April Business Report

It 2 weeks into the month of May and its time to publish the April earnings report.  April was a learning month for me.  One of those months where you sit down and decide what what direction you would like to steer the ship, while at the same time trying to focus on the long term goals for the business.  I took some time this month to have lunch with a friend, Bolaji O from the blog WhoisBolaji.com,  who has his own internet business to brainstorm a bunch of ideas and to come up with a plan of attack to reach our various goals.  I have to tell you, if you’ve not sat down with anyone who can be honest about your business ideas and be a good sounding board, then you are definitely missing out.

By the end of the meeting we’d both come off with a listing of short term goals that we would like to have achieved by the end of the month.  Our goal was to set smart objectives and basically check in with each other on a regular basis (turned out it was about every 4 to 6 days, given our skype convo logs) to ensure that we were on track to meet or exceed our goals.  Kinda like a business accountability partner.

Since I’m still in the initial bootstrapping phases of my business, I felt that I really needed to lay a stronger foundation and start looking to acquire more business assets: (campaigns, developers, and apps).

So I came up with the following goals:

1.) Hire a new developer with skills to make more advanced gaming apps
2.) Utilize the Jumptap Ad Network to find a breakeven or slightly profitable campaign
3.) Achieve a $300.00 a day cash flow profit
4.) Initiate a new “advanced game” development project.
5.) Have a total of 5 new apps published by end of month (April).
6.) Republish my popular apps back into the Android Marketplace under new names.

As you can see these were very lofty goals for the month.  Plus given the fact that I planned on being on vacation for 8 days toward the end of the month, this was going to make my goals a little bit more difficult to achieve.

My Results:

So how did everything pan out for the month?  Did I achieve half of the things I talked about doing?

Goal 1:  Hire Developer

Well as it relates to hiring another developer, I went through the process again to look for someone who could do what I start creating more advanced looking gaming apps.  I’ve still not found anyone to my liking, although I did create multiple project listings on Odesk.com, Guru.com, Freelancer.com, and Vworker.com.  I’m still evaluating candidates and will report back soon on when I find someone.

Goal 2:  Running on Jumptap

As some my know, Jumptap.com is a premium mobile display network.  They service billions of impressions to various mobile apps.  Great place to get an offer promoted.  However, for me, this was a total failure.  I burned through $7,000.00 of an advertising credit (not my own money) and only made about $64.00 in return.  I’m SOOOOOO glad this was not my personal money.  It was an expensive learning experience, that I don’t plan on repeating anytime soon.  For now, I’m going back to the drawing board when it comes to advertising.

Goal 3:  Achieve 300.00 a day profit

Check the earnings reports below

Goal 4:  Initiate Advanced Gaming Project

Since I was unable to find the developers I needed for this new project, I was unable to complete this goal.

Goal 5:  5 New Apps Published by end of April.

I was only able to deploy 3 new apps in the month of April.  They are growing organically right now.  Looking to deploy at least 5 apps in the month of May.

Goal 6:  Republish popular apps

Completed

April Financials

As you can see I was busy this past month, however, there is still much to do.   So lets get to the financials.

April 2012 Revenue

In the month of April, I promoted for 4 different networks:  (LeadBolt, MobAff, Neverblue, and OfferMobi).  Total Income for those networks was $5,547.46, this equals an increase of $1950.24 over March’s revenue.

April 2012 Expenses

Expenses for April totaled $1,840.53.   My expenses increased a total $266.61 over the month of March.  This was due mainly to year server hosting expenses popping up.  I don’t expect these expenses to carry forward next month.

April 2012 Profit

Total Profit for April ended up being $3706.93.  This was an increase of $1,683.63 over March.  Looks like we are moving in the right direction.  Looking for May to be even bigger month.

Plans going forward will center making new apps and deploying new mobile CPA offers.  In this business you can never get complacent.  You must always look forward and keep building assets.

Until next time, keep pressing forward.

Slinging Ringtones - Part Two

Awh, it’s good to be back from vacation.  Well, sorta.  For all who didn’t know, I’ve was on vacation in St. Lucia for the past 7 days.  While there, my wife and I both recharged, reconnected and refocused.  For anyone who does not make vacation’s a priority in their lives, I’m here to tell you that YOU SHOULD.  Sometimes we get so caught up in the day to day happenings of life that we sometimes forget why we are running so hard in the first place.  This vacation has definitely reminded me that although work is important, its even more important to slow down reconnect with the person that helps make everything possible, my wife.

Okay, I know you typically don’t read my blog posts to hear things like this but I had to throw this in as a reminder that we are all human and not some automatons slaving away at the computer everyday.  You need to take breaks to refresh your mind and refocus every so often.  This being said, let me move on to the topic of today’s blog post.

