My good friend Melanie was kind enough to fly out to Shanghai and put up with me for 10-days while we traveled around China. We had a blast exploring Shanghai, eating at the 88th floor of the Jin Mao tower, and hiking up and down the massive Yellow Mountains (an overnight train ride from Shanghai).

Here are some pictures from the trip.

Shanghai — Fun to Visit, No Way I’m Living Here More Than 2 Months!

I’m enjoying Shanghai– it’s an interesting, extremely safe (one of the safest cities I’ve ever been to), and vibrant city with plenty to do. The metro and taxi transportation are fantastic. There are lots of restaurants that cater to foreigners, but expect to pay a premium.

I have a fairly relaxed schedule for now. After a work day, I sometimes head downstairs for a $10 1-hour massage.

When I first arrived, I walked around many parts of the city. Lately it’s been way to hot for that, and I rarely venture out before 5PM… It’s actually much hotter than Florida!

Affiliate Marketing on Auto-Pilot?

So how did my affiliate business survive my 10-day get away? It went fairly well with no major problems. Although, I did see my profits decline slightly which was the result of me lowering my bid prices by 30% before I left using the Adword’s Ad Scheduling feature.

Outsourcing … (JUST DO IT!)

I have an outsource team which includes a content writer, web developer and programmer. In the past, I’ve outsource most tasks. Lately, I’ve decided to outsource pretty much everything. I don’t care. It’s more efficient than me wasting time doing many of the small tasks on my own, which detract me from the high ROI opportunities.

This has freed up a lot of my time to have a bird’s eye view of my business. It also allows me to focus on my core competency of managing my outsourced team and optimizing my Adwords campaigns.

Recently, I even hired a PPC copywriter, who is now split testing all my ads for me. She receives daily emails from Winner Alert and then sends me a spreadsheet containing 1 sheet of new ads and 1 sheet for the deleted ads. I simply upload using Adwords editor :)

All the inbound/outbound internet traffic from China goes through the Great Firewall of China. It’s basically a sophisticated filter that blocks many websites including offensive content.

Before I left Florida, I set up LogMeIn, a remote desktop sharing application which allows me to access my computer in Florida while in Shanghai.

Now, if I want to make a change to my Adwords account, I simply log into my computer at home, make the changes, and upload my account. It’s fast because it’s using my high bandwidth Florida connection.

(Click to Enlarge)

I’m going to be working from Shanghai for about 2 months. Of course, I brought my laptop with me and have a 2MB high speed internet connection from my apartment.

I booked the Shanghai apartment rental through a FANTASTIC Shanghai relocation agency. They provided me with a cell phone and picked me up from the airport. China Expats is highly recommended! :)

I explored the city a bit yesterday. It’s super crowded with 16 million people living in Shanghai alone!

The weather is usually rainy and hot, although it’s a nice day today.

P.S.

I usually use Skype to make and receive calls while abroad using the Skype In feature ($20 for 3 months + 0.02 cents/minute for outbound calls to USA). I get a local Naples, Florida phone number which forwards to my Skype computer wherever I happen to be traveling.

However, I just learned about the Skype Forwarding function (free). I have it set up so that when someone calls my regular US cell phone, it forwards to my SkypeIn number, which then forwards to my Chinese cell phone.

I only pay 0.02/cents per minute and I no longer have to use my computer to receive in bound calls! The call quality is fantastic since it’s Skype VOIP. And since I only pay for outbound calls with my Chinese cell phone, I don’t use any of my minutes. I called a few friends today and they all said the call quality sounds like I’m sitting in the next room.

The video shows a few people sitting around a table using their cell phones to pop popcorn.

What’s so special about this video?

The whole thing is a fake. They use the video to draw customers to buy a bluetooth headset with 99% reduced power consumption.

Unlike other competitive intelligence tools, iSpionage provides sophisticated ad tracking. You can see which ads your competitors are split testing, which position the ads are appearing, and how many times their ad has appeared.

I’ve found iSpionage most useful for getting a birds-eye view of any niche. Simply sign up for their free trial, enter 50 or 100 keywords related to your niche, and then wait a day while the data is collected. You will then see all the competitors in your niche and which ads they are using on each search engine.

