Work From Home Carefree - Be Your Own Boss Get Rich Make Money Working From Home Weblog. Billion Dollar Industry!

As many of you know, I’ve always considered myself more of an e-mail and SEO affiliate. I never did much PPC at all, too much tracking and headache for me (the thought of logging in multiple times a day scares me - I prefer to sit around and collect free traffic). Yes, yes, I know, PPC CAN be “sit-around” traffic too, I just never played with it until end of last year and mostly starting in Q1 this year.

Honestly, I just got tired of hearing all the HUGE stories of affiliates making a GAGILLION dollars using PPC, so I wanted in!

Well, as my PPC brain swells with wisdom and knowledge, I’ve learned a few things I want to share with you affiliates who are also looking to grab a piece of Google, Yahoo or MSN’s traffic.

A) I found that a LOT of these affiliates who claim to make $1 million+ in commissions are also spending close to $989,000 in ad expense (yes, I do exaggerate a bit).

B) If you’re just starting, don’t expect your PPC to be profitable right off the bat - typically it can take days for you to work your costs down, tweak your keywords, etc…

But, here’s the real doozy for me that I’ve never really read in all these “I make a million bucks an hour sitting on my a** on the beach” guides. I noticed that Google lets you control what day of the week and exactly what times you want your ads to be displayed.

I thought, “Surely, it should not matter? All traffic should be equal so long as they are searching the same keywords and are from the same geographic location…”

WRONG!

Just to see why Google even offered this ridiculous option, I started keeping track of my sales on a few of my campaigns by time over the period of a month. I just created an excel spreadsheet and marked a sale when it came in.

Indeed on some of my campaigns I noticed an even spread - so it really did not matter what time the ad was running. But, on some of my campaigns, especially one of them - WOW was I wasting money!

I was actually wasting about $25 a day ($750/month)! I noticed that ALL my sales only came in between about 3 PM and 1 AM ET. The rest of the time was dead on sales, maybe a few stragglers, yet the clicks seemed to come in just as fast.

I was quite surprised and shocked (also felt sick to my stomach thinking about the amount of money I wasted). So, since then I have stopped advertising at those times and guess what? NO DROP in sales.

Now, your accounts may or may not be SO clear to see, but it’s worth a shot.

1. What times are the best for your niche?
2. Do your ads still pull on weekends?
3. What about holidays? Should you shut ads off?

So, you see, not every hour or even day is the same - track your ads!

On Thursday, May 10, Haiko de Poel Jr. hosted an ABestWeb affiliate marketing dinner at Amalia in NYC. Great crowd and great times for the couple dozen folks in attendance.
I was planning to corner some of the luminaries there for brief video interviews, but the combination of a loud restaurant and fun conversations kept me [...]

The guys at MaxBounty.com are organizing a Pub Night for affiliate marketers in the Ottawa area.
The tentative date is Friday, May 25th at ByWard Market.
RSVP at http://www.maxbounty.com/byward.cfm.

Mpire has rolled out about 80 new e-commerce widgets that are geared towards bloggers.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, these affiliate widgets…
…will allow bloggers and online publishers to post shopping-related content to their sites and make money by passing leads on to Amazon.com and eBay. Those who download the widgets will keep 100 percent of the [...]

The deadline is looming for the ShareASale contest to create a video explaining the ShareASale Star Thingy.
ShareASale will pay you $10 just to enter the contest, and another $50 if your entry is used in their collaborative video project at the end.
After the deadline, ShareASale will display all of the videos that have been [...]

The May/June 2007 issue of Revenue magazine is now hitting subscriber’s mailboxes and newsstands.
The theme for this issue is Web 2.0: the next generation offers real results to marketers looking to gain more control of their message. Other articles cover the beauty of no borders in affiliate marketing, managing your reputation online, and a feature [...]

Long time readers of Affiliate Classroom magazine, and thousands of others, will already be familiar with Stefan Everaet’s Niche Content Packages site. For two years now, Stefan has offered the finest PLR content for sites looking for new or fresh articles.

Well, a great thing just got greater.

Stefan has revamped the business model, and done a complete makeover on the site to go with it. The results are spectacular in both function and looks.

Formerly, Niche Content Packages allowed a certain number of subscriptions and no more. That helped keep the possibility of duplicate content across multiple sites down to a reasonable level.

Responding to customer requests, the membership cap has been removed and new options for accessing content have been implemented. But the advantage of keeping the number of sites with similar content low has been retained. Downloads are limited to 250 copies of an article package.

Stefan has implemented a credit-based system to track members’ allowance and limit the total number of copies out there. Members decide which articles they’re interested in then download, using up their paid credits.

Several subscription levels are available and credits can be purchased on an individual basis, too. You get 35 free credits on sign-up.

Instead of having a few subjects chosen by Stefan, members now choose which subjects they want to download. But, all packages still contain the superior content that Niche Content Packages has always been known for. Stefan hires only professional, expert writers. None of the $5 per, amateur knock off stuff here.

The Niche Content Packages site itself is a good lesson to those building their own sites. The interface is clean, well laid out, and easy to navigate. The copy is well-written, and you know just where to go to get what you want.