I’ve had more than one person confirm my earnings as a fact. It was generated from April 11th through August the 14th of 2009. I generated well over 6,000 leads for the product at a price point of around $175 per sale. This comes out to a little over 1 million dollars in sales. These are my personal best estimates, I could be off, but likely not by too much.  My total net income was significantly less than this because of costs involved with sales, and the fact that I was running everything was as an affiliate.

The most interesting thing about this entire ordeal was that my total basic out-of pocket costs were less than $500 for the entire campaign. This excludes server costs which rapidly ballooned over the course of time due to my personal paranoia about Google and servers. That cost me a ton of money which I won’t go in to, because it’s completely irrelevant when dealing with this post.
I started in early 2009 working towards developing a few SEO campaigns. I had a wordpress.com blog that was starting to get pretty heavy on traffic. It was a real estate blog dealing with almost only foreclosures. 95% of my traffic was from SEO sources I was quickly realizing the power of SEO. I had also joined a few SEO/Marketing forums that were full of pretty awesome people. I was always impressed by Eli and Bofu’s take on SEO and how well they were doing. Especially since Eli was ranking #1 or #2 for “Acai Diet” and other phenomenal keywords. Through the grapevine, I had heard that Eli was potentially doing $1m in sales per month off of just that one website. In hindsight I’m unsure if this is true or not, but at the time I figured that it was true.

It was plainly obvious that if i followed what every single person was doing, I wouldn’t end up anywhere, so I had to find a unique way to get into some of the more major niche markets. At that time there were 3 that were killing it – Acai , Google Money and Colon Cleansing. Since #1 and #3 were almost the same thing, I decided that #2 would be the much better option.

I had already tried PPC for the Make Money Online niche, it was abysmal. Although I was getting cheap traffic from Yahoo, the conversion rate was still providing me at most a 15% profit margin with some days seeing a loss of 20% or more. This was extremely hard on me because I was running everything essentially on a credit card with a $2,000 limit. I started to break down the data I had got from Yahoo on the kinds of keywords that were converting. Keywords like “Google Money Scam” , “Google Money Review” , “Google money system for real” were by far the highest volume keywords with decent ROI. I was spending $2 to $3 a click for these keywords and each keyword was getting more than 100 searches per day. I quickly ran the math knowing that Yahoo accounted for less than 20% of the total search market. I quickly realized that these kinds of words on Google were generating a few thousand searches per day.

So, I developed an idea – Target affiliate product brand names via SEO. To test this theory I uploaded a post on my real estate blog about how awesome Google Money System was, and went to town on linkbuilding. Within 1 day I was on the first page of Google for terms like “Is google money system a scam” and “Google money system review”. At the #4-#5 positions I was getting approximately 100 searches per day. Most importantly I was getting product sales through a few affiliate links in the post. Around 2% of my traffic was buying the product. I was extremely excited about this, so I kept blasting more and more links. My absolute favorite link method was spamming affiliate marketing blogs with comment links. They worked great and within 3 days I was up to the #2 position, getting anywhere from 200-300 visits a day on the blog. Even more amazing was the fact that after refining my sales pitch on the page, my sales rate was anywhere from 2% to 5%. One day I sold something like 10 products at the $175ish price point. I was floored that I could make that kind of money with a absolutely free wordpress.com blog.

So, I developed a better plan – Do it on my own self-hosted blogs. I had already got a complaint from wordpress.com about putting affiliate links in a post, so I knew not to do that. I ordered a domain (Google-money-system.net) to use for the product. I quickly threw up a few 350-400 word posts chocked full of keywords and decent on-page SEO. Once I felt comfortable with the sales pitch about how much money I had already made by selling the product, I went to work on linkbuilding.

My SEO strategy was simple – Build as many links as humanly possible to my blogs. I didn’t worry about anchor text variation , deep linking. Just blasting away every single day with as many comments as I could. In less than 1 week I had generated 150 links back to my domain. At that time, most blogs lacked no-follow plugins for wordpress. Within about 5 days the website was up to #1 for a host of terms like “Google Money System” , “Google Money System review” , “Google money system scam” and tons of other longtail keywords surrounding just this one product. Essentially I was leveraging all the advertising being done by affiliates through media buys and the like. I knew that 90% of the people that clicked through on their ads to check-out the money system product would be turned off for some reason. I then theorized that I could capture these leads via SEO and turn them around for my own interests. I was right on the money with all my assumptions as within just 5 days of installing wordpress and linkbuilding, I was seeing upwards of 1,000 unique visitors per day. My conversion rate hovered in the 1% to 5%. I think my overall conversion rate hovered just below 2% for the entire tenure of the project.

