Greed Between The Lines|Ambassador of Quan. Follow me on my journey.

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I figure I will write a quick post to tell you all where I am right now with earnings, etc.

I have been doing affiliate marketing for about a month now.  It took me probably over a week before I even got my first conversion.  I started out before I had done the proper research.  Now my earnings bounce around from about $5 per day up to around $50 per day.

I really do feel like I am learning more and more each day, and I feel that I am getting closer to “making it.”  My small budget, I feel does hurt me a lot.  It takes me a lot of time to test stuff, and I don’t have much money to throw at many different offers.

My current goal is to steadily hit $100-$150 per day.  This would allow me to quit my full-time job and spend more valuable time on affiliate marketing.

I recently decided that I was going to venture into the area of the Facebook Ads.  It seemed like a reasonable place to test the waters.  From what I had read, CTR sucks, but clicks seemed to come pretty cheap.  It’s not hard to figure out why CTR sucks.  Your ads are getting shown to everyone, not people who are looking for something (like normal ppc).  People who are just looking at their profile to see if they have any new messages or whatever are being shown your ad.  They are not paying any attention to your ad, so you are getting impressions without clicks.

So anyway… I decided that I was going to give it a try.  I found a couple of offers that I thought would appeal to college-aged people (since that’s the bulk demographic for Facebook).  I made my image (another difference between Facebook Ads and search engine PPC), wrote my ad copy and submitted it.

My first attempt was for a site that has some freebies and paid surveys stuff.  This ad was DENIED by Facebook.  My best guess is that it was because the site had an ad for a place where you can play poker online (legally), and I believe Facebook frowns on the gambling thing.

Next I tried a cash advance offer.  It originally got denied as well.  I can’t remember exactly what I had as my ad copy, but it was denied because I guess the ad copy didn’t completely reflect the landing page.  Facebook seems to be strict on ad copy.  So I tweaked the ad copy and got it approved.

Right after that I did an offer for video games, and got it approved as well.

So after about 15 minutes, the offers both had around 10,000 impressions and only a few clicks (not surprising).  Then, the impressions stopped.  I checked it again 1/2 day later and nothing new.  They wanted me to up my bid close to $1.  Now, the reason I got into the Facebook thing was for CHEAP clicks.  I can pay $1 per click on Google!

A day or so later I did another new ad for a health store.  This time I implemented using keywords.  This reduced my potential audience from 18 million to about 300,000.  I had to leave after about 30 minutes, but at that time I was still getting impressions and some clicks.  My CTR for this was about .07, while my other ones that were quickly slowed down was around .03.  I don’t know what Facebook’s magic CTR number is, but I’m sure that’s why the impressions halted on my other ads.

One upside is that it is very easy to start a campaign with Facebook.  It takes almost no time at all, so it’s not really a big deal when you stop getting impressions.  You don’t lose any money because you aren’t paying for clicks.  All you lose is the time you spent making the ad.

I’m going to continue messing with Facebook.  Like I said, it takes almost no time to put up an ad, and there’s really no downside to it.  You can at least see if anyone is interested in your niche.

Cloaking your links is a must for affiliate marketers. What does this mean? It means that when someone puts their cursor over one of your links, instead of showing some long, ugly affiliate link (i.e. www.jkadl.com/jafj10402kljafdkla/lskjfa1) it can show whatever you want (i.e. www.greedbetweenthelines.com). Why do you want to do this? So not everyone in the world knows that it’s an affiliate link. Most affiliate marketers are still going to know it’s an affiliate link that has been cloaked, but the majority of ordinary users won’t have a clue. Some people don’t want to use your affiliate link (for whatever reason they may have), or they see that crazy-looking link when they mouseover and decide not to click on it.

My suggestion in choosing what to make your link say, is to use something believable.  You want to make people think that they are clicking on a “legitimate” link.  That’s the whole reason for doing this.  If I were you, I wouldn’t make it say something like, “Please Click This Link Now.”  That is just asking for the opposite. It’s going to look fishy and spammy, and therefore likely no one except the absolute noobiest net noob is going to click on it.  Don’t underestimate the intelligence that the general internet population has these days.

So anyway…. Here’s one way to cloak your links:

Type the following code into your HTML. It goes in your link code right after the ‘<a’ and right before the ‘href=’

onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.greedbetweenthelines.com’; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=”; return true;”

So your code should look like: ‘< a onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.greedbetweenthelines.com’; return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=”; return true;” href=”http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/subid/subid” mce_href=”http://www.youraffiliatelink.com/subid/subid”>Anchor Text< / a >

So there you go. Take it and make it work.

How do you go about getting your site indexed by Google (so it shows up when someone searches your keywords)? Make your page, then sit and wait for a week or two until the Google spiders stumble across it? That’s what I used to do too, but that is soooo old school.

First off, it’s important to know a few things about how search engines (Google especially) work. Search engines have programs called spiders or bots that are constantly combing the web and taking note of all the different content available. They go to a site, record the text on a site to get a feel for what it’s about, follow all the links, and index it for the search results. The search spiders visit “important” pages a lot more frequently than normal pages. “Important” pages are pages that are very popular, add new content often and have many links pointing to them.

These highly spidered pages are the keys to getting your site indexed quickly. Because spiders follow the links on the pages they visit, we can use these important pages to get the spiders to our site.

So here’s the pages I used…Go to Squidoo and write a quick article about your subject. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but make sure it contains some links back to your site. If you don’t have a Squidoo accout, get one because it’s free.

Next go to clipmarks (again, free account). After you download and install the simple clipmarks software, go back to your Squidoo page you created. Clipmarks your Squidoo article and give it a title and description and everything, and you’re good to go.

That alone should get you indexed in Google in just a few hours. Right now, clipmarks is getting spidered like crazy and you can use that to your benefit.

You can go further and use social bookmarking sites, other article submission sites and we forums to quickly build up your number of pages indexed in Google.

I hope you found this helpful. Now you won’t have to wait around to get spidered in a week or two.