So I finally decided to create my own, personal blog: RunPD.com. I will mainly post about my athletic career there and keep RevenueQuest more professional/affiliate marketing oriented.

Speaking of affiliate marketing, now is a good time to fill you in on where I am at. School has been as busy as ever and affiliate marketing is very limited these days. Currently, I am not running any PPC campaigns and the only traffic I am getting to my offer pages is via search engines. This would be great if the volume was there, but it isn’t.

Like the last few summers, I should have some time to put into affiliate marketing and get something going again…

Almost 18 months ago I wondered how long it would take Google to pass up Yahoo! on Alexa’s rankings. Yesterday I noticed that it finally happened. Google is now the #1 most visited website in the world! (according to Alexa)

It is interesting to note that Google owns two other sites in the top-10, Youtube and Blogger.com. Pretty impressive.

Last week I was lucky enough to finish up my taxes and sent them away to the US Treasury and the Franchise Tax Board of California. Last year was definitely the most I have ever made from affiliate marketing and I wanted to be a good citizen and pay my taxes. Since my total profits came out to be less than $10k, I thought I would pay very little. I mean, Obama is looking out for me, right?

Wrong

Self Employment screwed me. Many people that are making lots of money online incorporate or form an LLC to avoid these high taxes. In the future, if I start to make much more money, I will without a doubt incorporate.

So one of my friends recently got an email from a senior member of the Facebook advertising team. The email was sent because Facebook wants my buddy to spend more money with them. Using this new hook-up, my buddy asked if my Facebook daily budget could be bumped (It is currently at $250 and I have hit that several times). Within 5 minutes, I get an email saying, “We recently increased the daily spend limit on your Facebook Ads account to $5,000.00.”

Nice! Now I better go spend some money on Facebook… and get my credit card limit raised while I am at it.

For a while now, it has been recommended that landing pages have articles, contact page, privacy policy, etc. Adding these pages makes your site look legit to both Google (or Yahoo!, MSN) and the visitor. I have also had some success with generating leads with the contact page.

Some people that visit your landing page may not be completely sold. They may have some questions and a contact page is a perfect place for them to ask. You then have another chance to sell that visitor on your product. Answer their question to the best of your ability (Don’t lie. If you don’t know the answer, show them where they can find one.) and maybe include some elegant pros that will get them to wip out their credit card.

A Simple Contact Page

If you don’t already have a contact page, here is a simple one you can use. Put this code on your contact page (ie. www.yourdomain.com/contact.php):

  <form method=”post” action=”sendmail.php”>
<table width=”500″>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”>Name:</td><td><input type=”text” size=”30″ name=”name” /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”>E-mail:</td><td><input type=”text” size=”30″ name=”email” /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td valign=”top”>Comments:</td>
<td><textarea cols=”50″ rows=”8″ name=”comments”></textarea></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td><input type=”submit” value=”Submit” /></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

And then save this as “sendmail.php”:

<?
//send us your mail

mail(’you@yourdomain.com’,'Subject of the email’,$comments,’From: ‘.$name.’ <’.$email.’>’);
header( ‘Location: http://www.yourdomain.com’ ); // where they go after the message is sent

?>

1. Income of $20,000+

The last few months I have been thinking a lot about what I am going to do after I graduate. Making a living in affiliate marketing would be great, but it just doesn’t seem like a very consistent career. If I can make $20k this year while going to school and running, it will show me that there is a potential to continue affiliate marketing post graduation — at least partime.

2. No long breaks

I think this blog has had some helpful posts. Unfortunately, it has never really “taken off” and I think the main reason for that is inconsistent posting. I’m not going to make a specific goal of posting exactly every 7 days… instead this subjective goal will hopefully keep me in line.

3. Network

I would like to get to know more people involved in affiliate marketing. Maybe I will even make a trip to one of the big gatherings like Affiliate Summit.

I have three big goals to work on. $20k is about $55/day and I’m already behind.