As you know I’m focused on all things mobile this year.  Most of efforts have been in the mobile app creation and advertising process.  Things are going great in this area and I’ll be posting about my progress on this effort in my next blog post.  However, I failed to remember, until recently, that people still like to customize their phones with various ringtones.  If can recall, in an earlier blog post, I was promoting various ringtone offers through the owner of the domain “ringtones.com”.   The problem with my promotions through this domain was that the owner was charging me $0.42 a click to use his domain.   This presented a problem as my analysis showed that I could not profit at that cost level.

Just recently I started to look for other cheaper, albeit, less targeted traffic sources to revive my ringtone campaign – Thumbplay.com   After some searching, an online friend of mine showed me a source of traffic where I could pay between $0.10 to $0.19 a click for mobile traffic that would be somewhat targeted to the demographics of people looking for ringtones on their phones.  I’m currently testing this source (can’t reveal it yet for obvious reasons) and I’m finding that the return on investment (ROI) is holding steady between 50% to 100% daily.

More to report on this in the future.

Cell Carrier Redirection Script

One thing I would like to say about promoting ringtone offers and other mobile offers is that many time the advertisers our there only would like a certain type of carrier.  Some offers prefer traffic from AT&T, while others only want traffic from Sprint.  Some traffic sources are not advanced enough in their implementation to allow you to purchase traffic only from a specific carrier.  So you as the affiliate will have to manage and sparse out specific carrier traffic yourself.   I’ve been able to do this using a php script called a carrier redirect script.  I’ve pasted the contents of the script below.   The basic premise of the script is that it parses the carrier host address from the request and redirects the request based on a series of matching rules embedded throughout the script.   If you can read PHP code, then you should be able to understand the script below.

<?php
$url_att = ‘http://www.affiliateoffer.com/ATT-TRAFFIC’;
$url_tmo = ‘http://www.affiliateoffer.com/TMOBILE-TRAFFIC’;
$url_vzw = ‘http://www.affiliateoffer.com/VERIZON-TRAFFIC’;
$url_spr = ‘http://www.affiliateoffer.com/SPRINT-TRAFFIC’
$url_all = ‘http://www.affiliateoffer.com/ALLTEL-TRAFFIC’;

$hostname = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

if (preg_match(“/(mycingular)/”, “$hostname”)) {
header( ‘location: ‘ . $url_att);

}elseif (preg_match(“/(tmodns)/”, “$hostname”)) {
header( ‘location: ‘ . $url_tmo);

}elseif (preg_match(“/(myvzw)/”, “$hostname”)) {
header( ‘location: ‘ . $url_vzw);

}elseif (preg_match(“/(spcsdns)/”, “$hostname”)) {
header( ‘location: ‘ . $url_spr);

}elseif (preg_match(“/(alltel)/”, “$hostname”)) {
header( ‘location: ‘ . $url_all);

}else{
header( ‘location: ‘ . $url_tmo);
}
?>

Just replace the value of the variables

$url_att
$url_tmo
$url_vzw
$url_spr
$url_all

with the affiliate link that requires a specific carrier and you’ll be all set.

Thanks for tuning in and reading my blog post for this week.  I hope this helps you guys out alot going forward when dealing with carrier specific offers.

Until next time.

Well recently I found another way to monetize my apps without using up valuable real estate from within the app.  What I’ve found is something called “Push Notifications”.  So what are they?  Have you ever noticed that sometimes after you’ve installed an app, you start getting messages within the notification toolbar. These are push notification. Push notifications messages are the same type message you receive once you get a new voice-mail or text message to your phone.  These messages allow advertisers to  send advertising messages directly to a person’s phone.

The open rate / click through rate (CTR) for these messages is awesome!  These messages are shown to a user irregardless of them actively using an app or not.  Since most people typically look at their phone when they get a new text or voice-mail message, push notifications illicit the same type of response.

The service that I’m currently using to integrate push notification into my apps is called LeadBolt.  How this works is they supply you with a SDK and an integration document.  Without going into the boring programming lingo, the SDK allows your application to communicate with LeadBolt servers serve ads directly to your app’s user.  Pretty cool huh?

Below is a an example of how a push notification looks on you phone.

Push Notification On My Phone

Leadbolt is just 1 more way I’ve been trying to monetize my applications.  I’ll continue to look for other routes to increase my revenues.  I’ll continue to keep you guys posted on what I find and experiment with.

Stay Tuned.

March was a month where I also made some minor tweaks to the way I’ve been operating the app business.  For now I’ve suspended my In-App advertising partnership efforts.  This was done for 2 reasons.

