There are so many offers to choose from and you don’t know where to start. You can randomly pick an offer and see if you can make money off it. Will it work? Yes, but if you know how to make it work. All these offers do well and there is at least a few others making good money. If the offer really sucks then it wouldn’t be on the network. So how do you pick an offer?

1) Research. Basically just browse for possible keywords the offer might have. Say for example you want to do Scholarships. Well it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what types of keywords this might have. So I would go on yahoo/ google/ msn and type in. “free scholarships” “easy scholarships”, “college scholarships”, “scholarship grants”, “sign up for scholarship”. Etc.

2) Payout. Most of the time this is how I do it. I look at payout and offer and see if it is worth doing. Simple payouts like email submits or zip submits pay less but it has a high conversion rate vs. blockbuster sign ups. The lower the payout the easier to promote. This isn’t always the case but depends on the situation and offer. Sign up with different affiliate networks and compare which pays better. Always get the one that pays better. Or if you want, you can even ask your affiliate manager for a raise. Offers that are over $20 in my opinion is hard unless you have lots of money to burn and test.

3) Competition. Earlier I said research for keywords and search it. Most likely one offer with a bunch of ads are doing well. Ringtones is a gold mine.. or should I say WAS a goldmine. Search for anything and you get so much ads from affiliates like us. That means people are researching and giving you leads like crazy. But remember competition is a good and bad thing. For starters, competition gives you the impression that the offer is being searched and money is being made. But the bad thing is when there is too much like ringtones, we are all slapping each other in the face because we are bidding against each other. So ringtones.net is laughing at us because we are barley profiting and they are at 100% profit.

4) Testing.  So you got the campaign and you are ready to test it out. I do most of the time is direct link for a day or 2 and see if I get leads/ searches. If I get a lead I know that I have to get tracking ASAP. If I get no searches then there is more work to be done. People have said to always use tracking in the beginning. I agree on this but for me in order to fire up my campaign I direct link and hopefully hit a lead.

5) Track keywords. Important. Very Important. So its up and running and you are breaking even. VERY good job if you hit the breaking even mark. Install some sort of tracking and figure out which keywords are converting. Pause the ones that are NOT converting and also add some more keywords. Just ADD, ADD ,ADD.

6) Landing page / Not to landing page. This is the most confusing part. I have seen people just direct link the offer with tracking and bam! it works. If the advertisers, landing page really needs a make over then go ahead and make one. Just BS your way in and make sure you get a nice CTR. What if the offer has 2 pages to it? I’m talking about having an offer that has a “click here” then traffic clicks and makes a lead by filling out the following page. In my opinion I wouldn’t make a landing page for this because traffic will have to click 3x to get to the offer.

Those are just some advice I can give for someone starting out. There is many more things to learn but that is as basic as it gets.

I have been teaching a lot of people and they just can’t get the concept down. I made a post about this a while back but its hard to explain.I’m going to explain it as simple as possible. Mind you, this is what I am doing and everyone knows there are different aspects to learn.

First of all there is YOU. Someone who is living their life pay check to pay check, earning 50k a year, working retail, has kids, college student, nurse, fireman, police, high school drop out. WHATVER!

Now there is the advertisement company. They are the ones where you make your money. Basically they want to promote their product. Sell Ringtones, Rent DVDs, credit debit, dating, housing, freebies, WHATVER!

Now there is the affiliate program. They gather the advertisements for you to promote. Again I still don’t know 100% how this works but just stick with it. They put all the advertisement company’s into one place so its easy for you instead of signing up to 100s of offers.

Now there is the Internet. You will use a Paid Search or SEOing. Paid search is when you pay for bids of keywords to make you money. No keywords NO MONEY. SEOing is being #1 where your offers are and you don’t pay a penny and you are at 100% profit. SEOing is good but not as easy as adding keywords.

Finally there is the consumer. Their job is to sign up for your offer and give you money. Done? Alright here is an easy illustration.

HAHA! What happened? Yea I know I havn’t Blogged in a while. I have been working hard. I been making some income. Not much but I finally figured out how all this stuff works so nowadays i have some leads. So far its been good. I had my good and bad days..Like I keep telling people, this is not exactly a get rich now!. Its possible to earn $100+ off a new niche when you wake up tomorrow. Not always but can happen. Uhh..my credit card has been like tired from all the charges. I just paid it off and I had to dip in my savings because i get paid NET15 for now. So far life is good and you just have to keep working. Hard work pays off in this industry. Let me tell you a funny dream i had.

