Conversation with 2 CJ Top Performers, Part I

September 30th, 2007 by Amit

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

In the past week I had the unique opportunity to speak with 2 CJ Top Performers: Felix Leshno, on a mastermind call, and Jeremy Palmer, for an interview I did for PPC Classroom.

Both of these guys are seasoned veterans, super stars really, in this industry, they’ve both been full time super affiliates since before I even knew what affiliate marketing even was! So I appreciate every opportunity I get to speak with them.

I had a chance to talk with both Felix and Jeremy about what the future of ppc affiliate marketing holds, and here’s what we concluded:

Conversation with Felix:

I asked Felix how you deal with the following scenario:

You promote a new affiliate offer, get it profitable and strong. It’s making a killing, you optimize & expand it as much as you can, and then let it run on autopilot.

Everything is going fine the first couple of months, then you start to see a slight decline in sale and profits.

Okay, no big deal, probably just a slow month, right?

Then after 6 months of your campaign running on autopilot you realized that your profits have drop by 25%, 40%, or more. Sound familiar?

Felix said that you will see this steady decline in profit overtime in virtually every market you’re in! The fact is that there’s more competition entering in every niche, bid prices are going up. Also, ppc affiliates, and other advertisers are getting savvier and savvier.

Overtime this game will get more challenging NOT less.

So what’s the solution?

With his years of experience and expertise in affiliate marketing, here’s what Felix had to say: You need to accept the fact that profit margins will become thinner and thinner, and overcome this by launching affiliate offers at a faster rate.

Today you may be able to make a fortune with 4-5 solid & build up affiliate offers, 3 years from now you’re probably going to need 10-12 strong offers going to make the same net profit.

The bottom line is if you don’t launch affiliate offers FASTER than your existing affiliate offers are losing profitability, you’re in trouble.

Before you panic, here’s steps you can take to assure long term profitability of your business:

  1. For most of you out there you’ve BARELY touched the surface of the niches you’re currently in. If this is the case, you need to get busy optimizing and expanding your current campaigns. Split test your landing pages, do keyword research, test new adcopy, etc, etc. The more optimized and build up your campaigns are, the more long term & stable your profits will be.
  2. If you’re already having great success with affiliate marketing you need to start thinking about how you’re going to build a team and turn your one man show into a real company. With a team you’ll be able to launch, optimize, and build up more affiliate offers, at a faster rate. This way your companies bottom line continues to grow, even as your profit margins continue to shrink and more competition enters your markets.

Remember the average business in America has a profit margin of about 10%, expect that to be the case with affiliate marketing 5 years down the road from today.

Are you prepared for the future of affiliate marketing?

Stay Tune for Part II where I talk about My Conversation with Jeremy Palmer!

Posted in Super Affiliate Mindset, PPC Marketing, Google™ AdWords | 14 Comments »

Speaking at PPC Classroom Workshop in Vegas!

September 28th, 2007 by Amit

I’ve just agreed to give a talk at Anik and Jeremy’s PPC Classroom Workshop in Vegas. In fact I will be the keynote speaker!

This Workshop will be packed with hard hitting advice on how to take your ppc affiliate efforts to the next level. From what I understand there is a whole lineup of top super affiliate who will be speaking there.

I for one look forward to sharpening my skills by learning from these seasoned veteran super affiliates.

Everyone who signs up for PPC Classroom before this Sunday at 12pm EST get a free pass to this PPC Workshop.

Added Bonus : I have a surprised bonus for all the PPC Workship attendees that signed up for PPC Classroom through my blog.

It’s not too late to sign up for PPC Classroom through my link and get ALL the bonuses:

  1. The real time case study (over 8 weeks long), where I teach Andrew Wee how to do ppc affiliate marketing, step by step.
  2. Access to the Live 7-Figure Super Affiliate Group Coaching Call (expires tonight at 11:59pm EST!)
  3. Special Bonus for those who attend the PPC Workshop in Vegas
  4. Plus Another Bonus I have not Advertised on this Blog

So if you’d like to hear me speak and meet me in person, this is a golden opportunity.