1.) My application CPA offers were coming and going so quickly from various CPA networks that it made it very difficult to promote them as part of an In-App advertising deal.

2.) Application developers were not as responsive to my In-App advertising requests.  It would sometimes take weeks for them to respond to an offer.  When they did respond, it was either too late to advertise the CPA offer I was promoting or they did not want to carry the deal forward.

All and all that part of the business was just too unstable to continue to put more effort.  I’ll reevaluate my approach in the near future, but for now I’m sticking with app development.

Getting back to the apps I’ve been uploading, I wanted to illustrate the growth of my 3 most popular apps right now.  Below is a listing that shows my app installs over the past month. Actually these apps were all uploaded March 5th, 2012.  It’s amazing to me how fast they got traction this month.  I’d never expected them to do so well given this was my 1st effort to try something like this.

My Most Popular App

2nd Most Popular App

3rd Most Popular App

So how well did I do this month?  Remember in the month February I experienced a loss of $1,749.82.  This again was the 1st month of my business and I was really trying to figure things out.  In the month of March, however, things turned around a lot!

Revenues were way up.  $3597.22 for March across the 3 CPA networks I’m using:  MobAff, Date-Connected, and Neverblue.

March Revenue

Overall expenses increased by $369.00 over their February numbers.  However, I was able to reduce the amount I spend on the HasOffers platform from 279.00 a month to 99.00 a month. The major increase in expenses for this month was attributed to the Imgrind Conference I signed up for. Although I won’t be able to go their physically, I plan on getting the video recordings of the conference.

March Expenses

Overall profit for them month of March comes out to be $2023.30.  Way better in the loses I experienced in February.

March Profit

Challenges for March:

Outsourced Help – I’ve found out this month that although outsourcing your app development work can be a really cheap and efficient way to bootstrapping an app business, its not without its challenges.  This month my primary developer experienced an earthquake in his country which caused him to lose both power and internet service for 1 week.  For a second I thought that he’d just abandoned the project.  However, after getting my personal assistant to contact him (they are in the same country), I was able to get full details as of what happened.

Computer Crashes – March must have been the month for computer crashes.  Not only did my personal work computer crash causing me many headaches at my full time job, but also the computer of my application developer (same guy that experienced the earthquake) crashed causing us a major setback.  This happened at the time he was completing 2 apps for me.  He was just putting the finishing touches on a couple of gag apps I’d had him make for the week and then BAM, his computer crashed.  Not only did he lose the 2 apps he’d been working all week on, but also all the app code from the 3 previous apps he’d developed for me.  The good news in this situation was I had a copy of the source code of the 3 previous apps on my home network storage device.

Focus – There are so many apps ideas and concepts I’ve been wanting to go after.  Should I make a puzzle game, a quiz game, a jumping/jetpack game, turn based game, etc?  You get the idea. I’ve not had any problems coming up with ideas for games, however, that’s also my problem….I’ve come up with TOO many ideas for games. This causes havoc on my focusing abilities because I would love to try to develop every idea that I come up with.  But what’s starting to happen is that I try to implement so many ideas that NONE of them get completed.  However, the good news is this problem is something that I’ve learned to remedy this past month.

So as you can see, March as definably been about growth for me in more ways than 1.  Looking forward to April and I’m excited to implement some of my new app development strategies with the hopes of achieving even higher profit margins.  Stay tuned!!

Let's Go To Work

In a previous blog post, I stated that 2012 would be all about mobile.  Mobile Apps that is.  Over the past 6 weeks, in my spare time (what little I have between work and family), I’ve managed to bootstrap a mobile advertising and app development business.  The whole shabang!  (New website, 1 full time executive assistant, and 1 full time app developer).  The direction I would like this business to take would be that of extending what I’ve been doing in the online cost-per-action space and implement this concept in the mobile space. To accomplish this, I plan on attacking the mobile space on 2 fronts.

1. Partner with app developers that have a large install base for their apps out in the Android Marketplace and purchase advertising space directly from the developer.  This cuts out the middle man and should allow me to achieve a higher profit margin on offers I’m currently advertising.
2. Develop my own applications and publish them out to the Android Marketplace.  This way I’ll have control of my own app on which I’m able to place advertising and offers whenever I see fit.

My business model is constantly developing and improving upon itself and I’m definitely learning a lot on the fly as I run into various successes and failures.  However, there’s no success without a little sweat right. So let’s talk in detail about what I’ve been doing since the last blog update.

