Rory Hansen

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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November Recap
Early on in November, I realized that this was going to be a challenging month for my Internet marketing efforts. Natural search engine traffic for my most profitable niche site was way down, which has affected both AdSense earnings as well as affiliate earnings from Clickbank.

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.
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Last month I had a breakout month with Clickbank, with affiliate earnings exceeding $400.

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.

We’re now half-way through November, and it looks like my earnings this month are going to come in way below what I was expecting.

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 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.

Earlier this week, I wrote about my affiliate marketing goal of making enough money online per month to cover my mortgage. Effectively, this is around $1500/month.

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%

We all know the 1st-tier PPC networks are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. You might also classify Amazon in there, too. Of these top-tier pay-per-click advertising networks, I’ve used Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter for various search marketing campaigns in the past. (I’ve never tried Amazon’s service, so cannot comment to how slick it is, or how well the traffic converts.)

There are many reasons why these networks are considered 1st-tier, the number one reason being that their respective search engines have the largest market share. But it’s more than that. Each of the 1st-tier services also have great keyword research tools, have slick interfaces for creating ads, and have really nice reporting systems.

The only real drawback? They can be a little pricey.

But what about the 2nd-tier? Have you used any of them?

Here’s a list I’ve gathered so far:

• SuperPages.com
• GoClick.com
• Search123.com
• ABCSearch
• Findology
• SearchFeed.com
• MIVA
• Enhance Interactive
• 7Search
• FindIt-Quick.com
• BrainFox.com
• Kanoodle

(Oh, and I’m sure I missed a tonne more. :-)

Personally, I’ve used 7Search before and, although the PPC cost was rather cheap (I was bidding on keywords with click-thru costs of between $0.01 and $0.03 each), the number of clicks I also got were few and far between as well. It probably took 8 months to use up the $25 initial deposit I made.

I’m trying with another 2nd-tier PPC network now, Findology. Mostly, I’m doing this because I found a promo code for an extra $50 credit on an initial deposit of $25.

(Actually, it appears that these promo codes are all over the place, because people can create them on the fly and use them as advertising bait. Hmm…. Smart actually. Someone just made a few bucks off me when I signed up using their promo code!)

Questions:

• Has anyone out there in the blogosphere used Findology before?
• What’s your opinion of the service?
• Any tips?

Feel free to leave some comments detailing your experiences. I’d really like to know how the other 2nd-tier networks compare.