The Big Mistake

Well, I finally created long-tail keywords that had pretty good clickthrough rates and pretty good costs-per-click.

However, I spent a lot of money getting all of this figure out, and my return-on-investment is negative (bad!).

The reason why this is such a huge mistake (or learning experience) is that I had failed to absorb an important fact.

The fact is "your money is in your list".

That is, the "list" is a list of people who have bought a product from me.

Now, I thought I was trying to push as many ads as possible, get sales and make a bunch of money right away.

This thinking is not entirely correct.

My goal is to build my list; if my sales are covering the costs of pay-per-click advertising, then my list is getting build for free.

I cannot give a citation right now, but a well-established internet marketer stated that, on average, each person on the list brings $2-$3 per month in revenue.

So, to make $15K a month, I need 5000-7500 people on my list.

6000/12 = 500 new people a month I need to add to have 6000 in a year.

I certainly can wait a year to have an extra $12-15k a month of revenue.

At my current cost-per-click, I need to sell $500 a month of stuff and push the money back into PPC for building new customers.

In my next discussion, I will talk about my progress on creating my own information product. Enjoy!

Serious Feedburner Mistake

Unless you know what you are doing, do not turn on the LinkSplicer on Feedburner.

It ended up putting my Nerdcore posts(via Digg) in my computer security blog, and I lost 80% of my subscribers in one day.

*Pitfall* Adwords Minefield

Google Adwords is a minefield for a starting affiliate.

First of all, the tutorials that Google provides probably leave out as much information as the $37 eBook that I bought.

Yes, you can get started, but you are heading for a fall.

After my first sale, the high-and-mighty MCP (master control program) from Google decided that my ads did not provide relevant content.

Of course, one of 19 clickthroughs did think it was relevant enough to pull out some cold, hard cash and buy.

So, my solution is to create a squeeze page between the Adwords link and the affiliate site.

I do not know how or when the content bubble is going to burst, but it seems one day, there will not be enough people on planet Earth to create the "unique" content Google is seeking.

When that point comes, you will either have a pile of unique information assets, or be left out in the cold.

One final note, just because everything goes fine on Google the first few days, eventually your ad will be disabled unless you really have it tuned.

I cannot give anyone sage advice on avoiding this pitfall other than watch out for it and do your best to avoid it.

Affiliate Ethical Code

A lot of the ethical code referred to in this link is not directly applicable to the activities documented on this blog.

However, the document can provide some guidance on ethical behavior.

Google Adwords Guidelines

Here is a little tip.

Please read these guidelines.

In addition to providing boundaries, these guidelines also give hints as to the architecture of your campaigns.

Enjoy!

First Sale!

I made my first sale yesterday.

I had spent $2.38 on Adwords marketing, and the gross sales was $16.02.

My net profit on that transaction was $13.64.

My conversion rate was 1/19 (It took 19 clicks before a purchase).

Obviously, if I could have 10 of these everyday, it would be awesome.

10% to 14% Clickthrough Rate

I have an affiliate product that I am promoting via Adwords, and it is getting an incredible 10 to 14% CTR.

The key is good ad copy, which I tweaked following a couple of free tips from other Internet Markaters e-mail newsletters.

Right now, I just started hosting for one of my domains.

On the hosted site, I am going to deploy some squeeze pages, landing pages and sales pages.

I do not yet have a clear mental model of what these pages do, but I do know that I want a squeeze page for this product.

A squeeze (AFAIK) page is a page that asks for a little bit of information (the person's name and e-mail address), provides a little pre-sales information, and then send the prospect to the sales page.

A squeeze page builds an e-mail list, but it also gives the chance to market the product using several follow up e-mails.

The next steps of my action plan include:
1. Signing up for aweber.com
2. Finding PLR (private label reports) and free reports to send in my newsletters; things that are related to the product being pitched.)
3. learn how to write squeeze and sales copy
4. learn how to test