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.

How to Enter This Contest

1. If you aren’t already an affiliate with Market Leverage, sign up for an account.
2. Browse the various campaigns on the Market Leverage website and choose one that you’d like to “promote”.
3. Write a blog post or create a YouTube video, detailing your promotion ideas for the chosen campaign. (Quality and Originality will be two factors that determine the contest winners, so make your posts stand out!)
4. Head over to Zac’s blog and leave a comment on the contest post with a URL to your entry.
5. (Optional) Follow through and actually make some money executing your campaign promotion strategy!

On January 5th, the winners will be chosen. Who knows, maybe it’ll be you!

Below is my entry to the contest. It’s a little tongue-in-cheek, but who knows, it could actually work!

My “Share Your Secret” Contest Entry

The campaign that I would promote is the “Are You Psychic – Mobile Fun Test” campaign, which pays out a decent $8 per lead.

I’d choose this product because of the growing media buzz around fringe sciences, the paranormal, and conspiracies. Just look at some of the new TV shows to hit the airwaves recently: Fringe, The Mentalist, Monk, Psych, and probably a bunch more I’m not aware of.

I’d target the audiences of these TV shows, because I figure that people that enjoy these shows are also open to the idea of ESP, and possibly have dreamed about having ESP or being a psychic.

Two methods:

1) Advertise on Social Media sites like Facebook. Zero in on the favourite TV shows that users list on their profiles, and target users who list the ones I mentioned earlier. Create ads targeting those TV shows and asking the question, “Are you Psychic?” Or, ”Are you a Mentalist?” etc.

2) Advertise on Search Engines using AdWords. This time, target keywords like “fringe tv show”, “fringe tv series”, “the mentalist tv show”, “psych tv series”.

Direct users to your landing pages, with each TV show getting it’s own, customized landing page. Sell the campaign. Rake in the dough.

If you haven’t heard yet, you can use coupon code 99DOMAIN over at GoDaddy.com to purchase .com/.net/.org domain names for 99 cents!

This is a smoking deal for anyone looking to start the New Year fresh with a new blog/website. Even if all you do is buy a domain for $0.99 and flip it for a few dollars on SitePoint or DigitalPoint, that few dollars is nearly pure profit!

To make the deal even more smoking, as always, if you purchase 5 or more domains from GoDaddy, they’ll throw in free Privacy Registration (a $11 savings on each domain!).

Keep in mind, this is just for 1-year domain name registrations. I’ve got a handful I’ll be registering tonight. Lemme know which domains you end up picking up!

Introduction to Affiliate Link Cloaking

To improve the effectiveness of affiliate links, Internet marketers often “cloak” their links. For example, on my blog, I’ve cloaked my affiliate link to Market Leverage.

Cloaking changes the URL from

http://trendsbiz.com/a.php?a=CD11894&b=25367&d=470782&l=0&o=&p=0&c=4110&s1=&s2=&s3=&s4=&s5=

to

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php

Benefits of Cloaking your Affiliate Links

This has a number of benefits, including but not limited to:

• Prevention of affiliate link hijacking
• Increased professionalism through attractive affiliate link presentation
• Increased click-thru rate
• Improved search engine optimization, because Google doesn’t like affiliate links

How to Cloak your Affiliate Links

There are a number of high-quality products out there to help manage affiliate links, probably the most notable being the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in for WordPress.  These products can cost nearly $100 to purchase, and while that might be pennies in the jar for many Internet marketers, for those just starting out on the making money online scene, $100 can be a rather large investment. For that reason, this blog post isn’t about those expensive products.

The purpose of this blog post is to show you how you can cloak your affiliate URLs yourself, for free, and in just a few seconds.

To do this, we’ll be using PHP, and in a nut shell, creating a PHP file on your web site that will redirect the user to your affiliate link.

Note: This is a very simplistic example, that does not contain any click logging and should probably not be used to manage more than 10 – 15 affiliate links. If you require a heavy-duty solution, you should consider the Ninja Affiliate Plug-in, or some similar product.

Note 2: To make an even more attractive affiliate link structure, it’s possible to use more advanced techniques, like creating a .htaccess file and specifying your URL format. But, that topic is out of scope for this post, too.

Anyway, let’s get started.

Step 1: Determine how you want your links to look

If you scroll up, you’ll notice that in the example, I decided that I wanted my affiliate links to take the form:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/productname.php

I’ve used the word “recommends” in the link to further “sell” the link. Many other famous IM’s use this same naming convention. Others have used similar naming conventions, such as:

http://www.roryhansen.ca/go/productname.php

http://www.roryhansen.ca/goto/productname.php

It’s really a personal choice, but you’ll need to decide that now before you proceed.

Step 2: Create a new subdirectory on your website

Using your favourite FTP program, connect to your website’s FTP server. In your base web site directory, you’ll need to create a new directory to store all of your cloaked affiliate link files.

In my example, the new directory I created was called “recommends”. This is what enables the cloaked affiliate link format I decided upon.

Step 3: Create your cloaked affiliate link file

In a text editor like Notepad, cut-and-paste the following code:

<?php
header(’Location: YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE’);
?>

Replace YOUR_AFFILIATE_LINK_URL_HERE with the actual affiliate link for your product.

Save the file using a friendly filename, to represent the product you’re advertising. In reference to my earlier example, I saved my file as marketleverage.php.

Step 4: Upload your cloaked affiliate link file

Again using your FTP program, upload your new cloaked affiliate link file into the new folder you just created.

And you’re done!

So, how does this work?

In your blog posts, you’re now going to link to the new cloaked affiliate link file you just created. For example, you might write:

Click here to sign-up for <a href=”http://www.roryhansen.ca/recommends/marketleverage.php”>Market Leverage</a>.

