The age old question of being new to Affiliate Marketing, what should I set my goal at? The answer is usually around the $50-$100 a day range. That is conservative and generally speaking though. Affiliate Marketing is no different than anything else you may encounter in life. If you still working a job then just consider it a new one. There are going to be things that you have to learn and experience before you become a top dog around the work place. The same applies to sitting in your cozy little office with the coffee pot brewing, it is going to take some adapting and adjusting before you get comfortable.

Aside from the fact that there are a lot of things you will have to go thru and learn from, you also have to deal with learning pace. Everyone is different. Some people will go out and earn $500 in their first month. I’ve personally helped and seen it done. Others may take at least 6 months before making their first dollar. Uhh umm, Hello? That would be me. Some may even take more than a year.

In my opinion you need to start with something you know. I love gaming. More importantly I love gaming on the Xbox 360. Some of the first offers I ever ran were for Xbox 360’s and Xbox 360 games. On top of running CPA offers, I also sold xbox 360’s and equipment thru Amazon. Hell, I did not sell a lot but at least I was selling something. I knew enough about the niche that I could write about it without it being a strain. As a matter of fact, I knew the niche so well and being a member of the Halo Forums, General Gaming Forums and MLG PRO, I could relate and interpret the lingo used among gamers. Knowing this I could adjust my writing style to something that was actually INTERESTING to read for gamers. Knowing what you’re doing is a crucial component in Affiliate Marketing. Without knowing the ins and outs of your market, do you think shooting from the hip is going to be enough in that market to make a comfortable living? Maybe after a year or so when you have printed so much shit that you have so many rankings or ads running that people cant help but to come to your site. Now you have to deal with will they return or not?

Well the wait is over. Today I get the opportunity to introduce Eric’s (from The $1000 Affiliate Experiment) groovy new tool Poll Factory. Poll Factory is the newly created system that allows you to construct CPA voting polls at lightening speed. As a matter of fact it takes an average of 5-6 minutes per poll! If anyone has followed the CPA Marketing Series then they already know that polls covering celebrities, movies and sports can be some quick profit earners.

So a little math here shows that working hard for two hours a day would yield at least 15 polls a day. Seriously, with all the information that has been covered and the release of this tool, if you cannot make money with this simple tactic, you’re in real bad shape. Eric is an active PPC Marketer so he didnt spend his time and resources creating a tool that he himself would never use. He built it for himself! As a matter of fact you can check out his case study of the easiest $650 he’s ever made online. If that wasn’t enough, he gives you his topic for the poll! You can see the poll that generated the income here.

Here’s where I tell you the price and all that jazz. Luckily it’s not an ebook..Hooray! (Like you would see one here anyway). This is a real tool created by a PPC to CPA Marketer that I am using myself. As a matter of fact, I really dont know if I would still be doing polls if it wasn’t for the ease of use Poll Factory provides. On average my polls will make $30-$50 profit a day with my good ones in the $100 a day range. So with that mindset how much you think Poll Factory is worth? You will have to cruise on over and check it out for yourself at how ridiculously Eric has priced it during his launch. As for support, Eric has setup a forum specifically for Poll Factory.

I really dont link out to many bloggers anymore. The amount of disinformation on the net is rising at a sickening level but I wanted to take the time to let everyone here know about a cool little gig going on right now. First off, I have never met Chad from CDF Networks. I visit his blog EVERYDAY and even though I am subscribed, I much rather spend some time on the blogs and people I trust reading their material. I make it a point to visit him whenever he writes a new post because the fact of the matter is, is that he has given out and still continues to give out information that is VERY valuable in regards to my own PPC Business and PPC in general. A couple of quick examples of pure gold include Day Parting Pay Per Click For Higher Profits and Parked Domain Traffic From Google.

With that said Chad is doing something pretty incredible for his readers. He’s running a Mentor For A Week Contest right now. He’s agreed to help the winner for a week for free to get started in PPC and Affiliate Marketing. This is the single most valuable thing you can get from someone like Chad. The contest is simple too:

1. Contest is open to subscribers only, so if you haven’t already - subscribe to the CDF Network feed.

2.  Reply to this post with a comment of 2-3 sentences about why you would like some help getting started in PPC-affiliate marketing. Please don’t write a book, just 2-3 sentences.

Highly recommended to spend a few minutes snagging his feed and giving yourself the opportunity to winning the contest and learning from a Marketer like Chad. You can check out the whole post here.

Popularity: 45% [?]

There’s a large misconception online that only very few people are making money online. This cannot be further from the truth. There are a TON of people making money online but you may only know about a handful of them. Two of the largest net profit producing affiliate marketers that I know are virtually undetectable online. They just assume to keep it that way so we wont go into details but the first with CJ and the other with Linkshare are doing incredible numbers as affiliates. It amazes me that so many people procrastinate and verbally cut down others who are making money online. I really dont know why this is. Jealousy perhaps? Maybe the ebook selling and ripping off? Who knows and who cares. The ones that procrastinate are the ones likely to reach the pot of gold later than most.

