So I have been doing some initial research on adwords using amazon hunter. So far nothing huge to report except for I've found a way that might prove profitable for some products. This is of course thanks to seeing what other people are doing in amazon hunter.

As we stand now, I'm in the red for my amazon campaigns but I should be hitting some black really soon. No huge numbers to report, but I'm learning quite a bit.

As a generalized statement, I've found that bidding on a product ID's and brands can work if you can get bids low enough. These type of things you want low bids on because it's a lower converting term.

Another really good tip is to use exact and phrase match. This may result in less impressions and such but will increase your CTR and thus lowering bids considerably.

My $10,000 challenge will start November 1st and I hope to be making $10,000 a month via amazon publisher network in just 3 months worth of work. At the end of the third month, I'm going to stop working on my amazon projects and let it ride for 1 month. This is the month that I hope to be making that amount.

If you'd like to join me, please feel free to post your status here, or even ask me about being a guest blogger!

Good luck and I hope to keep everyone updated!

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Hi all,

Just a short introduction. Benjamin from Singapore here, and actually Jonathan gave me permission to do a 'guest blog' post, so here I am. Have been doing the same thing as Jonathan for a few months now, and have recently started to see an explosion in my affiliate commissions as well... Though not on the same level as Jonathan yet. But rest assured I'll try to catch up to you soon

Thought I'd write about something that one might ask if he/she were totally new to all these: How to get started in the CPA game.

This is going to be a rather lengthy post, so do bear with me, as I can ramble on at times.

If you are not willing to spend money to invest in a good home-study course, what you could do, is to read up as much as you can about PPC (pay per click), and how it works. Here's a good place to learn the basics of Adwords. Do take note that Google Adwords is NOT the only place one can advertise, as there is still MSN and Yahoo. Also, you should try to find as much info as you can about how the lead generation industry works, and also about CPA (cost per action) offers. Though its quite hard to find really good free info out there.

Some places you might visit is the Digital Point forums
, and read under the Affiliate Program/Pay Per Click section. Try to take what they say with a pinch of salt though...

An alternative, is to invest in a good home study course. However, there are TONS of such rubbish out there, and it is absolutely critical that you do not pay for overrated crap. The only course I have bought till date, and I think I will ever buy, is Pay Per Click Formula, by Gauher Chaudhry. You can read my review about this product here.

I got his course sometime in mid April, and have never looked back since. Have sinced recouped the cost of the course many many times over.

Is This For Everyone?
I'll be honest: Not everyone is cut off for this. If you do not own a pair of hands, and face a problem with typing, this is not for you, I'm sorry.

If you do not understand English, I'm sorry, this is also not for you.

If you do not fall under the above categories, CONGRATS! You are fully capable of doing this. Only thing you need, is persistance, determination and patience. If you do not have those, go buy them off eBay or something...

What Are The Costs Of This Business?
The startup costs is rather small, compared to brick and mortar businesses.

If you do get the course, it will set you back a couple of hundreds. You will also most likely need your own website(s), and a good hosting plan. Websites generally costs less than $10, and hosting can be as low as $10/mth.

You also do need some credit for your advertising costs, as networks generally payout at the end of the month, but you will need to pay up the costs of your advertising to Yahoo/MSN/Google before your paycheck arrives. So cashflow management is critical!

Once things start picking up, you might also consider registering an LLC., which can be done for low hundreds I believe. You can then write off most stuff as business expenses:

Dinner with friends at a restaurant is a 'brainstorming session' for your upcoming campaign..
Trip to Bahamas is 'research' for consumer traveling behavior for your newest tourist website...

You get the idea

Hope I've given a good enough overview of this entire CPA thing, and what its all about.

*Shameless Pitch*

I too have a blog where I blog about stuff related to CPA marketing. Do visit me there and drop me some comments if you do find the reads interesting.

*/Shameless Pitch*

All the best to everyone,
Benjamin

(P.S. Jon, thanks for letting me post here. Hope you didn't mind my shameless promotion. Lol!)

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Ok. So now you have a great google campaign started. Your Quality score is great, your bids are fair priced. Now what?

The most important thing (in my opinion) to the retaining a great google quality score is click through rate. If you have a crappy click through rate, your campaigns will suffer because of it and your traffic will die down eventually.

Now, some of you may know that google figures out the position of your ad by the cost per click and the click through rate. We can use this information to our advantage against Google's system. I like to call this "coercing the google beast."

