PPC Mom

I have had a couple of people request I post some further information on ppc coach, so I wanted to give my thoughts. First off, I joined May 28th under a friend of mine. He loved it, and I was struggling with learning ppc.

The first month was horrible. I don’t know how else to explain it. The site is less than user friendly. While the forums are set up, and you can ask anything you want it can be hard for a newbie to the forum (not a newbie to IM) to get around. Meaning, even though I have done IM for a couple of years almost now, it was hard to find the information I needed.

Coach says that he has everything mapped out for you, but I disagree a little bit. Each month for the first 3 months there are 2 strategies of making money with ppc available. There are also around 4 scripts, and lots of tools available as well. However each of the months only comes with a small summary of information on how to do the month. That can be very difficult to people who have no idea. This is where it gets sticky.

Each of the strategies has its own forum, so you are basically going to read the whole forum to know what to do. That can take some time. Along with that there are videos for the tools and scripts, but putting all the pieces together is stressful and time consuming.

However, I have been there since May 28th, so there must be a reason, correct? Well, of course there is. The first month is difficult. It can be very hard to follow the forums and coach and videos and well, Everything. But… the community is a huge help. Like I said you can ask anything and you will almost always get a response from Coach himself. That is impressive to say considering he has 500 plus students. You can send him private messages and he will get back to you, but remember he has the same 24 hours a day we all do and 500 students so it takes some time and he won’t always remember your last pm, so leave it all threaded for his sake.

On top of this, it seems that anyone who has had any success here is more than glad to give back. Instant message names are shared, emails, etc, all willingly. They all just are so helpful and you won’t get any flack for being a newbie and asking what might seem is a dumb question. In fact Coach has on the site “the only dumb question is the one not answered”.

After the first month or so, I picked things up and got moving, doing the first months’ method and getting some success for myself. I started referring people and still pm Coach or Harry (if you join you will see who this is, absolutely awesome, smart guy) and Coach v.2 when I have trouble and I do get great answers.

Another thing I really like about ppc-coach is the tracking script. Now it was the most difficult thing I have ever worked with at first because I could not understand it. But now that it is working and you can get it to work, dont worry, lots of help for this too, it is the best tool I have for ppc. I have tried Prosper and liked it, but it was way more time consuming to work with. I didnt like having to enter all of my ad stuff there and keywords, and do that all on adwords as well.

Coach’s tracker works with subids and it tracks everything down to the keyword and cost of the ads so you can figure out your ROI, and that is the most important number, correct. Not to mention this is all installed on your own site so no one will be able to see your information, pretty great huh? Oh, and you dont have to worry about installing your snippet code into the merchant thank you page either, because you will see which subid has an actual conversion and which doesnt.

These are all the things I think you have to know when you go into ppc coach. It can be hard at first so do your best to network with others and get a good team of people who will help you by answering your questions. Read and watch everything and ask questions until you get the answers.

You will learn a lot from this site, there is no doubt about that. You will learn about the glitches, slaps and oddities google throws at you. You will learn about dealing with cpa and affiliate networks and you will learn about doing your own webpages and all about landing pages and the elements needed to make google happy.

Now, why do I also want to join PPC Classroom 2.0?

Amit Mehta is one of my favorite bloggers on this whole super affiliate marketing thing. He has a great out look on just making campaigns for search and making them last, and turning each niche into a business. From everything I have seen of his work he teaches a great deal about keywords, research, landing pages, etc, for setting up campaigns and rolling with the product you have chosen. While I think you can learn a lot at ppc coach I havent picked up a great information about just choosing a product I want to create and promoting ppc style.

I really like all the strategies that coach offers on his site and like he has said before there is a method to his maddness when he gives a certain strategy each month. But I want to learn Amit’s way of doing things which will be yet another strategy to add to my toolbox. Not to mention all the tools that will be offered on ppc classroom v2 as well. So yes, I will continue my membership with coach and I recommend anyone interested in ppc go there to learn. Not because Im success, not because Im a super affiliate, because Im still learning and that is what this blog is, me learning and my journey with ppc marketing. But I think if you stick out the first month on ppc coach you will be able to find enough success to keep your own journey going.

And yes, I am joining ppc classroom v2. I love the videos and I think it will be greatly worth my time.

Well, even though I had some success with ppc coach, I have started doing a couple other testing projects in ppc. I learned a lot from ppc coach, and I wanted to go to the level of search campaign for landing pages and sites all for affiliate purposes but giving the visitors a lot of information if they choose to read it on my site.

