The The Affiliate Money Tree web site is down at the moment. The message on the web site says “This domain has temporarily been disabled. To restore the domain, contact your Customer Support”. I wonder if its a problem with their web domain?

I’ve got good news to share. 2 of the affiliate programs I tested are making 1 sale each with the keywords the author provided. If this continues, I would get back the $49 I invested in the ebook and it would be worth every penny.

If you decide to purchase this ebook, email me the order receipt and I’ll email you the full keyword list in text files if you purchase through my Affiliate Money Tree link. It took me over 6 hours to scan them from the printed ebook into text files. Then I had to check for any spelling mistakes.

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | 5 Comments »

There’s a new ebook on affiliate marketing with Google AdWords and its called The Affiliate Money Tree. I found this ebook while I was looking at all the work at home ads on Google’s search results. This one was the “outstanding” one because the ad made a claim that you can make $18000 a month writing an ad like this (the Google AdWords ad)!

I read the book after I printed it out and here are my opinions on this ebook.

There are a few “inconsistencies” in the sales letter and the ebook. I am not writing this to “flame” the author but I am writing this because it is the truth.

39 not 50 Affiliate Programs

The author promised to reveal his top 50 affiliate programs and their keywords but I counted all the affiliate programs and there only 39 of them. 11 were missing! Or maybe there wasn’t 50 affiliate programs in the first place.

Reviews of Affiliate Directories and Networks?

I think its more like a list. He doesn’t say what’ good or bad about each one. Why not tell us which ones make the most money outside of Clickbank?

Free PPC Money?

In the sales letter he said “get $1650 in FREE ppc advertising money”. I read the book and I only found the table of PPC search engines. They are not free to join. Why is it that he says “no deposit is required to get this incredible value!” There is an initial deposit in the book and in the sales letter he says “no deposit is required”. That is not true.

PPC Reviews?

The PPC reviews seem to be the same as:

http://payperclicksearchengines.com/
http://www.payperclickanalyst.com/index.htm
http://www.payperclickguru.com/

#1 Affiliate Program?

He promised to reveal his number 1 affiliate program but I don’t see it anywhere in the ebook.

The Keywords of the “Top 50 Affiliate Programs” Are Not Copy and “Pasteable”

It would be great if he had the keywords in a separate text file or something. I couldn’t copy and paste the keywords. What I did was scan the printed pages into my scanner to get the keywords. Very time consuming and irritating process. It took me over 6 hours to get the 39 affiliate programs’ keywords into text files.

Not For Beginners

I don’t think this ebook is for beginners because it doesn’t cover how to create campaigns and a lot of basic stuff. Its more for intermediates. So this isn’t “everything” I need to know to get that kind of income. You would be better off learning the basics with Google Adwords 123 before reading this ebook.

Conclusion

At this point it wouldn’t be fair to say if this ebook is worth the $49 price tag. I am testing at least 10 affiliate programs out of the 39 with the author’s keywords. You might be wondering why he is so generous in giving us his keywords? It’s because some of the affiliate programs are 2-tier affiliate programs and he will get a cut if you sign up using his affiliate link.

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | 3 Comments »

I don’t really celebrate Christmas here in Singapore but I know its a big deal in other parts of the world. I hope everyone who sees this post has a Merry Christmas and a happy new year! Let’s make 2005 a more prosperous year for our online ventures!

I don’t wish to spoil the Christmas mood… I thought not making sales for 3 days was bad but I’m so happy to be alive when thousands of people in Asia have died because of this huge earthquake which created a huge tsunami that affected Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and the Maldives. I’m lucky because Singapore didn’t get any of the destruction.

Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »

This is a summary of all the results of my entire dog training ebook campaign.

My campaign started on 7 December and ended on 15 December. That’s 9 days inclusive of 7 December.

I will seperate the screenshots into 3 groups to make it more readable and less overwhelming. The first group will be daily summaries of the clicks, CTR, expenses and ad positions of the whole campaign. The second group will be the daily full blown campaign screenshots with all its keywords, ads and other stats. And the last group will be the campaign summaries.