Hope to see you in Vegas! :)

Posted in Industry News | 10 Comments »

PPC Classroom Update + Previously Unadvertised Bonus

September 28th, 2007 by Amit

For those of you who don’t want to cough up a whopping $497 upfront for PPC Classroom, Anik has just announced that he’s introducing a new pricing structure: 3 monthly payments of $187/month.

I know when I was a newbie I would have been hard pressed coming up with $497 upfront, considering I was drowning in $20k in consumer debt. Kudos to Anik and Jeremy for making it easier for more affiliates to participate in PPC Classroom.

I’M UPPING THE STAKES WITH THIS NEW UNADVERTISED TIME-LIMITED BONUS:

Anyone who signs up for PPC Classroom through this blog today before 11:59pm EST will get access to a free Live 7-Figure Super Affiliate Coaching Call. In this power packed 2 hour call Andrew Wee & I will:

  1. Spill the beans on how we rake in massive profits with affiliate marketing, month after month!
  2. Have a Q&A where you can pick our brains with your most pressing questions.
  3. Have hot seats where we will tear your PPC campaigns and landing pages apart, and tell you EXACTLY what you need to do to make them massively profitable!

This is a $400 value, absolutely free to everyone who signs up today by 11:59pm EST. If you signed up already, you are automatically invited to the coaching call.

This is an extremely time limited bonus that expires tonight at 11:59pm EST, NO EXCEPTIONS. To gain access to the Live 7-figure Super Affiliate Coaching Call you MUST email me at amit at superaffiliatemindset.com with your receipt by 11:59pm EST tonight.

Please note: This consulting bonus is in addition to the bonuses I already offered in my previous post, and everyone who signed up for PPC Classroom through my blog prior to now also gets this bonus. :) So for those of you who sign up for PPC Classroom today, you will get ALL the bonuses, the case study with Andrew Wee, the 7-Figure Super Affiliate Coaching Call, EVERYTHING.

Posted in Industry News | 18 Comments »

Would You Walk Away From This MUCH Money?

September 27th, 2007 by Amit

If you’ve been involved with affiliate marketing for more than a few months than you probably have figured out that this business doesn’t exactly have the best reputation in the mainstream world.

Is it any surprise?

Blackhaters affiliates gaming search engines, online gambling affiliates, pornography affiliates, “free” ipod offers, etc, etc, etc. Let’s be honest, this type of crap get more media attention than the 1000s of affiliate out there promoting honest products and services using honest methods.

Than there’s also this scenario: A lot of honest affiliates get sucked into promoting an affiliate offer that’s basically a scam, and then when they come to terms with the fact that it’s a scam it’s hard shutting it off, since they’re making so much money.

I WAS ONE OF THOSE AFFILIATES!

It all started 6 months ago I was promoting an affiliate offer that was EXTREMELY lucrative. I mean I was spending upwards of $5-10k/day on Adwords pushing traffic to this offer and my ROI was 300%!@?!

At first I was oblivious, let’s be honest, naive, to the fact that the offer was a scam (I’m not going to give the details since I know some of you out there will jump at the opportunity to promote it).

After working with the affiliate manager I began to realized that the entire conversion model was based on deliberately deceiving the customer.

The affiliate manager strongly advised me to put the Google feedback button on the thank you page (that comes from the Google conversion pixels) below the fold and disable the scroll bar, so people couldn’t file complaints. Apparently several of their other affiliates had gotten kicked off Adwords because of too many customer complaints.

I started to feel more and more uncomfortable promoting this offer.

What’s worst, this affiliate manager AND his boss, where constantly pestering me, almost on a daily basis, treating me like I was one of their employees. I was constantly being pushed to get my sales higher, to double serve my ads (a direct violation of Adwords TOS).

It gets better…

At the Affiliate Summit in Miami I had a chance to have dinner with my affiliate manager and some of his other affiliates, and boy was that an eye opener!

The affiliate manager asked everyone at the table if they were doing any spamming.

One group of affiliates, who are running a highly successful affiliate company whose name I will not mention on this blog, replied that they had setup a bogus membership site (for movie downloads or something) that they are using to just get people’s user ids and passwords.

