Simple answer: It’s expensive.  Many people can’t afford to keep things running after they run out of their initial capitol investment.

Now before you get all “No it’s not, I started with nothing and…” with your arguments, let me say (and I hope you’ll agree with me) that this business is about volume, not much else.  The people who make their livelihood slinging berries to Shamwow users are the guys who spend, what most people consider, obscene amounts of money on a daily basis.  Some 9-5 working people make $16,000 in a quarter, some internet marketers spend $20,000 in a day.  Bridging that gap, hell, even conceptualizing that dollar amount, is beyond some people and they just can’t comprehend how it’s done.

So back to the reason for high turnover and how you can avoid becoming one of the losers this industry chews up and leaves on the sidewalk. Simply put, a lot of folks run out of money before they should and have a hard time scaling campaigns.  The simple truth is that there is a massive amount of fraud in this business, and as a result, when it comes to new affiliates, networks don’t like paying out commissions on leads that may be invalidated later on by the advertiser.

Almost every network is going to scrutinize any new affiliate to prevent fraud, but ultimately, they want to see some history from an affiliate before they start sending you frequent wires.  Most networks don’t want to send a wire payment that’s under $1000, and many use NET15 or NET30 terms, which means you get paid 15 days AFTER the end of the month, not 15 days after the date you make the commission.  For example: You earn $300 in commissions on January 1st, the network won’t likely send a check until FEBRUARY 15th.   Let’s assume you started out financing your affiliate marketing campaign with a credit card with a $1000 credit limit and your daily traffic expenses are $150.  (You’re spending $150 to earn $300 in commissions, or rather, you’re making $150 profit (100% ROI) each day)

You start this on Jan 1, and by January 7th, you are out of funds, but have $2000 in commissions earned.  The campaign is still converting at whatever rate and the network and merchant are happy with the lead quality.  Depending on the network, you might have to just sit on a paused campaign until Feb 15th when you get your check.

So what can you do to stretch your resources?  First of all find a network that’s willing to pay you when you’re out of cash.  You need to consider 2 things in this situation: 1) network owners carry the cost of the commissions they pay you for a few weeks or even months after they have sent you a check.  If the merchant doesn’t pay the network for whatever reason, they’re the ones who eat the loss, or they charge it against your current/future commissions.  Second, remember that your lead quality counts.  Send consistent quality leads from quality traffic sources, you’ll be in good shape.

So the million dollar question: How do you ask the network to put your commissions in the mail?

Ask.  Simple as that.   Give them the real picture. Tell them what you’re spending, what your margins are, and where the traffic is coming from. They’ve been there themselves and if you justify it, and plan to keep the traffic flowing to the offer, there is a good chance they’ll help you out.

The KEY is to keep the campaign alive, so if you’re 3 days away from broke, THAT’s the time to request the payment, not when your campaigns are paused and you’re not making any money.

Now go getmoneygetpaid!

I finally hit a slump. After 12 months doing affiliate marketing 6+ hours a day, 7 days a week, I hit a brick wall that was 50 feet thick and 5,000 feet high. In other words, it was insurmountable under any circumstance. Well, maybe that’s exaggerating it a bit, but when you’re all alone sailing the hurricane-fueled waters of internet marketing, losing just a tiny bit of direction often seems like you’re on your way to the bottom of the ocean, not just a little off course.

That’s what happened to me. I had an offer that was killing the competition and getting me a daily consistent ROI of 500-700%. It was an easy offer to manage, all-graphic landing page, merchant supplied creatives, lots of traffic from Google content network, and a 50% landing page CTR with a 40% conversion rate at the offer. I was happy, making great money, finally on weekly wires with this ad network, and had the next 6 months of profits from this campaign all budgeted for new projects and other campaigns.

Then out the blue one day, I checked stats in the afternoon and found that the numbers were horrific, only about 5% of the normal amount. Freaking out that the offer died and my AM didn’t tell me, or that my ads weren’t running, or worse yet, that I was being scrubbed like a 10-year-old who just said “uncle fucker” in front of grandma, I ran straight to the Prosper 202 spy menu to check stats there, and sure enough, not a lot of traffic.