Daily Summaries

Day 1 (7 December) - 0 sales
Day 2 (8 December) - 0 sales
Day 3 (9 December) - 1 sale!
Day 4(10 December) - 0 sales
Day 5 (11 December) - 0 sales
Day 6 (12 December) - 0 sales
Day 7 (13 December) - 0 sales
Day 8 (14 December) - 0 sales
Day 9 (15 December) - 0 sales

Download screenshots. (573 KB)

Daily Full Blown Campaign

Day 1 (7 December)
Day 2 (8 December)
Day 3 (9 December)
Day 4(10 December)
Day 5 (11 December)
Day 6 (12 December)
Day 7 (13 December)
Day 8 (14 December)
Day 9 (15 December)

Download screenshots. (4.41 MB)

Campaign Summary

Day 1 - 9 (7 December - 15 December) - Short
Day 1 - 9 (7 December - 15 December) - Full Blown

Download screenshots. (573 KB)

Campaign Stats

Avg. Ad Position = 5.4
Avg. CTR = 0.6%
Total Clicks = 288
Total Expenses = $27.44
Gross Proft = $24.92
Net Profit/Loss = - $2.52

What I Learnt From This "Test"?

I feel like I must have done something right on the 1st 3 days to get 1 sale? Then I added more ad groups and I screwed it up from there. The 1st 48 clicks gave me 1 sale. The remaining 240 clicks went no where!

Just like what Greg Heslin adviced me to do…. Try to understand why your current keywords are working. I obviously didn’t do that! I got carried away by blindly creating more and more keywords once I got 1 sale. Too bad I couldn’t track which one of my keywords resulted in the sale. If I could it would be very clear to me which keyword is working and which one isnt.

What I Plan To Do Next…

I will revive this campaign early next year after the Christmas holiday period is over. My guess is that a lot of people might be busy celebrating with their friends and family and won’t have the time to purchase stuff online.

I will use only the keywords I used at the start of the campaign because they were proven to create 1 sale and see how it goes from there. I didn’t lost a lot of money. A $2.52 loss won’t kill me. Its just a test that failed. No big deal. Learn from it and move on to the next campaign.

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | 1 Comment »

My mum asked me this very question "When are you going to get a job, son?". I probably would have asked the same question if I had the same beliefs about a job as her.

You see I just got out of the army not too long ago…. I received USD $270 a month during my last year or so for a Corporal’s "allowance". In October 2004, I made a net profit of USD $280++ and in November I made a net profit of USD $270++. I sort of replaced my army income straight after I got out of the army in 26 October 2004.

Mum: "But you can’t go on like this forever son. You can’t make small bucks like this! You need to plan for your future. Go get a real job will you?"

Me: "Mum don’t you get it? I’m making money without a job! Give me a few more months and I will have something to show for all my hard work…."

Mum: "Whatever son…. You’d better do something quick. I think you’re getting too lazy."

Me: "Mum, look at it this way… Can you make money outside a job?"

Mum: "Yeah of course I can. I do part time surveys at $20 bucks a survey going from door to door during the weekends. Yes I can and I earn more than you with my side income."

Me: "Mum, you misinterpreted my question. Can you make money outside a job? I don’t mean can you make money outside your job. I mean can you make money without working in a job… part time or full time. Just make money with NO job at all?"

Mum: "If you put it that way. No I can’t make money outside a job…. *Silence*"

Me: "You see mum, I’m actually taking a step forward. I don’t have a day job. I wake up whatever time I want. I work on my Google campaigns when I want and make money while I sleep then I am free to do the things I want during the day for the first time in years! Because of the huge time difference from the USA…. I create my campaigns at night while they begin to start their day. I sleep at night and they’re at their "buying time" in the USA and other parts of the world. Fantastic! I finally found a way to create a stream of "passive income" like what the money books describe! Get paid while you sleep, get paid by doing it once and paid many times over!"

The point is you might not make a lot of money in the beginning. There is a learning curve with this system. But if you stick at it and don’t listen to all those losers who tell you you can’t do it, I believe you will somehow find a way to make money with this. Damn! I wasn’t an easy journey for me but I probably doubled my income since December 2004. I’m getting better and better at this because I am taking this seriously as though my whole life depends on it. Because I know at this time of my life, it really does!

The next time someone who earns a living through a job taunts you about the money you make online, ask them what I asked my mum.. "Can you make money outside a job?" If they say yes, beg them to teach you how! Make sure its not getting another job!

I couldn’t let this opportunity to slip by. I can’t think of any other way to make money online fast enough other than using Pay Per Click search engines like Google AdWords to drive traffic to affiliate programs. You don’t even need a web site, just a desire to make it happen.

If you’re living in the US, you probably got it easier than me. I’m sure you don’t get paid USD $270 a month do you? You don’t have any delays or problems depositing your checks. Singapore is not welfare state. We live in developed city but drafted soldiers are not expected to be paid much.

I started this blog to document my ups and downs with my online adventures. I was inspired by Barry Stein’s blog to restart my campaigns after I quit for a while and to write more about my Google AdWords activities. I don’t blog to boast or talk about rubbish. Hopefully this blog can somehow inspire people into action believing that they too can have this great opportunity that I have been blessed with.

