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.

I attempted to remedy that by driving targetted search engine traffic to the site via PPC advertising with Findology, only to discover that the Findology traffic was difficult/impossible to convert.

In the end, I fell well short of the earnings mark I set last month when I earned a profit of $718.21.

Gross Earnings
AdSense: $65.53
Affiliate Sales: $230.05
Text-Link-Ads: $85.93
Sedo: $21.45 (My first Sedo earnings payment ever!)
Paid Reviews: $11.45
Total earnings: $414.41

Costs
Findology PPC Advertising: $25.00 (What a waste of money!)
Total costs: $25.00

November Net Earnings: $389.41

October Earnings: $718.21
September Earnings: $335.79

Earnings Analysis
Compared to my October earnings, my November earnings reflect a decrease in earnings of 46% month-over-month. While that decrease is quite sharp, my net earnings are still up by 16% from September 2008 when I began my renewed efforts in Internet marketing. Considering the search engine traffic issues this month, I’m satisfied with this month’s result, although not happy.

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 $389.41 profit, which is 26% of the way there. I have until June 2009 to hit my goal, so that leaves me with 7 more months to make up the remaining 74%.

Plans Going Forward
As the New Year is approaching, I’m in the process of developing a 5-step plan on how to further increase my earnings next year. I’ll be detailing the plan here once it’s complete, but in a nutshell, it has to do with setting goals, creating objectives, and measuring success.

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.

The valuation of clicks received for the time period July 2005 – October 2008 has generated a parking revenue of:

$21.45.

Yes, I earned a huge $21.45 over the course of over 3 years with Sedo, which averages out to about $0.55 per month.

For those that are unfamiliar with DealDotCom, their concept is similar to that of Woot! in that they have a different product on sale each day. But, each product/tool/ebook is focused on blogging, affiliate marketing, generating traffic… topics that webmasters (especially those wanting to make money online) are interested in.

What sets them apart is that they have a 2-level affiliate marketing program, where you can earn 35% of the sales you send their way.

Anyway, in their first day back, they’re advertising the AutoMarker Social Bookmarking Software, which allows you access to a community of users that will propel your blog posts up the social media site ladders through votes. Sounds sorta scheme-ish, but, hey, traffic is traffic.

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.

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!

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.

I’ve been researching Aweber this morning to see if it would be a worthwhile service to sign-up for. It costs $19/month to use their newsletter services, but with estimates of newsletter subscribers “worth” at least $2/year each, a newsletter subscriber list of just a hundred people could already offset the Aweber annual costs. And, with A-List bloggers like Darren and John compiling newsletter subscriber lists in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, it’s clear that you could earn huge profits from a successful newsletter strategy.

The one Aweber feature that has gained a lot of attention in the last couple weeks is the ’Pop Over’ signup form, which has been proven to improve newsletter signup rates by as much as 1000%. The common usage of the Aweber ‘Pop Over’ so far has been to have the pop-up appear on page load over-top of your blog’s regular content, enticing the user to submit their email address. Testimonials suggest that accompanying your newsletter sign-up “call-to-action” with an image (such as the SLR camera photo on Darren’s photography blog ‘Pop Over’) helps to sell the idea to your site visitor.

The Aweber website also suggests you can increase sign-up rates by:

• Changing the pop-up delay. Instead of having the pop-up appear directly after page load, try changing the delay value to 15 seconds, or 30 seconds, or higher. Of course, whether this will be successful will largely depend on the “Average Time on Site” for your user base. Google Analytics does a good job of compiling metrics like this, so I’d suggest taking a peek at that value before playing with the pop-up delay.
• Changing how the pop-up appears. The pop-up can be configured to either immediately appear, or you can add some nice transition effects to make the pop-up fade or slide into the page. These kinds of transitions are obviously a little more intrusive, but depending on where your users are concentrating their attention on the screen, they may be more appropriate for your blog.

Of even greater value is to read over the comments section for this particular post, as newsletter owners have submitted a wealth of feedback about what has worked for them.

I haven’t yet reached a decision about Aweber, but it’s clear from Google research that they are in a class of their own for newsletter management. I just need to determine if I can build a subscriber list in a timeframe that would offset the $19/month service cost.

Are you using Aweber? What has your experience been so far?