They were then using these user ids and passwords to BREAK INTO THEIR EMAIL accounts and spam their list of friends with affiliate offers. They were having a lot of success with this since most people use the same id and password for EVERYTHING (security tip there).

The affiliate manager (my affiliate manger!) laughed and nodded in approval.

To say the least I was absolutely disgusted! These guys are nothing more than cyber-criminals! And apparently, perfect company for the affiliate manager.

At this point I was desperately trying to find an excuse to shut my campaigns down with this merchant and clear my conscience. I REALLY started feeling very guilty about promoting this merchant’s scam product, but then at the same time I keep looking at the money coming in and had a hard time walking away!

And if I even tried walking away, I know my affiliate manager would be pestering me to no end. It’s like I was in the mafia!?!
Had I sold my soul to the dark site? Was I no better than these guys that were breaking into other people’s email accounts?

As luck would have it I found an exit strategy. Not too long after I came back from the Affiliate Summit I got an email from Google stating that I had to make some changes my affiliate site (for the above mentioned merchant) or they would start disapproving my ads.

My site was getting too many user complaints, not surprising!

Instead of trying to make some modifications to my site and come to a comprise with Google, or start a new campaign under some else’s account, or a million other things I could have done to get around this, I did the honest thing…

I shut down ALL my campaigns for this affiliate offer. I literally walked away from millions of dollars in profits. And I’ve never been happier!

You know, my happiness is more important than any amount of money I could have made from this merchant.

I believe you can make millions honestly, and I also believe you can make a fortune AND be happy. You don’t have to sell your soul to make money in affiliate marketing!

My tip for you is to be very carefully of what you promote, it’s easier than you think to get tempted by the dark side, especially when there’s a lot of money involved.

The fact is we’re all human.

Ask yourself what’s more important, your happiness or making money dishonestly by cheating people? If you’re a newbie affiliate the path you choose now will likely determine where you end up 5, 10, or even 20 years from now, make it a good one!

Posted in Super Affiliate Mindset | 18 Comments »

The Truth About PPC Classroom…

September 25th, 2007 by Amit

I get emails almost everyday from readers asking me if I have a coaching program, or if they can join my coaching program.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a coaching program ready at the moment, and frankly I’m busy for the next several months launching a bunch of different affiliate offers and getting my second company, Performance Marketing Worldwide, off the ground.

As luck would have it just a week ago my friend Jeremy Palmer told me about a coaching program that he’s launching with Anik Singal, that’s called PPC Classroom, that’s just about ppc affiliate marketing.

Now when Jeremy first told me about PPC Classroom, honestly I was a bit skeptical. In the time I’ve been in this business I’ve seem a lot of bogus info products on affiliate marketing that did not deliver or live up to their name.

Many ebooks, courses, and paid membership sites on affiliate marketing either provide very basic information (i.e. how to setup a clickbank account) or have hopelessly out of date information.

On the other hand, I personally know Jeremy Palmer, and he is a world class super affiliate and a world class guy, so if he’s apart of PPC Classroom, it must be good.

So Jeremy and Anik allowed me to take a peak behind the curtains and see what PPC Classroom was all about.

All I have to say is WOW!

I mean at first I could not believe the amount of information that Jeremy and Anik were giving away. PPC affiliate marketing secrets that had taken me years to discover were all revealed.

PPC Classroom is the first, bona fide, EXACT step-by-step blueprint on how to do ppc affiliate marketing. I wish I had had such an incredible resource when I first started out!

I know I’ve stated in previous posts that there is no blueprint to doing ppc affiliate marketing, honestly after going through the course material in PPC Classroom, I’ve been proven wrong.

The downside of PPC classroom is that you get an overwhelming amount of information all at once, you need to be discipline and systematically go through all the material AND apply what you’ve learned, otherwise don’t waste your money.