Bootstrapping the Business:

From the posts going forward, I’ll try to use real numbers again as to show you what it realistically took to bootstrap this business from the start.  Starting at the beginning for February, I opened up the business account with $10,203.30.  These funds would be used for hiring employee’s, maintaining hosting accounts, and other misc things involved in the business.  The chart below shows my monthly recurring expenses.

Recurring Monthly Expenses

My 1st order of business for this month was to search out app partners to place my in-app advertisements.  These advertisements focused on an offerwall that I owned.  This offerwall pointed users to various games they could download of which I would be paid a commission on each successful download.   My task was to find games that had a demographic that would match the types of games I was promoting.  I found the following 2 games:  Wormjump and Big Sport Fishing 3D Lite

The deal was to post dedicated banners in each app for a 1 week time frame and monopolize the ad inventory of these games.   Being that this was my 1st set of deals for the month, I was a little green in my negotiating.  I offered the app developers a little too much and did not receive the full inventory like I’d hoped.  The problem was I was asking the developers to place a static banner in their games.  The problem (that I found out after the fact) in doing so is that once the developer did this, I would not necessarily receive impressions from people that currently have the game installed.  I would only receive those impressions once the gamer updated their game version and since people don’t update regularly, my ads would not be showed to everyone.

After doing some research I found that its best to approach developers that have their own ad server and/or use a service such as Admob to serve ads.  This way I could just have them implement “house ads” and I’ll have instant access to ALL their inventory without the app user ever having to upgrade.   I’m in the process of working out those deals now.

Here are the results from my February In-app Ad campaign:

In App Advertising Campaigns

Moving on to the app development portion of my business.  Since I don’t want to depend on only 1 revenue stream for my business, I began to look around for other opportunities in the app space that would afford me to bring in additional revenues.  After researching various niches in the online space, I found there was a vibrant app community that paralleled these niche markets.   So I quickly tasked my app developer to create a set of simple applications to compliment this niche.  The app developer completed 3 apps.  They were then uploaded to the Android Marketplace on March 5th, 2012.  Below are the results:

Current Installs as of March 10th, 2012

Current revenue as of March 10th, 2012

Android Application Daily Revenues

The total comes out to be $552.00 over a 6 day period! Who knew apps could be so lucrative!  I have my app developer creating 3 new apps in this same niche right now.  I’ll report the results in the next blog post.

All and all, this has been a positive experience.  Although the amount of company cash available on hand has dropped $1,749.82, I’m confident that the month of March will yield better results. Until next time….

February Company Revenues

Kicking Butt

Happy New Year’s to all my readers!!

I know again its been awhile since I posted. My apologies for all of that.  Its my goal this year to keep this blog updated and to let you guys in on many of the things I’m planning and working on this year.  I have the feeling that this is going to be a breakout year for me.  Last year was the best year I’ve had with my Internet Marketing business, however, given what I’ve learned and my new focus this year, I have no qualms in saying that I’m poised to make 2012 the best year ever.

But before we go into my plans for 2012, let’s take a moment to remember many of the successes and accomplishments I’ve had in 2011.

I can remember that back in 2010, I set a goal to setup a cost per action business and have it product over 1,000.00 profit daily for me by the end of that year.  Needless to say I never reached that goal in 2010, however, on Feb 24, 2011, I was able to achieve that milestone.  This was one of my proudest accomplishments of 2011 and the year had just begun.  This thrend continued into March and April of the year.  However, a hard lesson was learned this year. Never put all your eggs in the same basket and never get complacient.  After managing a successful campaign for a few months, everything came to a halt when many of my main offers just went away.  Instead of continously building on my business in good times, I got lazy and figured I didn’t need to do anything to grow my business.  BIG MISTAKE.  In this business if you are not continually innovating and discovering new product niches, its only a matter of time before you put your income into jeopardy.

Aside from this accomplishment.  I also set a goal to get a my free business card site SEO’d to the 1st page of Google.  With the help of various SEO firms that I outsourced to, I was able to get my site to the 1st page of Google within a time frame of 6 months for a set of very competitive keywords:  ”free business cards” and “free printable business cards“.  My site took up residence there for about a month. However, I was later dropped from the listings because of some aggressive tactics I was employing to try to push my site to the number 1 position in Google.  FAIL!

2011 was also the year I entered my 1st affiliate marketing contest sponsored by the affiliate network YeahCPA.com.  The contest included various prizes ranging from an Amazon Kindle on the low end to a 10,000 in cash on the high end.  I opted for attempting to win an Apple Ipad 2.  To win the Ipad 2, I had to push more than 3,000.00 in affiliate commissions within 30 days.  With the help of my SEO’d business card site and various other pay per click campaigns, I was able to win the prize! A prize that both my wife and daughter LOVE!

