2008 June | Super Affiliate Mindset

How Much Money Have You Lost So Far on PPC?

June 30th, 2008 by Amit

You know, the more people I try help with ppc affiliate marketing the more and more I realize that most people’s BIGGEST stumbling block to affiliate success is NOT : creating a landing page that converts, finding a profitable offer, optimizing their campaign for profitability or any other technical aspect of the business.

So what’s the biggest stumbling block that stops most newbie affiliates dead in their tracks?

Let me illustrate…

Let’s say I’m helping Joe with his ppc campaigns, and every time I chat with him or talk to him on the phone he tells me EXACTLY how much he has spend with on Adwords from the day he started :

“Yeah, Amit, I’ve spend $1250.36 on Adwords and I’m STILL not making a profit. What gives?” (Joe won’t mention the fact that he made over $1000 in commissions.)

or

“Amit, I’m getting really frustrated, it’s been 2 months and I’ve lost $400. This affiliate marketing stuff is just not working for me.”

or

“Amit, so what you’re saying is that you want me to LOSE $50-$100 per campaign to learn how to do this business?”

It’s funny, Joe had no problem dishing out over $100k for his college education. He didn’t go up to his professors, and say : “I’ve already lost $35k doing this college thing, and I’m just not seeing any return yet, I don’t think this college thing is for me.”

Most traditional businesses can often be in the red for years before they start making a profits. Can you imagine someone who invested $80k into a fast food franchise getting discouraged after 2 months because they’re not making a profit yet?

WAKE UP PEOPLE!

You’re NOT spending money on PPC, you’re investing into your education. An education that will cost a TINY fraction of what it costs to get a college degree or start a traditional business.

If you think that ppc affiliate marketing is a way to instant riches then please QUIT NOW. Just like any other real business, ppc affiliate marketing will require effort and financial investment (don’t EVER call it losing money).

My students that have had the most success NEVER focus on how much they were spending on Adwords, or how much money they were losing. They understand, just as I did when I started out, that they’re learning and success will come in time as long as they stay consistent.

Remember you attract what you focus on.

If you focus on how much money you’re losing, then that’s what you’ll attract more of, losing money.

Instead if you focus on how much you’re campaigns are improving (overtime as you launch more and more), how much your CTR and sales are going up, how much your ROI is improving, and how much you’re learning from the whole process, then I have no doubt you will be successful…as long as you stay consistent.

investment mindset super affiliate mindset

Posted in Super Affiliate Mindset | 14 Comments »

Check Out the New Microsoft AdCenter Desktop!

June 26th, 2008 by Amit

Just yesterday I was approved for the beta version of the new Microsoft Adcenter Desktop, which allows you to managed your entire Adcenter account offline!

This program is the equivalent of Adwords Editor, a tool that I consider absolutely essential to building and optimizing my campaigns.

Check it out…

This program opens up a whole new world, enabling me to significantly improve the performance of my MSN campaigns. For Adwords I use the Editor to do all my bid optimizations based on conversion data and specific rules I set. The Editor allows me to change bids at the keywords level for 10,000s of keywords instantly.

Now I can do the same with Adcenter.

Well, not just yet, there’s a few limitations in this beta version :

The download stats feature doesn’t work yet, at all.
With Adwords Editor there’s a filter feature that allows you to filter your view based on campaign name, adgroup name, conversions, clicks, etc, etc. Adcenter Desktop does not have that feature yet. Which is a BIG limitation if you’re managing a large account like I am.
There’s no Advanced Bid Change Feature, where you can adjust the bids on a set of keywords or adgroups up or down by a certain percentage.

Microsoft managed to included most of the other features that make Adwords Editor such a powerful tool, including the ability to create and modify multiple adgroups, keywords, and ads at once :

There’s also some very cool totally unique features that MSN Adcenter Desktop has:

Keyword Bid Estimation : You can estimate how much it costs to be in position #1 for your keywords :

Now you can set your initial keyword bids based on these numbers. For MSN it’s actually worth shooting for the top position (for most markets), so you could even make the bet estimate you starting bids.

