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Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment – Part 4

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4:

So for the first part of this experiment I decided to try something really simple that could just be a proof of concept….just to if it could work. I wanted to do a simple campaign where I promote an affiliate link over Google Adwords. When someone clicks through to the ad and buys, I get a commission. So long as I spend less to buy the ads than my commissions ad up to, I make money. It works in theory, now to see if it works in action….

Step 1.) I had to find something to promote:

I could’ve either joined something like CJ.com or ClickBank.com to find affiliate offers to promote or find one myself. I decided to steer clear of the affiliate networks for this simple experiment solely to find something easy to promote without tons of competition doing the same thing.

I had seen some videos about this new thing called “electronic cigarettes” becoming popular in bars, and started Googling. I’m not a smoker, but this e-cig concept seemed like a brand new industry which has the potential to become big, but hasn’t yet.

I did a little research on e-cigarettes and first joined the BluCigs.com affiliate program simply because they had the best looking marketing material and easiest-to-buy-from website (See that link for BluCigs in the previous sentence? THAT’S an affiliate link in action! If you buy after clicking that link, I make a commission).

So now they gave me an affiliate link to place on my advertisements:
https://affiliate.blucigs.com/idevaffiliate.php?id=3257_0_3_1

Whenever you click that link, it takes you directly to the BluCigs website and if you make a purchase after you click that link, I make a commission! Simple affiliate marketing in action. Understand?

I now have something to promote….e-cigarettes…and I don’t even know a damn thing about them.

Step 2.) Get some people to click that link!

I could either make my own ecigarettes site and build up a readership over time, but this is supposed to be a quick experiment, so the best way to get traffic is to BUY IT.

Since e-cigarettes aren’t such a massively popular keyword at this point, the traffic is was dirt cheap. I could pay $0.05 per click and still be in the top results (or only result) for many keywords.

I immediately made a couple of Google AdWords ads and posted them.  Here was one of them:

Once again…Whenever you click that sponsored link, it takes you directly to the BluCigs website and if you make a purchase after you click that link, I make a commission! Simple affiliate marketing in action. Understand?

Step 3.) Make some moola

So now I just sit back and waste money on buying traffic to see if I make a sale. I thought this would take longer than it did, but sure enough in about 2 days (or maybe less, I didn’t check) I made my first sale! The BluCigs program gives me 20% of each sale, and it was a $59.95 sale, netting me $11.99 in commission….so far I’d only spent about $0.50 in ads! Pretty good return on investment!

This 24X return on investment was on an extremely small scale, so I was excited to see if that pace would keep up.  However if it does, you see how certain people can make lots of money with very little?

A day or two later, I made ANOTHER SALE for $104.95, netting me a total of $20.99 in commissions! Even though this isn’t a whole lot of money, I was excited my dinky little experiment was giving a good ROI (return on investment). Using less than $5 I now made $32.98 back. At this point I still didn’t even really know what an e-cigarette was, but I was making money off them.

Step 4.) Get caught

Google first slapped my hand in the beginning of this experiment and and pulled my ad since cigarette-related terms cannot be advertised. I changed the text so it never says “cigarette” or any closely-related term:

This worked for two days, then Google denied the ad again saying the link-to URL was different than what was advertised (I guess since I had the referral link in it) so they asked me to change it. Unfortunately I couldn’t get Google to accept my ad anymore…..I’ve been doing an affiliate marketing experiment for only a few days and ALREADY I was caught for doing something shady! :-)

Well, Google has a fair policy to ensure quality, so I decided an alternate and perfectly OK way of doing this….

Step 5.) Make my own domain

I bought a domain called BluCigsStore.com (if you recall the actually website is called BluCigs.com, without the suffix “Store”) and made an auto-direct script for the page to forward to my affiliate link. I immediately changed the banned ad to BluCigsStore.com and Google accepted the changes, I was back in business! This cost me about $19 to privately register the domain name (so my name is not immediately associated with it).

A problem I noticed earlier was if people browsed around the internet researching these BluCigs, they would invariably click on several affiliate links. Whoever was the LAST affiliate link gets the commission.

To help improve my odds of being that person, I made a simple frames page (just used a template in Microsoft FrontPage since I can’t even write simple HTML). Nothing shady or illegal about this, and it actually added some value to the customer because it makes it easier for them to navigate. I used Photoshop to make the graphic for the frame header, and FrontPage to create the simple frames page and picture-link the graphic.