All and all, 2011 was a great year.  I learned many new things about this industry both good and bad.  Things that have really opened my eyes to how one can really open up an online business and have it thrive in an economy where brick and mortar businesses are stagnant and/or failing.  I did have my own set of failures that I talked about in a previous blog post.  But everything is a learning experience and I’ve learned from those failures to make me a better person in 2012.

So what am I planning for 2012?
Well I don’t want to go into all of that in this blog post.  However, I’ll leave you this tidbit.  2012 will be about being “MOBILE“.

Going Mobile Peeps

Failure is Not an Option

It’s been awhile since my last blog post and you may have been wondering where I’ve been?   Did I give up CPA/Affiliate marketing?  Did I retire and move off to some exotic country?   No no, nothing like that.  What I have been doing is grinding out (when I can find time after working full time and hanging out with family and friends) CPA campaigns and testing out new traffic sources.  I wish I can say that I’ve been successful in all my endeavors, the honest truth right now is I’ve experienced quite a few failures over the past few weeks.  Most internet marketers like to talk about the successes.  They like to talk about their magic system that prints them money daily while all on auto-pilot.  Although there may be some truth to their tales, one thing I will tell that for every 1 major success story, there are at least 10 or so failures.  Those failures are not something they always share with the public.   Well today I felt led to buck that trend and talk about my failures while at the same time letting you all in on how those failures are shaping my mindset.  In the next few paragraphs, I will highlight a list of campaigns and idea’s I’ve been focusing on these past few weeks and the results of each “brilliant idea”.

1.)  Kindle E-Book Authoring

Kindle Ebook Publishing

So I was listening to a webinar a few months ago that talked about a guy making over 20k per month selling e-books on Amazon’s Kindle Publishing platform.  The host of the webinar was Ty Cohen and he was selling a product called “Kindle Cash Flow” for $997.00.  Before you gasp at the price, I will just say that I did NOT purchase this course as it was, IMHO, TOO EXPENSIVE.   However, I was able to acquire this program through some friends online.  After watching all the video’s, I was pumped and was ready to start publishing e-books.  I got an idea of a niche I wanted to go into and hired both American and Filipino writers to write short stories that I would combine and sell on Amazon.   I hired American writers from Guru.com on a per project basis, while I hired Filipino writers from www.onlinejobs.ph on a salaried basis.  What I found was that although the American writers produced better sounding “content”, the Filipino writers could produce way more content for a cheaper price.

SO what happened?  After about 6 weeks of working with my writers, my team produced a total of 14 shorts, 4 of which I uploaded to Amazon.  The books were priced at $3.97 of which I got 70% royalties.  It took a few weeks before I started to get sales, however, over time my sales dropped off dramatically.   All and all, the project has been a failure.

So why did I fail?

Cash Spent:    $1211.93  =  (writer’s salaries)
Book Revenue:    $  80.19
Total Loss     ($1131.74)

After doing some analysis, I can definitely tell you where I went wrong.  First, I had 14 books written, but only uploaded 4.  Well I did not have the time to really proofread the rest of the books.  Over time I got busy with work, family, and other projects that I let this go to the wayside.  So the additional 10 books were not uploaded.   Plus, I was getting really frustrated and discouraged by the small sales volume of the 4 books I’d uploaded.  Also, after some time I realized that I was not utilizing my workers as efficient as I could have been.  There were days where I did not assign them any work but they were still collecting a paycheck.  This was poor planning on my part.

How will I remedy this situation?

• - Proper Planning of the scope of the project.  Don’t hire more than 1 worker if you can’t fill his/her workload.

• – Don’t expect things to happen rapidly.  Just because person in a course makes 20k a month on Amazon does not mean you’ll do it overnight.

• – Follow through.  Just because I did not see sales on the 1st 4 books does not mean the other 10 books would not sale.  Strength in numbers.

2.)  Ringtones.com Marketing

Slinging Ringtones

I know you may be thinking, who downloads ringtones these days.   Well truth be told there is still a viable market out there for ringtones.  The problem is its very very saturated and its hard to make a buck.  I figured, however, I could still go into this market if I’m smart about it and make some money.  I struck a deal with a broker that represented www.ringtones.com.  The deal was that I would buy traffic from this domain and redirect it to my personal affiliate link.  This sounded like a really good plan.  The problem is the broker representing the owner of www.ringtones.com would not sell me traffic (clicks) for no lower than $0.42 a click.  Although cheaper than most places for targeted ringtone traffic, I quickly found that I was not able to make a profit on my ringtones campaigns.

Cash Spent:         $200.00
Ringtone Revenue:    $158.00
Total Loss:           ($ 42.00)

How will I get this campaign profitable?

