A few months back, I decided to take the plunge into PPC training. From May to August, I had been working diligently trying to organically rank 3-4 sites I had created and was finding meager success when it came to conversions.  I was getting 30-50 hits a day and converting one or two.  Easy $1000 a month, but my goal was $300 profit each day.

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!

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