Keywords Expansion : This is an AWESOME feature that allows you to added additional keywords (long tails and variations) directly into specific adgroups:

Now it’s time for Yahoo to produce a Desktop app like this, it’s LOOONG overdue!

microsoft adcenter desktop msn adcenter msn adcenter desktop tool

Posted in Industry News, PPC Marketing | 7 Comments »

More on My Outsourcing Talk for Black Ink Project…

June 23rd, 2008 by Amit

If you didn’t get a chance to see my talk on outsourcing for the black ink project, you can download it here.

I also want to address several questions that came up regarding outsourcing :

Q : “If you’re a newbie affiliate, should you hire someone to build you an affiliate site?”

A: If you’re a complete newbie to affiliate marketing, I would strongly recommend that you NOT outsource.

Here’s what I can tell you from my experience : when I first got started I didn’t know enough about ppc, landing pages, or just about anything else to justify hiring someone to make an affiliate site for me. You need to know what the heck you’re doing, before you starting outsourcing your web design and site content.

By doing everything yourself in the beginning, just as I did, you will learn a great deal about this business. By building your own landing pages and writing your own content in the beginning you’ll be forced to learn what type of design and copy works best. Once you’ve done this a couple times and have launched at least one successful affiliate site, then I would say you’re ready to outsource.

There’s one caveat to this : if you want to add content to your affiliate site so it won’t get slapped by Google, I would recommend outsourcing that content, but not the content on your landing page - it’s important you write that yourself (in the beginning).

Q : “Do you train your team and provide them tools that will help them out?”

Yes, I’ve spent $1000 purchasing training resources for my team and providing them whatever tools they need so that they can do their jobs better. In my opinion the best investment is investing in your people.

Want a great copywriter but don’t shell out big bucks? Here’s a tip : Buy some copywriting resources and training for your writer. Then have them start writing your landing page copy. In the beginning you may need to guide them a little bid and help them out, but once they understand how to write effective copy for the niches you’re in then that will really allow you to scale your efforts.

Q : “Where can I find a good bookkeeper and accountant?”

I found my bookkeeper through my concierge service. When I first called her she was VERY enthusiastic about Quickbooks, I hired her immediately and she’s done an excellent job ever since. I just send her all my bank, credit card, and paypal statements every months and she takes care of everything!

I also have an AWESOME accountant who saved me about $60k in taxes last year, I found him through a referral.

The only tip I can give you for finding a good bookkeeper and accountant is to go through the numbers. I went through a very medicore accountant and 2 very bad bookkeepers before I found my current team. I just kept looking.

One thing I can tell you is don’t chince on this by trying to do it yourself or hiring someone really cheap. I pay my bookkeeper $35/hr and my accountant $85/hr. The amount of time, money (in taxes), and headaches I’ve saved make it more than worth it.

Once you start making few $1000/month in profits start looking for a good accountant and bookkeeper.

Also, the link to the basecamp, the project management platform I recommended on the webinar is :

basecamphq.com

Once you start hiring outsourcers and start working on multiple projects I HIGHLY recommend you sign up with basecamp. It’s an EXCELLENT service that will improve your productivity and keep things organized.

content writing copy writing outsourcing web design

Posted in Website Content | 17 Comments »

Are Long Tail Keywords the Holy Grail of Search?

June 19th, 2008 by Amit

Before we get started let me define what a long tail keyword is. A long tail keywords is a highly specific keyword containing 4 words or more.

Here’s an example :

buy nike tennis shoes size 10

discount nike running sneakers

red leather high heeled shoes

As you can imagine someone typing in a keywords like : “buy nike tennis shoes size 10″ is READY TO BUY! In other words an effective long tail keywords will have a very high conversion rate.

But here’s the thing, a 4+ word keyword will not get a lot of traffic, maybe 1-2 clicks a month. So the trick is to bid on 30k,50k, even a 100k long tails. You can do the math, the traffic will add up.

These keywords have very little to no competition so you’ll get a very low cost per click. Heck, with a strong list of long tails you can launch a very effective direct linking campaign, and completely clean up.

Sounds pretty simple right?

