According to TheDomains.com,

Efficient Frontier Inc, which calls itself the world’s largest search engine marketer says that the number of clicks on ads served by Microsoft Bing.com search engine jumped 13% in the two weeks since it was switched from Live.com.

“Those gains are significant in terms of revenue,” said Justin Merickel, marketing vice president at Efficient Frontier, which places about $750 million in text ads on top search engines worldwide.

With the U.S. search ad market valued at $12 billion this year, each additional point in paid-click share Microsoft gains would be worth $120 million in annual revenue.

So, that being said, are you testing your campaigns on Bing.com? If not, don’t you think it’s time to give it a shot? Sounds to me like Bing could be liquid gold!

How the Book Came to Be:

The idea came to me awhile ago, actually. I was cruising the Google Adwords Toolbox looking for potentially profitable, high-traffic keywords when I somehow happened across the keyword “baby name” and noticed that, between the singular and the plural version of the phrase, there were nearly 11 million monthly searches. And, when I Googled the phrases myself, I noticed that there was nearly no PPC competition for either keyword. “Golden!” I thought. But when I went into all of the affiliate networks we belong to to look for a baby names-related offer to begin to promote, I didn’t find a single one. I was bummed out and quickly put the niche out of my mind to move onto something else. And the “baby names” idea stayed there — on the backburner — until weeks later when I read this post on Shoemoney.com about making money online with your own products. The post was guest written by Scott Skinger, who is the founder and president of www.TrainSignal.com, an ecommerce company that produces and sells computer training products for IT pros. After reading it, I immediately started brainstorming and that’s when I remembered the baby names niche! Brilliant! Since I couldn’t find any baby names products to promote when I wanted to, why not write my own?!

Making the Book:

I was able to procure a baby names database from the Buy, Sell, Trade section of the forums at Namepros.com, which I was able to convert into a Word document and, after a full week of reformatting the database to read like a book, writing an introduction, a table of contents etc. to make it look more like a book and creating a cover for it in Photoshop, I had a final product to start promoting. When all was said and done, the book has nearly 8,000 names — complete with their country or culture of origin, their intended sex, and the meaning of each name, all listed alphabetically — and is more than 180 pages long. Not too shabby. Though it was pretty tedius work reformatting everything, it wasn’t an awful lot of “work” really, and the potential moneymaking benefits could far outweight the work I put into it.

Getting it Online:

I knew I wanted to sell the book online through affiliates. Although it cuts down on the profit margins a great deal to where we’ll only make a few dollars per sale, it also cuts down tremendously on the amount of work we’ll have to do moving forward so we can continue to focus on other projects while this one runs quietly in the background, hopefully bringing in some nice residual income. With that in mind, I set up the landing page in the traditional “long sales letter” style you see many eBooks sold through. Only I didn’t want ours to ramble on for hours like many Make Money Online eBook sales letter pages do; I needed to keep ours short and sweet. I found this great, FREE “sales letter” landing page template from dotcompreneur.com to start with and made some personalizations to it to better fit our niche and our target audience. And just like that, we were in business.

To begin to promote it, I looked into listing the book on ClickBank, PayDotCom, and Click2Sell but ended up opting for ClickBank because of their built-in automation. Although their set up fees are higher than either PayDotCom or Click2Sell, I liked that ClickBank paid my affiliates for me during each sale. With the other two networks, I would have had to pay them all manually from my own funds, which is a pain in the ass. I would have to make sure I was around to pay them on time and that I had enough funds on hand to pay them the money they were due when they were due it. I like that with ClickBank the money that gets to me — even if it takes a few extra days to arrive — is all mine, and I won’t need to worry or do anything more with it.

So I went ahead and followed the ClickBank directions for setting up my site for their system (including the “pitch page”, “thank you page”, payment buttons, etc.) and was good-to-go. I paid the setup fee and litterally 2.5 business days later (yesterday), I got an email saying that my Baby Names Book was approved for sale and would be listed in the ClickBank marketplace to be promoted.

What Happens Next:

From here, we can only hope (and monitor and optimize, of course) that it begins to be promoted right away and takes off, which I think it should. Between all of the Baby Names-related keywords (there are a bunch of high-traffic ones; look them up) and keywords like “mom”, “pregnant”, etc. there are TENS OF MILLIONS of monthly searches — think about it, how many women become pregnant every day; it’s a limitless niche — and very little PPC competition currently. After that, we can sit back and rake in the money while an army of affiliate marketers sell the product for us. As I said, we can then use that residual income to fuel other products we have on our horizon. Here’s wishing us luck!