If you’ve done the math, 2% of 1,000 per day is around $3,500 which is just about what I was bringing in per day gross to the advertiser.

I was thrilled at the amount of money coming in ,but I knew I had to start scaling it. So I ordered as many domains as I could relating to google money system and the other products. I ordered URLs with hyphens, without hyphens, .org/.net versions. I then wrote unique articles for these blogs, and started linkbuilding to them as quickly as I did the first one. The .org version of my first site within 1 week was to the #2 position. I managed to get 3rd variation of the website to the #3 position as well. Within 3 weeks I literally had the first page of Google locked up concerning “Google Money System” including all anchor variations, long tails and the like. I was capturing approximately 3,000 unique views across all the sites per day. As time went on, these affiliate offers would drop off and would be replaced with similar products. Google money system , google biz kit, google money master, all of them would be the hot item and I would build websites out for the product and add keywords. A few people tried to copy my websites but after I integrated Xrumer comment spam into my SEO mix, I was able to push everyone else away.

As time went on, sales stabilized and I had a extremely hard time growing any beyond this point. I was roughly bringing in $9,000 to the advertiser every day. Saturdays and Sundays were the worst as I was bringing in only $5,000 a day while the typical Thursday brought in $12,000. I was hooked on waking up every day , logging into prosper 202 and checking my conversions. I had gone from having a maxed out credit card to making obscene amounts of money over the course of a few extremely short months.

Then it hit me “What do I do with this money?” I knew that Google Money system and those kinds of products would eventually lose favor with the public and traffic would drop down to nothing. So I made the absolute worst mistake possible – I took the money and invested it.

I had people from all over asking for money in their revolutionary ideas. One guy locally caught my attention early on – He was arbitraging bankruptcy leads between various firms. He was essentially buying affiliate data and re-selling it to another brokerage. He was paying something like $6 per lead and selling it to a major firm in California for $10 each, a profit of $4 per lead. He told me he could handle roughly 5,000 of these bankruptcy leads per day.  I figured that it might not be a bad deal, it would *Only* take a investment of 30% of all that I had made. I was sure it would double or even triple within a month or two and put me in a even more secure position. So I did what I perceived as smart and invested it with him.

Over the next few months, my costs started to balloon. I hired a guy to manage the dedicated server(s) I had leased out so that everything was running smoothly on the new sites. Some of my older sites were still on my shared $4.95/mo account at webair. It didn’t occur to me that if I was making tons of money off of $4.95 hosting and doing everything myself that it would be a bad idea to hire someone and buy expensive dedicated servers.

Time went on, and that 30% investment was quickly running me out of cash. I also thought that running PPC campaigns along with my SEO stuff would help. I was making so much money that I thought I could throw more money into it, not analyze and be just as profitable – I wasn’t. I quickly started spending $500 to even $1,000 a day on PPC expenses via adwords for a increase of $500-$1000 per day. It was breaking even but I didn’t care as the SEO portion that I had essentially made for free was still making $9,000 a day.

Time kept going on and i thought to myself “I need to find another investment”. The lead sales deal with the guy was going phenomenal………..on paper. According to him my initial investment had already grown by 200% or so. Rather than take out my initial investment, I decided to keep going on, since even if I lost the entire investment, I still had all my SEO sales going strong. I decided as another investment I’d buy a few properties in my area. I figured that I’d have more than enough money to buy a rental, fix it up and have it managed by someone else, just in case everything fell apart and I was stuck with no income.

August rolled around and everything was still going great. That was until the last half of the month rolled around. Google had received a few lawsuits from people buying the products I was promoting, so they decided to do a manual review of every single site. This took my entire network of websites down with absolutely no chance of re-indexing. I was in a totally “Oh crap moment”. Over the next 2-3 weeks I ran around trying to figure how to get those keywords back, I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
I went into a self-preservation mode, I called the guy who I had given thousands of dollars to with the lead buying deal. I spent another 4 weeks trying to get that money – it was gone. The company that we were selling leads to had been shut down by the DOJ for fraudulently filing bankruptcies (or so I was told). That 30% of my money was gone but I still had plenty left, right?

