I can’t say I’m an expert at it quite yet, but I’ve learned a few things, and I don’t plan to stop any time soon. I still have a lot to learn, but then again you never stop learning in this profession. Things are always changing, and if you want to be successful, you have to keep up with the industry.

• Be prepared to lose money at first. This is where most people give up. You aren’t going to make money right away; it takes trial-and-error. When one thing doesn’t work, try something else. When you find something that does work, find out why, and continue to apply that success to more projects.
• Diversify. Don’t pigeon-hole yourself into only one niche or market. If that market goes sour, which it often does over time, you’ll be out of luck until you find another niche.
• Read, Read, Read. Don’t stop reading. This business is always changing, and if you don’t keep up, you’ll get left behind quickly. Search engines make new rules (Like Google’s Quality Score,) and if you miss big events like that, it will dramatically affect your earnings. Here are a few suggestions for reading material:
  • Wickedfire
  • SEO Book
  • DigitalPoint
  • Syndk8
  • Black Hat World
  • Warrior Forum
  • Earners Forum

  I personally read all of those, and I’ve learned a lot with them. If you only read one, read Wickedfire, but to be successful, you want to read all of them. There are many more I can recommend as well, but stick with those while you’re just starting out, there will be plenty of material to read.

• Join a Good Affiliate Network. Forget about Commission Junction for now, no matter what you’ve been told. There are other networks out there that work better, especially for newbies:
• Copeac – They build your landing pages for you
• AzoogleAds
• CPA Empire
• Hydra Network
• ShareASale

I haven’t tried all of these personally (I’m too busy with Copeac right now,) but I’ve heard good things about them all. I do plan to eventually get an account for each of these networks.

• A couple quick pointers to help you out on your journey, and hopefully save you some money:
  • The days of running a PPC campaign and linking directly to the advertiser’s page are over. Google and other search engines are taking into account the quality of the landing page from the ad you place. This is called “Quality Score,” and you will quickly learn to hate it. A member over at Wickedfire posted a great article suggesting how he deals with the Quality Score problem.
  • To analyze a new program to promote, don’t just look at the payout amount. A program might pay you $75 per sale, but if it’s a crappy product, you won’t make any sales. Instead, look at each program and decide if you would buy it yourself. If you wouldn’t buy it, why would anyone else? I’d much rather promote a Zip Submit program for $1.30 per lead than a crappy $100 e-book with a $75 payout.
• Take advantage of new coupon codes for PPC networks, like the $199 credit Yahoo is giving new customers. Keep an eye out for these codes on the forums listed above.
• Don’t give up. Like I said above, this takes a lot of trial-and-error. This is why most people quit after losing a little bit of money trying this. Nobody is going to walk you through how to be successful at this.
• Don’t expect to receive any hand-outs. You aren’t going to find other successful Internet Marketers giving away their secrets. When they find a new trick, they use it to it’s full extent, then maybe let others know about it after they’re done. Why? Because if they have a trick that makes them a lot of money, having hundreds of other people start using that same trick basically makes that technique useless by diluting it’s effectiveness.

If I think of anything else, I’ll add it here. Feel free to add any helpful comments or criticism to the comments below.

Stephen L. Nelson, one of the original Dummies authors (Quicken for Dummies and QuickBooks for Dummies) recently shared with me some chilling statistics concerning the Google Content Network. This summer, Nelson ran a six-week to sell his downloadable do-it-yourself incorporation kits. He sells these kits for all fifty states and, as you might expect, created state-specific sets of keywords that advertised, for example, on the keyword “Florida incorporation” and then dropped a visitor clicking on his ad onto the web page that sells his Florida Incorporation Kit.

Here’s the scary part of his story. Over the roughly six week period that Nelson ran the Adwords, he paid for 643 clicks in total and for all fifty states. Of those, 317 clicks were for the Idaho Incorporation kit. Of those clicks, 315 were Content Network clicks. Yet, Nelson did not sell a single Idaho incorporation kit.

Why does this matter? Nelson told me that the conversion rate that he receives for organic traffic runs between 1.5% and 3%. Accordingly, if those 315 visitors had instead been organic traffic visitors, he would have expected to sell between 5 and 10 Idaho limited liability company formation kits.

The final part of this story: When Nelson did contact Google Adwords customer service about his experience, they simply sent him a nice message which assured him he didn’t have anything to worry about. “Please know that we have several proactive measures in place to automatically detect invalid activity on the content network,” they said.

Gee, really? I think not.

Being into Pay Per Click advertising myself, I know all to well about these types of stories; it can be frustrating. We never really know if we can trust AdWords or Yahoo or any other ad networks, for that matter. None of their algorithms are (even close to) perfect, but hopefully they’re getting better as time goes on.

On the topic of this specific story though, there are multiple reasons this could have happened, including the fault of Mr. Nelson. We don’t know his keywords, landing page, and not really knowing much about the product, don’t know if it’s worth the $59 he’s asking for it.

I’m not saying this was Stephen’s fault by any means though. Like I said above, PPC advertising can be very frustrating, and sometimes takes a lot of trial-and-error to create a successful campaign.

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