I forgot where I heard that quote from. I’m making profit today because I got a grip of myself and created 1 more campaign after failing 50 times to find a affiliate program that sells consistently. Thanks to Greg Heslin, Barry Stein and Mike Litman for the Tony Robbins interview MP3 that kicked by butt into action!

Categories: Vincent's Updates | 3 Comments »

Last week was mega cool. I finally felt like my Google income was going up, up and away! I had sales in all 7 days of the week. That’s my first time. I have my highest sales on Wednesday with $120+. All that great stuff I had was followed by 2 days of “slowed” activity due to Google AdWords new rules I think? My account was slowed for 2 days and I finally got it back up on the 3rd day. Somehow, I still managed to make some sales.

Some time ago I asked Greg Heslin, author of the ebook Google AdWords 1 2 3 for some advice about my campaigns. I felt like I wasn’t moving forward with my campaigns. My profit in October and November were almost the same. In fact, November was a little lower than October! I wasted some money on my failed campaigns and profitable ones were getting disabled keywords and lower sales than the previous month!

Greg adviced me to look at my current campaigns to think why they are working and think of more places my target market would go to. Concentrate on the most profitable campaigns I have and make them better. I found my second “Affiliate Money Maker” in November and it was only in December that is started to “blossom” and sell like hotcakes.

I stopped creating new campaigns for a few days and focused on my 2 working campaigns. I re-read the ebook Google AdWords 1 2 3 to see what I left out from my previous readings. I must have read over 7 times now. I feel like I learn something new everytime I re-read it.

I started thinking like “Where do these people go to if they are interested in XXXXX?” and “What do these people do on the net?”. I then came up with new bunch of keywords for my campaigns and thank goodness it paid off very well!

Categories: Vincent's Updates | No Comments »

I’m sorry guys… I wanted to show you a profitable campaign but this one’s just couldn’t cut it. I lost $3++ with this campaign. I wanted to post this earlier but I couldn’t get my blogger to publish the files for almost 1 week! Anyway blogger seems fine at the moment.

I will post my day by day stats in a short while. Thanks for all your support!

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | No Comments »

I received an email from Google 2 days ago:

Hello Liaw Hong Zhi Vincent,

We’d like to notify you that the AdWords system has slowed the delivery of some of your ads because one or more of your keywords isn’t meeting the minimum required click through rate (CTR).

It’s critical that you review your ads as soon as possible. If your keywords continue to perform below this minimum requirement, the system may disable them completely.

Also, please note that if the system slows your account due to low performance three times in a row, we will charge you a $5.00 fee every third time you restore it. (According to our records, this is the second time your account has been slowed.)

Please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/performance.html?hl=en_US now to learn how to:

- Restore your account.
- Optimize your ads.
- Avoid this process in the future.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to send us an email by logging in to your account and clicking ‘Contact Us.’

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

I couldn’t understand what was wrong! My overall campaign ads are at 0.7% CTR at that time and 2 of my campaigns were at 1% CTR and above! But I did had 1 campaign that was doing very badly at 0.1% CTR. So I asked Google why? Why slow my account when I have an average 0.7% CTR for all my campaigns? I complained that they could send me an email about the specific campaign or ad they didn’t like. Why did you have to slow my whole account for?

Here’s what they told me:

Hello Vincent,

Thank you for your email. I understand that you would like clarification about why your account has been slowed when the overall CTR listed within your account is 0.7%. This occurs because the CTR on which your ads are
evaluated is for Google only while the CTR listed within your account includes other partner sites.

In this email, I will provide additional information about the account evaluation process. I will also provide a list of tips to help you improve your account performance going forward.

ACCOUNT EVALUATION

To ensure your advertising is effective for you and your users, we require that your account and individual keywords maintain a minimum click through rate (CTR). Our CTR technology ensures that your keywords are given every opportunity to perform well per the matching options you have selected.

With this technology, CTR isn’t the only performance consideration, so there is no exact cut-off point. Our system automatically assesses a match’s degree of relevance by analyzing Google search queries, your ad
text, keywords, and CTR.

We measure Google AdWords ad performance solely on how well ads perform on Google.com. This ensures that all ads are evaluated on the same criteria. Since you are currently running ads on Google.com and on sites in our search network, the CTR you see in your account reports represents the combined average CTR across the various ad network channels.

If the CTR for your entire account falls below the minimum required CTR, we may slow all of your in trial keywords. To give you the opportunity to improve your ads’ performance, they’ll show only occasionally when users search on these keywords.