Note: if you would like to promote our Baby Names Book “Hello, My Name Is…”, make sure you’re signed up with Clickbank.com and then click here to get started.

(click on the image for full-sized version)

Now out of these two ads, which would you be more likely to click on? The good, professional-looking ad on the right-hand side, or the one on the left which is pixelated, was clearly made in MS Paint (I didn’t add those red arrows, they were already there!) and has a huge, glaring misspelling!

Running display ads in your PPC campaigns in addition to the traditional text ads is always a good idea — there’s often less competition on a keyword with display ads than there is with text ads and the CTR of display ads can be higher, too — but if you’re going to take the time to test display ads, make sure and take the extra twenty seconds to spell check your ad. And if you’re serious about making money from PPC (or online in general), find a way to acquire a copy of Photoshop and an at least remedial understanding of the program (or shell out the couple bucks it takes to hire someone who can make a killer ad for you).

Otherwise, if you end up running ads like the guy on the left has done, you’re just pissing your money away!

But I’ve found — for me at least — it to be super helpful to have and end goal in mind, something you can buy or have if you make X number of dollars online. For some people it’s something like a new car, or a new house or even an item as simple as a Nintendo Wii. And while I too want all of these things for myself, I’ve been reading Timothy Ferriss’ book Four Hour Work Week this week and I’ve decided the one thing that I now want to work toward is having enough money to have a Virtual Assistant on my payroll.

Seriously, I can’t think of anything more ballin’ than that. Ferriss describes his experiences with VAs at length and discusses how he’s hired VAs from places like elance.com or Your Man in India for $4-$25 an hour to do everything from blogging research to setting up meetings and interviews, to sending people flowers for him. Reading that has given me a new found drive for making enough money online to be able to hire myself a Virtual Assistant. Everyone needs to have goals, right? What are yours?

The rules to enter the contest are quite simple. All you have to do is follow Cakes on Twitter @nickycakes, go to Cakes’ original contest post here, click a button to generate a unique tracking link to the contest for yourself and Tweet it out to the world. Pretty friggin’ simple, really.

So how do you win? Well, for linking to the contest you get 1 point, and for everyone that enters the contest through your personal link, you will get 1 point. The winner will be randomly selected at midnight EST on MAY 15th from all of the entries. Keep in mind that the winner will not necessarily be the person with the most points (although the more points you have, the better your odds of winning); think of each point as a raffle ticket, or an entry into the contest. So even if you only send one Tweet for one point and have no followers and no one enters the contest through your site, it’s still better than not entering at all. Do it. Good luck!

Chances are, if plenty of other people are running similar offers in similar niches, then there’s money to be made there. Yes, it means greater competition and a higher cost per click, but it also means a greater reward. Keep your eyes and ears open as you surf the web in your spare time and take note of what you see. Have you seen the same affiliate offer or landing page advertised in many different places, or even just the same niche in a lot of different ad networks? Well then, it’s pretty safe to assume that the affiliate running that offer is making some decent bank at it, or you wouldn’t see their ad everywhere (unless they’re just throwing a ton of money against a wall and hoping something sticks. But wait long enough and if the ad is still there then they’re probably onto something).

Check out their offers, check out their landing page and see if you can learn something from what they’re doing. Keep in mind I am NOT recommending you copy their landing page word-for-word; there is no room in this industry for straight stealing and you are not setting yourself up for long-term success if you simply steal other people’s content. You will eventually be caught and run out of Dodge.

That being said, there is no reason you cannot learn from what other people are doing to be successful and emulate their campaigns. We’ve all capitalized on good ideas we’ve seen demonstrated elsewhere, in this industry or any other.

As I said, though, with a popular niche comes more people and more competition. Chances are you won’t be able to direct-link, for instance, to an offer in a niche like Diet Offers or BizOpp Offers and you’ll need to be that much more creative and original to out-do your greater competition. But remember, if there are a lot of people already there promoting a niche, there’s already a lot of money to be made there, too. Go get yours!

So, if you’re stuck when it comes to what niche to choose or what offers to run, look around and see how other people are doing what you want to be doing. Learn from them, build on what they’re already doing, test, optimize, think outside the box and GET PAID! Good luck.