Anyways, I have started doing the keyword research. To get started I have made a huge list. But then all this ppc classroom stuff has come up and Im not sure what to do. If you read what Amit has posted on his blog under keyword research (the category) you will see he talks about problem keywords and going wide before going deep. The breadth of the list instead of the depth.

Im not sure if I will hear from anyone on this, but I wanted to vent my frustration. Until I figure this out I will stick with my month one methods that work. Oh, and I will be joining ppc classroom with Amit as soon as it launches. I love his blog, there is so much free information there.

I finally finished watching the video of ppc classroom v.2 it is 40 minutes long. Can you believe that? It was pretty great though. And I took notes up until the last 8 minutes (which I did watch) so that I can share what is revealed at different times through out the video. You should absolutely watch this video though. It is an interview of one of the best Super Affiliates who believes in building this whole affiliate marketing thing into one long term business plan. How great is that? Building campaigns that will last, not just one short campaign after another, after another.

To get to the point though, here is what I got in notes:

95% of Amits business is in 3 niches. He does 2-3 niches per year. That’t it. When he started out he did 15 campaigns before his 16th which was a success, thats around 5% success. He now has about 80% success from his campaigns. Most affiliates don’t have that high a rate for their campaign success. How he does it, is with a lot of research. He researches everything, the niche, the products, the keywords, etc. He says that:

Every Failure Brings You Closer to Success

It costs about $50-$100 to test an affiliate offer nowadays.

Minute 7- Research

He talks to his AM to get information on what the top affiliates are doing volume wise, paid search wise and to see when the offer started, along with all the numbers he can get from the AM to use in his research of the offer. If you don’t have an AM who will help you with this, keep looking for someone who will, they exist and you can find them.

He will gage the volume for the offer by typing in non obvious words into google and keyword tools to see how many people are looking for the product. He talks largely about using lateral keywords which reminded me of the post on his site about Deep and Wide Keyword Research. He also gives an example of what he means by this in the video.

Another part of the research is to see how many affiliates are promoting the offer. This is easy to do with Clickbank as it is part of the gravity number, but other places you might have to ask.

Minute 11:30- Niche Research Begins

On Cj.com you can find good offers by seeing the 1-5 bars indicating the network earnings.

On forums and masterminds you can learn about the hot niches that others are working in. This is one of his biggest indicators into what is HOT affiliate wise. He also talks about networking and how it is just as big in affiliate marketing as it is in any other business. This part in particular he talks about a few hot niches by naming them.

You will also learn here that in the beginning he did a lot of research to see what was hot as any new person would almost have to do.

KNOW THE HOT NICHES

Another way to find out what is hot is to ask your AM yet again. Amit talks about this being a HUGE help in affiliate marketing and that it is a good idea to foster a good relationship with your AM in order to become successful.

Minute 15- Landing Pages Information

Right around 15 minutes he talks about landing pages and using review sites to compare different affiliate products. Such as an affiliate review site about Acai berry because there are several of these offers. He talks about the keywords you use with sites like this, compared to keywords you should use when you are promoting a site just about 1 offer. This is really great information and you should definitely tap into this because it is very telling about keywords and the offers we can use to make sales.

Minute 18- More about Keywords

Here he talks about the mindset of the visitor, again and still, about the keywords we use, and about going lateral with keyword research.

Minute 20- Landing Pages

He and his business use the same kind of formats for all of the landing pages he uses. However each one is different based on images, fonts, colors, etc, according to the niche. He says that short pages made to get people to take action are the best Landing pages.

Simple & Easy To Understand (landing pages) Convert Best

You should also always have the most important elements above the fold, such as your images, call to action, etc.

Minute 22:30 Important Tip

This is where Amit tells us we have to check all of our landing pages in different browser resolutions. The thing being you want certain things to be above the fold, like the headline, the call to action button, etc. Here might be a good point to say use a tool to check out the site looks is all different browsers too, just to be sure everyone is seeing it the same way. This tool should work browsershots.org/

Minute 25- When its a dud…

Basically Amit says you can figure out something is a dud after hundreds of clicks and testing or no traffic. Actually the information about hundreds of clicks is on his website superaffiliatemarketing.com where he talks about mistakes people make, starting out.

Minute 26:30- Google Accounts

It takes up to 4 months for Google to give you an account Quality Score. With his course though he is going to show us how to make that time smaller.

Minute 28- Clickbank

Here Amit discusses why it is good to get started with Clickbank for affiliate marketing. You dont have to apply to get started, it is a reliable network and digital products convert well.