Now when you go to BluCigsStore.com you see the normal store with a static header on it that doesn’t move. When you click around the site, that header stays up. If you want to navigate home, it has a button for that. It also has an EXIT button that is a link to my affiliate link:

Using the frame bar on my own browser made it easier to navigate the site for me, so I’m guessing other people probably found it helpful (and probably never expected it was an affiliate tactic…just part of the normal site).

So Google once again approved my ads and I started making more money….

Go to Part 5

Signup Confirmed!

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WHAT YOU DO NOW…..

1.) Check your email inbox for the first welcome letter (with the password inside).  Make sure it didn’t go into your spam folder.

2.) THAT’S IT!

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-Neville

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment – Part 3

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3:

My favorite method of learning something is jumping into it. I’ll usually start by reading all I can about a subject, then quickly try a real life version of something simple, then something more advanced….an “experiment” so to say.

So I wanted to try an affiliate marketing experiment in order to learn all about this industry. From what I understood, a lot of affiliate marketing had to do with creating effective landing pages and making people want to buy or take action. Basically that means out of 100 visitors to a web page, how many of them can you make buy/signup whatever. Since I run an e-commerce store, this appealed to me.  Perhaps learning some of this affiliate marketing could help me increase the effectiveness of my own business.

For the month of October 2009 I decided to embark on this affiliate marketing experiment in my spare time. I first made a written list of things I wanted to learn from it:

  • Learn why most affiliate marketers don’t go into much detail about their work.
  • Learn more about what all this affiliate marketing stuff is about.
  • Learn to make great and effective landing pages.
  • Learn how to A/B split test landing pages using Google Website Optimizer.
  • Further understand how to optimize paid keywords and conversion rates.

Even if my real life experiment lost money, this list contains some pretty valuable skills that could add much benefit to my own business.  So it was decided, the month of October 2009 I would try an affiliate marketing experiment to see how this all works.

Now to start a real life experiment promoting something……

Go to Part 4

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment – Part 2

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Part 1
Part 2:

….so the first thing I did was research the term “Affiliate Marketing” and printed out all the articles I could find. I read them all and took notes on a plane ride somewhere.

I read the Wikipedia article and a bunch of other search results, and the most basic idea behind Affiliate Marketing is:

  1. Someone is selling a product.
  2. You help promote that product.
  3. When someone buys a product through your recommendation, you get paid a percentage of the sale.

SIMPLE.

I thought about this for a second and realized there are many successful companies that heavily use affiliate marketing in a non-shady way. These include Amazon, eBay and so many others. Amway and other companies also use an affiliate structure. Even car dealerships to a small extent seemed like “affiliates” of their larger companies.

The easiest example I can give of a super-simple affiliate marketing experiment is my books reviews page. If you click one of those book links and buy from Amazon, I get a small portion of the sale. Amazon is willing to do this because I helped drive a sale to their site through my review. If it weren’t for me, they probably wouldn’t have made that sale.

So THAT was affiliate marketing?? Not completely.

A lot of people I met talked about buying ads to promote their affiliate products….this was part of the term “Pay-Per-Click Arbitrage” I heard so much about. Some of the more intelligent people in the internet marketing group I attend made a lot of their money this way. I found out what some of these people do is:

  • Signup for an affiliate program for a product.
  • Buy ads on Google, Yahoo, banner ads etc promoting these products.
  • Clicks get sent directly to the product page or their own webpage promoting the product.
  • Whenever a sale is made from that action, they get a percentage of the sale.

This is a frequently touted method of getting rich quick by many crappy eBooks out there. In essence it makes sense. For Example:

  • If you buy paid clicks from Google costing $0.10/click…..
  • You send all that traffic to a webpage that offers an affiliate product/service/signup…whatever.
  • That service pays you $2 per transaction that succeeds.
  • If 1 out of every ten people completes that offer, that costs you $1.00 at Google.
  • So for every dollar you spend, you make two dollars.
  • So long as your spending is less than your earnings, you’re making money.

The math behind this actually works, and some people legitimately make a lot of money doing this….and that’s why people buying get-rich-quick schemes believe in these methods.

I thought this affiliate marketing world was a good model at its essence, so why was everyone I met in this world always so shady? If these people were making money doing arbitrage, why didn’t they share details?

Just like the bottled water idea or homeless experiment, I decided to find out by simply trying it out….

Go to Part 3

My Affiliate Marketing Experiment – Part 1

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Spending a lot of time online I run across the term “Affiliate Marketing” all the time. I even go to an “internet marketing” event once a month here in Austin to meet other entrepreneurs, but always found some of the people doing affiliate marketing a little perplexing (and sort of shady).

