Well, many months since my last update but I'm back with some first hand experience of using PPC to drive affiliate sales.

I was hoping that my experience at using PPC in my day job could be easily turned into a way to make money without having to go through the process of setting up a website and writing content (which are my weak points as I still have a lot to learn).

The experiment was a qualified success so let's see what I learned along the way.

I had heard good things about the affiliate program at travel company sunshine.co.uk, and they paid 7% commission on the accommodation part of any sales made (there is no margin on flights for travel agencies, so they rarely pay commission on them).

They work through an affiliate company called Paid On Results, and in my experience they had a good team working to support new affiliates and answer any questions.

Once signed up, I talked with both companies to see if I could run Adwords ads containing display URLs for sunshine.co.uk pages, but having destination URLs which were the Paid On Results affiliate links which would then redirect to sunshine.co.uk. They weren't sure but suggested I try it to see how Google reacted. After setting up an Adwords campaign, everything worked fine. Google do not like intermediate pages between ad and target site, but this type of affiliate redirect seems to be OK.

So, did it work?

The results were OK. I was only doing low volume keywords, as the travel market is so competitive, but I did manage to break even on the test. I spent about $150 and made the same amount back in commission. Unfortuately sunshine.co.uk have recently reduced their commission level to 4%, so the project as I ran it would no longer be viable. This doesn't bother me so much as I am moving towards a more content based approach now. I'll talk more about progress on my Spanish Examples site next post.

My day job partly involves working on a huge Pay Per Click effort for an e-commerce site. And when I say huge I am talking about a large product range, with campaigns in over twenty languages. It's a challenge, but I am learning a lot about paid advertising. One of the things I have learned is that I like it. I like the quick feedback and concrete steps that can be taken in response to data. I like trying to think my way into a potential customer's brain. And I definitely prefer it to the thought of using content marketing to try and make a living.

So in my thoughts lately has been the idea of experimenting with driving PPC traffic directly to niche sites or affiliate offer landing pages. I know that a lot of people do this type of marketing already but I have heard some warnings about Google's terms and how you have to be careful when doing this more direct type of selling.

Does anybody have any first hand knowledge or good examples of people making a profitable go of this? I would be very interested in hearing your thoughts.

I was sure that something was broken. How long do you have to wait for your first Adsense click? I had over 1,000 impressions showing on my Adsense dashboard, but not one single click. Now admittedly my site traffic is just getting going, and that 1,000 impressions was probably inflated by my own visits but I was starting to think that I had missed out on some vital step of the Adsense sign up process and Google were laughing at me behind my back.

The Adsense strategy

Adsense was planned to be the primary future income stream for my Spanish Examples site, as I designed it to offer some useful Spanish study material but nowhere near a complete 'Learn Spanish' course. Hopefully people will click out through a targeted ad, after reading what they were searching for when they arrived at my site.

I have vague ideas about writing some study aids to be distributed as an e-book, but at this early stage in the game I have to concentrate all of my efforts on writing content for the site. In a strange turn of events, I have just started working on the adwords accounts at my day job, so I am learning lots about how that works but unfortunately not too much of this new knowledge is directly applicable to me at the moment. In the future though I can see this experience coming in very handy. It's a beast of an account with around 30 websites each in about 20 languages. The keyword lists run into the millions.

So how much money did my Adsense click make?

Coming back to earth from those heady heights, I can reveal to you all that my first Adsense click made me a fantastic 0.79c. But hey, I'm just happy to finally know that the system is set up correctly and working.

By the way, has anyone else considered dropping Amazon because of their caving to illegal political pressure over Wikileaks? It's a dilema for an new affiliate marketer, especially one who has recently bought a Kindle. But I feel that losing out on a few dollars here and there is a small price to pay for going with my consience.

