Well I haven’t had anything now for about a week so I am going to pause this one and come back to it in the near future.

I have learnt a lot from this campaign and the financial market isn’t for the faint hearted, it’s fierce place where big budgets rule the top spots. If you can crack it there is certainly a bag load of money to be had, so much so that some days I was earning more than my day job was paying. That’s a great feeling but at the same time it’s very frustrating knowing that you have to go into work the next day.

Here are my final stats:

Expenditure: £97.43
Income: £685.49
Net: £588.06
ROI: 604%

R.I.P - Finance PPC I am gonna miss you

I am so chuffed that I did this and I am now fortunate enough to have a decent budget to start a series of proper campaigns

It took ages to get my ads back up and running, but today they have been approved and I have had £120 already today but sadly a few declines from previous sales. However, here are my stats:

Expenditure: £23.06
Income: £364.27
Net: £341.21
ROI: 1480%

ROI is dropping pretty rapidly but still incredible this is because I am now running 2 campaigns. I need to give it a few weeks to balance out.

I think I can now predict a trend so I am gonna put my money where my mouth is and say this time next week income will break £500… Hopefully

This morning I logged into Adwords like normal and I noticed a lack of impressions / clicks so I started to sniff around wondering WTF is up… It seems that they have finally twigged that my display URL is not going where it says it is, so all of my ads are sitting in “disapproved” status, fair cop I guess but sheer laziness on my part.

I guess I need to actually do a bit of work now. My plan is to create a landing page on my domain and set a redirect to the merchant, I thought I had read this somewhere, does anyone know if this is allowed?

If anyone knows of a better way around all this please let me know?

Sorry for the delay, I have had nothing worth reporting the last few days but I thought I should give a quick update.

As I mention in my first post, getting decent click volume is still proving a major problem and even more so for the last few days. I got into a bit of a bidding war and ended up paying through the roof for a few days just to keep it running. However, since then I have been adding new keywords and removing the non performers and tweaking ad variations like crazy to try and up my CTR, which should ultimately lower my CPC.

Because of my f**k up, both sales and ROI took a hit, but I am now back on track.

Expenditure: £18.06
Income: £338.00
Net: £319.94
ROI: 1772%

All in all the program is chugging along with the odd click and is converting at 1:4 which is pretty amazing. Now I need to leave it alone for a few days so Adwords can spit some stats at me.

More to come shortly

So maybe it isn’t as hard as everyone makes out, or is it? I have been running a campaign for about a week now and here are my stats:

Expenditure: £7.36
Income: £105.00
Net: £97.64
ROI: 1327%

These results are mostly fluke but partly due to timing, but still far to early to tell. I am sure the ROI will come down a bit, maybe about 1000% or so

My only problem is now volume - it’s time to rinse and repeat x3.

I will start off by saying that I am very new to PPC and poop myself everytime I set my daily spend to £5!

A few weeks ago I created a PPC campaign via adwords, I wont advertise the details for obvious reasons but it was a very low value product as too was the commision.

On the first day I had 25 clicks and 1 sale but was losing money so I decided to pause the campaign. The clicks cost around £3 and I made £1 for an unacceptable £2 loss, yeah so what I’m a cheap skate…

Fast forward 2 weeks and the campaign is still paused but I have had 6 sales from those original 25 clicks. I have now made £18 so that’s £15 profit from the original £3 I put in.

I am not sure whether the campaign was a success or it’s to do with the Christmas Rush. Either way I’m investing another £3 in the new year…

Update: I am far from as tight as I make out above, I am new to PPC and just testing the water. If I had the money to lose I wouldn’t hessitate in setting a high daily spend. Now stop e-mailing me

I started in the affiliate marketing game only 4 months ago, which feels like a lifetime already. I have learnt so much about marketing and loads of do’s and don’ts.

My motivation was simple:

1. I don’t like being skint
2. I don’t like having a boss anymore
3. I don’t like the 9-5 routine
4. I want to upgrade my Audi A3 to the new model
5. I don’t like office politics
6. Oh and… I want to earn stupid amounts of cash!

One Saturday morning I hit all the major engines with a flurry of “make money online” variations and got the usual sales pitch letter sites for example: “Buy our e-book and earn $100,000,000 a month”. WOW this sounds great but that’s a sure sign for it being complete bollocks, being internet savvy anyway I knew about these and knew to avoid them but despite this I was still very tempted in buying something I knew would be garbage. However, I figured I was an easy target and moved on.

If you are new to the affiliate game I am confident that you will find yourself (like I did) on a quest looking for the ‘magic secret’ that will make you millions overnight, the truth is that there are no secrets. The quicker you accept this and move on the better.

I continued pounding Google for answers and eventually ended up at the A4U Forum (now a regular) and read this inspirational post by Aquanuke. This site has been a godsend and if you’re serious about affiliate marketing you need to register and get involved. It’s a very busy forum and the people there are friendly and helpful.

Howdy

The aim of this blog is to document my affiliate marketing journey from newbie to (hopefully, one day) super affiliate. I will also probably rant about other stuff like football, gadgets, beer and other stuff.

Stay tuned!