After a bit of research I’ve found out that the most important aspect of the quality score comes from your click through rate (apparently) and mine was abysmal. It was either that or my landing page. I think Google have something against landing pages that have the sole purpose of getting a potential customer to click through to another site like mine does.

So I gave Google the boot with that campaign but left the other one going.

I finally figured out how to work Yahoo after getting a reply from their customer service department. Good response time by the way.

On Yahoo I started my campaign anew. For exactly the same ad with the same words I’m getting 10 times as many clicks AND  linking directly to the merchant. Considering they only have 15% of the search traffic that Google has I’m quite impressed. Conversions haven’t been through the roof though as I’ve currently only managed to snag two sales total.  One from the Google campaign and one from the Yahoo campaign.

I’ve bought, renovated and rented out two houses to the value of 100′s of thousands of dollars but I’ve gotta admit that I’m finding this PPC stuff a lot more stressful and it’s only costing me about $10.00 a day.  I’m also finding that I’m spending a lot of time poring over statistics and analyzing, analyzing, analyzing with no experience to base my analysis on. I don’t really know how long I’m suppose to try a campaign out before trying to tweak it or ditch it.

At the moment I’m just hoping that I reach another three sales in Clickbank before my campaign funds run out. At least then I will get a check from Clickbank and hopefully break even.  Then I can get back to my websites in peace.

My recommendations with PPC at the moment are that you should do a lot of study on it beforehand. Highly recommended is a degree in Marketing or Psychology or both so you can write an effective ad.

From everything I’ve seen so far most of the successful campaigns are riding on the back of thousands of dollars of research.  My poor old marketing budget currently can only stretch to free so I might give it a miss if it doesn’t come good soon.

Maybe I shouldn’t have started over Christmas season but I’ve never been one  to wait for the perfect time.

For the whole one or two of you who come to this blog for reasons other than writing some crappy comment for a back link I wish you a Merry Christmas.

So for the last couple of days I’ve been actively absorbing all this great information. As I’m a bit of an exciteable bloke and I had all this wonderful information making it all out to be so easy I decided it was time to jump right in and start a PPC marketing campaign.  I’ve been wanting to start into this aspect of online marketing for a while now but have balked when confronted with actually exchanging money for clicks.

Google seems to be the place to go to get your feet wet if you haven’t done it before. I’ve started with all the three big boys and Google is by far the easiest to get going. The interface is easy to navigate, it’s a doddle to change the ads and bid prices, it’s just easy all around.  What I don’t like about Google is the quality score. It’s hard to get your head around having a high quality score with good click prices and then waking up to a low quality score with high click prices. What The!! That sucks the big one.

You can diddle around with your keywords, your landing pages and your ads to improve on it but as nobody really knows what the algorithm is and Google aint’ telling you really are just guessing. The little box thingy was telling me that my keywords were unrelated which had me scratching my head because the targeted keyword in the ad is mentioned no less than 5 times.  I found some advice which talked about putting the exact keyword phrase into the meta description tag so I tried it.

I didn’t think this would help things much but it changed back to being relevant. Didn’t change the quality score though. Oh well.  My ads were still not being shown so I had no choice but to up the bid price. Now I’m not only showing but I’m at the top of the page! Again What The!  I’ve read that this is not the place to be and dropped the bid price very slightly. Back to not being shown so raised it back to the minimum. Now I’m near the top again. Doh!

I’m really starting to dislike this PPC stuff. It seems random and is starting to piss me off. The other two, Yahoo and MS Ad Center,  are no easier to get your head around but for a different reason. Their interfaces are terrible. I don’t know if I’m a bit stupid or what but I created my campaigns and then decided I needed to change them slightly. I  had a terrible time trying to figure out where to go to change targeting and all that. In short I hated the whole experience. I still can’t figure out why my ads aren’t showing in either of them and don’t know what else to try. I’m not getting impressions so I know they aren’t showing up anywhere.

I’m going back to niche websites and article marketing. It’s a lot more of a peaceful past time and only costs me my time plus I know what I’m doing.  I’ve had a sale through Google Adwords but as my click prices aren’t going down I’m not hopeful about actually making a profit.  It’s a Clickbank product as well and I’ve only sold the one so I’ve got 4 more to go otherwise my money is just going to sit there and get eaten away with Clickbank charges.

I would have to say that affiliate marketing through PPC is not one of the easiest  stay at home jobs.  At least not for me so far.

Mark Ling has been online marketing for 10 years now and is already making millions from his efforts online. According to him he makes 85% of his income from doing what he teaches and 15% from selling information on how he does it. I have no way of backing this up but I get a good feeling about this guy as he doesn’t come across as spammy or fill you up with lots of hype. He talks in a down to earth fashion with his quirky Kiwi accent. I’m an Aussie and I’ve got a couple of Kiwi friends so I have no trouble understanding him.

Of course, when he gives you free information there is always the little nudge in the direction of the paid services. It’s done in such a way that you get the feeling that he just doesn’t care whether you buy it or not. His free services are phenomenal though and plenty of thought has gone into their design.

I love Traffic Travis. This is quite simply an invaluable tool that every affiliate should have. Simply put, it allows you to find keywords and then discover how tough a market those keywords represent. Within about 5 minutes flat you can discover a market that is ripe for the picking. I still use my trusty Micro Niche Finder because it does some new things in the latest update that are very convenient plus some other things that I use a lot that are not included in Traffic Travis.

Another beautiful thing about Traffic Travis is after you design and publish a website you can have Traffic Travis analyze any page on that site. It gives you a score based on your SEO optimizing efforts and also gives you a detailed analysis of what you need to change. I used it to check out some of my sites and went and made the suggested changes. The websites were already on the front page of Google so I haven’t seen any improvements yet and might not ever but every little bit helps. I’m still in the process of creating back links to those sites anyway.

Traffic Travis is my favorite thing about Affilorama but there is a truck load of free tutorials that will help you get started. The site covers everything from keyword research to the best tools to use for web design as well as lessons in PPC. Something which I have yet to venture into. The tutorials are very easy to follow and usually come with video and text so they suit a variety of learning styles.

Affiliate marketing is one of the best stay at home jobs there is and it really does have no limit to how much you can earn if you learn the right processes. You do need to learn the stuff though and this is one place where you can learn everything you need to get started. Start with the free stuff first and gradually work your way up to the paid services when the money is rolling in. I can not recommend the webinars highly enough. They have an absolute wealth of information that is 100% useful.

I am not yet a paid subscriber and I have only reviewed the free services but if you are interested in learning more go to Affilorama. This link is a sponsored link and will result in commissions if any purchases are made through it.

Here’s a video from the man himself.