Well , over the next month I ran around getting all the servers, employees and stuff shut down. I had to buy out contracts for everything it felt like. I was quickly hemorrhaging money. I started to look at the rental to check if things were going well – they were not. The repairs were totally under stated by the company that I had contracted to do the repairs. My 10% repair cost quickly became 150% to fix the property. I had spent 5 figures on fixing the property up only to find out that nothing was really done and that the property was in such bad repair that I was being fined by the city as an eyesore.

By January I was literally back where I had started – A maxed out credit card, and a handful of somewhat profitable SEO campaigns. The big money was gone, taken by people that I thought I trusted, employees and the like. The only thing I had to show for it was a truck I had bought in July for cash.

So, looking back ,what are the lessons that I’ve learned?

• Always plan long term. Don’t rely on what’s going on today to keep you going tomorrow. Run multiple projects and diversify when possible. There are only so many hours in a day.
• Build a list – Even though the sites went down, had I of list built I could have had 150,000 to 500,000 email subscribers interested in making money online. Instead I ran them directly to the advertiser so I didn’t have to deal with building a email list. This would have been something great to fall back on, instead I wanted the quick buck.
• Don’t trust anyone but yourself. Everyone you deal with has their own interests in mind, and the only one working for you is yourself.
• Don’t get into long contracts with employees and only outsource if you have to. Leveraging other people’s time is a good thing but only if you do it right.
• Save back as much money as possible for calamity. I ran thin through the entire course of this project and it killed me in the end.
• Don’t buy realestate unless you can watch over the repairs being done on a daily basis.

Please re-tweet and share. I don’t want anyone else to run into the problems I have.

If you have any questions you’d like to ask, feel free to ask and I’ll update this posts with answers. P

In this post I’ll be talking about the inner workings of kaching kaching, in the mean time to put a long story short – No it’s not a scam , but it sucks none the less. It’s just a ploy to get some referal income and unless you REALLY know how to market, it’s not worth your time.

So , I was in my gmail account reading various business emails, when I saw a little adwords text ad that said “Premier wealth system” or something like that , and since I’ve been working on my very own “Make Money At Home” Course offer, I figured why not check into it, and see the lander.

I must say , I was blown away with the intro video , by far the absolute nicest lander video I’ve ever seen. So, I was curious to see what the program costs (That’s always the first thing that comes to my mind).

So, I opted-in to their Aweber opt-in system (Somehow it seems like they’ve bypassed the double-opt-in) , to see the product cost and whether the program was MLM or not.

That’s where I confirmed my thoughts about what it was……..Not only was it a MLM , but their top course was only a few dollars shy of TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!

I’ve heard how in the past there were a few MLM companies out there with $10k products, but had never seen one online till today. It sure did pay for a nice video to start off with , but I don’t feel nearly as bad about selling $40 internet ebooks now that I see people are buying ‘courses’ off this company for anywhere from $500 to $9497.

Amazing stuff, and here I was worried that my own ‘internet wealth course’ at $19.95 was going to be too high.

AM has been pretty good this month, had a $350 profit day a week or so ago ,which was absolutely aweome but haven’t been able to replicate that success. Knowing something that works is good, so I’m continuing to keep working and refining this specific niche/campaign set and trying to get it to do well.
My current goal is $2,500 per day in AM net income, I know it’s 100% doable, so I’m hoping to hit that within the next 3 months or so.

Real estate has SUCKED recently, and I hate spending too much time on it, unfortunately sales have been way down, although I do have a few in contract which is nice.

Brandon’s Big Affiliate Contest

All these lazy affiliate marketers do contests on their blogs, so why shouldn’t I?

So , here’s the deal – I want to hit consistant $2,500 days, I NEED to hit $1,000 days for my special projects that I’m obviously not going to share.

So , what I’m offering is a prize to whoever helps me out the most in affiliate marketing, reaching that $2,500/day goal.
Whoever helps me the most regardless of whether it was to reach $2,500/day or whatever, upon one week of consistant $2,500 days, the person who has helped me out the most gets a prize.

The Prize?

Yes , it’s a house , no it’s not that house , but the house I’m giving away will look similar and be worth a minimum of $50,000.

The house is free of all liens and encumberances and will have 3 years of taxes paid on it in advance at closing. All you have to do is help me to my goal , maybe it’s SEO advice, maybe it’s something else, but whoever helps me the MOST hit this goal gets the house , you can sell it , keep it for the heck of it , rent it out but never the less it’s $50,000 in your pocket.

