rule to be true there as well. I just find it so amazing how Pareto stumbled across it. Kudos to the Pareto!
Nov 12
I just got back from a holiday in Bangkok to find that 5 campaigns had been blasted with the dreaded $5-$10 min bids. Looks like Google’s done another landing page algorithm update. I still have 1 campaign going strong so compared those landing pages to the ones that got slapped. The main differences were that on the Great QS landing pages I cloaked all my affiliate links and it was a very non-competitive market. All the other campaigns that got slapped were for products in super competitive markets and had no masked affiliate links. One more important difference that I forgot to mention is that the Great QS landing pages had unique content. I used the PPC Riches software on the slapped landing pages and PPC Riches basically scrapes together related content from ezine articles.
I spent all of today rebuilding my landing pages and hopefully these will stand the test of time. I made sure content was unique and I had at least 5-6 internal links with the usual recommended pages such as Privacy Policy, Contact Us and Disclaimer. Software such as PPC Riches and LPGen that build loads and loads of pages with ezine article (duplicate) content work well initially until the Google spider detects duplicate content. Can’t say for sure if this duplicate content issue resulted in high min bids but from my previous experience with my failed blog project Google does take duplicate content quite seriously. Am gonna stick to building landing pages with unique content.
Oct 18
I am sure a lot of people would beg to differ but I honestly feel that after a year of full on PPC affiliate marketing is getting easier. I have a system in place and all I do when I wanna start a new campaign is to follow my system. The reason I find it easy is because my system works. It has proven itself and now I just gotta replicate. Now I don’t always make money from a campaign right away. Some campaigns require tweaking and testing but to date I have always been able to profit from a campaign. Here’s a peak at the overall flow of my system :-
Select a niche –> Monitor competition –> Build landing pages –> Build campaign –> Test & Tweak
Monitoring competition is probably the most important part of my system as I can be almost certain that if an advertiser is running an ad for a month or more then they must be profitable. I then start a full blown campaign and by being slightly better than the competition I’m able to not only take over the campaign but also make a nice profit.
What do I mean by doing things slightly better than the competition? Study their landing pages and improve on them. Create tighter ad groups with super relevant landing pages and ads. Eventually when you’ve been in PPC long enough you’ll develop your own system that works for you.
Mar 16
I mentioned about a week ago in one of my posts that Google was clamping down on the promotion of download music, movie and TV shows sites. A lot of advertisers had their Google ads disabled due to copyright infringement. I had about 2-3 ads disabled but the remaining ads I still left up and running. I figured I’d just leave them till they got reviewed and disabled.
Whilst I was enjoying a nice meal & watching American Idol I received a heart stopping email from Google. These emails seem to be able to stick out like a sore thumb in a mass of other emails! I wonder why? I hate moments like that when my heart is racing 1000 beats a minute as I click to open the email. It was basically a warning email to remove all my remaining ads that were advertising download music, movie & TV show sites (P2P download sites) or have my Adwords account permanently suspended! Read the rest of this entry »
Mar 07
Yikes…woke up this morning to find my sales the lowest it has ever been in two months. Logged in to my Adwords account and everything seemed ok there. Pretty much average number of clicks. What was going on? Logged on to my Clickbank account….ahaa…no sales from Yahoo today!
Logged on to my Yahoo Search Marketing account and lo and behold - Yahoo Search Marketing will be under maintenance from the 6th - 7th March for a system upgrade. As 20% of my revenue comes from YSM guess today I’ll just have to be satisfied with 20% less. Dang!!!!
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