• - Open up negotiations with the domain owner directly.  If I’m able to get him/her to lower the price of my clicks, I’ll definitely have a campaign that a winner.   I found that if I can get my costs down to at least $.030 a click are less, I’ll be in profit.   Don’t you people go out and still this campaign now .

• - Ask for an increase in my payout for the campaign I was running.

3.)  Free Business Cards Domain SEO Failure

Got a Business Card?

All of you may know I used to owe a business card domain that was on the 1st page of Google (position 7 to 9)  This domain was bringing in some sales for me on the SEO side and I was attempting to really skyrocket my sales by pushing my site to within the top 3 listings of Google.

The problem with wanting to do this “quickly” is that you have to rely on “blackhat” tactics that if not used correctly, can get you website deranked or delisted from Google.   This is exactly what happened to me.  I used a technique that would point lots of backlinks to my site in a huge burst.

Hindsight being 20/20, I know that this was not the best thing to do.  Google quickly caught on and dropped my site from Page 1 to Page 20+.  I lost a site that was bringing in a steady $100.00 a month in SEO traffic to a site that brought in $0.00.

What did I learn from this?

• - Patience!!!  Don’t try to trick Google.

• – Google will always catch you and punish you with a vengeance.

As I type this post, I realize that I’m getting a little long winded.  There are actually quite a few more failures I wanted to tell you guys about, but then I remembered that I didn’t want this post to be just about my failures but more so about my mindset after the failure.  The way I look at it is we are all going to fail at some things.  Some people will fail more so than others.  But in the grand scheme of things, you have to get over your fear of failing, because if you don’t then you’ll never take action.  If you never take any action, you are doomed to be stuck in your current state of affairs.

The reason that I keep testing and moving forward in my endeavors is because I see (I know) the light at the end of the tunnel and that light shows me that I have a bright future up ahead.  So, I tell you this.   DON’T GIVE UP.

- Ollie James Hales.

YeahCPA Contest Giveaway!! This is true!

Do not hesitate,

Just rock offers you like!

Time is limited.
This contest lasts from 5th July to 5th Aug. Here it goes!

If you hit 1k in total affiliate commission than we will give you a brand new Kindle!!

If you hit 3k in total affiliate commission than we will give you $300 in cash that you can spend anyway you like to!

If you hit 5k in total affiliate commission than we will send you a FREE Apple iPad!!

If you hit 10k in total affiliate commission than we will send you 2 FREE Apple iPads or $1000 in cash that you can spend anyway that you would like to!!

If you hit 20k in total affiliate commission than we will send you $2000 in cash so you can go on a shopping spree or whatever you like!!

If you hit 50k in total affiliate commission than we will send you a $5000 bonus on top of your commissions and also a special China Jade!!

If you hit 100k in total affiliate commission than we will send you $10000 in cold cash that you can spend anyway that you desire and we will also send you a special gift from the YeahCPA team.

YeahCPA!!
Since I had a few very profitable campaigns on that network already, I figured hey let me enter the contest to see what I could win. Needless to say after about a month of promoting various offers, I was able to cross the $5,000+ commission threshold to win an Ipad 2.  I have to admit, the Ipad 2 is pretty cool.  I’m still in the process of downloading various apps for it, but my preliminary assessment of it tells me its a keeper.
On top of receiving a free Ipad, I decided to treat myself to something I’ve wanted for over a year now.  An AR Drone.  Basically its a wi-fi control quadricopter that have forward and downward facing cameras which stream realtime video back to your Ipad!  How cool is that?!?! You fly it by tilting your Ipad forward, backwards, left, and right.   An awesome toy!

Just thought I’ll keep you guys updated on not just my affiliate camapaigns, but some of the prizes you can win by just promoting on various networks.  I believe YeahCPA is running another contest.  Let’s see what I can win this time around as well.

So How Do You Find These People To Buy A Product?

So have you ever did a search online using Google, Yahoo, or Bing and saw that their were ad listings on the very top and right hand sides of the page.  Those listings are are paid advertisements.  Advertisers like me will purchase those ad placements based on keywords that you may type into a search engine.  For example, say you were looking for “video game rentals” in the Google search engine. You will be presented with search results along with a set of ads at the top and right of the regular search listings.  I am an affiliate for Gamefly, a game rental service.  So what I would do (note this is not my ad) would create an advertisement for Gamefly.com as seen in the illustration.  If someone clicks on my ad and purchases a Gamefly subscription, I would be awarded $20.00 for that sale. The main thing you have to worry about when buying ads is your conversion ratio and the amount you pay per click.