After this I wasnt taking notes, I didnt realize until today I was going to post, so I didnt take notes through the whole thing. So this should get you to at least minute 30. Go watch the rest here:

www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/01/video-interview-2-top-questions-answered/

If you are looking for the free report, you can find it here:

3 ppc mistakes- www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/03/surprise-bonus-report/

If you want to see the questions that will be in video 3, check here:

www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/06/question-for-interview-3/

I’m so excited about joining ppc classroom when it opens. It is suppose to be open the 18th, it was the 14th, but oh well. I know these guys have been working on this for quite some time because I contacted Amit about coaching a few months ago and he mentioned it. Anyways, the second video is now open, and I got one of the first comments.

www.ppcclassroom.com/blog/2008/10/01/video-interview-2-top-questions-answered/

Once, I finish watching I will write more about it.

Since November 2003 I have been learning and working on making money online. Its been quite the journey and though I’ve spent most of this year in PPC I want to share some other ways I have found to make money online.

Working online- Basically this is just working for companies online. You can find a lot of information by checking out the boards at www.wahm.com The ladies there have a lot of knowledge. Mostly though you are going to find phone jobs, if you can keep the kids quiet or get a sitter you can do the work at home. You will be able to schedule your own hours the last I checked. I worked with a few of these companies myself and found west to be the best for me. Check out www.workathomeagent.com if you are interested.

Freelancing- In December of 2006 I found a forum called Warrior Forum www.warriorforum.com through that site I have learned a lot and met a ton of people that I still chat with almost 2 years later. I still visit the forum but not as often as I did because I am so busy. Its a good place to start. This is where I started doing freelance as a ghostwriter. It helped pay the bills and whenever we needed instant money (from Paypal debit card) I could run a WSO (warrior special offer) to write articles from $5-$7, and ebook pages for $7-$9. You have to stay on top of your orders though, but like I said, it helps pay the bills while learning Internet marketing. If you have any other skills webmasters can use the warrior forum is the place to find buyers.

Product Creation- You can search online and find a problem that people are having and then write an ebook to give them the answer. If you check out www.theuniversitykid.com you can read a lot about product creation, if you can dominate in a niche and have some money for investing in advertising of your new product you should be able to make decent money. In fact some internet marketers swear this is the best way to make money online and the most profitable.

Blogging- They say that most bloggers will fail, but I don’t know exactly what “they” consider failing. A blog can be up and running and making money within days if done right. You have to have a way of writing that gets people to understand and want to purchase through your links. If you can do that, write about something you are passionate about. Keep the content short and unique and add affiliate links. After you get a few hundred unique visitors a day add adsense. After a couple of months you can sell the whole thing on Sitepoint www.sitepoint.com for up to 10x the monthly profit. There are a lot of ways to get traffic, but I have found commenting on other blogs to be really great, along with forum sigs.

PPC- For this one you need some money saved up to get started. Not too much though, I would say $250 at the least. To get started you absolutely have to join ppc-coach. There is no other place like it online. And as a bonus if you join through me I will personally help you get started. It can be a bit confusing when you first join to get all the scripts and the first couple of methods going so a little hand holding should help you profit enough to move on to bigger and better things, which of course are all part of ppc-coach.

Article Marketing- More commonly known as bum marketing (www.bummarketingmethod.com) this is writing articles to send traffic to your sites. You can start with blogs and then refer the article readers to your affiliate links. Some people do really well with this. The only problem is that recently ezinearticles.com is taking their sweet time reviewing articles causing a lot of frustration with this method. I am looking at other ways to get past this and still get a lot of traffic to your sites. I would recommend though starting to build a list in your niche through the article marketing method, that way you collect leads and can keep them as your life long customers.

There are other ways to make money online and lots of other paid forums that I have been a part of. I will write more about them at another time, but hopefully this helps get someone started. Good luck.

Have you ever noticed how much easier life gets, with the more tools you add to your arsenal? I know mine is much easier. With that in mind I wanted to share a few things.