I guess all this marketing has been in my head and I even dreamed about it. I was actually with my girlfriend in my dream and I was in line buying something. There was a customer in my dream who kept mugging me and saying how slow I was when I was paying the cashier. I didn’t care but I think the cashier did. He called up the owner, I guess hoping I would get kicked out of the store for being so slow in paying. So I told the man “O man…its a thos old white men in business suits to the rescue” Then he was like “what do you know about us?, I do the same thing you do, I’m always stuck in traffic trying to ge to work , we are the same

So I told him “No sir. we are not the same. I own an ONLINE BUSINESS.” He looked at me astonished and I walked away.  Weird dream isn’t it? It seriously happened. I guess this whole making money online thing has gotten to my head. But yeah guys I’m still here making money. If you guys need help just post me a comment. I don’t believe i left an email so this is the easiest way to give me a holla! lol

I am so down right now. Its like 3 days ago I was up 200%  Now I’m down to 0%. Because of this I started to do “evaluations” every week. A full evaluation is basically trying to see the past 7 days stats and check every single aspect. You can check kws and take out the ones that are not converting, CTRs, QS, profit vs loss, ad group, ad copy, and of course the landing page. This should take away any technical problems you have in the campaign. But don’t wait until the following week if your having problems in day 1 -3. I would do half evaluation and just remove keywords that are not converting. I suggest a full evaluation so you can improve the campaign and save some $ on stuff you shouldn’t be paying for. Remember that you should always check stats 24/7 to see if something is going bad. Catch the problem before it becomes huge. Now if you are on vacation, depending on the length of time you are away,make sure you check it every now and then . You need a vacation too so don’t stick around in the computer giving your girlfriend a hard time when she wants to go to the beach and your making a landing page. If i was on vacation I would do a 2 day test on the campaign. Remember to NOT set NEW campaigns while on vacation or a few days before. If a campaign is looking bad, just leave it on for another day. If the next day it is still doing bad just pause it or stop it. So that way you are not losing money and hopefully that wasn’t your own campaign, so you still make money drinking a pina colada.

One thing I learned after having an increase of almost 300% since last week is GREED. My first goal like I said before was just to make a few leads and I will be a happy camper. Now that I’m constantly getting leads 24/7 I’m feeling like I should always check my account and see if I made a lead. I found a pattern that I make a lead about every 4-6 hours in a day. But when I check every hour I start getting impatient and thinking what I am doing wrong. HELLO! Entrips! Wake up!. You just said you make a lead every 4-6 hours and every hour you check? haha. Well this whole thing is new to me and making money this fast is pretty extraordinary. Today was I guess an “average” day. It wasn’t that big of a money making day but I still got some leads. Yesterday was just too crazy for me because of all the leads.

So yesterday was the worst day ever. 80% of yesterday was bad because I lost money and I didn’t expect to lose that much. In the evening of that day, I got one lead off the campaign and in my terms, I “fixed” the situation. I let the campaign loose overnight to see if I would lose again. I increased my bids +.10 to see if that would make a difference. Well it didn’t make a huge difference but it was noticeable. I woke up earlier today and it was another day of trabajo (work in Spanish). I always check how much I spent on my traffic first so I can estimate how much traffic I got and the % estimate of how much leads I receive. I spent about the cost of a starbucks frap. However I made a few leads. Not bad right? So today looks like a brighter day and I have to work more! and get more results. As of right now let me get breakfast :/

So 2 hours ago I was hiding in the dark because my leads were not working as well as how I wanted it to work. People said never give up. So I didn’t. I knew I had a problem with my campaigns and I fixed it. Since I didn’t give it time to convert, there was no way it would convert with out some magic right? Well Since I have been up since 7am, getting frustrated and pissed off and on the verge of drinking my problems away, I saw a lead. So in my last post I told you guys how I would solve my resolution. Well I gave up and fell asleep for like an hour and I woke up and saw a lead made. Good job! for SLEEPING. So remember just how other affiliates say, You get your good days when you are about to buy the world, then you get your bad days when you just crashed and burn. So if you ever have a problem FIX IT!

So this past few weeks my Profit Vs. Loss has been the alltime lost. I had days where it was really good and now it is going downhill. So what is the problem? As of right now I have been brainstorming of what the problem is. I know people are still making money off the niche I’m doing so the problem is not the network itself. My landing page has not changed so that can’t be it either. Time to reevaluate my keywords. In the beginning my main goal was to get some keywords and make One Sale. My goal this week was make $1,000 Gross. My Loss from Yahoo Search Marketing is huge compare to my leads. So this time around I had more experience one what keywords to use and not to use.