With that said there is an important piece of the marketing online puzzle that I feel is very important to marketers. It’s called risk taking. Now if you have ever got scammed in the past then your mind presets itself to calculate risks. In my opinion this is a good and bad thing. While it’s a good thing to calculate risks, it’s a bad thing to over analyze them to a point that you talk yourself out of taking one.

One of the hardest questions I get is “how do I make money without any money to invest”? This question is so hard to answer because while you CAN make money without investing any it takes a tremendous amount of willpower and work ethic. It takes so much, that I normally ignore this question altogether because I will tell you right now that I normally will not waste my time replying to a stranger of whom I know nothing about. If I had an idea of what you have accomplished so far and what your plans are going forward then I might be inclined to reply.

If there is one thing that is important about a competitive niche it’s that it HAS GOT TO BE profitable. Now you’re probably saying well if it’s competitive then it’s profitable right? Not necessarily. A lot can go on in a niche, especially with large companies coming to play for branding purposes. Sure in the end it’s probably profitable for them but if you’re at the top of the chain promoting with/against them then you could stand to lose a substantial amount of capital. The reason is because a lot of these companies have millions to spend to brand themselves and we as affiliate marketers do not or will not engage in spending that much of our capital.

It comes down to two things ultimately here folks. There is no need to over-analyze things because you can sit around and think about this for years and you’re still going to come out with the exact same equations.

1. Lots of competition most likely means profitable markets
2. Low competition means it’s 50/50 with no guarantee

Simple as that.

The more competition you’re facing, the harder you have to work. I really hate hearing about PPC Marketers who tell people they spend 1-2 hours monitoring their campaigns and the rest of the day stroking their meat. Honestly, I’ve met markets where I could do this and while it is nice, that’s a surefire way of getting a big case of the lazy ass. It’s not real hard with someone who is NOT dominating the market to come along and knock you off your high horse. The reason it’s so easy for them is because you have more motivation when your NOT making money than you do when you ARE making money. I know this first hand and that’s why it’s important to always be moving forward. Stationary and reverse are two speeds in which you basically just give your place up for grabs. It’s not their fault for whooping your ass, it’s yours.

Today is one of the days where I absolutely felt like crap after waking up. Granted I did stay up until 4 am working on a new site for Jeff and I. As usual I went thru my work-out routine and went for my morning jog which usually refreshes me. After taking a shower and sitting down at the command center, I started making my rounds but could not for the life of me engage in any comments or hardly any forum postings let alone want to start on the days productivity spread sheet. Sheesh!

I guess the morning work-out and jog is going to have to be revised into something harder. I started optimizing the home office a bit more (specifically the desktop) and here’s what I came up with. Currently I am still unsatisfied with the setup but at least I can run all communications off a separate machine now, which is vital considering the amount of gabbing I have been doing with affiliates, managers, network owners, entrepreneurs and marketers over the last couple of months.

A mess at first:

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A lot has been covered with the 3 major search engines as of late with the CPA Marketing Series so like you, I feel as if even I may need to take a break even if it is just for a few days. We will resume the Series soon with other great places to advertise and even get into the web placement and email marketing side of things with CPA offers. For now I would like to talk about a question that was asked in the forum just awhile ago.

Whoopie: I have a shedload of ideas and things to try. Maybe it’s the AS and ADHD, but I’m having a *really* hard time pushing things through. I have … far too many ideas on the go at once, and I’m not covering all the bases I need to and therefore not seeing the results that I should. It’s not that things aren’t working, it’s that I can’t focus to push them to work even better - if that makes any sense.Anyone else have this? How have you dealt with it?

I and every other Entrepreneur/Marketer have and will experience this. This is just the nature of working online. I remember when I first started out it seemed like the only way to make money online was to write and ebook or promote one. Being online for 3+ years now, things could not be any farther from that. As a matter of fact, I’ve made my living by not even following that business model. It’s a good way (obviously for some) but not the “be all, end all”.

Here are my responses to questions asked regarding quality score. There was not too many of them. SWEET! Less work for me haha. Seriously though, check the PPC Section of the forum for more in-depth conversations.

MasterOf None: I understand that most of quality score is about having a quality site, but adgroup/keyword organization also affects things for sure. In light of this, what is the best way to structure your campaign?

Here are some thoughts I had, are any of these on the right track(assume I have a script to make all these easy)?

-One keyword to an adgroup, include keyword in ad
-Few keywords to an adgroup, include only very similar phrases
-Lots of keywords to an adgroup, but they all share a common word or two in the ad.

If I may go two for one with the questions, even if we have a quality site, should we/can we still utilize dynamic keyword insertion techniques to boost relevancy?

Personally since I use a lot of software and the Adwords Editor I tend to go for a lot of one keyword per adgroup type of campaigns. This requires contact with Google in getting the limits raised such as the 25 campaign limit and 50K keywords starting off. This also takes multiple accounts but so easy to track. If one adgroup is getting clicked on the so easy to scrub others that dont perform so well.

I stay away from adgroups with over 25 keywords if I am not doing singles. In my experience, it’s just not worth it. Spitting out landing pages per adgroup (keywords within) is the best way I have found to counter the QS.