So who’s helped me out the most? Just ask

Without going into graphic detail about PPC-Coach, the system revolves around the process of learning PPC-Marketing on a monthly basis.

Month 1 starts you out on the absolute cheapest way to try your hand at PPC Bar-None (I spent maybe $50 total on everything). I did make some money using month 1′s tactics, overall it was pretty good, but very basic.

Month 2+ was really where the stuff started kicking in , part of it was promoting a $300 per lead offer (Now how’s that for a project?). I haven’t really spent a whole lot of time doing that one, but the 2nd month’s strategy guide is absolutely worth the price of admission times 10. Month 2 includes a “Special ” script when dealing with adwords that was absolutely phenominal. The first day of testing it I was able to get a QS10 on some words which was something I’ve never done (before that, my best was a 7QS)

Overall it’s been really worth it, PPC coach has been a good expirance, I definately would do it again, and do sugguest that anyone who hasn’t tried it go for a month.

I am offering a $20cdn discount off your first month of subscription if you email me prior to registration and then we can work out some details.

Click here to sign up for PPC-Coach , and feel free to post comments/questions about ppc-coach.

Surprisingly enough, we just broke the top 1 million websites, and are ranked at  901,646 according to alexa’s website.

This will be the first time I’ve had a self hosted website break the 1 million mark (I have another one that’s around 250,000 I figure , but it’s a .com blog which I can’t track to well or monetize.)
I’ve got HUGE plans for the blog, and by huge, I mean so big no one else has done them before. I really want to empower people to change their lives, whether it be something small or something large, people need to realize that THEY are the ones in charge of where their life is headed, not someone else.

Far too many times I hear people ranting “I can’t do it” , “The goverment keeps me down” , “They don’t let people like me make money” or 100 other reasons that they CAN’T.

CAN’T is a word that I don’t like to use much , it states that some task is impossible.

Many people know that I’m a practicing Christian, which I don’t ever want to hide, and the Bible does say that “I can do all things through Christ”. I wish everyone would get the fact that there are very, very few things in life that are truely impossible.

I’ve also joined PPC Coach , Check out My PPC Coach Review and see how I’m doing with it.

I set out just 2 months ago to get a new source of income, and I am pleased to report that I am now making a equivilent of a 2nd, part time job just through PPC/SEO campaigns online. I’ve been making progress and should be making $100/day profit any day now.

I really think there’s some good things in store for the website, so PLEASE either join the RSS feed , or follow me on twitter. This will keep you in the loop of what’s going on, the hope is to run a few contests in the near future with a few AM networks.

Thanks for reading!

This is the company I’ve run A LOT of stuff through, they’ve got tons of offers and the payout is generally higher than other networks.They don’t have alot of offers I see at other companies too, so signing up with them is a very good idea. They send payments out via fed-ex, which is great because waiting on a check SUCKS when you need to pay off credit cards.

• 400+ Offers
• Good Payouts
• Good interface
• 5% Recurring Commissions
• I’ve made $921.80 with this company so far.

Flux Ads

This is a company I really do like , they’re one of the smaller companies, but they definitely have competitive payouts. I really like them for zip-submit/email-submit offers. In fact, this network has more zip submit offers than anyone else does.

• 400+ Offers
• Direct Trac Software
• Great Email Submits
• 2% Recurring Commission Program
• I’ve made $39.50 with this company so far.

Amped Media

Obviously I haven’t used this company a whole lot. I originally signed up to them because I had heard they had good low-scrub zip-submits. This was very true, they did have a great group of zip-submits that were profitable. In addition to that , they do have plenty of other good offers I haven’t had enough time to really put them through their paces, but they’ve really got potential.

• 150+ Offers
• Direct Trac Software
• Good Email Submits
• 5% Recurring Commission Program
• I’ve made $2.40 with this company so far.

Revenue Loop

This is one of those obscure (I haven’t seen anyone mention them before) Affiliate companies. I signed up with them because I saw they had a variation of a offer I was promoting. They’ve got quite a few unique programs that I haven’t seen anywhere else. The best thing is they tell you exactly what % they take off the top for any given offer. As you progress in your sales, you automatically get a pay increase. Of a few offers I compared, they had a better rate on many at the initial fee (So it’d be even better if you did well with this company).

