ScottMW.com

Just some quick updates on my progress to the $5000/mo goal. Recently, a friend of mine told me about the wonders of ad segmentation and how it would improve CTR as well as targeted traffic. For those of you who aren’t aware of what segmentation is, you can either Google it or look at DirectoryVault Chad’s post on the subject here. He doesn’t go into detail, but you’ll get a better grasp on what it’s all about.

Essentially, what you do is break lots of general keywords that match your particular destination page and break them up into very targeted keyword groups that match specific pages on the destination link.

So that’s great and it’s a beautiful concept, except for a novice to advertising, this can be more difficult than it seems. This last week was my trial in segmentation, and to be honest with you, I failed miserably. For three of the seven days, I spent $150/day with next to no returns. This was because I paused my successful campaigns to segment them into several smaller groups, and in doing so I got a ton more clicks and for some reason, way less sales. I will say this — most of the money was going to an industry that is heavily saturated and gets tons of traffic, but that doesn’t account for the other campaigns which were usually more successful.

In fact, if I showed you my current ClickBank screen shot, you would be depressed for me because I lost my momentum I had going before. Luckily, I saved my campaigns that were bringing me success and I enabled those again a couple of hours ago. I have a new strategy now that won’t cost so much, and it might save you a ton as well. In short, it’s:

DON’T BE LAZY.

Yeah, that’s right– I said it. On my previously successful campaigns, I was so lazy upon finding something that worked that I didn’t want to actually research into the success, magical as it seemed. Now, knowing I was so close to my goal before and knowing how easily it was removed from grasp, I have done several things to ensure future success:

1. I have reduced campaigns down to the way they were when success was happening
2. I am now using software I am developing for public release to make affiliate landing pages easier to manage
3. I am using that same software to track keywords from click to payment, thus maximizing keyword efficiency
4. Each time I start a new campaign, it will be reasonably capped as to avoid loss on ROI
5. I will avoid saturated markets as much as possible and focus on niches

This starts … now! I will keep you updated on my progress as I go along, as I know a few people are keeping track.

Wish me luck!

This is a continuation of part III of the ClickBank Experiment.

Good things are happening in the world of ClickBank!

First off, if you’ll take the time to click on my ClickBank earnings as of 2/14/2007 @ 10:00pm (thumbnail to the left), you will notice I had my biggest sales day yesterday at $148.34! Woohoo! Not only did I break $100 for a couple days in a row there, I also technically broke $150 because I also had a nice $5.00 with AdSense (totaling $153.34). So double woot to that!

You’ll notice a few zero days (days where I made $0 on ClickBank) and these are days when either A.) the market was fluctuating (out of my control) or B.) I was messing with my bid prices on keywords. So don’t lose hope if you’re just starting out with ClickBank. There is steady money to be made in this, despite actual low days (like today – a market fluctuation).

Now as I’ve been talking about my ‘Experiment’ a lot on DigitalPoint forums in the ClickBank area (I’ll talk about that in a minute), I’ve been asked a lot of excellent questions. One question everyone probably wants to know when you have a good day like $153 is – how much did you spend to make that much? My advertising budget came out to about $73, which might depress you until you think- that’s a profit of $80 for something that runs essentially on auto pilot while you’re gone.

Also, that advertising budget is covering all of my advertising expenses as I am also testing additional campaigns that might turn out to be profitable. When they aren’t profitable, and they aren’t most of the time, then they eat up the profit! But, in the end, it’s more than worth it because you’ll have paid to find 100 working products out of 1,000 that generate you income on a daily basis.

This is also known as passive income, and it’s a beautiful thing. I can be at school or another job and be making the same or more money while I’m away. Oh yeah, and what happens when I’m on vacation? Money keeps rolling in. What happens when I’m in the hospital? The checks keep coming. As long as someone is there to deposit your checks into the bank, your income is going to be generated like interest in a bank account — 24×7.

Anyway, there has been much buzz about my experiment on DigitalPoint. Just check out this thread I started when I was trying to make my first sale with ClickBank. The thread doesn’t only contain my testimony, but also the advice from some experts in the field. You’ll notice that a nice chap that goes by Telmari contributes a lot on there. If you’re starting out on ClickBank, or even if you want some new pointers, I definitely recommend checking this thread out.