So how do we get a high click through rate?
This is a trick I was debating sharing but I decided to release it. You'll notice that the higher your position, the more clicks you get (Higher CTR). Therefore the best way to get high position and low cost is to bid very high at first.

Doing so will give you an amazing click through rate. Now you have some CTR to boost your rankings, you can lower your bids a bit. What... your ad stays up high! Why? Because you have a great CTR.

Continue lower the bids till you achieve a profitable level or your position drops.

I have sometimes bid at a level where I am taking a net loss each day but can get a very high click through rate (A good example is a campaign I just started is getting a 8% CTR). Then I lower it down by nearly half and the position drops just slightly.

Hope that helps.

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I posted about widgetbucks a few days ago, which you can find HERE.

Just an update and some recommendations for those wanting to test it out.

First, I've found that widgetbucks does load pretty slow so be cautious of that.

Next, I tested it on a forum and boy did that bomb big time. If you own a forum, I've actually found doing image only google ads seems to work the best for me. You can see how I do ads on my forums here at one of my forums, MMOCC Forum.

Conclusion: Widgetbucks is best for blogs, product sites, and information sites. Integrating it above the fold is (obviously) the best way to increase revenue and click through rates.

Right now, I'm going to remove it from my forum, but keep it on my other information sites. I wanted to post some screenshots, but it's actually against Widgetbucks terms of service. So I'll just say, it's good for me!

Hope that helps.

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If any of you know anything about SEO for Google, you'll know you need a lot of incoming relevant links. I think this is perhaps the most important thing in an SEO campaign for google. (Yahoo and MSN are a bit different IMO)

I've been testing out how links affect quality score.

For one of my site, I purchased a few links from text link ads. (Get $100 in Free Links Here)

I then purchased some cheap links - I didnt go all out and buy some PR 8 link or anything crazy. Just some simple links to see if they would help.

I then went and purchased a directory submission to 300 directories. You can find these all over forums.digitalpoint.com... Just go with a 5 star rated thread and you'll be fine.

Next, I did some manual link exchanges in Metrolinks.com.

The result? It seemed to help my PPC actually. Although it wasn't dramatic yet, I will keep you updated.

Perhaps what's even more exciting? My site is ranking in about 15 terms that I know convert really well for my site which added on a good amount of free and clear income. ($xxx/day)

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Google seems to remember domains very very well.

I had recently purchased a domain name that was created in 2004. I thought it would be good for my campaign to have a bit of age. What I didnt think about is that google may already have a quality index for this domain.

For about 2 months, I tried everything I could to increase the quality score on this domain, but no matter what keywords I put in, no matter how much I tweaked my landing page, I would always get a POOR Quality score. Doh!!!

So I decided to try a little experiment. I registered a different TLD of the domain name and behold, "Great" quality score. Same keywords, same landing page, same information.

That being said, if you're having trouble in google, just register a new domain name.

Some more google tips coming soon (Since I've been posting so many yahoo tips, I think it's time to even things out)

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When you find a profitable niche, what do you do then?

Well... You go wide of course!!!

Going Wide
Perhaps you're marketing a product / offer that is only open to US Residents. Try finding a similar / identical service that is offered in other countries. This is perhaps the easiest way to expand your income with the least amount of effort!

I recommend thinking about registering the country specific domains for those (Canada = .ca, UK = .co.uk, etc) new offers.

If you cant find any offers in your affiliate networks, then you might be sitting on a potential gold mine. Why? Chances are there are companies that are willing to allow you to promote their offer via a private offer. Search around for the more popular companies and shoot them an email letting them know what kind of volume you do in the US and they will more than likely be willing to offer you something good.

Why is that a gold mine? 3 Reasons.

• Low Competition From Affiliates.
• Results: Lower Bids
• Higher direct payouts (No Affiliate network commissions)

I recently did this for a US niche I have that generates $10,000+ a month for me and I actually got offered a whole direct relationship which could end up doubling my income just like that. Of course all the details have not been worked out, but this is just one example of how you can take a niche and expand horizontally.

Dont spend your time researching new niches when you can first expand out.

A word of caution. Sometimes niches can have some dramatic changes and can leave your campaigns unprofitable. You'll want to expand multiple niches in case this happens.