It is hard to determine what I done back then but I do have my logs and keywords. My adcopy is better than last time and my Quality Score is at 5 Bars. Everything is running smooth. This time around my main goal right now is going to be changed. I’m going to do my hundred keyword test. Basically it is just putting a bunch of keywords together and testing it for conversion. I have been doing that but in a different way. I would put 1,000 keywords and expect a return. More keywords = more conversions. Well DUH! it doesn’t take a rocket  scientist to figure that out. However you also have to put in consideration the amount of keyword Costs vs Daily Spending Budget.

Hypothetical Situation

If you put 1,000 keywords loose then in about ONE day you will be PAYING for 1,000 keywords correct?. So lets say for example all my keywords got like 100 impressions each (1% CTR)and I got 1 click @ AVG CPC = .50. Then lets say for that cpc I get 2 clicks from EACH keyword. That will mean that I am spending about $1 per keyword and ONLY 2 chances for EACH to convert. If you do the math in that one day you will spend $1,000. By the time you get a conversion its either by luck or finding a good keyword. So what am I getting at?  Well just like every affiliate marketer no one has $10,000 to burn to begin with. If you did then 1) you saved up. 2) you have a mind of a business man and hate your job. But wait isn’t this a good way to test? YES it is but if your on a budget, losing $1,000 in one day kicks your behind. Then tomorrow you get discouraged and give up and wished you had just bought that new laptop from apple. If you had $10,000 TO BURN then that gives you 10 days to test. In that 10 days each keyword , hypothetically OF COURSE, it will get 20 clicks which means a chance of 20 times to convert. So what? What if 2/3 don’t convert in 10 days? I would be happy with 1/3 of the 1,000 keywords to convert. That is about 333 leads. So in the end of the 10 days you got 333 converting keywords and say payout was $10 = 3,330. You lost $6,670. Bad? No thats good. So delete/pause 2/3 of the non converting keywords. Run the 333kws for 10 days again. So now lets say for every 5 clicks they make a sale 5:1. Total spent @.50 = $1332 Spent. Then your gross is 3,330!. Gross - Loss = Profit = $1198 Round it off to $2,000 PROFIT. So will it take a month for me to actually profit since I lost $6,670? NOPE. In that 20 clicks in a converting keyword you would probably had gotten at least 2 leads. So you would have NOT lost $6,670.

So I figured out where I was going wrong. I don’t let my campaign run long enough to give me some conversions because I get too impatient. I let it run for one day. I lose money I get discouraged then I give up and move on the other keywords. Call me stupid but I learned my lesson. I think I should let campaigns run for at least a few days and having 20 clicks minimum then move on.

“Show me a Successful man I’ll show you a failure”

Lets see too bad I didn’t have this blog up since I was too busy getting up my campaign and niches. Lets just say I started on the first week of MAY. I was told by a friend to start it on ASAP so I had some sparetime and why the hell not right? So I done it. First of all, I got some accounts from affiliate programs. I got approved in a few days. I already had a web site up and I had a host. I had money to burn on this campaign. Now I needed a domain for my niche. I got everything all set up. First I created a landing page. I will NOT lie. It took me about 5-6 hours to make one. I did not have sufficient knowledge to make a landing page. I researched how to do it and by the end of the day I had made my first landing page. Now I linked everything with my affiliate links and i did NOT use tracking. But wait.. shouldn’t I use tracking first?

The answer is YES and NO. The reason why I didn’t get tracking was 1) I did not know how to get tracking and 2) That was not my goal. I had a goal of “making my first few sales”. So it doesn’t matter and I just threw my eggs in the basket with no names or color. So if the eggs fell I made some $ but I didn’t know which fell. I was being skeptic and didn’t think you were able to make money in this certain amount of time. For me the goal was 1 week = 1-3 Leads. It was a small goal / step but my return would be huge. The return was not the money but the inspiration. My first Night this is what happened.

