RevenueQuest

Shoemoney has just announced the Shoemoney Media Group’s latest website. It’s called Bellow A Buck.

Below A Buck uses eBay’s API to show auctions that are ending in less than an hour with a price that is less than $1. The site categorizes everything nicely and has a search feature for your convenience.

Does the site sound familiar? It did to me too. On August 10th John Chow wrote a review about a site called LastMinuteAuction (www.lastminute-auction.com). Below A Buck is pretty much a copy of that site. If you try to go to the site, you’ll notice it is down now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Shoemoney never read John Chow’s review and honestly came up with the idea on his own.

But that’s besides the point.

Over at Dave “Dillsmack” Dellanave’s blog, Dillsmack goes through their process of building the site. It is pretty unreal how fast he and Shoemoney got this website ready to go. He worked for 40 minutes on the first day and 30 minutes the second. Then it was sent off to a designing company for a couple weeks. When the design was finished, It took Dillsmack about 90 minutes to finish integrating the code into the design. That was 2 hours and 40 minutes of total work minus the designing.

How crazy is that? I always say to myself, “I just don’t have time for new things.” I guess the lesson learned here is to work fast

Popularity: 3% [?]

The last two days have not been good for me. After setting all-time records for me less than a week ago, I’ve managed to flip that around and lose money. (Actually, I didn’t lose much because I’m using a $100 Yahoo! Search Marketing coupon. I had to deposit an initial $30 upon signing up, so that means every dollar spent on Yahoo Search Marketing is only $.30 of my own money. Taking that into consideration, I still made a profit yesterday and ended up almost even today.)

But not all is lost. After sulking for a good hour or so today, thinking, “I’m back to square one, again! I guess affiliate marketing just isn’t for me,” I realized there is something to be learned from all of this. While I did lose some money, what I really did was invest in education.

Let me share a little about what I have been doing over the last week. I began affiliate marketing through PPC using COPEAC, Incent-a-Click, and Yahoo! Search Marketing. I have been promoting Zip Submits for varieties of gift cards (Like $500 to Target or Apple) which pay $1.25 - $1.40 per lead.

There are two requirements for Zip Submit campaigns to work.

1. Bid low on keywords. Think like $.10 low.
2. High conversion rates.

Bid Low

I have been able to find keywords with one or two OR EVEN ZERO advertisements. This way I can pay the Yahoo! Search Marketing minimum bid amount of $.10. This is very important because the payout is so low on Zip Submits. The margin we are dealing with is so slim to begin with that paying $.20+ on a campaign isn’t an option.

High Conversion Rates

Other than the last two days, my best campaigns have seen conversion rates as high as 25%! On a $1.40 CPA Zip Submit offer, that means for every $.40 I spend (four clicks * $.10 a piece = $.40), I am profiting a $1. Spend a measly $10 and make $35 or a $25 profit. You need to be creative and think of something that would make people want to play along and give out their Zip Code.

Naturally, my goal is to get several campaigns up to that 25% conversion rate. However, as I said earlier, the last couple of days haven’t worked out as well for me.

So what did I learn from the bad campaigns?

1. Zip Submit campaigns don’t work for all demographics. I think the “smarter crowd” catches on to what is going on and actually takes notice of the asterisk next to the word “FREE” that reads “Participation Required.”
2. From that conclusion I decided I need to pick keywords that younger people would search for. I have come up with a great way to research these searches… maybe I’ll share that tip another time…

Now I need to get back to work and make some of my money back. Stay tuned to see how it goes.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Thanks to some inspiration from a friend that has been earning ~$100 a day with PPC advertising a affiliate marketing, I once again am giving it a shot. More on what I am doing with that later…

I just wanted to say that I set some new records yesterday. I set new total revenue, total profit, and total cost (you have to keep track of the bad records too, right?) records. They may seem low to some, but it is all very exciting to me.

New Total Revenue Record: $39.70

New Profit Record: $20.17

New Cost Record: $19.53

Popularity: 2% [?]