As I’ve reached one of my main goals (breaking $100), as well as a sub goal to that end (breaking $150), my next goal is obviously to break $200 in a day. So when that happens, you should be expecting another post. Let’s hope it doesn’t take too long.

That’s it for now. Thanks!

Today (now yesterday) was an exciting day for me! I’m pretty stoked. As you can see from the image (left, click to enlarge), today was my best day on ClickBank ever at $122.72.

Previously, I’d set a goal to reach $100/day by the end of this month but I felt like taking a few risks yesterday, and I managed to accomplish it over night. My next goal, after I test the $100/day goal for a few days is to get to $200/day. In fact, here are my adjusted goals in sequence:

• Reach $100/day by 02/05/2007
• Reach $200/day by 02/15/2007
• Reach $400/day by 03/01/2007

Oh yeah, baby.

As you can see, I’m no longer being moderate with my campaigns. I’m moving into aggressive mode, because I’ve developed a crazy method with a friend of mine to optimize the campaigns for the products we sell. We have definitely found a formula for success. As with any business, the goal is to maximize profit while minimizing cost and we’ve figured out an awesome way of doing that.Unfortunately, I can’t give out this information but I will say it has to do with keyword optimization. In fact, the information we’ve learned is so priceless that we will begin marketing it in the not-too-distant future after we’ve done plenty of testing and make sure the system works like a formula should.

I don’t know whether it’s been luck that I’ve been so successful or if it’s the fact that I had related knowledge entering into the business, but I do know that I am unbelievably thankful that all of this work is finally paying off and by the end of this year, I could very well be on my way to being a very rich kid. I won’t tempt fate too much, but I will say that the future is looking bright ahead.

Aside from all the sunshine and butterflies gobbledegook, I have been working tirelessly in my spare time to optimize and narrow down the right keywords for each campaign. I’ve been doing tons of research on the topics I’ve chosen, and although I am finding loads and loads of information, it’s very draining.

Also, as of late I’ve been receiving a lot of requests for help and advice from newbies who want to know how they should enter into the ClickBank business. I would like to say to all those interested in receiving advice from me that I am very aware of the fact that I am new in the business! I haven’t even been doing this stuff for a month yet, so I haven’t quite settled into any position of “expert” or even “moderate.” I would still call myself a novice. Perhaps when I get to the “moderate” level, I will start dolling out advice but for now, all I can do is help people by giving them simple advice and tools I’ve found to be useful along the way.

Advice

My advice to anyone who wants to start out is to do research and LOTS of it.

• Forums – Search the forums (like DigitalPoint and Webmaster World) for hints on what other people are campaigning for and how they’re optimizing their campaigns for more sales per click.
• Ads – There is a ton of information I’m finding online for how to phrase ads to get more clicks. Be careful though, don’t focus entirely on getting more clicks in general. Instead, focus on getting more “interested” clicks, therefore increasing sales.
• Keywords – Also, I won’t go into too much detail here, but think outside the box when it comes to keywords. Don’t gun for the ones everyone else is using unless they bring you a high ROI. I recommend going with the fishing net theory on this one– use a ton of related keywords and figure out which ads work best for you.
• Math – Use math to your advantage. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about people losing money because they don’t do the right math when making ad campaigns. If your product brings you $25 per sale and it takes you 100 clicks to make a sale, do NOT spend more than $0.25 per click. If you bid $0.31/click and you make a sale on your 100th click, you may have gained a sale but you lost $6 in the process. However, if you haven’t had ANY sales, you may want to increase your cost per click to increase your click through ratio as well as figure out how many clicks it takes to make a sale in the first place. Only then can you accurately gauge how many clicks it takes to make a sale.

Tools

What would we be without tools? Monkeys!