A few things happened after I talked to my AM. Earlier in the month. I had to pull teeth to get a tracking pixel on this offer, and it wasn’t until the pixel was placed that things started to go South. First, my AM called, said “bad news, our payout should have been $1.75, not $2, we need to immediately drop your payout, but in addition, this merchant hasn’t paid us since September 08 and we’d like you to stop the traffic right now.” (This was in March 09) So at this point I’m kind of stressing, but not too bad as the campaign would only lose about $1200/month and was still really profitable if I went down to $1.75, but to stop RIGHT NOW? I mean dude, I have this money budgeted for the next 6 months.

Then the ax came down, the AM said “Truth is 3 days from now we’re meeting with the merchant and will likely drop them for non-payment.” So here I am with this GREAT traffic source, AWESOME conversion stats, and PLANS for the future profits, and this flaming bag of shit is thrown on my doorstep.

No biggie I thought, I’ll find out who else has the offer or a similar offer and jump ship. I did that but the payout at the second network was just too low to make the campaign worthwhile and I’d have to get busy on a new campaign ASAP. Add to that, 24 hours after I switched the links to the new network, the great hand of Google, like a pimp hand to a wayward ho, came CRASHING down against my chin in the most spectacular Google bitch slap of the year. They killed 100% of the campaign, no reason, no explanation, no excuses, nothing.

So there I was, sitting there thinking “no biggie, I’ll get back to work.” and for a week, that’s what I did. Then the FTC got it’s panties in a knot and decided to go after gov’t grants and google cash offers, so all the guys running those jumped out of the niche and started hammering the other offers extremely hard, which made my efforts to find a new profitable niche a lot more expensive than I anticipated.

So I worked and worked for 2 weeks, never really putting anything together and each day, growing more and more depressed. I questioned my talent, my ability, my knowledge, and most of all, I questioned if this was the biz for me at all. Nothing seemed to go right.

Then it came to me one night in the middle of pwning a 6-pack of Guinness stouts, “you don’t have to hit a home run your first at-bat each game, just get on base, then go from there.”

So for the next few days I did just that. I stuck to some basic maintenance of some older sites. I dropped 40-50 links a day each day and started to see some organic conversions come across for the higher payout niches, I also started getting excited about doing the simple tasks. You know, for a long time, I thought I had to be everything from the CEO to the janitor, making sure I had 100% of the project plan organized and being completed on a constant basis throughout the day. I realized that’s not the case.

I started just telling myself “I’ll do 3 major things today, if I get them done in 8 hours, cool, if not, I’ll re-evaluate tomorrow morning and redefine my day’s priorities.” This was just what the doctor ordered. I wasn’t worried about the “big picture” all the time like I was previously. I still knew what the big picture was and documented accordingly, but by and large, I could just focus on the task at hand, and not get flustered with worrying if the other tasks were perfect.

I’m at the point now where I know tough times will be there in the future, and I’ll get depressed again over some dumbass campaign dying suddenly, but I’ll also be better equipped to handle the after effects of such a slump.

This scenario is like Las Vegas in a lot of ways. Tons of bright lights, tons of boobage, and tons of booze, but you have to remember that it all has it’s price, and if you play your cards right, you’ll come out better in the end.

I asked around my circle of friends at WickedFire.com and was told PPC-Coach.com had some decent information, especially if you were on a budget.  I had $2000 to blow on this new venture and wanted to at least double my money before I made the decision to continue.

A little background on my PPC experience before I started PPC-Coach.com…  I had dabbled with driving PPC traffic to a few Ebay affiliate domains I owned.  Huge mistake.  I spent a few hundred driving VERY targeted traffic and still only generated $64 or so in commissions.  This immediately put a sour taste in my mouth towards PPC.  The next thing I tried was direct linking offers with YSM and Adcenter.  The commissions broke me even with my ad spend, but didn’t reimburse me for the time I spent creating the campaigns.

Again, I was doing what I was advised to do: test the hell out of everything, keep what converts.  Well at this point my goal was 100% ROI for each campaign, which included my hourly wage of $35/hour for setting the campaigns up.

So fast forward to PPC-Coach.com.  The way they sell their product is pretty intuitive. You pay a monthly subscription for access to their site. PPC-Coach.com has a number of tools, articles, videos, scripts, and forums to help you become a more well-rounded PPC ninja.  Each month, you are granted access to a new strategy/idea.  Month one is polls, not sure what the other months are…

Before you start using PPC-Coach, you’ll want to have these items:

• Adwords, Adcenter, and Yahoo Search Marketing Accounts
• Adwords Editor installed, Adcenter Desktop Installed. (Yahoo doesn’t have a desktop tool, and if you want to import campaigns personally, you need a gold account.  Support will import campaigns for you, but it’s not immediate.)
• $300-$2000 for your ad spend  (Remember to divide this between the 3 networks…)
• An account on a network such as Neverblue, Copeac, Ads4Dough, or Advaliant.  (Click on the links to get started. I recommend getting signed on with all 4.  It’s a good idea to diversify, and many of them have the same offers.)