You will need to refine your campaigns to improve their performance and effectiveness. Once you refine your keywords and optimize your campaigns, please re-enable your account by clicking the ‘Restore Full Delivery’
button near the top of your ‘Campaign Management’ page. (Please note that if your campaign performance improves while delivery has been slowed, full delivery may resume automatically, and you will not see the ‘Restore Full Delivery’ button.)

If your campaigns continue to perform poorly we will slow delivery to your account again to give you more time to re-edit your keywords and advertisements. If you do not refine your ads and these keywords and they
continue to perform poorly, the keywords will eventually fall below the minimum CTR. When this happens, they will be marked as ‘disabled’ and your ads will stop showing for these keywords altogether.

Please read the campaign optimization tips listed below and visit http://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html for more tips on improving your CTR.

OPTIMIZATION TIPS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To refine your keywords and ad text and to improve your campaign performance, follow the steps below:

1. Use multiword, specific keywords to remove singular and/or general keywords. You can use our Keyword Tool to refine your keywords at: http://adwords.google.com/select/tools.html

2. Create new Ad Groups specifically containing your targeted keywords in your ad headlines or text.

3. Use keyword matching options to help weed out irrelevant searches. For ideas on negative keywords, look at the irrelevant results from our Keyword Tool as negative keywords. To learn more, visit:
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6100

4. Use descriptive and specific ad text to highlight the relevancy of your ad.

5. Delete poorly performing ads with low clickthrough rates (CTRs) to improve the CTR for your keywords and campaign.

6. Use keywords in your ad text to attract users to your ad. Plus, if a user searches on a keyword that appears in your ad, the word will appear in bold.

7. For more tips on improving your CTR, visit http://adwords.google.com/select/tips.html.

If you have additional questions, please visit AdWords Support at https://adwords.google.com/support, where you’ll find answers to many frequently asked questions.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising available.

Sincerely,

Ketzel
The Google AdWords Team

You all know what happens when your account gets slowed the 3rd time, you get "fined" $5.00 from Google to re-activate your account. This is one of the idiosyncracies of Google AdWords that I don’t quite understand. They now have this "in trial" and "on hold" keyword thing too.

Google told me "CTR listed within your account includes other partner sites", I am not sure if this refers to the content network? I turn off all my content network options in my ads. I’ll have to wait for their next reply.

Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines | No Comments »

Its been about 1 week since I posted about this campaign. Things haven’t been looking good since that first sale. I’ve had similar campaigns before. I even had 1 campaign that sold within 3 clicks then it stopped. I had 1 campaign that sold 2 copies of an ebook in 80 clicks and then it stopped. Very strange indeed….

I’m going to hold on to this dog campaign for 1 or 2 more days to see if it sells again. By then I would have accumulated 200 clicks on it. If it sells 1 copy in 200 clicks, the conversion rate is about 0.5% with my current bunch of keywords. I’ll post more about the actual results from this campaign once Blogger is working again!

My experiments with the animal tv shows flopped. I have since paused those ad groups. But my dog breed and pet supply web sites ad groups all actually receiving a lot of clicks. Unfortunately, these guys might not be looking to purchase anything by searching for a specific dog breed or dog supply web site. I’m actually hoping they would if they search for something like "golden retriever" and see my ad that says "Train Your Golden Retriever with our system" and then buy the ebook.

I’m not focusing on the super targeted keywords like "dog training" because my $0.09 max CPC rate is simply too low for this phrase! My positions are not even at the top 10 in Google and my clicks are pathetic. I’m thinking about my consumers and trying to guess what they would be looking for in the search engines if they were looking directly or indirectly for a dog training book.

I’ve tested this indirect approach on other campaigns and they sell on average at least 1 a day with cheap CPC rates at or below $0.12. I’m going to look into CJ.com for something to promote. I’ve been shying away from it because I had a few expensive flops with them. I think its time to go back there for some physical products.

The digital products that sell for me aren’t ebooks. They are more like membership sites and software. Things that people are already comfortable buying online.

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | No Comments »

I posted about the web version of the Keyword Toolkit last month. The creator of the web site actually made a software version of Keyword Toolkit and it sells for $35. You can take the Keyword Toolkit software for a test drive with a free version but it comes with some limitations like a loading delay for the free version and a automatic pop up ad to purchase the Pro version everytime it loads.

It definitely helps to save some time to “wrap” and “jumble up” your keywords with this software because its much faster than copying and pasting from the limited features on their web site.

Again I wanted to post this earlier but Blogger’s FTP tool has been really inconsistent for the past few days. 1 day its up, the next day its down…. Very frustrating. That’s the problem with having a hosted service. If I install my own blogging script, I only have to fear about my web host going down. With blogger, I have 1 more thing to worry about.

Categories: Pay Per Click Search Engines | No Comments »