The code in the file tells the browser to redirect the user to the URL you included into the file.

User clicks on link –> Browser goes to marketleverage.php –> Code tells browser to redirect user to the real affiliate link.

And there you have it, your first cloaked affiliate link.

Happy affiliate marketing!

This month, I’ll be lucky to break $100 with Clickbank with the same site and same niche and same product, largely because traffic is wa-ay down. The keywords which were driving much of my traffic from Google are no longer ranking my site well.

So, since natural search traffic is killing me, I’ve been experimenting with PPC traffic. (You’ll remember that I wrote an earlier post about signing up for Findology, one of the many 2nd-tier PPC networks out there. I signed up after finding a $50 coupon code with an initial deposit of at least $25.)

Well, so far, my opinion of Findology is this:

The Good:

• I have only good things to say about their staff. Carey, my account manager, has been polite and helpful from the get-go. But, since our initial email conversations, I’ve yet to use her services again.
• PPC costs are LOW. We’re talking $0.03/click.

The Bad:

• I’m having trouble converting the traffic.

In the last week, my ads have generated 630 click-thrus. Result: No conversions. And, actually, I don’t even think I got any AdSense clicks. I got nothing. In comparison, with natural search traffic for the same site and same product, my conversion rate was 0.7%.

Also, Google Analytics is showing a very high bounce rate. And my gut feeling just tells me that the traffic was not engaged.

Granted, I’m still new to PPC and so, my ads are weak, my landing pages are weak and/or canned, and my sales pitch is untrained. Maybe it’s just a lack of skill on my part.

So, I queried Google to find others that WERE having success converting Findology traffic. What I found was the exact opposite. Link 1. Link 2. Seems that others have come to the same conclusion as me. Findology traffic has low conversion rates.

So, What Now?

I’ve now eaten through my initial $25 deposit with them, and still have $50 remaining. It’s essentially free money.

Not sure how to use it though. I figure I’ll still run the campaigns, and continue to tweak them to see if I can generate a sale. I just need 1 or 2 to recoup my initial $25 deposit.

After that, I don’t think I’ll deposit anymore money with Findology.

At the beginning of the month, I had blogged about how the niche site which is responsible for 75% of my earnings has had it’s SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Positions) completely disappear for about a week. They did come back, but all of a sudden, have disappeared again. Google, you’re breaking my heart!

It’s been quite disheartening, but to keep myself distracted, I’ve been working to update content, implement nofollow’s on my blogs, and research PPC more. I’d really like to start an effective PPC campaign using the Facebook ad platform, but just haven’t had the time to do the appropriate research.

It’s times like this that PPC Bully would come in handy, as it would be doing the research for me! (LOL). But, before I start using an automated tool to create successful ads, I’d like to do it by hand, to really digest how to do it successfully. To me, that’s what attracts me to this whole Make Money Online concept– understanding how all of these various tools and methods work and seeing if I can take my learnings and execute a successful campaign.

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.

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.

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.

I figured that I was bringing in around $300 per month already, as it’s been pretty steady for the last year. Up until September 2008, I’d been coasting, doing less than an hour per month of work to support that $300/month income stream, as I had no motivation to invest anything more.

As a baseline measurement to understand where I am with respect to meeting my goal, I need to know my September 2008 results. Well, I just took a couple minutes to tabulate them, and here they are:

Mortgage Goal: $1500 / month

September Results:
AdSense For Content: $254.25
Text-Link-Ads: $81.54
Total: $335.79

(No earnings from Amazon Affiliates, and neglible earnings from Chitika and other programs during September.)

Mortgage Goal Remaining: $1164.21 / month
Percent of Mortgage Goal Met: 22%

For years now, I’ve used AWStats to help understand my site traffic; how many people are visiting, what pages are getting visited, and what search terms they’re using to find my site. If you’ve never used AWStats before, it’s a pretty typical web log analysis tool that parses your server logs every night, and produces a series of reports that detail the various things I mentioned above.

But therein lies it’s two downfalls:

1. AWStats generates its statistics by looking at your server logs. Because it parses server logs, it cannot provide metrics on anything that isn’t stored in the logs. This includes tracking links that your visitors clicked on, tracking user browser resolutions and bandwidth, and an assortment of other client-side facts.
2. AWStats refreshes it’s stats every night. When tweaking ad campaigns and landing pages, writing blog posts, and adding new links to my sites, I want to be able to know exactly what’s going on in real-time. And, waiting til the next day just isn’t good enough; it simply causes me to make too many guesses and assumptions.

(Okay, I know you can change how often AWStats runs, but my web host has it scheduled to run once a day, at night.)

3-day trial with MyBlogLog

I recently signed up for MyBlogLog a few days ago and one of the services that I started to make use of immediately was it’s Statistics service. Pop in a little bit of javascript on your website and it’ll start tracking in real-time site visitors, what pages they viewed, how often pages were viewed, and what links your visitors clicked on (including Google AdSense links!). Although they only provide a 3-day trial on the service, I found myself practically refreshing the stats page every few hours to see what was new. I found that I really enjoyed having all this knowledge at my finger tips.

Now, on to Google Analytics

Well, that 3-day trial is ending today, and I can’t imagine just going back to AWStats, so I’m giving Google Analytics a shot. I’d known of it’s existance for a long time, even when it was still called Urchin, but had never bothered looking into it. So far, I’m pleased with what I see, especially with a feature called Site Overlay. It’s truly amazing. When you click on the Site Overlay link in Google Analytics, it opens up a new browser window and points the browser to your website. Then, on a translucent overlay of your website, it shows you exactly what links are being clicked and how often. It might even provide more info, but I’m still investigating all of the options and functions that this tool has.

Open questions:

• What analysis tool are you using on your website?
• What does it do well, and what does it do poorly?