The transition, although pretty nerve wracking, isn’t without some security. I have lined up a part-time sales & marketing job (also working mostly from home) with some guaranteed income and some definite security, which is helping to keep me sane. Meanwhile, I will be using the rest of my weekly free time to do some freelance & magazine writing, and to build up and officially launch Nate & my own New Media firm, TookMedia; which will specialize in Internet marketing, social media branding & development, copywriting and content creation, blogging, and a few other bigger web ventures we have up our sleeves (which will undoubtedly be unveiled in the coming months).

Back to the Blog

The change will also allow me to put more time and energy into AffiliateByNight.com, which I’m excited about. It should grant me enough free time that I’ll be able to get back to posting almost daily, rather than the two or three posts a month we had fallen to. So certainly be ready for lots more goings-on ’round here.

Lastly, if anyone in “the industry” happens to be reading this — I know some of you are — and wants to collaborate on your Internet marketing/branding initiatives, or if you need some freelance writing done, please don’t hesitate to give me a shout. Otherwise, grab our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter, and get ready for lots more to come. Cheers!

One thing that we have discovered over the last month or two is that it isn’t all about Google. We were beginning to get discouraged with our disappointing forays into the world of PPC advertising on MSN and Yahoo! Even Google wasn’t giving us the great results that we had hoped for with a couple of our promising new campaigns, despite our use of the content network which was the home of our last big breakthrough campaign.

We decided to give social networking sites another try with our PPC dollars, since we knew that the campaigns we had were solid but we needed a more affordable testing ground than AdWords. We had limited success with them previously, but were hopeful we would find the right combination of demographics and ad copy on MySpace and Facebook that would start turning us a nice profit again. If Shoemoney and others were talking about how great of a market imbalance there was regarding these sites, there had to be something to it. Lo and behold, our instincts about our campaign were right and there certainly is something happening with the growing ad platforms on social networking sites. Here are 5 great reasons you should be advertising on both MySpace and Facebook:

1.    Cheaper Clicks

Generally speaking, the cost to advertise is lower on sites like MySpace and Facebook for many niches. We were going to have to spend upwards of $1/click on Google for our new campaigns compared to .35 - .40 / click or less on these social sites. Being on a budget as part-time affiliates, saving 60% per click is a great deal. It gives us more leeway to split test our ads, run them longer to gather more test data for optimization and gives us a greater profit margin per conversion.

2.    Demographic Targeting is Awesome!

The ability to laser-focus your campaigns on MySpace and Facebook is something that even Google can’t quite match. With all of the demographic and personal interest data that users submit to these sites it is really easy to tighten your advertising net and show your ads to people more likely to click on them AND convert to a sale. You can target much more narrow bands than “United States” or “New York.” You can have a campaign set to target 18-30 year old, single women, interested in fitness (dieting perhaps?) divorced fathers who are 55+ with children in the Northeast. The combinations and categories to use are massive and you can get some really good focused traffic

3.    Less Competition and Tons of Viewers

Most people starting out in PPC go right to Google, or MSN, or Yahoo! They don’t hit up social networking sites for a variety of reasons and this is one of the main reasons for the imbalance that exists right now in using these networks to advertise. Take advantage of this before the market corrects itself and everyone is spamming Facebook and MySpace with ads and copying your campaigns. Also because Google is so prevalent in search and search marketing today, many people assume that is the only way to get good traffic volume seeing your ad. While it is certainly a great way to get viewers, MySpace and Facebook have hundreds of millions of users who could potentially see you ads as well, not a group to be ignored by any stretch.

4.    The Ability to Go Visual

One of the great advantages to using social networking sites for advertising is the ability to use image ads and insert pictures into your ad copy. While these options exist in other methods of PPC, one of the reasons I feel it’s so advantageous on social networking sites is that these sites almost condition people to look at images. Tagged pictures of friends on Facebook, cool bumper stickers or imbedded links on wall posts, widgets and add-ons for MySpace pages – the list of visual stimuli on these sites is high and as a user you get used to looking at them. Pick the right image to go with your ad and you’ll attract a ton more visitors than whatever witty/catchy/insightful text you put on in your AdWords Text Ads.