How PPC-Coach.com Works

The program is segregated into monthly tutorials. Each month you are granted access to a new tutorial via the forum.  The first month, you are given a script that allows you to run polls on your website. The script itself is pretty bland, but it converts.  It has some features that are supposed to help with quality score.

The premise for the first month is to build a landing page asking a web user to answer a question, typically a yes or no format, and in exchange they get something.  “Is Barack Obama going to save the country? Yes or No gets you a free iPod Nano”, or something like that.  The web user answers the question yes or no, and is taken to the advertiser’s landing page, where they enter their ZIPCODE or Email address.  At the point the end user enters their ZIP or Email, you’ve just earned a commission and frankly don’t care where the end user goes next. That’s how ZIP/Email submits work for the most part.

This strategy is pretty solid if you want to generate some inexpensive and consistent revenue.  You won’t make TONS of profit until 5-6 months down the road when you have the cash to run the more expensive scaled campaigns, but once you hit that mark where you’re profiting $1000+ each week and are on weekly payouts with the networks, you’ll find that this method is a cash cow.

The forums are FULL of good ideas and information that will help you start your first campaign.

The main complaint I had with the program is the volume of posters in the forums not using the search feature.  The same questions were asked over and over and over, which really prevented me from getting a lot of info in short order.

I had some technical issues with the poll software. I prefer to run IIS and the software is copy-protected with Zend, so it was a real pain in the ass to get LAMP hosting off my network.  Once it was on the Apache box, the script ran fine.    Of course, the forum post I wrote asking Coach for help went unanswered for a long time.

The next issue that really cost me time was the 3-in-one and other PPC tools. It appeared that the output for MSN was using the wrong delimiter.  I had to redo the entire thing in Excel, then import it into MSN before it would work.  I again commented that it appeared not to be working properly, but got no response.  The tools are good for newbies, but if you’re a geek who knows a thing or two, the tools can be a hinderance.

Bottom Line Review

It seems that for a total newbie, the PPC-Coach.com system is great.  The coach and other members take TONS of time to spoon feed people as they go the course.  For those of you that have more than 20 minutes technical experience, I think you’ll find the courses/info/tools a bit lacking and frankly, you’ll find similar tools out there for free, and MUCH better tools out there for a few bucks more than what PPC-Coach.com charges.

If you have the cash and want to invest some time picking up new tricks, take a look at PPC-coach.com.  If you have experience in PPC, there are no strategies on PPC-Coach.com that aren’t discussed elsewhere for free!

Here are some basic rules of PPC for those just starting:

You need funds, lots and lots of funds.  Cash card, credit card, free credit coupons, whatever. There is nothing worse than running a successful campaign that’s profitable, then running out of money to keep it going.

Efficiency.  You need the desktop client for Adwords and Adcenter, and a gold account at Yahoo Search Marketing. (Though YSM will upload a campaign data file for you before you hit gold status, it’s costing you time. You must spend $1500 in 3 months to qualify for Gold. Call your account rep for more info.)

Keyword Research/Automation.  You cannot rely on the Google keyword tool for all your keywords.  You need to geotarget, dig deep and wide for keywords, and ultimately, put your ad in front of the folks who are ready and/or willing to buy, not the tire kickers.  Using automated tools and scripts that allow you to not only view your competition, but find underserved keywords is what separates the folks who profit and the folks who break-even.

Patience. You need to let ads run for a period of time before making decisions to optimize.  Just because you get 10 conversions the first 10 hours doesn’t mean you change things up. Let data aggregate, then analyze.

Networking.  Make friends in the right groups. Either on Sphinn, Wickedfire.com, or wherever you can find folks who you trust…  It’s not about what you know so much as WHO you know.  Lots of good strategies and tips are shared, get yours!

Business sense. It’s a business, treat it as such.  Understand risk analysis, cost/benefit analysis, and for goodness sakes, set some goals.  Putting $1000 on RED at the roulette table is a better use of your cash than spending $1000 on a campaign with no direction.
If you don’t have these fundamentals down, learn them now.  You’re wasting time and leaving money on the table if you don’t.