Say in the above example, your cost per click is say $0.10.  Then you would have to convert someone to a sale in ($20.00 / $0.10) clicks to be profitable or risk losing money.

Here are a few questions I get when people ask me about what I’m doing online.

1. How would you recommend getting started on your first one?

Here is a course I found online search Google that does an “okay” job of introducing you to CPA marketing.

http://www.alpha-affiliates.com/backend/

Modules 1 – 5 are pretty good to get the background.
Modules 6 – 19 are the more advance stuff…..you’ll need to know it…but focus on 1 – 5 first.

I have another course that is a little dated, but also gives a good overview written by the same guy that I sent that pdf to you about earlier:

PDF = http://www.unlimited-trials.com/cpamarketing.pdf

2. Do you use the company’s landing page or always create your own?

I usually test out the company’s landing page 1st.   This is called direct linking.  Many times I can tell whether and offer will be profitable by doing this.  However, there are some offers that require me to create my own landing page instead.  Its basically one of those things you just have to test to see which one performs better.

3. What do you do that requires you to always be out there tinkering with stuff? Do you not just advertise a promotion and see what happens? Do you spend most of your time trying to climb the google search list? What?

Most of the “tinkering” i’m doing is adjusting bid prices, adding new keywords to my bidding list, checking conversions, and trying new traffic sources.   I don’t spend most of my time trying to climb the google search list (that’s organic traffic) as most of the traffic I get is paid traffic.

4. How much should I put into this while we’re trying to learn how to do it?

This is a relative question.  I would not put more into this that you can not easily afford to lose. (say if you were going to Vegas….its the same concept).
You should be able to get some good data if you were spending say 100 or 200 a month on this..

5. How do you loose money doing this? And how can I avoid losing money right off?

You basically lose money by spending more money on traffic (clicks on your ads) then what you are earning in conversions on the back end.   Say you are running an Eharmony offer and you spend 20.00 in clicks and only get say 3 conversions / sign ups (each conversion is worth say 4.00).   You’ve lost 20.00 – 12.00 = (8.00)

It’s inevitable that you’ll lose money up front as you are learning how things work (but over time with tracking your keywords and conversions) you’ll be able to get rid of the keywords that are not converting for you and focus on the ones that are.

In upcoming blog posts, I will discuss the topic of looking up an offer and putting it on an search network and test profitability.

Ollie James Hales signing out.

So why did I title this post, “Never Bid On Facebook“.   This is because I ignored everything I just mentioned in the above paragraph and decided to bid on the keyword “facebook” in an Microsoft Adcenter PPC campaign.  I had an offer that was basically a Best Buy zip submit offer that I wanted to test against the same people that visit facebook.   I created a page that would mimic the color scheme of Facebook.  Hired a spokesmodel and dressed her in Facebook colors. (Although note to self, white pantyhose do not look well on African American legs.) Then I setup a PPC campaign with only 1 keyword in the adgroup (“facebook”).

I then setup a budget of $100.00 per day and $500.00 per month.  Bid for 1st position in Adcenter , ignored that the cost per click for 1st position was over 1.00 (figured it was a glitch in the system or something) and let her rip.   I watched my prosper202.com tracking page and noticed the traffic was flowing in at a crazy pace.  In the 1st 30 minutes i’d received over 500 clicks to my landing page.  I figured…I’m in the money now!!

Then I waited for my Adcenter stats to update..(I hate that it takes 3 hours to update).  Low and behold I was shocked!!!!   I’d spent a total of 647.11!! In the course of 30 freakin minutes!!

“Wait a minute!!….I set a $100.00 per day daily budget and a $500.00 per month budget!!”  I could not understand why I was being charged so much.  SO I contacted Microsoft Adcenter for an explanation.  After talking with 3 different reps (1 hour each a piece!), I learned that on very high volume keywords, they can not guarantee they would not go over your daily budget. “What the heck?”  A multi-million dollar company can’t ensure they don’t go over budget!?!?  I was upset!.   On top of that, the campaign flopped and I didn’t earn no more than about 30 bucks or so.  After some positioning and complaining on my part, they refunded me $500 bucks to my account.   They explained that I should not bid on a high volume keyword like this again if I was not sure it would convert for me.

Once caveat is that if you setup your campaign and set ONLY a monthly budget and set it up till “spend until depleted“, then you won’t run into this problem.   So basically you are by passing the daily spend and setting a “monthly maximum spend”.  Their system is designed to stop spending once it hits that spend limit….but only if you use this combination.    The draw back from doing this is that you don’t have control over how much gets spent each day.

Lesson learned….

