admin's blog

In preparation for starting various PPC campaigns relating to offers and products, I thought I would first start by joining various networks. I'm already a member of a few 'product' type networks, but when it comes to offers, I'm really not with anyone. Based off of some of the things I saw on the Top Affiliate Challenge, I thought I'd start with NeverBlue Ads.

Hello All

Today is a special day at the Money-Code compound. My daughter, Kathryn, turns two years old today! Happy Birthday Kat! She has the classic "Terrible Twos" syndrome, which can make things very challenging, but at the same time adds some very humorous moments.

I'm hoping a few of you getting into affiliate marketing and not showing earnings right off might be able to get some inspiration from this post. I'm no where near where I want to be, but I like seeing progress.

I officially started with affiliate marketing in September 2006. I was doing Google Adsense prior to that, but I signed up with CJ on 9/2006. Looking back at my affiliate tracker, I made a grand total of $278.61 with CJ/eBay. Counting AdSense for the entire year, plus donations and CJ, the total came to $574.91. Pretty crappy for the first year.

Top Affiliate Challenge (TAC)

Well, I already touched upon my feelings about the production of TAC. The worst had to have been episode #5. Worst editing ever! But, I have to say there was a glimmer of hope in #5. They went into some interesting tips. A nice grey-hat nugget by John Chow. That was a good sign. Now, I watched Episode #6 yesterday, and was happy to see that they improved the video slightly. They changed the size of that annoying logo so it doesn't cover people's faces any longer. Glad it took them 5 episodes to figure that one out. This episode clearly lacked 'drama' in the sense of the competition, so they at least padded it with some good tips. I thought the tips they provided were of good quality, which got me to scratch my head a bit. I started looking at AWeber and Van Clute's talk about PPC was good too. It was pretty fundamental concept of split testing ads, but he conveyed it well. I have to say, after #6.. I do have some hope for the show. I'm curious how they're going to re-integrate Shoemoney.

So today I decided to try something different. Lately I've been in a affiliate marketing rut. I have a base of EPN store fronts, some community sites that are doing well with paid donations and banners, but I really feel that the next level will be to actively promote products and offers via PPC. I've dabbled with this in the past, and without really knowing what I was doing, my performance sucked.

What I would like to try is some kind of mentoring system which could teach me the ropes with offers without losing my shirt initially while I learn. I've been looking at WealthyAffiliates.com for a while now, and I finally pulled the trigger on it. They do go into detail with PPC techniques and how to work various offers and products. I think this will be a good learning experience.

I previously apologized for my lack of posts during the TAC (Top Affiliate Challenge) post. So where have I been? Well, I've been working my ass off with my web development business. Projects definitely picked up, and I wanted to give EPN a rest. I was sorely disappointed with EPN after the migration from CJ, and wanted the dust to settle before focusing any more efforts to it. Prior to the switch, I was making almost $2,000/month off of eBay on CJ. After the switch my earnings plummeted, which you can read more about in the post titled EPN Status. There was a definite problem, and things have been slowly improving. May and June were my best months since the migration. I made $1,200 each of those months, which is still down, but with the improvement of ACRUs and their announcement of a MakeGood on ACRUs, things could improve even further.

During the migration phase, eBay decided to change Category IDs which also led to more frustration. Some of my sites were un-affected, but a few of them were completely hosed with this change. I took the opportunity to fix all the sites as well as add Privacy Statements to comply with Google AdSense's new TOS. Talk about a rough Spring dealing with all these unprofitable changes. So during this, I was just putting out fires and not creating any new sites or spent any times to promote or optimize the sites.

I've been involved with affiliate marketing for almost 2 years now. I would say that I've been 'successful' in the sense that I've been profitable every month since I started, but I'm definitely not where I'd like to be. I'm thinking a coach or mentor might just be what I need to shake me out of my rut and take affiliate marketing to the next level for me. I'm also interested in creating relationships with people to help bounce ideas of off. I originally created money-code.com to give me the opportunity to talk to fellow marketers and to help others. I've created many great relationships out there and I think I've helped a few along the way.

I wanted to give a little bit of my skill set help see if I'd be a match for being coached.

- I program in Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL (LAMP)
- Currently, I run a web design business from home (this is my day job for 4 years), so I know how to be productive in a home environment.
- I manage my own Linux servers for hosting

Top Affiliate Challenge (TAC)

First off, I want to apologize for my lack of posts lately. I'll go into what I've been working on.. and thinking about in a follow up post, but for now I wanted to talk about TAC, Top Affiliate Challenge (http://www.topaffiliatechallenge.com/).

I have to say that I was sucked in and very impressed with Joel Comm's Next Internet Millionaire show. I really enjoyed the personalities and there were a few tips that I could apply, loosely with my campaigns. I really wished that they would give you a little more of the classes, but oh well. Thor Shrock from NIM decided to put on his own show called Top Affiliate Challenge featuring some gurus that I've been following for a while - Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) and John Chow. I use to read Shoemoney's blog on a daily basis, but have been turned off by the almost constant barrage of self promotion and promotions products or services. I really enjoyed the site when he'd offer very helpful advice and provided great inspiration. I guess I've lost trust with the site - never knowing if a post is just a sales tool for that particular day. I know I'll end up following him again, because I do feel he's inspiring, and think he's a damn good at what he does.

Hello All. First of all, I'd like to apologize for the lack of posts here at Money-Code.com. Frankly, I've been quite busy with web development clients, and that really puts things on the back burner as far as affiliate marketing. Not to mention, that I'm quite frustrated with the current state of eBay's ePN and the drastic change of commissions since migrating. I wanted to give you a summary of where I am, and point out some interesting results.

I was at DigitalPoint today, and came across a great thread "Adwords and ebay?How necessary?". I personally don't like to use AdWords (I prefer Yahoo's YSM), but I wanted to get some basic tips for PPC in general... since I'm always wanting to learn how others are doing it.

Anyway, manx posted the following post, which I thought was extremely useful. I wanted to put in here, so I could easily reference it in the future... but some of you might find it useful as well. It's basic, but the basics get easily lost when you dive into PPC.