First is a plugin I got yesterday. It is the drop down admin menus for 2.6 wordpress. Now, I keep doing blogs because I love working with wordpress, and because I want people to see who I am when I leave comments places. Since wp went to 2.5 I lost my favorite admin drop down menu and it took forever to get someplace in the admin area because you had to wait for multiple pages to load. So, if you have a blog, go get this:

www.studiograsshopper.ch/wordpress-plugins/admin-drop-down-menus-plugin/

Now, in addition to this I have an extension to Firefox called scrapbook. This is where I paste links and things like that so I can get back to them. Its a note taking extension that saves all your notes as soon as you are done writing them. You don’t have to push save or anything and you can add webpages, folders, and notes. This is very useful if you ever want to look at a list of things at the same time you are looking at a website.

amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/

Last, but not least, my newest favorite tool is Evernote. I LOVE this thing. With evernote you can take notes on your computer, and they save to the web, you can access them from everywhere. If you love a post on a website you can easily drag the icon to the website from your tab bar in firefox to the icon for Evernote and it saves the page. All of my favorite blog posts are in there and it is private when your notes are saved to the Internet, so you aren’t republishing someone elses work or anything. I just love this, and it is free, so check it out.

www.evernote.com/

I spend a lot of time working on campaigns, so that is why I dont update often. In fact one of the reasons I write here is so that when I comment on other sites people will have some idea of who the heck I am. It isnt so much to brag if I do get success here and there, as Im certainly not successful to the point I want to be. Anyhow. I just want to say what Im doing.

Im still in PPC Coach and Im on month 4. Coach has another program that I have started as well and it seems promising. I have actually hired a VA to help me with both of the programs so that I can get more done with the time I do have.

I am going to focus mostly on PPC Coach for the next couple of weeks. I havent done anything in the new month 1, or any other month since I have joined. Basically if you get started, for the first 3 months you can learn 2 new techniques on each month. Thats like an added bonus.

On top of that I am going to stick with using Uber Camp. I really like Paul www.uberaffiliate.com, he and Jonathan volk are some of my favorite Super affiliates. Well thats about it. If you decide to use any of my links to join ppc coach, let me know and I will help you get started in month 1.

This is the keyword tool from Howie Jacobson that I have joined. Check out the sales page and come back to ask me questions if you want.

The Ad Tool

Last week on Amazon I found Adwords For Dummies by Howie Jacobson. I haven’t ever really gotten a “dummies” book before, basically because they don’t have crap for pictures and its all black and white. I like color, lol. Plus, isn’t the title a little insulting?

Anyways, on Amazon you get the book for like $16, and with the book you get a $25 credit for adwords (new accounts only). So, yes you basically get paid $9 to get the book. Pretty good so far, right?

I have the book (with free shipping) and it took less than a week to get it. I dove right in. I think I am falling in love with “dummies” books, because there is so much in this one. First off I never heard of Howie before, but I like him now and I have registered on his site for the free extra stuff for the book. I have also signed up to use his keyword tool that he talks about in the book.

From what I see it gets keyword info from Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker and the free Google Tool. There are lots of great features of it, and I will post an in depth review soon, but I love it so far, and its only $19.95 a month, so how could I go wrong?

Anyways back to the book. My favorite parts so far are the index (where he puts all the links he references in the book, and obviously I can find anything I need to), and the tens parts in the back of the book where he talks about mistakes people make with PPC.

I can tell this guy knows what he is talking about, he references Perry Marshall a lot in the book and we know he is a top notch guy with PPC. Oh, and I got this book so when I take the Adwords test I have a book in hand to help me.. Can I do that? I don’t know, but its a great book, and Adwords is paying you to try it.

Just a recap of what I have gone through since I started doing PPC in June. Through PPC coach, I launched over 40 campaigns in month 1 before a friend helped me with my topics and I got a winner. From that I have made about 3k total. I already got slapped by Google too. I have learned a lot with them already. But luckily I havent lost much money there. I just want to say the 3k is my net, I dont see much point in posting a gross when it could mean several different numbers to me in the end. I also realize that the 3k is a very small number to most ppc marketers and thats fine with me, this site is about my journey to success in ppc. I have to start somewhere.

The main thing I did there was learned that any time you change anything I seemed to get reviewed. Thats if I changed my billing information, on top of that if I changed domains without getting slapped, or moved a campaign from one account to another. I did park a domain at a slapped domain to see if I could get past the slap like that, they caught on in less than a day. So, my advice there is, dont do it. But I had to try, I figured it wouldnt work but on the off chance it did it would have saved time.

Just buy another domain and do what you have to do to switch it all over. Though I have read it is better to just fix your domain it will take longer. The new book Im reading about adwords says to get a new domain and fix the campaign so that it wont get slapped. There are a lot of different ways you can do this, but mostly you want the site to look legit. To do that make sure you have your about page, contact information, privacy and terms pages as well.

I will be making more posts soon about the different memberships I am on, that add to my ppc journey.