Listen to my interview below with Leon Krishnayana & Marcel where we discuss:

• How competitive intelligence tools help sophisticated PPC advertisers dominate their market
• How to use iSpionage to spy on your competitors keywords & PPC ad copy
• Why it’s important for Google to be your “Most Important Customer” when using Adwords
• The importance of adding “Long Tail” Keywords to your PPC campaigns
• The future of PPC

Listen to the Interview (right click -> Save As to Download)

1) Maintain a high CTR on all your ads by continual split testing.

When first starting a campaign, upload 2 to 4 ads into each ad group. If you are targeting the ‘head’ of the search volume that contains a lot of traffic, feel free to add up to 4 ads. If you are targeting the tail (less search volume), then add only 2 ads.

The reason is because you want to ensure you are split testing your ads most efficiently. If there’s not a lot of traffic, then it’s going to take you forever to split test 4 ads with a 95% confidence interval. You can use SplitTester.com to test for statistical validity.

I pay $20 bucks a month to get emailed reports from WinnerAlert.com which notifies me by email each time I have a winning ad. I delete the losing ad and upload another ad to try to beat my control.

A common question is “Should I optimize my ads for the highest click through rate, or the highest conversion rate?”

It depends on your market and overall Adwords strategy, however, I recommend optimizing your ads based on the highest CTR. It’s a trade off, but I found good ads should get the highest CTR AND the highest conversions. Also, you make it up by having a higher Quality Score.

Yes, Google is very smart in getting us to put our business goals aside and give them more money!

2) Delete keywords which have accrued more than 200 impressions and less than 2 clicks/month.

Run a Keyword Report with a Filter “Clicks Is Less Than 2″ AND “Impressions Is Greater Than 200″ AND “Average Position Is Less Than 10″.

Quickly delete all the keywords which do not meet your Cost/Conversion goal using Adwords Editor.

The reason I don’t recommend deleting keywords in position 11+ is because you might want to try bumping up the bid price before deleting them to get them into a position where they have a chance of getting clicked.

From my point of view: A) It’s better to improve your Quality Score by deleting keywords that are racking up impressions without getting clicked. B) Your time is better spent optimizing the 20% of the keywords that bring in 80% of the traffic.

3) Add more targeted keywords to continually expand your campaign (and profits).

This is obvious. Make sure you run the keywords through the Google Traffic Estimator and only add keywords with a Search volume of 1-5 (export the report into Excel and then filter by Search volume).

Although adding “long tail” keywords that get little search traffic is a viable strategy, it is better to wait until your campaign is fully matured before spending too much time on the long tail.

You might also want to check out my reviews of many of the keyword tools on the market. Here’s a comparison chart.

4) Lower the bid price of high cost/conversion keywords (or delete them entirely).

I seem to be stuck with the same problems forever and the problems are numerous: getting a muse, then designing a website, drive traffic towards it and so on and so on…
It’s like an endless list of obstacles to overcome. And on top of that, I have to do all of that in between activities of my current job. So that makes that I am frustrated now because it seems to be impossible.
-Davey

Hey Davey,

1) Set a goal for yourself. Realistically, what type of position do you want to be in exactly 1 year from today?

2) Once you set the goal, write down all the things you might possibly need to achieve the goal. This could mean a new computer, certain software, particular relationships, a mentor, # of hours a week you’ll invest, money, sacrifices you need to make, etc..

3) After you’ve completed step #2 (if you don’t complete step #2, you need to re-think your life), you need to organize all that information into a meaningful plan. Start from 1 year out, how might your new life be different from where you are at now? Picture your new lifestyle in amazing detail.

4) Then you need to dig deep into researching everything about your plan. Start talking to people, researching ideas, getting suppliers, finding a website designer, and all the stuff you NEED. Don’t worry too much about all the pieces, just FIRE! Start taking small baby steps , EVEN if you don’t know which direction to go! There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start moving– that momentum will propel you forward.

5) Write down all the stuff from step #3 and #4 onto a new piece of paper. Label the paper “My Plan”. Don’t worry, it’s nothing too difficult. Just jot down your thoughts and basic ideas about what you will do. Try to make a rough outline of what your business might look like.

6) Make sure your plan will provide an extraordinary amount of value for other people. If you are not totally excited and pumped about your KICK BUTT idea, go back to the drawing board and come up with an idea in a market that you know A LOT about.

