Hello people, it has been a long time since I wrote my last post, the college was consuming me… So how are you guys? While I was offline, I kept reading your comments and reading other people’s blogs, so  I hope you didn’t feel abandoned . Also I was exploring other kind of businesses which I will be talking about soon.

My incomes dropped… but not so much

So let’s talk about my incomes! I noted that many people take a look at my reports. So this months of recession people started cutting their expenses – as you know – and that included banners and text links from my blog, which means that my incomes became lower.

I kept earning money from banner subscriptions, but my ppc campaigns dropped like %50! So I needed to find other ways to make money to avoid all those cuts.

Someone asked me about my earnings of Text Links Ads, and I’m glad you asked because I think I’m gonna quit. I was earning like $25 with TLA, but Google was (and still doing) digging my grave… In the latest months my blog dropped from PR2 (which was low enough) to 1, and then to a big zero. So I think I’m gonna quit that and focus more on sales of banners…

What I have been doing

Aside my private sales, I also play with affiliate marketing and web design. Recently I sold a blog (www.bigghealth.com if you are interested on my work) and that gave me a boost on my incomes, fortunately. Also I have been dealing with pay per lead campaigns, also known as CPA campaigns (cost per action).

I want to make a couple of articles related with alternatives besides Google Adwords for advertising, i.e. facebook ads,  MSN & Yahoo advertising and others…

I want to ask you a favor

Yes, you heard it. If you have any experience with advertising and PPC, I would like to know it. So you can drop me a comment here or send me an email.

PS: Especially I’m looking for information about Facebook Ads

If you have never done a Pay Per Click Campaign before, it can be very daunting.  Sometimes the risk factor turns you off before you even think about creating your first Adwords campaign.

Even if you have been burnt before, here I’m going to present you a list of 8 simple and systematic steps that should put you on the right track to creating successful pay per click campaign after successful pay per click campaign.

1. Choose a Market: Go to popular affiliate program sites like Motive Interactive or Ads4Dough and find out what the most popular offers and affiliate products are.  You need to choose a market that is proven and has lots of competition, as then you know that there is money being made in that niche.
2. Choose the Keywords to use for your campaign:  Once you have chosen a market, think about four or five search terms that you would enter into a search engine if you wanted to find out more about this market, just like if you were a customer looking for something that fits your necessities.  Make a note of these keywords.
3. Compile these keywords into a list:  Take the keywords researched in the previous step and enter them into the free Wordtracker or Google Keyword tools.  Copy and cut the lists of keywords that this tools generate into a Notepad and process them through another free tool like  Good Keywords to get rid of any duplicates.  Now you have a list that you will use in step 6, so save it and put it to one side.
4. Choose what affiliate products you would like to promote: Using the first five original keywords you thought of in step 2, type them into Spyfu.com and study the sponsored ads it brings up for those keywords.  You want to see which affiliate products are being promoted and which are most popular, so you can make a decision as to what affiliate program to promote based on your findings.
5. Choose what kind Pay Per click campaign you are going to run:  After you have determined what the most popular affiliate is, have a look how the pay per click advertisers are promoting their link – is the link directed to a landing page like a blog, or review page, or is it a direct link to the affiliate product?  You will want to try and differentiate yourself from the other advertisers in your selected market.
6. Break down your keyword list into groups of related keywords:  Take your list of keywords from step 3 and break it into groups of 5 to 15 related keywords, ready to enter into your Google Adwords account.
7. Create your Google Adwords account and start testing:  Open your Google Adwords account and enter your keyword groups, which personally I do with the Adwords Editor to make the process faster. Take the plunge and set up an amount per day that you are comfortable with spending.
8. After a week or so run a Google Adwords Search Query Report: The search query report will show you exactly what people have typed into Google for your ad to appear to them.  This will help you refine your keywords and chose the best ones to continue on with your campaign.

This is a good strategy for creating your first Adwords campaign and once you have completed the steps, it is a formula you can refer back to and create many more successful pay per click campaigns.

To make this process even simpler, I do all of this with the help of Affiliate Espionage. It is a simple but powerful plugin for Firefox which exposes profitable PPC campaigns with ease. Check out what you can do with it, 100% recommended!

Lastly I noted that many people who started following me on twitter is an affiliate, many of them has a customized background with the product they promote and when I started following them back they sent me a message (automatically with TweetLater for example) inviting me to check out their website.

After checking a couple of them, I noted that some of them were using static pages whilst others were using dynamic pages to promote a product, what do you thing is best?

Static Pages

Static pages are those that ends with .html, .htm (and similar) and they need to be designed from scratch (at least you want to buy a template). This kind of pages tends to load pretty fast due to their simplicity in the design.

This kind of pages work very well because you can practically create one of them very fast, much more than if you want to set a page with wordpress for example. The bad thing is when you want to update the content because you don’t have an admin panel or something similar than a CMS can provide.

Dynamic Pages

Being the opposite of static pages, this ones end on .php or similar and they use to be generated by content management systems like WordPress or Joomla. They could be as pretty, complex and interactive as you want but they need dedication to be done.