Well I hate to burst your bubble, but coming up with huge ’smart’ list of long tails (like the examples above) that actually get traffic is NOT easy :

Sure you could crack open KeywordDiscovery and Wordtracker, but you’ll be disappointed with what you get back. They’re typically not the type of quality long tails that will generate massive amounts of traffic and high conversion rates. Plus everyone else in your market has access to these keywords.
The other thing is that the long tail strategy really doesn’t work well in every niche. Niches like retail, travel, insurance, that have massive amounts of search volume, and people are often looking for something very specific, will work well with the long tail strategy.
You could make a huge multiplier of terms related to your niche and generate 100k long tail keywords. However, unless you really understand your niche chances are you’ll get a huge list of junk keywords that don’t get any traffic.
The long tails for different niches, say retail vs travel, will be very different, so that just one more layer of complexity added in!

So is it worth cracking the long tail strategy for ppc affiliate marketing. Are there really affiliates out there making a fortune bidding on 100k+ long tail keywords?

Every heard of Clicks2Customers (C2C)? They’re the biggest super affiliate company in the world, started by renowned PPC expert, Vinny Lingham. Clicks2Customers (which has now become more of a performance-based agency), specializes in the travel and retail markets with a direct to merchant long tail strategy.

When I mean long tail, I mean REALLY long tail. C2C bids on several million long tail keywords per merchant. And you thought managing your 10k keyword campaign was intimidating!?!

C2C brings tens of millions of dollars in affiliate commissions every year.

So I wouldn’t say long tails are the holy grail of search so much as developing a killer system for generating quality high converting long tails, now that’s THE Holy Grail of Search.

This is a research project I’ve started with a fellow super affiliate. We have some very good ideas, but we still need to test them.

clicks2customers direct to merchant long tail keywords vinny lingham

Posted in PPC Marketing, affiliate marketing | 27 Comments »

My Outsourcing Session for the Black Ink Project

June 17th, 2008 by Amit

Okay, this time I want to give you a heads up BEFORE I give my next black ink session.

Tomorrow at 6:00pm EST (3:00pm PST) I’m giving an in depth presentation on the ins and outs of outsourcing for affiliates.

If you want to discover how to effectively outsource your business and build a team around your affiliate efforts, then sign up for black ink now and join Jeremy Palmer and myself tomorrow.

Outsourcing key components of my business has allowed me to skyrocket my income while actually working less. I’ll show you how to do the same, so you too can have all star team that committed to helping take your affiliate business to the next level.

black ink project jeremy palmer outsourcing

Posted in Industry News | 6 Comments »

Is Affiliate Marketing Just a Numbers Game?

June 16th, 2008 by Amit

You’ve probably heard a lot of people talk about this, and I myself have talked about it.

So is ppc affiliate marketing just a numbers game? Is you success determined by how fast you can go through niche after niche, product after product, until you find a winner?

Here’s the problem with that idea : You have affiliates who go through 50 campaigns and are not making a cent of profit and then on the other hand you have affiliates who consistently find winner 20-30% of the time?

Do you see what I’m saying? If you’re just going through niche after niche, not making cent of profit, thinking it’s JUST a numbers game, then you’re in for a very frustrating ride!

Yes, to a large extent you have to go through the numbers to find a good niche but you also have to know what the hell you’re doing.

You could be in the most profitable niche in the world and STILL FAIL. In order to strike it big you have to do more than just find a good niche :

You need to bid on the right keywords for that market. That could be geotargeted keywords, niche speific lists/names, 1000s of highly targeted long tails, or just a really broad keyword list.
You need to know whether the content network, search, or both work well for your niche. Do NOT write off your campaign until you’ve tested BOTH.
Is your landing page setup correctly? That alone could be killing your conversions.
How about your Adwords campaign, is it structured correctly so you get a good quality score right off the bat?

It’s easy to right off a niche as a dud, but if other affiliates are having success in that niche you have to ask yourself : “What are they doing that I’m not doing?” or “What am I doing that they’re not?”

My education in this business began by asking these questions. By seeking out the knowledge, and persistently testing and trying everything I learned, I discovered what I need to know to succeed.

