My Affiliate Marketing Experiment – Part 7
25 Feb
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7:
….so eventually I pulled the plug on this little experiment (it ran for roughly 5 weeks) even though I was still making some money.
One of the negative parts about affiliate marketing I mentioned was the price of Pay-Per-Click varies wildly, especially when people are bidding up keywords. This can be the difference between a profit and loss if you don’t watch out. This happened several times and the cost I had to pay shot up too much to be as profitable.
Basically I got these campaigns running for the experiment, but when I stopped paying attention, most of the good keywords stopped running because they exceeded my set budget. Eventually most traffic died down, a sale was made here and there, but nothing big.
Ultimately I ended up bringing in $727 from the BluCigs campaign and $360 from the GreenSmoke campaign (about 90% of that money was from that first 5 weeks) and paid a total of $166 for Google Adsense.
I could have kept on going, but the amount of effort for a short-term profit wasn’t worth it, especially when I already have profitable businesses of my own that offer a more long term payoff. I can already see some of you trying to signup and start your own experiments with these ;-)
…however…hopefully this experiment demonstrated the POTENTIAL this sort of business model has in a more legitimate form. I wish I knew about it a long time ago when I was an active “financial” blogger.
I learned a lot and made a net profit!
-Neville Medhora
Very cool and educative experiment Nev :)
Thanks for sharing your discoveries with all us!
Thanks Jaume, you were the FIRST one to post a comment on my switched-to-wordpress blog :-)
fix the time!
It’s interesting to work in an industry with nearly zero fixed overhead
wtf, fail. You build hype, we think we’re going to learn something.
Summary:
Step 1: Do something illegal
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit, not go to jail.
Nothing to see here.
Affiliate marketing is borderline scams most of the time. I have seen a few people get it going, but when its so over-populated to begin with, its hard to actually get started and even mild success.
Always love to read about residual type income opportunities. Anything to create business. Keep the ideas coming.
Nev,
Your experiment inspired me to try out affiliate marketing for myself. I have already made $55 in just my first week! I can’t believe it!
Jen,
I looked at your VaporPuffs site, good name :-)
Glad this helped you start off!!
I know this is an old post… But with Google’s streaming search results, adwords success is probably going to be cut down tremendously.
It made a great read. You are an awesome writer, I cannot believe how you got me going until Part 7 of your experiment. More grease to your elbow.
Thats a great blog, easy to follow and explained it perfectly , Thanks Nev
Most help articles on the web are incaurctae or incoherent. Not this!
Awesome experiment Nev! Just saw this… actually very cool you did this in 2010… e-cigs are actually still a somewhat profitable aff niche even now some are bankin LOL… your LPs and ad copy were pretty impressive too for someone who hasn’t done this before..
And you’re right, few affiliates would share ALL details of their CURRENT active campaigns. Anything public is usually already a couple months late. Most aff spend alot of money and time to hit profits, it’s like they figured out a secret video game move combo and will keep it to themselves until they move onto the next game…
Should they be more transparent? Yes, if they don’t care about competition and happy to share the money :) I have friends whose employees stole 6 figure monthly campaigns and vanished. That’s why super affs usually remain pretty underground until moving on to something new, but usually no probs sharing old stuff :)
3 reasons I left the space (a) shady not being able to explain what i do exactly lol (b) lack of true value creation (c) campaigns can be very profitable but can also come and go, vs a stable biz like House of Rave. Alot are realizing so starting to explore alternative sources of stable income.
Vince
Thanks Nev. Very inspiring to us underemployed college-grads! Gotta take our future into our own hands and not expect a handout from an employer!
Great info, there are not many articles that share such good info.