Leaving the Land of the Rising Sun

Fellow affiliate ninjas! Thanks for dropping by my Affiliate Marketing Blog. Why not stay updated by subscribing to my RSS Feed or joining my Internet & Affiliate Marketing Newsletter? - Rian, Sept. 2007

Yep, not much left in my house but a bed, TV, and my computer. I still have a few personal items to either ship back home or sell on eBay and then I’m outta here.

I’ll be heading back to California to pursue my IM career full time, living off my current income streams and my savings account. Been here in Japan for 9 years, but now preparing for the “culture shock” that awaits me back in the US.

I spent most of last year saying I wanted a business, tinkering with things, but never really getting serious. I figure now, just going for it without having every last fine detail hashed out is the best way to go. A little risk is what I need, plus some faith in my own abilities. As Martin Luther King Jr once said, “Faith is taking the first step, even when you can’t see the whole staircase.”

Of course there are the natural fears of failure, and needing to go find a “job” (oh no!), if things don’t pan out. I really don’t think that will be the case though. On a side note, Mountain View isn’t far from where I live, so I can always pay Google a visit if I really need work.

July has been my best month to date online, and I’ve managed to make some pretty good money with just 2 niches. It’s nothing to brag about really, but for me, compared to my struggles of the past, this has been my turning point.

I finally understand Internet Marketing. I get it. I don’t know why it was so difficult for me to grasp how money was made online when I first started. It’s incredibly simple once you get your head around a few concepts like, “Adsense, Adwords, or list building.”

An over used but totally true cliche is that in boils down to taking focused action. That’s the magic bullet separating you from piles of cash! The latest ebook won’t make you a dime unless some action is taken on your part (and mine). I struggled with this due to sheer laziness and lack of focus for a long time. Finally though, now that I’ve got into a more serious and determined mindset, my struggles are starting to pay off.

Now I’m not saying that IM is simple in that its easy. I’d say the learning curve is pretty steep. And the less tech savy you are, the longer it may take, unless of course you have funds to outsource work from a site like Elance. The tech stuff has come easy to me, but learning to “think” like a marketer has taken me a bit longer. Now though, I’ve got ideas poppin’ left and right, so many that I need to email myself daily so I can come back to them.

In light of other things to report for a blog that has been left untouched for a couple of weeks, I’m finally seeing the “fruits of my labors.”

What’s funny is that recent success has come from a couple small campaigns that each took less than 10-minutes to setup. I do a lot of JV promotions simply because it’s usually easy money. I got a JV offer that I was originally going to pass up simply because I didn’t have the time.

But I soon remembered that I had previously purchased a domain name for the product in question months earlier, so I’d better at least try to earn my $5.99 for the domain name back.

Now a couple weeks later, I’m shocked at how well I did. 2 dumb ads, about 30 keywords spread across each match type, and a direct link to the vendor site. To date it has made me $671 in profit! (2 weeks running). This is all from a direct link campaign that took about 5 minutes to setup using the Adword editor.

Now what surprises me more than anything is that I’m able to make sales. I’m advertising in a pretty crowded space with other affiliates who’ve done bonuses, presells, reviews, etc. I did none of that simply because I didn’t want to take the time out from all the other things that I’ve got going on. I thought, “What the hell, I’ll throw it up and see what happens.” Sure glad I did!

Normally on a JV promotion, I’d do a bonus with a presell to ad value amongst the crowded Adwords real estate. But these usually take a couple of hours, if not days to write the presell copy, setup the ad campaign, develop a bonus, create a website, etc. In my past experience, the pay off hasn’t been worth the amount of time and effort that I put into these types of promotions.

So my simple direct link campaign has left me thinking that my time is better used simply using the “throw it up and stick” strategy, instead of going balls out on a new product that may or may not sell.

Without giving away the ad or the niche, I think one factor that helped me stand out and get the click among all the advertisers was that I used a “™” in the headline of the ad next to my keyword. This makes it look more official. I also included the price in the ad, as well as included my main keywords in the domain name that I purchased. This of course helped me get more bolded keywords displayed in the ad, as well as qualified more of the clicks since the user already knew they’d need to spend money.

All these factors, plus adjusting my bids to make sure that I appeared above the fold on US adwords attributed to an average CTR of about 7%. Normally, I’m ok with being position 5 - 8, but since I started seeing sales daily, I decided that staying above the fold was my best bet to see continuous clicks, therefore more sales.

Perhaps after this product has burnt out and sold all it will sell, I can reveal the niche and the adcopy as to make a quick “case study” on it to try to determine why this worked so well. Another thing I noticed too was that the majority of my sales weren’t from English speaking countries, though this was an ebook written in English. I saw lots of sales coming from India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Italy.

I had originally planned only advertising in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, like I usually do. But due to wanting to experiment a bit, I just set the campaign to global and let her rip.

Another campaign that I’ve been having a great amount of success with is yet another direct link campaign, this one for a software product. This one is not a Clickbank product and uses a third party affiliate software that doesn’t allow for keyword level tracking.

Normally I wouldn’t want to run a campaign like this, but when I found that there wasn’t a single advertiser on Adwords for it, I jumped up the opportunity. Again, glad I did…

To date, this 2 ad campaign, with about 20 keywords has made me about $300/week consistently. I only started it about the last week of June and have made sales daily. $300 may not sound like a lot, but considering my affiliate commission is only $12/sale, it is converting nicely.

But I’m dominating the niche since I’m the only advertiser. Plus, my clicks are about $.03 per click since I’m not competing for ad space. A word of advice: When you come across some obscure site with an independent affiliate program, take notice. You may not get many searches per month, but you can probably dominate since the affiliate program itself is not hyper competitive as it would be in a big network like Clickbank.

When I have more time, I want to document more on what I did that worked so well to share with you, and perhaps do a video to reveal a niche I think might work for those who are struggling to find a good niche to work in. I highly recommend the Niche Inspector software if you’re stuck. This little tool is freakin’ awesome and worth every penny IMO.

Anyway, other that running those two quick campaigns, I really haven’t done much online. I’m still truckin’ along with Keyword Xray, hoping to have some time before I fly out to finally update my Xray journal.

I also have some ideas that I want to share for subscribers only of my newsletter. I haven’t sent out an official newsletter yet, other than a promotion here and there and blog updates. I’m planning to reveal something that will blow you’re mind. It will only be available for my subscribers though. You won’t see what I’m going to reveal posted here, so if you want to learn something incredibly sneaky and awesome, opt on in…

http://www.rianbrooklyn.com/newsletter/ 

That’s all for now. I wanted to dust off my blog a bit and getting something posted before I let July slip way. The next few weeks will be crazy hectic with my move back to the States, so blogging time is scarce. Stay tuned… (oh and feel free to comment so that I know I have a few readers)