The answer is a little different for every niche.

finding a profitable niche market research pp affiliate marketing ppc strategies

Posted in Market Research, PPC Marketing, Super Affiliate Mindset, affiliate marketing | 7 Comments »

Beware of Adwords Editor 6.0

June 13th, 2008 by Amit

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE fan of Adwords Editor. It’s the lifeblood of my business because it allows me to managed 57 active campaigns and literally 1000s of adgroups.

However, be wary of the newly released Adwords Editor 6.0. It has ONE major bug I’ve been pulling my hair out over for the last 3 days.

Whenever I try downloading my stats for say one specific campaign or set of campaigns at either the adgroup, ad or keyword level, adwords editor start downloading the stats for MY ENTIRE ACCOUNT! Even deleted campaigns!?!

To make matters worst, after 5 minutes it stops and I get an error message. When I start over I again get an error message after about 5 minutes :

WTF?

At first I thought the error message may have something to do with my lousy internet connection I’m getting down here in Coral Gables, but it turns out that my friend Josh has been having the same problem.

I finally remember that I had an older version of Adwords Editor running on the Windows side of my Mac, so I’ve been using that.

I’m hoping Google will fix this bug asap!

Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

adwords editor

Posted in Google™ AdWords, Industry News | 16 Comments »

Weekend at the Ritz Carlton Key Biscayne

June 11th, 2008 by Amit

I gotta tell you, my wife and I love it down here in Miami, we just got burned out moving in (still have some decorating left to do) so we decided to hit the beach this last weekend.

We didn’t just hit the beach, we turned it into a weekend mini vacation at the Ritz Carlton in Key Biscayne!

Although Key Biscayne is only a 30 minute drive from our place in Coral Gables, it’s its own little island, both quiet and secluded. It’s perfect for a weekend getaway.

Shilpi and I have stayed at several 5 star hotels, but this is the first time we stayed at a Ritz, and all I can tell you is that it’s an AMAZING experience. The service, the food, the location (right on the beach) is all amazing.

Here’s what’s really cool…

I got a ton of perks for booking the Ritz with my black card :

PERK #1 : Upon check in our room was immediately upgraded to a Oceanside Suite. The room was HUGE, it had a seperate living room and bedroom, 2 bathrooms, a shower + a bathtub, and 2 balconies.

Our Suite was on the 12th floor so the view was great :

PERK #2 : We got full American breakfast buffet for 2 each morning + plus on time lunch for 2 all completely free.

We actually only ended up paying for dinner at the Cioppino the 2 nights we were there, which wasn’t keep, but it was some of the best food we’d had in a long time!

The Cioppino serves authentic Tuscan cuisine and was name one of the top 20 new restaurants in the US.

Get this : they fly in cheese from Tuscany twice a week. I won’t bludgeon you with what a meal for 2 costs at this restaurant, let’s just say I’m glad that our lunch and breakfast was covered!

PERK #3: $50 cover for incidental expenses. Not a big deal compared to the room upgrade and the food, but it all adds up.

We didn’t do too much while we were there, expect spend some time at the pool, and on the beach. We planned to go snorkeling but it was canceled (water was too choppy), however, we ended up biking through one of the parks on the island, and that was very cool.

Shilpi and I have some more little trips planned this summer, just enjoying our time while we’re in South Florida!

key biscayne ritz carlton super affiliate lifestyle

Posted in lifestyle | 23 Comments »

Understanding Your Metrics…Part II

June 9th, 2008 by Amit

Last time I talked about some key metrics you need to follow in your affiliate campaigns, today I want to talk about something just as important, that is, when to act on your metrics.

Here’s one of the biggest mistakes affiliates make…

Rash decision based on too little data.

What do I mean by rash decisions?

Tell me if any of these scenarios sound familiar :

You get 2 sales on a keyword at a conversion rate of 10%, you get excited and immediately double the bid on that keyword
You get 50 clicks on a keyword with no sales, so you pause the keyword
You seem to be having a really slow sales day so you pause your entire campaign for the day
You have 2 ads with the same amount of traffic, one ad has 2 sales and the other has 4 sales. You conclude the ad with 4 sales converts better so you pause the first ad

Making rash decision based on emotion, rather than statistical significance, will keep you in the affiliate poor house.

I admit, I’ve been guilty of making rash decisions. It’s REALLY easy to make rash decisions when you have a campaign that’s losing money. So don’t beat yourself up about it!

