I bought 150 C @ 3.9 and 200 more @ 3.6999 averaging down to about 3.79 PPS (Price Per Share) on Tuesday. I figured that C is worth over $4 in the short term, and the pullback in the market was a good time to get in. I was right. Once it got over $4, I got a little too conservative and put in a stop loss order at $4.01. Of course, C shot right back up after I sold my shares and never dropped that low again all day. Still walked away with $48.51 profit after commissions. Commissions cut my profits by over 38%… I gotta start trading higher volumes.

My second trade of the week was actually a mistake. I subscribed to Timothy Sykes‘ TIM Alerts this week (more on that later). On Thursday he recommended shorting MNI if broke through some “technical support” @ $2. Somehow I misread the alert and I decided to buy 450 shares @ $1.9899. Luckily the market was on my side and I was able to get out on Friday with a small profit after commisions of $7.03. Holding the stock overnight, after I had realized I had made a mistake, probably wasn’t a great idea… I just didn’t want a loss.

Moving forward, I want to get into short selling stocks. Brokers require clients to be on margin trading to short sell, so I have been waiting for that to be enabled. I am debating adding some more cash to the account as well so I can have more leverage without the risk of buying on margin.

Goal for the next week is a 5% increase. If I continued increasing profits 5% ever week on my account balance, in a years time I would be up $28k. Piece of cake, right?

But that’s ok. This blog is called “RevenueQuest;” I have always accepted that affiliate marketing isn’t the only way to make great income and the future of this blog will likely reflect that.

Lately, my earnings have come from two locations. First, I got a paid summer internship at ITT Aerospace Controls. I am learning a lot and I think it will put me in a good position when I am looking for employment in the future.

The other is the stock market; and more specifically a mutual fund called Fairholme (FAIRX). My girlfriend’s brother-in-law recommended I buy this mutual fund after being not so please with MFEGX. Since I purchased FAIRX just over a month ago, it has earned me $860. Anyone that wants to take advantage of the market right now, but doesn’t know which stocks to invest in, I think this one is a great pick

I have been doing a little trading on my own and I am currently up about 7% since February/March. Moving forward, I need to put more money into each of my trades because $9.95 trading fees are killing my margins. I am thinking $4-5k would be a great place to start.

Here is some good reading I found recently. I’m thinking about trying these strategies soon when I get a chance. Powerful Day-Trading Strategies Combining Fundamentals and Market Direction

Speaking of affiliate marketing, now is a good time to fill you in on where I am at. School has been as busy as ever and affiliate marketing is very limited these days. Currently, I am not running any PPC campaigns and the only traffic I am getting to my offer pages is via search engines. This would be great if the volume was there, but it isn’t.

Like the last few summers, I should have some time to put into affiliate marketing and get something going again…

It is interesting to note that Google owns two other sites in the top-10, Youtube and Blogger.com. Pretty impressive.

Wrong

Self Employment screwed me. Many people that are making lots of money online incorporate or form an LLC to avoid these high taxes. In the future, if I start to make much more money, I will without a doubt incorporate.

So one of my friends recently got an email from a senior member of the Facebook advertising team. The email was sent because Facebook wants my buddy to spend more money with them. Using this new hook-up, my buddy asked if my Facebook daily budget could be bumped (It is currently at $250 and I have hit that several times). Within 5 minutes, I get an email saying, “We recently increased the daily spend limit on your Facebook Ads account to $5,000.00.”

Nice! Now I better go spend some money on Facebook… and get my credit card limit raised while I am at it.

For a while now, it has been recommended that landing pages have articles, contact page, privacy policy, etc. Adding these pages makes your site look legit to both Google (or Yahoo!, MSN) and the visitor. I have also had some success with generating leads with the contact page.

Some people that visit your landing page may not be completely sold. They may have some questions and a contact page is a perfect place for them to ask. You then have another chance to sell that visitor on your product. Answer their question to the best of your ability (Don’t lie. If you don’t know the answer, show them where they can find one.) and maybe include some elegant pros that will get them to wip out their credit card.

