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Part 7:
….so eventually I pulled the plug on this little experiment (it ran for roughly 5 weeks) even though I was still making some money.
One of the negative parts about affiliate marketing I mentioned was the price of Pay-Per-Click varies wildly, especially when people are bidding up keywords. This can be the difference between a profit and loss if you don’t watch out. This happened several times and the cost I had to pay shot up too much to be as profitable.
Basically I got these campaigns running for the experiment, but when I stopped paying attention, most of the good keywords stopped running because they exceeded my set budget. Eventually most traffic died down, a sale was made here and there, but nothing big.
Ultimately I ended up bringing in $727 from the BluCigs campaign and $360 from the GreenSmoke campaign (about 90% of that money was from that first 5 weeks) and paid a total of $166 for Google Adsense.
I could have kept on going, but the amount of effort for a short-term profit wasn’t worth it, especially when I already have profitable businesses of my own that offer a more long term payoff. I can already see some of you trying to signup and start your own experiments with these ;-)
…however…hopefully this experiment demonstrated the POTENTIAL this sort of business model has in a more legitimate form. I wish I knew about it a long time ago when I was an active “financial” blogger.
I learned a lot and made a net profit!
-Neville Medhora