I was so excited when I saw a Clickbank envelope in my mailbox yesterday. That was my first ever Clickbank commission check. $442.53 for last month or pay period I think? Its not a lot of money to brag about but its a nice start. I don’t want to get carried away with this because I only made $289.48 in net profit from my Google AdWords campaigns. A little short from my $300 milestone. Revenue isn’t revenue until I see it in my bank account. Expenses are expenses because money has left my bank account for my Google AdWords expenses!

I was probably wrong about my previous post about Singapore banks ripping me off for USD checks. I called my bank today and they confirmed that the bank will charge me SGD $25 plus SGD $3 for postage. No conversion fees because I have a USD savings account. So I expect to receive UDS $425.53 minus USD $17 for my bank fees. Clickbank were pretty punctual in mailing out my check. They mailed it out on 15 November and I got it on 22 November. Just 7 days via air mail. My bank promised me that they will clear the check in 2 weeks or less but sometimes it might take longer. I hope its less than 1 month before the check clears!

This month’s sales has been going down a bit. I hope the sales in the last few days of November will pick up. Maybe its because some of my keywords got disabled and I received less traffic from my ads. Maybe I’m spending too much money on some of the useless keywords.

If there’s one improvement I made this month is that I have made sales in at least 3 more affiliate programs. But only 2 of them seem promising, 1 of them has been dropped. I need to take my affiliate income to the next level and I believe that would mean:

1. Keyword Tracking of Clickbank sales - I need to know which keywords resulted in the sale. Right now I am absolutely clueless! If it makes a sale I simply keep whatever Ad Groups and keywords I have at that moment and work on improving the ads.
2. Split Testing of multiple affiliate programs - This would double my speed in finding profitable affiliate programs. I have doing this for 1 week plus now and I’m still learning about it. I put 2 affiliate programs through my split testing script and see which makes more sales within 200 clicks. I drop the loser and keep the winner.
3. Expanding my reach beyond Google AdWords - I have opened a FindWhat account but I must tell you the interface put me off so much that I just got too lazy to work on it. Furthermore all 4 of my ads got disabled. They are very strict and if you thought Google was strict, wait till you see FindWhat. Other PPC search engines would include Overture and Enhance. Google, Overture, FindWhat and Enhance seem like the top PPC search engines.
4. Become a value added affiliate - I might be losing some sales just by sending traffic to the merchants. Maybe I could build mini sites for my profitable affiliate programs and give them a bonus or something in return for buying through my affiliate link. I could set up autoresponders to “pre-sell” or educate them about the affiliate program or related information, set up a newsletter sign up form etc.
5. Find a mentor! This is hard….. I was disappointed with the AdWord mentor forum. I didn’t feel like they wanted to mentor me. I’m wondering who would be so kind as to “hold my hand”, show me all their insider secrets, doesn’t mind me becoming better than them without charging outrageous fees that would make me bankrupt!

If you’re new to my blog and you’re wondering what this is all about. Read my previous posts and you’ll understand more. And also please check out the ebook Google AdWords 1 2 3. I received the above check because of the techniques I learnt from that book. Cheers!

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