I would only sign up for this program if you’re dead serious about making big bucks with PPC, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Here’s just some of what’s inside PPC Classroom:

  1. Six modules that provide a step-by-step blueprint on how to: find a niche, pick the right affiliate offer, research and bid on the right keywords, build your landing pages, and much more…
  2. Expert “tell all” interviews with top super affiliates, including myself, Rosalind Gardner, Vinny Lingham, and many others…
  3. 6 weeks of live webinars, where Jeremy and Anik will build profitable campaigns right in front of your eyes.
  4. A Top Secret Tool Jeremy uses to manage and track all of his campaigns across all 3 major search engines.
  5. And Much More…

Here’s a 10 minute excerpt from the 40 minute info packed interview I did with Jeremy Palmer for PPC Classroom…

10 Minute Excerpt of My Interview with Jeremy Palmer

My full interview with Jeremy is available when you sign with PPC Classroom.

For those of you who have been asking me about a coaching program or help with ppc affiliate marketing, I strongly recommend PPC Classroom.

I wish I had such an awesome resource at my finger tips when I got started, it would have significantly cut down on my learning curve.

SPECIAL PPC CLASSROOM BONUS:

I’m offering a special bonus for anyone who signs up for PPC classroom through my affiliate link on this blog.

Andrew Wee and I are compiling a series of interviews and videos where Andrew grills me on the ins and outs of PPC affiliate marketing.

Watch and listen as I teach Andrew on how to pick an affiliate offer and promote it through Adwords. Take notes as I tell him how to optimize his campaigns and make the affiliate offer profitable.

We leave no stone unturned.

We will provide the first two recording immediately, and subsequent recordings & videos each week for the next 8 weeks via email. This is a REALTIME CASE STUDY that many of you have been asking for!

We plan to eventually sell these interviews for $997, but you get them for free for signing up for PPC Classroom through this blog.

Here’s what you need to do: forward your receipt for PPC Classroom to amit @ superaffiliatemindset.com. Once I confirm that you signed up for PPC Classroom through my affiliate link, I will email you the bonus.

Posted in PPC Marketing, Industry News, affiliate marketing | 42 Comments »

49 Killer Adwords Tips from Googlelady

September 23rd, 2007 by Amit

Just the other day I got an email from Sandra Lopez of Googlelady.com, about a blog post she did about Adwords. Now I get a lot of emails from readers everyday, and I usually don’t have time to respond to everyone. Nevertheless, I thought I check out her article about 49 Adwords Tips.

All I have to say is WOW! If she put this article into PDF format, added some screen shots and examples, it would rival Perry Marshall’s Definite Guide to Adwords.

I’ve never seen so much excellent information on how to master Adwords in ONE post.

You can read the article for yourself, I want to talk about some key points that she mentions:

GOOGLELADY TIP:

“8. Extreme relevance between keywords, ad text and landing page content (This works if you are an affiliate marketer).”

Relevancy is the name of the game when doing Adwords (or any PPC marketing). The more tightly targeted your keywords are to your ads and to your landing page the higher your conversions AND the better your quality score.

You can accomplish this by creating tightly targeted adgroups, with ads that have the main keyword in them, and a landing page about THAT keyword.

So if you’re bidding on: green widgets, blue widgets, and red widgets, here’s how you
should structure each adgroup:

Adgroups I: Green Widgets

Keywords:

[green widgets]

“green widgets”

green widgets”

Ad:

Buy Green Widgets

TheWidgetStore.com/Green

thewidgetstore.com/green_windget.com

Repeat the above for blue and red widgets.

So don’t be lazy, if you want to make big money with PPC, take the time to REALLY setup your campaigns RIGHT.

GOOGLELADY TIP:

“10. Continual experimentation for optimization - even if killer results are already being observed”

This is a really great tip that I personally need to take to heart. Its really easy letting a campaign run on autopilot, especially when it making $1000s a day in profit with 100% ROI!

But even when you have a solid campaign that been running for a while, keep looking for new ways to increase your sales, keep digging up new keywords, keep testing new landing page copy and layouts, try new ppc search engines.

Set at LEAST a few days out of each month to optimize existing campaigns. If you don’t you’re going to see your sales gradually decline over a period of time, I know, I had it happen to me a number of times. And I gotta tell you, it’s a horrible feeling.

GOOGLELADY TIP:

“The browser. The buyer. The person who wants freebies.

The browser is interested in something to do with a particular product, but isn’t sure if they want to buy. The buyer is searching on laser targeted keywords, usually keywords with the brand name in them and the guy who wants freebies is the kind of jerk that looks for anything that is free (or in marketing, buy through his own affiliate link).