A Simple Contact Page

If you don’t already have a contact page, here is a simple one you can use. Put this code on your contact page (ie. www.yourdomain.com/contact.php):

  <form method=”post” action=”sendmail.php”>
<table width=”500″>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”>Name:</td><td><input type=”text” size=”30″ name=”name” /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”>E-mail:</td><td><input type=”text” size=”30″ name=”email” /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”>Comments:</td>
<td><textarea cols=”50″ rows=”8″ name=”comments”></textarea></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td><input type=”submit” value=”Submit” /></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

And then save this as “sendmail.php”:

<?
//send us your mail

mail(‘you@yourdomain.com’,'Subject of the email’,$comments,’From: ‘.$name.’ <’.$email.’>’);
header( ‘Location: http://www.yourdomain.com’ ); // where they go after the message is sent

?>

1. Income of $20,000+

The last few months I have been thinking a lot about what I am going to do after I graduate. Making a living in affiliate marketing would be great, but it just doesn’t seem like a very consistent career. If I can make $20k this year while going to school and running, it will show me that there is a potential to continue affiliate marketing post graduation — at least partime.

2. No long breaks

I think this blog has had some helpful posts. Unfortunately, it has never really “taken off” and I think the main reason for that is inconsistent posting. I’m not going to make a specific goal of posting exactly every 7 days… instead this subjective goal will hopefully keep me in line.

3. Network

I would like to get to know more people involved in affiliate marketing. Maybe I will even make a trip to one of the big gatherings like Affiliate Summit.

I have three big goals to work on. $20k is about $55/day and I’m already behind.

Last year’s recap post began with me evaluating my performance based on the goals I set the previous year. I decided to call it a draw as I met one out of the two goals I set for myself. Lets see how I did this year…

1. 100 RSS Feed Readers – This one is almost comical as my counter tends to hover around 7 with a standard deviation of about 1. The simple reason for this failure is that I don’t get enough traffic to the blog. More in depth reasons would be no promotion or advertising of this blog, infrequent posting… Failure
2. Sign up for more networks - I definitely succeeded here. But to be honest, how difficult is that?… Success
3. Break $100 in a day – I am really proud to have finally broken this barrier. What a wonderful day May 2nd most have been for me… Success
4. Have $15,000 in the bank – It looks like I am slightly shy of this one if I just count liquid assets. Since that is what I meant when I made the goal… Failure
5. Organize the categories - Happy to say that I got around to doing this. There are still a lot of them, but I think they are all appropriate… Success

3/5 isn’t bad.

January

I think I wrote two of my most popular posts in January. They doing well with organic traffic and have a few links from other bloggers… How to track keywords with Adwords and How to track keywords with Yahoo! Search Marketing

April

I started doing some PPC again and set some new records. Everyday is a new record

May

May was the first time I started making, what I consider to be, decent money. With the money came better and more frequent posts.

I began doing monthly affiliate income reports.

First $100 profit day (as I previously mentioned), I spent $4.69 for gas, Adwords site placement tracking, and I had my first guest post.

June

May affiliate income report,  $200 profit day, and I started following the stock market (but didn’t jump in… thank God), I hit $500 in revenue, I went to my second undie run, and I went to Italy.

July

June affiliate income report

September

I saw the end… July affiliate income report.

December

How I do Facebook ads

Prosper202

I use Prosper202 for tracking on all of my campaigns… Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and even Facebook. For Facebook, I start by setting up the network, offer, and text ad that I will be using, and generate the appropriate link. It looks something like this:

http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=

Redirect page

I then set up a redirect page. This is important because Facebook does not allow the url of your ads to be edited once they have been submitted. So if you want to change your bid, you can just change the link inside the redirect page.

The redirect page looks something like this:

<?

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
if($ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’) {Header( “Location: http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=”.$ad );} //ads with $0.xx max bid

elseif($ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’) {Header( “Location: http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=”.$ad );} //ads with $0.xx max bid

else {Header( “Location: http://www.affiliate-network.com/reporting.php?pub=xxx&offer=xxx?=none” );  } //this is in case I get traffic to this url that isn’t from Facebook.

?>

A couple things to note here about the redirect page.

• You must save it as a .php file.
• “fbxxxxxx” is what I name my ads on Facebook. The first ad I made was named “fb000001″. I do this so that I can organize my ads and so that I can see which ads are performing and which ones aren’t. OPTIMIZATION.
• The url I actually put for my Facebook ads looks something like this: http://www.mydomain.com/redirect.php?ad=fbxxxxxx

Tracking and Optimizing

Once I have all that setup, I sit back and let some data collect. Hopefully, I can easily see that I’m spending less money on Facebook than I am making with my affiliate network of choice. When I do have some conversions to check, I simply update the subids into Prosper202. I then sort my results by keyword and I can compare all of the ads. This lets me delete ones that need deleting and change bids.

This has become an efficient way for me to setup and test campaigns on Facebook. It seems like speed is very important in advertsing on social networks as people often copy your ads within a day or so.

Let me know if you have any problems with this. I would be more than happy to help you out.