Profit for March =  27.19% increase over February Profits

Some quick highlights of March:

1.)  Affiliate offers have been pretty stable all month.
2.)  Cost Per Click (CPC) costs are down.
3.)  SEO Site is dropping in rankings (Google Update dropped me from 1st page)…
4.)  Joined Adbeat.com (advertising network spytool)

Of the quick highlights of the month, the major thing I’d like to talk about is the fact that I joined a private website called www.adbeat.com.  This site has a treasure troll of information relating to information gathered while spying on advertisers of over 10 major advertising networks.  The site is very similar to a spy tool that I created a few months ago.  Where as my tool only spys on the AOL/Adsonar network, Adbeat.com spys on the following ad networks: 

• Google,
  
• Yahoo,
  
• MSN,
• Doubleclick,
  
• Adsonar,
• Pulse360,
  
• BuySellAds,
  
• Chitka,
  
• AdBrite,
  
• ValueClick,
  
• Adhere,
  
• TribalFusion
• Technorati

It also has a forum that is really active were people share knowledge and tips about how to best advertise and outdo the competition. My prayer is that I’m able to use my 1-year subscription to help further my online goals.

Going Forward:

So now that March has come and gone its time to focus on what I plan on doing for April.  At the time of this posting, its April 11th.  So almost 1/2 way through the month what have I been working on and what do I plan to do for the rest of the month?  Well to be honest, I think I was trying to do so many things at once that I got a little overwhelmed and have not done much of anything (other than my stable PPC campaigns).  Sometimes I have have so many grandiose ideas in my head and on paper, but be paralyzed in my execution of those ideas.  Well this past weekend I took it up on myself to start working focusing on ONE new campaign.   Notice the word ONE!   The reason is that I would really like to get some traction on a n established evergreen market I’m planning on going into and at the same time, create a mailing list that I can continously market too.  Something I’ve been neglecting for quite some time.  So with the help of an outsourced worker from www.scriptlance.com and a close internet marketing friend, I’m in the process of developing a website that’ll capitalize off a very general market with the express goal of providing a value added service while also monetizing the traffic on the backend.  If all goes well, I can report about it in upcoming posts.

Well, that’s all I have to say right now.   Please stay tuned to the blog for continued updates.  Also, I still plan on doing a set of blog posts that are the “Back 2 Basics” on affiliate marketing.

Signing off:  Ollie James Hales

Eharmony:

Starting with the Eharmony offer, Azoogle.com pays $4.40 for every person that signs up for a profile on Eharmony.  I setup a campaign via Adcenter and bid on a few dating related terms.  After optimizing my PPC costs, I was able to become profitable on the offer relatively quickly.  Overall, I was spending about $0.14 per click.  However, my ECPC (earnings cost per click) was equal to $0.46.  So if you take my spend at $0.14 per click and subtract it from my average ECPC of $0.46 I ended up earning  $0.32 per every click to my Eharmony link.

FTD Flowers:

This campaign could not get off the ground for me.  I don’t know if I just didn’t set the offer up correctly or if the offer was not tracking or what.  I could not get this offer to convert.  I bid on keywords such as flowers, valentine gifts, flower delivery, and valentine flowers.  Keywords that got me lots and lots of clicks, but 0 conversions.  After a few days of running this campaign, I gave up and decided to focus on the Eharmony campaign and 1 over secret campaign I wont reveal here just yet.

Febuary Revenue:
This month has been my best month in all of my internet marketing efforts. Not only did I surpass my goal of $8,000.00 by earning a total of $13,689.40 (surpassing my goal by $5,689.40), but I also learned alot of new lessons that I will be implementing in the month of March and beyond.  One of the things I’m planning on implementing is something called CPA pathways.  It’s basically a concept where you create your own CPA offer, but your offer is basically an opt-in form with other CPA offers on the backend.  To illustrate:  User lands on your CPA Offer Page —> submits their information (usually an opt-in form) —> forwarded to multiple backend CPA offers which someone else owns.  The theory is you get to build a list and at the same time you get paid for forwarding people to other CPA offers in your pathway.  This concept has been out there for awhile, but people are just now starting to talk about it…and I think that is where the next major push will be.  I’m in the process of brainstorming ideas that I can use for my own CPA offer.  I will blog about this in detail in the near future as I set up my own offer and pick a set of CPA networks to put the offer on.

March Goals:

Profit = $10,000 (not sure if I can repeat Feb numbers as there is no major holiday in March)
Setup 2 CPA pathway websites and test.

Find another set of profitable campaigns.

Start testing out other traffic sources:

Adperium – A network specializing in bit-torrent traffic

Mochi Media – A network specializing in in-game advertising

Ad4game – Another network specializing in in-game advertising.

See you guys next post…..