Let’s take the example ‘Dog Training Guides’. Many affiliate marketers bid on that term, but I don’t. Why? Because visitors are likely to type that into a search engine, come to a review site with the ClickBank product ‘Sit Stay Fetch’ ranked #1. Afterwards, the visitor types in ‘Sit Stay Fetch’ into Google and ends up purchasing from one of the sites that appears for that term. So basically, the site advertising on the keyword ‘Dog Training Guides’ has practically given a sale to the guy promoting ‘Sit Stay Fetch’ under the term ‘Sit Stay Fetch’.”

This one took me a while to really understand when I was a newbie. Search engine marketing, whether you’re doing PPC or SEO, all ultimately comes down to the psychology of keywords.

That’s why it’s critical tracking your keyword conversion rates, not only will this allow you to optimize your campaigns, but it will teach you what type of keywords convert the best in whatever niche your in.

The more campaigns you do the more you’ll really beginning to understand keyword psychology. One of the reasons Super affiliates can start a new campaign and hit the ball out of the park 7 out of 10 times (or more) is because they have a good understanding of keyword psychology.

GOOGLELADY TIP:

“18. Best Way to Lower CPC? The easiest ways:

With adwords, is simple.You must bid high on the beginning, like for the top or second position.

This way you will get more clicks (although more expensive) but you will rank better on relevancy, and quality score.

After just a few days you will check that the minimum bid needed for a specific keyword had been lowered. For instance, let’s say you advertise on the keyword youtube. You would want to deactivate content network ads this time…

Now let’s say that the youtube keyword minimum bid is 1 dollar. The guy on the top position is biding about $ 1.5

You shall bid 1.55 (leave some cents margin) for let’s say, 3 or 4 days. At the end of day 3-4 you will see that the minimum bid have dropped to 80 cents. You can now lower your bid to 1.45 and still be in the top position due to quality score.

the whole process repeats itself until the minimum bid for that keyword reaches 20 cents. This way, you can bid 35 cents for that keyword, and still be on the top position, while the other guy is biding 1.50 and in the second place.”

This tip may sound hard to believe for a newbie ppc affiliate, however, I can tell you from personal experience that it really works.

Back in my Googlecash days I was making $300 a day profit with Netdetective.com by just bidding on the keyword “net detective” + variations.

You had to pay over $1 a click to get in the top 3 positions. However, if you could hold the top position your cost per click would drop to 0.30! :)

Now the keyword “net detective” didn’t get a lot of impressions, buy hey, my CTR was 30-50%!

The only problem with this strategy is if you get kick off the top position by another advertiser than you’re screwed, your CPC goes way up!!

That’s what eventually happened to my netdetective campaign, so I had to shut it down. It was sweet while it lasted though.

I personally know a number of super affiliates that use this aggressively bidding strategy, and have a lot of success with it. I don’t recommend it, unless you want to constantly monitor your campaigns - because the minute you get kicked out of the top spot your CPC jumps WAY up.

Remember your goal should be to make more and work less!

Posted in Super Affiliate Mindset, Google™ AdWords | 5 Comments »

My Take on Google’s Smack Down on Affiliates

September 20th, 2007 by Amit

There’s been a lot of buzz about Google recently disclosing who’s next on their hit list of ‘evil doers’ (in their minds anyway) that are going to get slapped out of existence with future and frequent (read daily) Google slaps.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, my friend Geordie Carswell sums it up well on his blog.

Now I can understand Google targeting arbitrage/MFA and malware sites, but comparison shopping sites, travel sites, and ‘get rick quick’ info product sites?!?

WTF?

You know it’s amazing, the pinhead PhDs at Google, all knowing & all wise, are kind enough to tell us pion affiliates what constitutes a legitimate business model and how our business should be run, even though they’ve never started an internet business or done affiliate marketing.

They never spend months struggling, losing money, working hard to get their affiliate offers profitable.

They were never force to work with super thin margins that affiliates do to squeeze out a profit from their efforts.

They never bought one of those so called ‘get rich quick’ ebooks, applied the info in them, make enough money to quit their jobs and change their lives. (Thanks to those scummy ‘get rick quick’ ebooks I’m financially free today!)