Went to sleep at 3am (5/6/2008). Landing page was up, Traffic was high bid, I added about 100-120keywords. The keywords were just random but I handpicked it and made sure I was on top of everyone. My alarm goes off around 9am. Well there goes about 5 hours of sleep. I was going to go back to sleep but instead I checked my earnings. DING DING DING. One lead. I broke even though but no profit. WHO CARES! CONGRATZ Entrips you proved to yourself you are able to make money by sleeping. I was wide awake and I was about to jump around like a maniac. The logic behind this was, if you are able to make a lead you can multiply it after and tweak things to make even more money. 1*1 = 1 , 1*2 = 2. Multiplication does not LIE. So fast forward to the next few days. This was an actual blog post I posted on my other blog

May 8, 2008 - Thursday

“Last Night I was up until 230am again. I was workin on my business. I decided to attack it late night so I get a chance to wake up with $$ in my pocket. I woke up at 10am and im like I just dreamed about my web site. (No Joke) I guess it was because I think about it too much. So 30mins I laid in my bed. I was worried that if I didn’t profit today I would not get as motivated.

I opened up my laptop looked at my ppc program. Looks like I lost a few bucks. Thats fine. I looked at my affiliate program…holy shit PROFIT!! DING DING DING!!!. Basically I got a 1:3 ratio. Which isn’t bad.

So how much did I make? I made a little more then how much the average person who works in retail makes in a day

So…who wants to jump on the bandwagon with me? Once I start earning more I probably won’t teach u guys anymore. I won’t teach nonbelievers so you guys are on your own.

Amazing isn’t it ? Basically I was broke on May 5th, 2008. Then I made profit on MAY 08th, 2008. WOW thats really fast. If you guys only knew how i felt it was crazy. So now I am busy tweaking all my campaigns and getting better landing pages and CTRs. I have a small amount of profit but when I know how to do it, it should not stop me from becoming my dreams. I have been so into my little online business that I added a goal, calendar, quotes, timesheet on my wall. Whatever it takes to focus just do it. In order to succeed you need to have short / long term goals. Some can be nearly impossible to reach but make sure you attempt to reach it.

HISTORICAL POST

Well this is where the borderline where people decide if everyone’s PPC Marketing is True or Fact. Let me explain. First of all I’m 20 Years old, I go to college, I WORKED parttime at a retail store and fulltime when school was not in session. I know a lot of people who are older then me, WAAYYY older than me. Ages range from 21-50s. I use the internet for everything in my life. The keyboard, the mouse, the computer that I’m using are all bought online. I have a myspace, facebook, etc. So I’m your typical young Entrepreneur. When it comes to talking to people on what I do online everything calls me a bluff, calls BS, says you can NOT make money online. And if you do make money online, its not going to pay for a car payment, house payment etc. Most people who doesn’t know anything about the internet and its market are clueless about earning money in a virtual world

No matter how much you explain things, no one believes me because I’m young and can be fooled with scams. Not trying to be cocky or MR. Right, but chances are, the non-believers are most likely to get scammed with other things. I have to admit that I was one of them at one point in my life but I reached the point where I’m not much of a skeptic with online money making. Everyone thinks that your name has to be Bill Gates (microsoft) Larry Page and Sergey Brin (google) to make money online. If you read a brief history of these strong Entrepreneurs, they were not born SUCCESSFUL. They knew something was up with the market and took risks to become where they are now.

So it was more than a RANT then the topic itself. Back around in the Late 1990s I was already on the internet. Not until when I was in High School around 2004 I was attempting to earn some fast cash on the internet. I had a few friends who tried to make money but failed. My first pay check was at $30. It was one of thoughs filling out survey for $1. That was it for that year because $30 was literally nothing. I was then introduced to making money off Screensavers. You sign up and you are suppose to put it in your web site and each download was $1. My friend found a way to bypass this and earn income using a hack. So how did we do it? I can explain it but it is no use nowadays because it WILL NOT WORK and you and get in DEEP trouble.

Entrips @ $1 a Minute

Sign up for the Screen Saver Affiliate Program.

Download Firefox (back then no one had it )

Use firefox auto fill.

Use a Free Proxy Program ( I used a firefox plugin that changes IP every xx-seconds)

So now we are all set. Get your affiliate link on the screen saver program and click on it using the proxy. It will ask to fill out information so use your firefox autofill. Now download the screen saver program and when it asks you to install simple click NO. Now go back to the affiliate web site and login with your name. BAM! $1!!. The only thing you have to change is the autofill the next time you do it.

Smart right? NOT bad for a couple 16 year olds trying to earn some bucks. Well in the end my friend got up to around $2,000+ and I got up to $700. By that time we all had emails saying we are being reviewed. Since I never got my check,I was just banned from the web site. My friend on the other hand had to pay the money back. In the end we all lost the money and luckly we had no fraud records on the criminal records.