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.

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!

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.