RevenueQuest

I have finally jumped on the bandwagon and will be utilizing PayPerPost Direct. Currently, I am only charging $5. I will likely bump that up after I get a few requests, so make sure you are one of the first to buy one.

Why would a post about your site on RevenueQuest?

Currently, RevenueQuest is a PR 2 blog. I am not one to post more than once a day, so your paid review would be on the front page for over one week. This means Google will have no trouble finding the link to your site on my front page.

A paid review pretty much guarantees you that every person that reads the post will take a peak at your site. RevenueQuest doesn’t currently receive an overabundance of traffic, but it is on the rise (my Alexa is now up to 732,826 with the weekly numbers hovering around 300k).

Plus, what’s $5, right?

I am sure many of you have heard of John Chow’s “new” ad network TTZ Media by now. The ad units show price comparisons from several different online stores for different products using the Shopping.com’s API.

Here is an example of a TTZ Media ad of a Western Digital 320gb External hard drive:

As you can see, it lists prices from a few different stores and has an image of the product. It should have some nice CTR. TTZ Media gives $.15 per click.

Over the last few months, I myself have been doing some work with Shopping.com’s API. Unfortunately, I haven’t been working as hard or as fast on the project as I would have liked because school and running are taking up most of my time these days.

Anyways, I have made a similar ad unit to TTZ Media’s that I have been using for a month or two on a product review site. My CTR has been pretty good (much higher than I get with Yahoo! Publisher Network) and the price per click tends to hover around $.30, but sometimes as low as $.20 and sometimes as high as $.39.

Take a look at mine for the same product:

As you can see, they are pretty similar. Too bad John Chow beat me to the market. Maybe I can make mine a little better and then release it to the public?

Time will tell.

A couple days ago, Stuart from Earners Blog made a good point about posts that are a step-by-step guide to affiliate marketing.

If a technique or campaign is posted it’ll become saturated within days (or weeks). Which will probably end up costing you money & have you thinking that you suck at Affiliate Marketing (I don’t want that).

I myself get a little annoyed when a blogger makes a post with a title that leads me to believe he is going to show me exactly how he makes hundreds a day, only to see there are a couple key details missing. But Stuart’s point is a good one and reminds me that bloggers are not writing to give free handouts. If the affiliate marketing business was easy, there wouldn’t be countless blogs telling you how to do it.

I have to say thanks to Stuart for making me feel better about “leading on” my readers in my recent post about how I am using zip submits to get 200% return on my investment.

I checked my Alexa ranking yesterday and I was happy to notice I am now in the top-1 million sites. Maybe my little trick to easily raise my Alexa ranking actually worked.

I now stand strong at #864,526. My 1 week average is up to 356,799.

Alexa ranking are a good measure of how popular your site is. If you see a raise in them, you know you are getting more visits. It can be important because sites like Text-Link-Ads and PayPerPost use it to determine the value of your blog, among other things. So I higher Alexa ranking can mean more $$$.

I would like to one day get this blog into the top-100,000 over at Alexa. If I keep up the more frequent blogging, sure it can happen.

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

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.