Rory Hansen

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Market Leverage is running a brand new contest with Zac Johnson and a few more bloggers, giving away prizes such as a Flip Mino HD, an iPod Nano, an Amazon Kindle and gift certificates. It’s easy to enter; just write a blog post or create a YouTube video.

The idea is to choose one of Market Leverage’s CPA offers and share how you’d market the idea. From the submitted blog posts, a few winners will be chosen: 1 winner by Zac, and the rest by Market Leverage.
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The Vancouver 2010 Olympics are just a few months away, and there will be tonnes of people flooding Vancouver looking for places to stay. The hotels will fill up, and people will be looking for private properties to rent for the 2-week Games. They’ll be scouring rental websites looking for listings that match their needs. But, before these renters start looking, Vancouver home owners will have to get their listing online for these perspective renters to find. And that’s the opportunity.

Your money making opportunity:

Rent2010.net, the #1 Google result for “Vancouver 2010 rentals”, lists Vancouver 2010 Olympic rental properties for Vancouver, Whistler, and the surrounding areas. For $25, homeowners can purchase a full-page listing on the website, complete with pictures and a customized description of the properly. This gives the homeowners access to the thousands of people that will be flocking such rental sites looking for a place to stay.

Rent2010.net offers an affiliate program that pays out $10 for each “sale”, where a sale is when a homeowner purchases a full-page listing on Rent2010.net for $25. This equals a 40% payout, which is pretty decent.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Rent2010.net Affiliate Program, check out the information on their Affiliates page.

How to advertise this opportunity:

Google AdWords may be a good advertising vehicle, so long as you target as local as possible to the Vancouver-area. But, you might have better luck through your own personal network, on Facebook, MSN, or your own email contact list.

Another strong place to advertise this opportunity is on Craigslist, specifically the Vancouver Craigslist site. Of course, you’ll have to be careful about how you script your ads, or you’ll be flagged for spam.

Good luck!

Have you seen PPC Bully? As a relative new guy to PPC advertising, to me it seems like an incredible tool for uncovering profitable niches and the EXACT ads that people are using to profit in those niches. Just input your keywords and wait a few days and PPC Bully will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

The guys behind PPC Bully have come up with this term called Profitability-Indicator. The idea is that if an ad is showing for a long period of time at a high ranking, then one can assume that the ad is profitable (because no one would keep an ad up so long, unless it was profitable).

The PPC Bully team even published their algorithm. From their FAQ:

Ad “Birthday Flowers” was seen 12 days out of 18. The Ad was last seen 2 days ago.

• Number of Days Seen: 12 days
• Percentage Seen: 12/18 = 66.6%
• Number of Days since Last Seen: 2 days
• P-Index = (12 * 66.6%) / 2 = 4

Profitable Ad is an ad whose PI is at least 7.

Similar to Aweber, the only reason I’m hesitant to sign-up for PPC Bully is because of the monthly cost. At $49 US per month, it would be the most I’ve ever paid for a web-based service subscription.

Here’s the Pros vs. Cons thinking that’s currently running through my head.

Cons: It’s $49 US (so, about $60 CDN) and I don’t even know if it works. What if I sign up and don’t like the tool? Or, worse, what if I don’t even have the TIME to use it?

Pros: But it’ll save TIME. I’ll have just to make the time to use the tool. And, as everyone knows, time is money. Using my current salary as a benchmark, it works out to LESS THAN TWO HOURS OF WORK per month to cover the cost of PPC Bully. From the looks of the demo video, PPC Bully would save a lot more time than just 2 hours per month. And with a 60-day money-back guarantee, even if I don’t like the tool, I can get my investment back.

You know, even just going through the exercise of typing out those Pros and Cons makes it clear that at the very least I should try the service. If nothing else, I’ll gain some new insight into some of the cutting-edge tools that other affiliate marketers are using to rake in the dough.

Embedded below is the PPC Bully demo from their website. Take a watch and let me know what you think.