When prying into what they do, they never gave me CLEAR answers. They would always say things like, “I do lead generation” or “performance marketing” or “sell an online product” and other buzzwords I didn’t fully understand. I’d ask, “Ok, give me an example of a product you generate leads for” and they’d state a general industry at most (such as insurance, health or real estate). Some of the people said they do “PPC arbitrage” and that they “promote products” but wouldn’t go much further into detail about their business.

I was never satisfied with these responses and just presumed these people were really shady (which some of them are).

So here I am trying to find out what these people do and they keep skirting around the actual details…WHAT THE HELL?

I can tell them I own a rave store and sell light up stuff online. It’s a pretty straightforward, and they can even see the website for themselves. Why were these people acting so shady? They were obviously hiding something or lying about something.

Many of the people I met in the affiliate marketing world seemed to sell herbal pills online or get rich quick schemes for the masses. Most of the products they were promoting seemed relatively useless once purchased, and most had “interesting” billing plans.

In my mind, I saw “affiliate marketing” as referring to a website that promises to get you rich quick…something like this kind of crap:

(You should be PUNCHED if you even TRY to click that image).

I’ve read many bloggers like John Chow and other guys who make their living from blogging and they frequently talk about affiliate marketing. I kept wondering what exactly it was, especially since they correlate so much of their income to it…..so I decided to do some research and find out…..

Go to Part 2

The Condenser Mic

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For Christmas my brother bought me a Samson C01U Studio Condenser Microphone. That’s basically fancy talk for a high quality microphone I can hookup to my computer:

I always wanted a nice mic but never got around to buying one, and now I realize all the fun things I can do with it.
For example:
  • I can speak like I’m on NPR radio and talk like the Saturday morning classical music announcer. Today we’ll be listening to Concierto Number 5 by Beethoven.
  • I can even talk like God.
Silly stuff aside, I can record written posts into audio, all in a high quality format. I have some expensive software such as Adobe Sound Booth, but the free and open source program Audacity is by far my favorite and easiest to use so far.
I wrote this post simply to have a script to read from. You can now hear the whole thing here:
(or if that doesn’t work, download here).

iPhone Goals = Awesome

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I stopped making monthly goals a while ago because I rarely followed up on them. They always get stuck on a sheet of paper somewhere which I promptly forget about on day 2 of the month.

I wrote my goals for February recently and snapped a pic on my iPhone….then had a brilliant moment where I SET IT AS MY WALLPAPER:

Now every time I look at my phone, guess what I see? Monthly goals staring me in the face waiting to be completed!

2009 In Numbers

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IN 2009 THERE WERE….
——————————-
154,458 Unique visitors to NevBlog according to Google Analytics.

442,307 Unique visitors to NevBlog according to Plesk Stats on my server.

84 Number of posts on NevBlog

5 Days spent homeless.

11,453 Miles put on my car.

87 Gigs of bandwith transferred to HouseOfRave customers.

377,176 Unique visitors to House Of Rave according to Google Analytics.

722,329 Unique visitors to House Of Rave according to Plesk Stats on my server.

$35,244 Amount of money I spent to live.

54 Times I rode the Cal Train

$1,892 Money spent on iPhone service.

1 Time I almost bashed my face in doing back flips on videotape.

Blogger’s Almost Dead (To Me)

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Google officially announced it will be cancelling FTP support for all of Blogger.

You can read about it here.
This blog was started roughly 5 years ago and Blogger seemed to be the easiest blog platform to use at the time (and still is for most users).
However I use a custom-domain version of Blogger where it publishes files on MY server, not Blogger’s….this of course causes much engineering difficulty for them, so they’re pulling the plug.
Kind of sucks, but I completely understand their logic. 0.5% of people on Blogger use FTP support, but it probably drains 25% or more of their engineering resources. That’s just bad business.
Anyhow, this blog has to move somewhere. I could easily pop this whole blog onto Blogger (which offers a lot of very easy to use tools), I can even still use my own domain name…but Blogger isn’t very customizable as open-source platforms.
I asked myself, “If I was going to start this blog TODAY, what platform would I use?”
…the obvious answer is WordPress, so I will use that.

I already use WordPress for all business related blogs because it’s MUCH faster, extremely customizable and has a MASSIVE library of free templates and widgets. I can’t program very well, so customizing templates myself is a wee bit harder than Blogger, but something I’ve in the past been able to do (or pay someone to do).
I’ve many times considered crossing this blog over to WordPress but there wasn’t a real need….so this is actually a fortunate nudge in the right direction!
So pretty soon this blog will cross the blogging platform see to the WordPress side. What do you think Adam?