• Over 300+ Offers
• Direct Trac Software
• Lots of unique programs
• High payouts
• I’ve made $143.00 with this company so far.

Express Revenue

This is yet another company I found while researching affiliate companies for good zip-submit offers. Not only do they have really high paying zip-submit offers, but they’ve got alot of hard to find ones too (Like Netflix). The average payout is a little higher than most of the other companies. Their AMs are also super helpful, they have a background in Affiliate marketing, so when you ask them a question they know the answer and WHY you’re asking the question.

• 150+ Offers
• Good Payouts
• Unique Offers
• Hard-To-Find offers
• I’ve made $8.00 with this company so far.

Neverblue

Neverblue is one of the big boy companies in the industry. The interface is relatively unique compared to everyone else (Navigating offers is pretty easy). Payouts are generally good, and they have TONS of offers. Being a neverblue parnter is a definate must IF you can get accepted. They are definately one of the harder networks to get into, and there’s good reason for that.

• 800+ Offers
• Great payouts
• 2% Recurring program
• Awesome interface
• I’ve made $51.65 with this company so far.

I’m also a member of PPC Coach , Check out My PPC Coach Review

The great news is the fact I’m profitable on my online endeavours , so much so that I’ve almost hit the 100/day barrier. I’ve had several days so far over the past few weeks that were in the $75 profit range, but then sometimes the next day will be down a few dollars. Monday was pretty darn good, I spent $5 to make $85 which i think is pretty gosh darn awesome.
As of today I’ve made a little over $700 since Dec 1st with the online stuff, and have spent around maybe $400 on PPC advertising.

My new project is pretty darn cool celeb gossip and news is my new website. We’re doing a revenue share so people can get paid to write about stuff. I’m quite happy about the progress of the website, we’ve only been live for 2 days and had almost 40 subscriptions, it will be nice to help others make money online. I’ll keep you updated on my article website project as time goes on.

I’m also a member of PPC Coach , Check out My PPC Coach Review

I’ve been SUPER busy with working on other websites and sort of left this blog on autopilot for a while.

I’ve started 2 content based websites, 1 PPC landing page website and a review/arbitage website.

If you don’t know what these things are, some day I’ll explain them so you won’t feel so left out in the dark.

Anyways , one of the big things I’ve done in the past day or two was join PPC-Coach’s program. Everyone at wickedfire seemed to believe that PPC-C was a good program and would help affiliates who were loosing money to loose less money and had a decent chance of making actual money.

So far I’m in about 3 days of PPC Coach and have learned a sheer ton of information about making money from PPC style campaigns online. The information has been really good so far, although I can’t say the website is exactly what I was looking for. I do NOT believe it’s a end-all for affiliate marketing woes, but does help alot. I will be posting a full review in the near future, after  I have more time under my belt with the program.

I did have my first decent ROI on a product promotion (which was with the help of PPCCoach). My ROI has been -50%. That may seem like a bad loss , but it’s been my first “Big” Success, and I say this becuase many people are loosing bucketfulls of money. In this case ,I spent $2.50 to make $1.25. The reason I’m so happy is becuase the setup involved a AWFUL website layout which I know I could greatly improve my total conversion rate was 5.8%.

My Affiliate income is a little higher than my last post, it’s increased a little, and so has my adwords income, both are growing slightly. My expenses are still relatively high, but are getting a little bit more under control as I’m not spending more money on $25 domains like I was a few days ago.

Real Estate is still my #1 income source , but my goal of increasing my passive/part time income through affiliate marketing is making progress.

Right now, all my affiliate marketing has been done between Market Leverage & Motive Interactive.

I’ve been running PPC Ads via Google ,Yahoo , Facebook and Myspace. As of this time, Google & Yahoo are the only ones I’ve made a dime off of. In the beginning I figured Facebook would be a good source, as it’s quite easy to get a few hundred dollars in free advertising. Unfortunately along with low CTR rates, there has been no revenue from what I’ve done with them.

Yahoo would be #1 so far for the $ amount made from PPC, I’ve spent a total of around $25 in money there (Do some research and you can get $100 in free ads from them). Of that $25, about $10 has come back to me, which still is a negative cashflow. I hope to reverse this trend, but do realize I’m only a few days into this.

I’m a big full disclosure fan , so in the near future I’ll be posting up how everything has worked in detail (As much as I’m allowed).

I also updated my income statement, obviously real estate is still my primary income, but I have brought in a little bit of online income too.