Really!

Who’s making these decisions at Google as to what a legitimate business model or method of promotion is? Is Google on a quest to protect their benighted visitors from internet marketing sharks (i.e. affiliate marketers and info marketers)??

Who are they kidding?

Perhaps Google should stop cooperating with the Chinese government to crack down on human rights protesters before they start making judgments what we do and promote.

Google, don’t be evil!

Am I ranting?

Nevertheless it’s sad that ill informed people, who don’t understand affiliate marketing, are making decision that are going to put a lot of affiliates, who’ve been busting their butts for years, out of business overnight.

Yes there are plenty of bad ebooks, and comparison and travel sites that don’t add much value. However, there are also plenty of really great ebook out there, I’ve read my share that’s for sure.

Were it not for these info products a lot of us super affiliates would not be where we are today, and may never have even discovered the business.

There’s also lots of great comparison shopping affilaite sites (ever heard of pricegrabbers.com, fatwallet.com) and affiliate niche travel sites as well.

Is Google going to slap all of these sites as well??

Anyhow, this is all the more reason that affiliates really need to whatever they can to follow (however ridiculous) Google landing page quality and site quality guidelines.

Here’s what that means:

  1. Only promote stuff (on Google) that Google considers legit. In other words stay away from comparison shopping (does this include all datafeeds?), info products, MFA sites, incentivised offers, zip submits, etc, etc. Sorry! Their rules not mine.
  2. Follow my suggestions for making your affiliate site Google friendly.
  3. Consider focusing more-much more-attention on Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter. That is if you’re not already doing so. BTW, Yahoo’s new interface ROCKS!

For those of you who have given up trying to fight Google landing page quality smack downs, have heart, my sites have been completed unaffected by all the Google slaps this year.

In fact after one of the slaps my min bids actually went down! :)

It’s not hard creating a Google happy site, just follow these suggestions.

Posted in Google™ AdWords, Industry News, affiliate marketing | 9 Comments »

Three Distinct Super Affiliate PPC Strategies

September 18th, 2007 by Amit

I recently stumbled upon a great article by Mike Peters of SoftwareProjects.com, a full service internet marketing & web development firm:

PPC Management - 3 Approaches to Making a Killing as a Super Affiliate

What a great article!

Mike discusses the strategies that top super affiliate such as : Shoemoney, and Kris Jones, use to make millions with ppc affiliate marketing. Then he goes on to mention me on this list!

I’m flatter to say the least, to be compared to industry veterans like Shoeomoney and Kris.

Mike (as do I) have tremendous respect for all 3 super affiliate strategies that he mentions, however, in conclusion he had this to say:

“In many ways, I like to think of Jeremy’s PPC Management strategy as “Generation 1.0″ (When MSN traffic was a nickel a keyword), Kris’ PPC Management strategy as “Generation 2.0″ (When you wanted to expand into targeting offers that don’t work well with generic keywords) and Amit’s PPC Management strategy as “Generation 3.0″.

With the recent Quality Score, rising PPC costs and market saturation, thin affiliate pages, huge (irrelevant) keyword volume and mashed-up content, no longer works. Well, at least not as a long term strategy.

Sure, you can still make money with Jeremy’s approach and yes there are still several players utilizing Kris’ approach to this day (ever seen the infamous “I got scammed 47 times” ad? Generic ad that leads to a different offer every time).

The major difference between the three approaches is that while the first two can deliver serious net profits in a much shorter time-frame, the third approach of building a complete super-site surrounding one (or a few related) affiliate offers, requires less ongoing management and delivers ongoing increase in profits over time.”

All the strategies that Mike discusses are ultra advanced, if you’re just a newbie, don’t get overwhelmed, just focus on the basics for now.

However, if you want to eventually make BIG money in ppc, take to heart the strategies that Mike discusses in the his article. He mentions PPC API frequently throughout the article, and I’d have to say, using API and developing automated scripts is essentially to really making it big as a super affiliate.

Once you understand how to make a campaign profitable, then you need to understand how to SCALE it. Anyone can launch a campaign that makes $10/day profit.