Earnings
AdSense: $166.53
Clickbank: $437.58
Text-Link-Ads: $89.56
Sedo, Amazon Associates: ~$2
Paid Reviews: $22.54
Total earnings: $718.21

Costs
No AdWords costs this month.
Signed up for Findology, but have yet to start any campaigns.
Total costs: $0.00

October Earnings: $718.21

September Earnings: $335.79
This represents a 214% improvement month-over-month.

Mortgage Goal
As you may recall, my goal is to earn enough each month through AdSense and affiliate marketing to cover the cost of my monthly mortgage payment. For the sake of the experiment, we’re saying it’s $1500/month.

This month I earned $718.21 profit, which is 48% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 8 more months to make up the remaining 52%.

Concerns going forward
As I had mentioned in a previous post, my main contributing site has seen it’s traffic dive in recent days. By dive, I mean traffic has reduced by about 75% (natural, search engine traffic). This concerns me because unless things pick up again, November earnings could potentially be 75% lower than October earnings.

On Friday, I earned more than $125 through my small network of sites and couldn’t help but tell everyone around me! I was ecstatic! It was the first time that I’d earned more than $100 in one day.

It’s amazing how small, incremental earnings improvements can do wonders for personal motivation. I’m not making a 6-figure income from affiliate marketing or blogging, but I feel like I’m headed in the right direction. In September, I was averaging about $10 per day, which added up to $330 that month. And, with one week to go in October, I know I’ll be surpassing that by QUITE A BIT, but I’m trying to avoid calculating anything til after the 31st. I’m looking to be surprised!

I’ve had some good days in the past, but none as good as this. Some readers might recall my Firefox experiment for Google Referrals. During my most successful days, I had Google Referrals earnings of over $175/day. But this is a bit deceiving, because I was also PAYING for Google AdWords. In all, I saw profits of about $1000/month during the experiment, which would average to about $30/day.

Perhaps this was just a lucky day for me. And I doubt I’ll even hit the $1000 mark for the month of October. Regardless, I’m so pleased with where I am this month and am even more motivated to hit my Mortgage Goal.

Many of the big names in internet marketing are proponents of setting goals for their affiliate and internet marketing campaigns. And, while I’m also a firm believer in goal-setting, I’ve never actually sat down and thought about my affiliate marketing goals– at least, not in any way which would result in a firm, realistic goal.

But, that’s all changing today. I’ve decided that, after many months of saying I’m going to actually start trying to make money online, that I’m finally going to put forth a somewhat serious effort to do so. And the first step in reaching my goal is to state it in black-and-white, here on this blog, so that I can be held accountable for reaching it.

My goal: By June 30, 2009, my monthly net earnings from all affiliate and search marketing efforts are to exceed the amount of my monthly mortgage payments. (For the sake of security and privacy, my target goal will be simplified to $1500/mo.)

So where am I today with respect to that goal? It’s been a while since I’ve actually tallied up the numbers from the myriad of affiliate and internet marketing programs that I participate in. But here’s a decent estimate:

Current status:

• Time effort per month: ~3 man hours
• Earnings per month: $250 US
• Costs per month: < $10 (web hosting)

So, as you can see, although I only spend about 3 hours per month working on the niche sites I run, I still earn about $250 US per month through a variety of programs. To reach my goal of $1500/month, I’ll obviously have to spend more time developing my sites, but hopefully, I’ll also be spending this time smarter than I have been to this point.

Anyway, I’ve got a number of ideas bouncing around my head that I’ll need to start executing on, so I’ll end this post here. I’ll be posting monthly summaries of my earnings results, so that my visitors can track my progress. I challenge you to set your own affiliate marketing goals, too, on your own blog, and through friendly competition, naybe we’ll meet our goals together.

A little bit of history on the Firefox / Yahoo! Search Marketing challenge

So, as many of you may remember, I ran an experiment way back a year or two ago, seeing how much money I could make through Google’s Firefox browser referral program. I started with essentially a $50 credit with Yahoo! Search Marketing, and then expanded to include other PPC programs, such as Google Adwords. Shortly afterwards, after a quick windfall of a few thousand dollars over the course of a couple months, I shut the program down due to the ever expanding cash flow requirements for shrinking profits.