I remember about 5 months ago, I was running the True offers which paid out $4 per free profile. At the time, they were the only ones offering that large of a payout with that simple of a conversion. Profit margins were great. Then true had to cut the offer due to profitability. Needless to say, I was left with no offers to promote at the time that could profit like true was.

Recently things have picked back up and it's all good.

Just goes to show you that you cant rely on a single niche (and that dating is volatile ;))

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I've been asked (many times) if I could teach someone on a personal level how to be successful with affiliate marketing. The truth is... I cant. Success is really a mindset that you must strive to achieve.

That aside I've come up with some tips that may help you to reach a relative level of success using some common methods of marketing known as pay per click marketing.

The trick with yahoo search marketing is as follows.

• Quality score. Essentially work towards any means of getting a 5/5 quality score. Why? Because when you have such a high QS, terms that would normally cost 5 to 10+ per click, you can get to for QUITE a lot less (IE I am paying 1.25 for a term others are paying 3+ for). The key to quality score is to group your ads tightly (meaning a small group of related keywords) and to have a high click through rate. Find keywords that are not performing well (All ads not on the first page, and all ads with excessive impressions and no clicks) and pause those keywords.
• Coverage. Get a lot of keywords relating to your industry. Use tools like wordze (My review on Wordze Here) to maximize your coverage on yahoo. Be creative. A good example of this would be in the ringtone industry. Sure you could get 100,000 keywords on ringtone related words... OR you could be creative and bid on keywords like bands / artists, songs, phone models... ya know, that thing people actually are searching for. I think it was Shoemoney who said once that one of his most successful keywords for ringtones was "AOL." Think about the demographic... It works and works well.
• Lastly, you'll need the inability to give up. Just dont give up till you reach your goal. I always test a campaign, and then set a personal goal for myself. "For this campaign I want to hit $200 dollars per day in sales," for example. Thinking like this will drive you to try new methods, cut unneeded costs, and ultimately "become successful!"

Now, this is a very very short list and wont guarantee that you'll be successful tomorrow. Since you're an internet marketer, the hinge of your success is thinking creatively.

I hope this helps someone.

For more information on winning with yahoo campaigns, please view these two posts.

How to win with YSM
How to win with YSM 2.0

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Amazon is one of those sites I had never really thought about promoting using the "publisher" network they offer. I have successfully run many small offers through it for very niche sites but never thought to apply it to other products and sales.

After seeing the success of some other internet marketers using amazon, I think it'll be my next big experiment.

What I'm going to do is run a huge amazon blitz. I want to make as much as I can from amazon in just 3 months of hard work. At the end of the 3 month period, my goal is to have added an additional $10,000 profit per month to my business. I will be using multiple marketing techniques including (but not limited to), pay per click, website advertising, contextual advertising, and other methods I feel I have a firm grasp on.

I will be documenting each step with general / broad updates as to my current sales, profit margins, what's worked well and what has not worked.

(Feel free to subscribe to my blog to get the updates to your email)

As an additional update, I've been working on a parallel offer for a niche I am in that could potentially double my current sales for that niche. After discovering this, I am putting my sales goal of $50,000 per month at the end of 6 months. 12 Months my sales goal is $83,333.00 per month. I'm going to be adding a little "graph" diagram on the side so you can monitor my progress.

Wish me luck.

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Well, it seems we have a new advertisement we can put on our sites to make an easy buck again. When Yahoo Publisher Network first came out, I put it up on my arcade sites and I was making an easy $1+ per click!!! I'd spend practically nothing in google adwords and I'd make a TON in Yahoo. Those were the good old days.

It seems there may be a new publisher out that might bring a arbitrage craze 2.0. :: Dramatic Pause :: Widget bucks.

Boasting a massive $7.00+ dollar eCPM for ads, that is unheard of. This kind of payouts are sure to go away after it get's abused like crazy from people like me who will send cheap traffic to every site we have and gain a huge return from this sort of payout.

I'll be sure to post back with more results. Get in while the payouts are hottttt.

UPDATE: Seems to be doing great. I'm seeing about 0.40 cents per click with around a 2.1% CTR which when broken down to earnings per 1000 impressions is quite good. I'll update with screenshots soon.

UPDATE 2: So I've moved my ad placement around a bit and it made my CTR go to about 9%. Thing is now I get paid about 0.21 cents per click which is still good. I'm sending cheap banner traffic and in 1 day made the full return. Lol. Gotta love it.

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