5.    Avoiding Google for a Change

Google is the “king” of search and PPC advertising for most people, and it’s not an undeserved title. They provide great products and services, for free mostly and are a great benefit to casual web browsers, advertisers and everyone in between. However, affiliate marketers (ourselves included) are often complaining about Google’s quality score system being impossible to comprehend at times, the seemingly random nature to the ever dangerous “Google Slap” and various other annoyances that come from using their system. It’s nice to take a break from all of that sometimes and enjoy the freshness that forgetting about their metrics provides (granted, getting an ad approved on Facebook is harder than getting front row tickets to the Super Bowl, but that’s a different post all together…).

Each of these reasons is compelling enough for some to make the move and branch out onto Facebook and MySpace advertising. Taken as a whole, it seems foolish that you wouldn’t at least consider diversifying your interests and give them each a try. Until then, we’ll be over there making all the money for ourselves.

Our Affiliate Goals for 2009:

1. Increase posting frequency on this blog. Between balancing full-time jobs, affiliate campaigns, learning affiliate marketing ourselves, multiple blogs and plenty of other online adventures, unfortunately this blog seems to go by the wayside far too often. So one of our biggest goals for the new year is to increase posting frequency on AffiliateByNight.com
2. Become steadily profitable. We made HUGE strides in our affiliate campaigns over the last few months and did eventually have a few profitable campaigns in 2008 (all of which have since died), but Nate & I would really like to become steadily profitable this year and really develop some long-term, high profit campaigns. And I think (hope) we’re on the verge of doing just that with our newest, biggest campaign set to launch in a couple of days.
3. Grow our domain portfolio. I wrote a couple of days ago about how we’ve started to get into domaining and are really enjoying it (as well as the huge long-term benefits of having an impressive domain portfolio). Well in ‘09, we’d love to add some very strong domains to that portfolio and maybe make a few sales, too.
4. Continue to learn. Maybe this is self-evident, but you simply cannot win with affiliate marketing if you’re not on top of your game! You need to bring your A game constantly, staying ahead of the curve, and on top of all the latest trends. The more you know about PPC, about PHP, about design, about marketing, about Google, and the ways of the Internet in general, the better suited for success you’ll be. Good affiliate marketers never stop learning and, as you know, we’re striving to be better than good.
5. Have fun. If you can’t have fun making money online, than you don’t know what fun is! Sure, sometimes the Affiliate Rollercoaster is stressful-as-hell and it sure isn’t for the faint of heart (I can’t count how many times these past 6 months I’ve wanted to throw in the towel), but when I put all the bullshit behind me and focus on what we’re doing and how we’re making money — real-life cash monies — I am very thankful to be an affiliate marketer!

What do YOU want to accomplish this year?

Have a good year, everyone, and good luck!

Making a Battle Plan

We quickly realized a few months back that income streams in affiliate marketing can be extremely variable. One week you are raking in money hand over fist, and the next week the profits all but dry up. This is the danger in having a limited number of modes for generating income and why we have started to diversify our earnings streams by branching out a bit. We were promoting a particular dating offer that was doing really well for us but the advertiser decided to pull the offer and we didn’t really have a solid back-up in place at that time leaving us with a serious gap in our earnings. We knew at that point that we needed to have a battle plan for our business and got to work hammering one out.

Divide & Conquer

Since the two of us work together but live in different locations and have different schedules, it made sense for us to divide up the tasks each of us will be working on and set dates to check in with each other on progress. This allows us to each be working towards our new goals over the course of a week and then when we check in we use some of that time to outline our work for the next week or so. As part of our divide and conquer strategy we also started to implement a lot more future planning so that we constantly have campaigns running and other ideas being developed in the background. Rarely do he and I work on the same project simultaneously so that we can have as many different opportunities developed to make money online as possible. We are hoping that this process of planning ahead will lead us to a very profitable and productive 2009.

Implementing your own plan

Many of you won’t have the advantage of working with a business partner right away, or at all, but that doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t make a plan for your online business. In fact, it is often even more critical to plan ahead when you are working alone since you are the only one holding yourself accountable. Making a weekly, monthly or even yearly goals list for yourself and then structuring your work around those goals is an excellent way to stay focused, productive and profitable since if you’ve planned correctly you’ll always have several streams of income working for you.

If you aren’t in the business of planning ahead, you should make an effort to start 2009 off on the right foot buy planning your online plan of attack for one month and see how much more productive you can be. My guess is it will cut down on wasted time, focus your efforts more and provide opportunities for self-evaluation and improvement. Good luck!