So how do you keep from making rash, emotional decisions when optimizing your campaigns?

Let’s start with some hard and fast rules :

You need at least 10 conversions on a keyword, adgroup, or ad to get a ballpark estimate on it’s conversion rate. You really need about 30 conversion before you get an accurate measure on what your conversion rate is. Even then expect to see weekly and seasonal fluctuations in your conversion rates.
As a rule I don’t pause an adgroup unless it’s had at least 300-500 clicks and no sales, and I won’t pause a keyword unless it has at least 200-300 clicks and no sales.

Here’s how to get your emotions under control & why they may be out of control :

Stats Checking Addiction: Don’t check you stats more than once a day once you’ve established that your campaign consistently converts. Even when you first launch a campaign, try to limit checking stats to 3 times a day. Additively checking stats will lead to making stupid emotionally driven decisions, trust me on this one, I’ve been there done that!

Fear of Losing Money : This ones a biggie and there’s really no easy solution for this. I won’t lie to you, if you have a strong fear of losing money you’re going to have a hard time doing ppc affiliate marketing. My best piece of advice is to set aside a fix amount of money, something you feel comfortable with, to test each campaign you launch. That may be $50, $100 or $300, or whatever you feel comfortable with. And of course, keep your daily budget low until your certain your campaign is winner.

Remember this : If you let fear control you, and control your decision-making process, you’ll NEVER become a super affiliate until you overcome that fear.

ppc campaign optimization ppc marketing

Posted in PPC Marketing, Super Affiliate Mindset | 16 Comments »

Understanding Your Metrics

June 6th, 2008 by Amit

This is a bit of a technical post, however, if you’re serious about making big money as a affiliate you need to understand your metrics.

Let’s start with the basics :

Cost/Conv

Now if you’re using Google Conversion Tracking you’ve seen this column. Here’s what it means : Cost per Conversion, it’s the amount you spend (on average) to generate ONE sale.

If for every $10 you spend on clicks you make 1 sale, then your Cost/Conv is $10.

So if your payout is $20, you need a $10 Cost/Conv to generate a 100% ROI

Speaking of ROI…

ROI = Return on Investment = profit/adspend = (Commission - adspend)/adspend

What should your target ROI be? That depends on your goals. Generally the lower your ROI the more you have to monitor your campaign.

My target ROI is 100%. If you’re doubling your money with your ppc affiliate campaigns, you can basically take a one month vacation (if you’d like) without checking your stats and you’d be okay. That’s how I choose to run my business, even if I make LESS net profit.

Now if you’re operating on 20% or 10% margins, believe it or not some affiliate do, then you’re basically a day trader who has to constantly monitor their campaigns.

Profit and Net Earnings per Click

Profit is without question the most important metric in your business. I want to introduce another metric to you that’s also very useful, I call it NEPC = Net Earnings Per Click

NEPC is how much net profit your making per click, as opposed to EPC, which is affiliate commissions per click.

PPC arbitrage is ALL about getting your NEPC positive and then scaling that by buying as much traffic as you can with a positive NEPC.

Here’s how to calculate Profit and NEPC…

First let’s define some variables :

N = Number of Clicks

P = Average Payout for Your Offer

C_r = Conversion Rate

C = Cost

From these we ascertain :

CPC = C/N

Number of Sales = C_r * N

Sales Volume = P * C_r *N

Net Profit = Sales Volume - Cost = N*P*C_r - C

NEPC is just net profit divided by the number of clicks

NEPC = P*C_r - C/N = P*C_r - CPC

Now notice that : EPC = P*C_r

So we also have that :

NEPC = EPC - CPC

Which makes sense!

These formulas are really useful in a lot of different situations:

If you have two ads with different conversion rates and different CTR you can use the Profit and/or NEPC formulas to determine which ads is producing the most profit.
You can determine which adgroup/keywords in your campaign are producing the most net profit for you, so you know where to focus your energy.

Etc, etc, Etc..

Are YOU monitoring the metrics for your affiliate campaigns?

affiliate metrics cost per conversion earnings per click net earnings per click ppc metrics

Posted in affiliate marketing | 13 Comments »

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