The Analysis

No matter what kind of pages are you using to promote a product, the only thing you want to do is to sell. The thing is that Google prefers static over dynamic pages, so if you want to get a high rank on search engines you better build static pages.

Nevertheless many of these affiliates use PPC campaigns to get their potential buyers, so what’s the matter with using static or dynamic pages? If you are one of those who are using PPC campaigns go for whatever you want, but remember if you use dynamic pages it doesn’t mean that you won’t get a good rank, it is all about SEO.

To conclude, I would like to know if you have a kind of preference on this. Personally I have done either static or dynamic pages to sell products and honestly, it’s not so different.

Yesterday someone commented about my incomes of february, which I completely forgot about them! So today I’m here to talk about them, which were pretty good:

• Private Sales: $85
• TLA: $22.12
• Web Design: $200
• Affiliate Commissions: $98.1

Total: $405.22

Are they good? I think they can be improved… February didn’t go well in affiliate marketing, I don’t know why but my campaigns stop converting suddenly… Now I’m working in other things and probably the incomes of affiliate marketing will increase in the next months.

I have 2 things pending, which I will be writing about this week.

1. About different methods to increase your subscribers. ( asked by a reader via email )
2. Something related with affiliate marketing, may be giving you examples of landing pages. ( including free samples downloads )
3. Updates about the Dell Social Innovation Competition
4. Surprises

So see you in the next days!

There are many business strategies you can use to promote your affiliate products, and a very interesting way to do it is with Article Marketing.

Article Marketing is nothing more than a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline that include references and contact information for the author’s business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business’ credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

Source: Wikipedia

So what’s the strategy? How can I boost my sales by writing articles?

The strategy is not so hard to do, but actually it is if you have difficulties to be consistent, but we are going to see how to deal with that.

What do you do when you want to buy something? I bet you search on google everything you can: videos, reviews, scam alerts, comparison articles etc etc. That’s why you need to write articles of the products you sale!

People used to investigate before taking actions and you need to take advantage of this situation by promoting your marketing products with articles. Articles of every type, but specially you need to write articles that review the product, articles that talk about the pro/cons of the product and things like that.

By writing many articles and using the proper keywords you could rank high in most search engines, or at least Google. Is not so hard, you just need to find keywords that sell.

The basic strategy is to redirect the people who read your articles to your landing page or another website where they can buy the product. This way you will get a commission per sale.

NOTE: You cannot use hyperlinks in affiliate marketing, so how do you redirect them? Using the little bio box at the end of the article, where you can place hyperlinks.

How to write articles that sell

Write from experience: When you write from experience your articles will be much convincing, and that’s what you want. This relates the thing I was talking the other day about choosing products that you are interested in. If you are not interested in a product how could you write “from experience”? It’s kinda impossible… Also, many times you won’t need to pay just for getting the product and then write a review about it. In most cases you can contact the advertiser and explain it the situation, asking for a free copy of the product in order to test it and promote it.

It’s kinda usual to get free copies of what you want to promote.

Be precise: Don’t write things neither too long or too short, just be precise. Hit the nail and that’s it, don’t waste lines talking and talking about nothing. Give the information you want to bring to your potential customers and that’s it!

Write what they want to read: This may sound unfair or non-ethic but this is how marketing works. Study the people you are targeting, their likes, their ages etc etc… So then, when you really know the people you will target, write the articles based on that statistics and give them what they expect to read when they search for a product on Google. Of course you will need to write several articles in order to cover a wider espectrum of possibilities. FYI, you can try QuanCast to know demographic stats of people specificing a page.

Use outside sources to validate your article: This is a fact, people like to read “as seen on CNN” and things like that. When possible, use outside sources that help you to validate the things you are talking about in the article. Try to find a special article from a magazine, news channel or something where users can read and makes them believe in you.

Hopefully if you follow these guidelines, you will boost your sales promotions in a targeted market.

Where to write these Articles?

Great question, I was talking about article marketing and I didn’t tell you where you can publish them. The following is a list of websites where you can do it, most of them could be well known by you:

• EzineArticles
• BestEzines
• AssociatedContent
• WebSource
• Freesticky
• Amazines
• IdeaMarketers

Those are the main websites, but you can find more by looking into the tag called Articles of my Delicious account.

Your Ideas About Article Marketing

Well in other posts I will talk more about other promotional marketing methods beside this one. For now I’m done, but I would love to read your thoughts or experiences in this matter in order to learn more from you, I don’t know everything!

Hi guys,

It’s fridaaaay! So as I won’t blog this weekend (theorically, I have scheduled posts ) and as I won’t give you all my affiliate marketing information at once, I’m going to take a breath today respecting AM and I’m going to share with you my incomes report of the first month of 2009:

• Private Sales: $129.5
• TLA: $21.16
• Affiliate Commissions: $215.5

Total: $366.16

The other months I was earning about $400, so you could appreciate a little drop during the last month but algo note I didn’t make any Web Design jobs, which ussually gives me at least $100.

So what do you think about them? With all this posts about affiliate marketing I’m very inspired and working in a couple of affiliate campaigns which will increase my earnings by hundred dollars – or at least I hope so.