Well, Yahoo! is back with another promotion, giving you a $100 credit towards clicks, so long as you deposit $30 (and not refunding it!). This coincides nicely with the release of Firefox 3.0, as there’ll be a large focus on downloading the new release of the very popular browser.

So, the challenge resumes…

Anyway, I started up the ads tonight, and spent just over $30 for 195 clicks, coming in at an average cost per click (CPC) of $0.17. Google doesn’t like us talking about exact figures, but I can tell you that I lost about $16 overall in the process tonight, as the cost of clicks fromYahoo! exceeded the conversion revenues I earned from Google.

Basically, how it works is that you do not get credit for a conversion if the visitor had downloaded and installed Firefox in the past on that same computer. So, although I had 195 click throughs to my site from Yahoo! Search, with a majority of those clicking on afterwards to download Firefox from Google, I only got credited with a few conversions.

(Of course, it doesn’t help that Google supplies an older version of the browser for download too, probably causing most users to click away once they realize this fact. But I knew that going into this and took that as a known risk.)

Explanation of results

Because existing Firefox users are essentially worthless in this scheme, I made the appropriate enhancements to my landing pages last year, using JavaScript to detect the user’s browser, and if they’re using Firefox, to redirect them to a custom page. This custom page had no link to download Firefox, but instead, a selection of the finest ads that Google Adsense could serve up. I figured that this might offset the cost of Firefox visitors clicking on my ads a little. But, looking at today’s summary, we’re talking puny returns. In the grand scheme of things, click throughs for “Firefox” related keywords are extremely low.

Next steps

Anyway, I’m waiting for Yahoo! to credit my account with the promised $100 credit. Once they do so, I’ll resume my campaign, but I doubt I’ll continue once the funds run out.

Adsense: $236.07
Firefox Referrals: $793.10

Yahoo! Marketing: $167.39
Google Adwords: $271.80
MSN AdCenter: $5.62
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $68.38

Profit: $515.98

Commentary: During the course of the month, I noticed conversions were steadily decreasing. I began to cut back on some of the traffic which was less targetting (ie, the content network traffic) so my costs are slightly below where they were for December. But you’ll notice that my revenue is off by more than 50%. This all adds up to a profit which is about 1/3 of the profit I had back in December.

Why? Really, I dunno. I suppose the easy answer is to suggest that it’s becoming harder and harder to attract users to my site that haven’t already installed Firefox or the Google Toolbar at least once in their past. Either that, or I’m not properly advertising to the right audience.

In any case, if profits decrease again next month, I’ll have to seriously think about whether it’s worth it to keep the Firefox/Google Toolbar site running.

Adsense: $98.05

Yahoo! Marketing: $291.44
Google Adwords: $369.26
MSN AdCenter: $6.24
Ask! Sponsored Listings: $7.40

Referrals: $955.60

Profit: $379.31

So, earlier this week I was looking for information on taxes for small businesses in Canada, specifically Internet-based businesses. I googled and eventually stubled upon the Small Business: Canada section on About.com, which is a great resource!

I ended up bookmarking two links:

• Calculating The Home Business Tax Deduction
• 7 Ways to Make Record Management Easy

I bookmarked the 7 Ways to Make Record Management Easy page because my current method is just not working. Maybe that’s because my current method actually means no method, but that aside, the tips that have been recommended do make sense and aren’t too hard to implement. The page mentions that credit card statements aren’t suitable records for prooving expenses and earnings, which is unfortunate since most of the costs for my Internet-based business are in the form of regular monthly charges to my credit card, such as hosting fees and PPC advertising fees. I guess what this means is that I’ll have to make it a point of actually printing out the invoices from these companies on a fairly regular basis now and then storing those away until tax time.

I also learned that as a sole proprietorship, I can simply fill out one additional form when doing my personal income taxes. That additional form is the T2124 Statement of Business Activities form. And while it looks fairly complicated to fill out, there’s a guide available on the Canada Revenue Agency website called the Business and Professional Income Guide which has step-by-step instructions on how to fill out the T2124 form.