Last year’s recap post began with me evaluating my performance based on the goals I set the previous year. I decided to call it a draw as I met one out of the two goals I set for myself. Lets see how I did this year…

1. 100 RSS Feed Readers - This one is almost comical as my counter tends to hover around 7 with a standard deviation of about 1. The simple reason for this failure is that I don’t get enough traffic to the blog. More in depth reasons would be no promotion or advertising of this blog, infrequent posting… Failure
2. Sign up for more networks - I definitely succeeded here. But to be honest, how difficult is that?… Success
3. Break $100 in a day - I am really proud to have finally broken this barrier. What a wonderful day May 2nd most have been for me… Success
4. Have $15,000 in the bank - It looks like I am slightly shy of this one if I just count liquid assets. Since that is what I meant when I made the goal… Failure
5. Organize the categories - Happy to say that I got around to doing this. There are still a lot of them, but I think they are all appropriate… Success

3/5 isn’t bad.

January

I think I wrote two of my most popular posts in January. They doing well with organic traffic and have a few links from other bloggers… How to track keywords with Adwords and How to track keywords with Yahoo! Search Marketing

April

I started doing some PPC again and set some new records. Everyday is a new record

May

May was the first time I started making, what I consider to be, decent money. With the money came better and more frequent posts.

I began doing monthly affiliate income reports.

First $100 profit day (as I previously mentioned), I spent $4.69 for gas, Adwords site placement tracking, and I had my first guest post.

June

May affiliate income report,  $200 profit day, and I started following the stock market (but didn’t jump in… thank God), I hit $500 in revenue, I went to my second undie run, and I went to Italy.

July

June affiliate income report

September

I saw the end… July affiliate income report.

December

How I do Facebook ads

Prosper202

I use Prosper202 for tracking on all of my campaigns… Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and even Facebook. For Facebook, I start by setting up the network, offer, and text ad that I will be using, and generate the appropriate link. It looks something like this:

http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=

Redirect page

I then set up a redirect page. This is important because Facebook does not allow the url of your ads to be edited once they have been submitted. So if you want to change your bid, you can just change the link inside the redirect page.

The redirect page looks something like this:

<?

Header( “HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently” );
if($ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’) {Header( “Location: http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=”.$ad );} //ads with $0.xx max bid

elseif($ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’ || $ad == ‘fbxxxxxx’) {Header( “Location: http://trackingdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=xxxx&t202kw=”.$ad );} //ads with $0.xx max bid

else {Header( “Location: http://www.affiliate-network.com/reporting.php?pub=xxx&offer=xxx?=none” );  } //this is in case I get traffic to this url that isn’t from Facebook.

?>

A couple things to note here about the redirect page.

• You must save it as a .php file.
• “fbxxxxxx” is what I name my ads on Facebook. The first ad I made was named “fb000001″. I do this so that I can organize my ads and so that I can see which ads are performing and which ones aren’t. OPTIMIZATION.
• The url I actually put for my Facebook ads looks something like this: http://www.mydomain.com/redirect.php?ad=fbxxxxxx

Tracking and Optimizing

Once I have all that setup, I sit back and let some data collect. Hopefully, I can easily see that I’m spending less money on Facebook than I am making with my affiliate network of choice. When I do have some conversions to check, I simply update the subids into Prosper202. I then sort my results by keyword and I can compare all of the ads. This lets me delete ones that need deleting and change bids.

This has become an efficient way for me to setup and test campaigns on Facebook. It seems like speed is very important in advertsing on social networks as people often copy your ads within a day or so.

Let me know if you have any problems with this. I would be more than happy to help you out.

August

August saw a big, fat ZERO. Luckily, I also spent $0.

September

A losing month. Terrible. Spent $79.96 and brought in $76.05 for a grand total of $3.91. Basically I tried to revive a money-maker from the summer that Facebook killed.

October

I made a couple bucks… Spent $83.62 and brought in $94.50 for a total of $10.88.

November

November had very little of anything other than school and cross country going on. I had my Big Sky Conference, Mountain Regional, and National meet all in November (I should have quite a few airline miles accumulated now). All income that trickled in was from campaigns that I didn’t know were running. Spent $5.24 and brought in $10.85 for a total of $5.61.

December is already looking much better. It won’t quite meet up to my Summer months, but hopefully it will cover all that Christmas shopping I do. I’m sure I will at least beat UberAffiliate’s last month.

I think an anniversary post is a great time to update you all on what I am up to. Another semester at school has ended, so I am back home running, relaxing, and trying to learn some Danish (via Rosetta Stone… I think it is a pretty good program). This four-week break from school should allow me to delve into the affiliate marketing game once again. To be honest, I am way behind and I hardly have a clue about what is hot right now and what has since withered away.

Anyway, maybe I’ll be able to get back on it and start to write helpful posts once again.

Happy Holidays!