• Google AdWords Keywold Tool – Use this to generate tons of relevant keywords for your ads. If you haven’t found this one yet, you aren’t in the loop and it’s a good sign you need to do more research. In addition to generating keywords, you can also use this tool to accurately predict how much you will have to pay per click for a keyword. Priceless, really.
• Google AdWords Editor – Software for Windows or Mac that allows you to manage your AdWords campaigns/ads from a program that runs on your desktop. This is excellent if you don’t want to go through the trouble of logging in or dealing with a web browser.
• Overture Keyword Selector Tool – Use this tool to get a good idea of which keywords will bring you more hits than others and in parallel, figure out which ones will cost you more!

But of course, don’t stop there. There are tons of tools available to you if you just SEARCH for them. Google is at your service!

For now, I am off to go work on making more money. Good luck on your own business, and wish me luck as well!

Thanks,
Scott

Man, is my head spinning. I’ve got a lot going on these days! Not only do I have my work to deal with, but now I’m working full-time on affiliate marketing, as well as trying to manage all of my other crazy ideas. It’s hard work, but someone’s got to do it.

For instance, I was reading this post in John Chow’s blog and got inspired to post my not-amazing-but-not-shabby-either Agloco Referral status (left image, click to enlarge). Using the Referral Earnings calculator, I determined that if each of the 41 referrals browses at least an hour using the Agloco toolbar when it comes out, I should receive a nice $7,000 check each month. I’m betting it will be more like $7, if anything but only because I don’t trust marketing gimmicks.

By the way, if you want to jump on the Agloco boat before it sets sail, click here!

Aside from that, I’ve been spending a lot of my free time building my ClickBank stats. This doesn’t qualify as a post for the ClickBank experiment, but I would like to give a nice little update on my stats thus far in order to catalog my journey.

So here is a screen shot of my earnings over the last 15 days. As you can see, it’s starting to become much more consistent. And the best part is that as I’ve started to increase spending, I’m getting better returns on the average.

This whole thing is a learning experience, because as I see more and more success with online marketing, the more I want to do it. I mean, I’m 18 days into this thing and I’m already doing reasonably well. When I say “learning experience” I’m referring to the education that I am paying for in advertising dollars.

Unfortunately, all of the ClickBank money I’m accruing on a daily basis isn’t 100% profit. To be honest, it’s around 40% profit on the average.

That’s not horrible though. In fact, I’ve learned it’s an excellent average! So excellent, in fact, that it has no where to go but down. I’ve accounted for this though, because I am starting new advertising campaigns every day and chances are, most of them will only eat up my profits and send me into the red for a while. I have my reasons for allowing this.

Oh, and I just took advantage of a nice $95 in free advertising money from Microsoft adCenter by using this ad (valid until 2/15/2007). Now I can get a few free purchases to increase my profit margin.

In other news, I spent all last night redesigning my file sharing website to have a fresh, clean look. If you want to take a look at it, just click the image (left) and it should take you there.

Not to mention, if you want fantastic free file hosting, you should definitely check it out.

The coolest part about the newest design is that I’ve incorporated a random ad display. Ads randomly switch between Azoogle ads and AdSense ads of the 300×250 flavor. This helps to eliminate the effect that static content seems to have on the eye, as my Azoogle Affiliate Manager was telling me earlier today.

As soon as I have another breakthrough in ClickBank earnings, I will write another ClickBank Experiment post. Until then, I am going to work my ass off to increase sales!

Here’s to not being bored!

- Scott

Just thought I’d clue you guys in. You can get full licensed copies of Windows Vista for much cheaper if you go the OEM route. OEM stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer and typically, they’re used for installations on new machines before they’re sold to customers.

These vendors are allowed to sell the actual OEM software, which comes at a much discounted price. For example, if you were to buy Windows Vista Ultimate edition, you would pay anywhere from $349-429.00 to get the full package; however, if you were to purchase the OEM version, you would spend roughly $205. No kidding.

For Vista Business edition, you would normally spend around $300 — the OEM version is in the neighborhood of $150. Similarly, for Vista Home Premium you’d normally spend $235 on average, while the OEM version would only run you only $121.

You can take a look at all of the cheapest OEM deals I could find by clicking on the link below. The Vista deals are at the bottom of the page.

Microsoft Windows OEM Packages from ComputersWorth