Here’s the key: take the $10/day profit and scale it, or duplicated 100 times. Depending on who you talk to there are multiple ways of doing that. I will talk more about how I scale up and build up campaigns in future posts.

Who knows, maybe you’ll develop you’re own super affiliate strategy. :)

PS SoftwareProjects was recently honored by Inc Magazine as one of America’s 5,000 fastest growing companies. This company definitely on the up and up, so watch out for them!

Posted in Super Affiliate Mindset, PPC Marketing, affiliate marketing | 6 Comments »

Which PPC Search Engines Should You Advertise On?

September 17th, 2007 by Amit

I know a lot of affiliates are frustrated with Google, with the stringent quality score and all, and have gone on to smaller ppc search engine in search of friendlier and, hopfully, more profitable waters.

However, a word of warning: a lot of smaller ppc search engines don’t produce a lot of traffic and, more often than not, the conversions are horrible.

If you want to make big money in ppc affiliate marketing master : Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter.

I learned my lesson with Ask.com :

  1. Ask does not offer conversion tracking, which is completely insane. Unless you take the time to setup an elaborate third party tracking tool, you have no idea if you’re making sales or not!
  2. Ask has a weird system where you have to sign a contract every time you want to adjust your monthly budget. So if you set your monthly budget to $10k and you hit $10k of ad spend on the 20th of the month they immediately pause all your campaigns. You have to sign and fax a document to them to have your monthly spending increased before they can resume you ads! NUTS!
  3. Ask.com charged me $23k on my credit card, all in ONE month. I have a contract with then for a monthly ad spend of no more than $15k. They had forgot to bill me for the past 3 months of ad spend, so they hit me up all at once!
  4. They claim that they can bring advertisers high converting traffic, but just by tracking the change in my overall ROI, I noticed it went DOWN after I turned Ask on. I was spending $500-600/day at with them one point. I went in and lowered all by bids by over 30%, so now I’m spending between $200-$300, but at least I’m making a profit.

If you ask me (no pun intended!) focus your time on the big three search engines, and nothing else!

There’s a very good reason why smaller search engines are small, because they SUCK (in many ways!)

Posted in PPC Marketing, Industry News | 2 Comments »

Affiliate Bonus: 10 Day Alaskan Cruise, Part II

September 15th, 2007 by Amit

All I can say is that the Alaskan cruise was absolutely amazing! Shilpi and I had a Sky Suite that included a butler, his name was Lawrence!

The food and entertainment was great, and the best part of the cruise were the land excursions. Now I have WAY too many experiences on the cruise & land excursions to share them in this one post, so I’m going to talk about some of the more unique experiences that my wife and I had.

I already blogged about zip lining in a previous post, this time I want to blog about:

DOG SLEDDING

The dog slep camp, which is the biggest dog sled camp in the world that prepares dog for the famous Alaskan Iditarod, was located up on the mountains on a glacier!

The helicoper trip up to the glacier and glacier landing was amazing…

to-sled-camp.JPG

heli-trip-to-camp.jpg

training-camp.jpg

The dogs were not what you might expect, our guide told us that these dogs are not “pretty Hollywood dogs,” rather these dogs are bread for speed and endurance.

dogs1.JPG

The dogs were super excited before our sled ride, they just love to run!

on-sled.JPG shilpi-on-sled.jpg

The dog sled ride was INCREDIBLE! The dog were running at least 15 miles/hr, our trail was about 2 miles of hills and lots of bumps. You really have to hold on, especially when you’re standing like I was.

Afterwards Shilpi and I had an opportunity to play with some of adorable puppies that were only 5 weeks old, check it out…

puppies.jpg

This was just ONE day in our Alaskan vacation, the rest of the trip was almost as amazing!

All I have to say is that I’m so glad I decided to do affiliate marketing, if I was still working at MIT I guarantee you that Shilpi and I would not have been able to afford to go on this vacation.

The final tab for our entire trip come to a whopping $20k!?! And the best part is that the entire vacation was paid for as a reward for being a top affiliate!

Affiliate marketing is the best business in the world. What other business allows you to live the super affiliate lifestyle? ;)

Posted in lifestyle | 11 Comments »

« Previous Entries