7) Continue pushing forward with your plan, even if it’s small steps. If you really want to change your life this exact moment, get off your butt– print out this page, get a few pieces of paper, and start at Step #1. DO IT NOW!

Good luck!

We spoke for 30-minutes and covered many topics:

• My entry into the business.
• The travel friendly lifestyle affiliate marketing has made possible.
• The basics of paid search based affiliate marketing.
• Some of terms and conditions I like to see from merchants and networks.
• The importance of merchants placing conversion tracking code for Super-affiliates using paid search.
• Some of the techniques I use to test offers, then profit big from the ones that work.

Wade is a great guy who I met at the Affiliate Summit Gospel Brunch.

Listen to the interview.

Most of you know I was fortunate enough to take a 2.5 year trip around the world. I haven’t written too much about this on my blog, but I’d like to share some of that experience with you.

Basically, you don’t need a lot of affiliate income to travel. When I was traveling, I was making $50 bucks a day. That’s laughable, but it was enough to pay for my food, apartment, and all living expenses for 2.5 years, traveling to 4 continents.

The trick for me was to choose countries that were inexpensive and the dollar would go a long way. I tried to stay out of Europe. I also preferred to get an apartment in a country so that I could stay in one location for a period while I worked from my laptop (I did this in Barcelona, Cape Town, Jerusalem, Buenos Aires).

Here’s a brief run down in case you’re interested:

Started in Mumbai, India and backpacked through India for 5 months. Headed from Calcutta to Thailand for 2 months then to Laos. Did some trekking. Took a plane from Bangkok back to the USA. Stayed in USA for a bit, then headed to Buenos Aires, Argentina 6 months. I rented an apartment on Craigslist which is where I find all my apartments. I took side trips to Peru and Uruguay. Then I headed to South Africa (Durban) along the Ivory Coast to meet a friend at a Drumming festival. I booked an apartment in Cape Town, South Africa. Then I traveled around to Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique before heading back to South Africa and then back to Buenos Aires. I came home for mother’s day, stayed in the states for a bit, then booked an apartment in Barcelona, Spain for a month before heading to Israel and then a 10-day Mediterraneans cruise. See some pictures and my travelogue.

If you are working from the internet, it’s entirely possible to travel the world. If I rented an apartment, I made sure to book it in advance and ensured it had high speed internet. The only problem I ever had was in the desert of Namibia, where the only internet was at a gas station that I passed and in Windhoek.

To give you some more details.. My affiliate income came from promoting a few affiliate offers and working with 2 client’s which I had a consulting position.

I would say it’s hard to grow your business while traveling, unless you are in one location for an extended period. You can maintain an affiliate business and usually sustain revenues. While I was in Israel and working barely 15 hours a week, my business actually grew faster than when I was in the states and working from home 30-40 hours/week!

So, how do you get into this whole traveling + affiliate marketing thing?

If you have no debt and no kids it’s pretty simple.. Decide that you want to make $xxx amount per day and then you will leave for a specific country. Put a picture on your wall or other things to remind yourself of your goal. Then as soon as you hit your daily goal (and it probably won’t take you much time since you are so motivated), go on Craigslist.com and start emailing owners in the Apartments section of the country you want to visit. Secure an apartment with high speed internet (I don’t usually give a deposit), and then get a Visa and book your ticket.

I’ve done that process over and over again. In fact, next month I’m moving to Shanghai, China. I booked my apartment tonight :)

So in conclusion, affiliate marketing rocks.

There’s a mathematical reason why I’m a huge fan of CPA. It comes down to being able to split test everything MUCH faster because the conversion rates are higher.

Think of it this way– in a traditional CPS the conversion rate is 1% - 3%. Which means, you will need 200-300 clicks minimum before you can say with any degree of accuracy if the offer is actually converting into leads.

With CPA, you can sometimes have conversion rates around 15% - 25%. You need to send a much smaller amount of traffic to an offer to get a statistically valid confidence interval to know if the offer is converting.

If you are sending PPC traffic straight to a CPA offer, that means you will have to spend less money and time testing an offer. And with affiliate marketing, it’s usually a numbers game– the faster you can test offers the better.

Here are 3 CPA networks I currently work with:

• Azoogle Ads
• Copeac
• CX Media

Here are additional CPA Networks:

• 140 Affiliate Networks
• The CPA Network list I use
• More CPA Networks
• Another list of CPA Networks