With this journey into the unknown that is Internet Marketing, there is a whole heap of information coming at me from all sides. I'm having to learn about Wordpress,Squidoo, Twitter and the actual marketing itself. Not to mention actually writing the content (which is what I find the hardest, I have to admit). With all this on top of a day job and my feeble attempts at studying Spanish I sometimes feel I am getting nowhere fast.

A plan was needed, and if there is something I love it is making plans and lists. If I can somehow turn those lists into a spreadsheet then I am in organizational heaven. Enter the Webproject Progress Tracker. A spreadsheet with each of my sites/pages running down one side and tasks to do on them running across the top. These tasks are such things as write SEO Title, write SEO description, submit to Stumbleupon plus many more. I am adding new things to the list as I read about them during my investigations.

Now I have a place with all these tasks set down so I won't just forget about them 10 minutes after reading them. It also means that I have a bunch of super small tasks that I can be getting on with when the writing juice isn't flowing so well, all of which are necessary for getting the most out of the work that I am putting in. Win Win.

If anyone has any other tips for helping me stay organised and productive, please drop a comment and help to keep me sane. If you happen to be a beginner like me at all of this, then please say hello and consider subscribing to my RSS feed. Thanks.

There is more to SEO than tweaking your pages to rank high in the search engine results. Human behaviour also comes into play as people scan down these results lists. Which result will they pick? Which short bit of text best seems to answer their need?

I have the All in One SEO wordpress plug in installed, which lets you edit your page titles and descriptions independently of what actually appears on the page. The page title is what appears in bold as a Google search result and the description is the 2 lines of text that appears below that.

Obviously, these two elements are vital in conveying to the searcher that your page is exactly what they were looking for. I believe that a good title and description can perform better than higher up search results that have uninspiring ones (this scientific data is sourced from my gut).

With all of this in mind I have changed the description for my niche site, and I shall be tweaking both this and the title to try and continually improve my click through rates from the search engines.

Here is what I had first. Not bad but could be better.

And here is my current version.

So what did I decide to change?

1. There was some unused space so I took advantage of it.
2. I put in the word 'Free'.
3. I mention my learning progress blog. People like personal stories.
4. I used the word 'Spanish' 3 times, so when people search using this keyword it will show up bolded in the description 3 times.

I am going to make another modification now. Adding 'Read more...' or something similar to encourage people to click and have a look. If your description is longer than about 160 characters Google will truncate it and add '...' at the end automatically.

I personally love these less technical tasks. Thinking about how people behave, analysing my own behaviour on the web and trying to convert that knowledge into a better performing website. Writing these things and also writing adwords copy (which I sometimes do in my day job) is a bit like doing a puzzle or writing a Haiku.

UPDATE

Well, I've had another go and updated the description again. I felt that the originals were solely aimed at Spanish learners and I wanted to try to also appeal to people who just needed a few phrases for a holiday or business trip. Here is the latest version.

What do you think? Better or worse? Have you had any positive results by editing your own site descriptions?

So as I am a beginner at all this I am doing everything in quite a mixed up order, jumping between tasks as I read something new. Very innefficient but it's necessary at this stage as I learn what is useful and what is a pain to do. Today I logged in to Google Webmaster tools to see if there was anything vital to sort out with my site. Everything looked OK. One of the plugins I have installed on Wordpress generates an XML sitemap for Google to read, so everything seemed to be indexed.

One thing to that it told me though was that the anchor texts on a few inbound links were a bit random. These were all links from pages I have, so I can control exactly what the anchor text should be for each link. And the SEO experts say that it should nearly always be your key phrase for the target page. So I spent a few minutes editing these so that "Spanish examples" was set as the anchor text for all of them.

There are so many little jobs to do with a new site that I will have to get a spreadsheet going to track and record everything for next time. I have also installed another Wordpress plugin, Peter's Post Notes,  that adds a note box to your post edit pages, so you can leave yourself post/specific to do lists inside the Wordpress Admin interface. Just what I was looking for.

If you're trying to earn money through websites you should be reading Pat's Smart Passive Income blog. Along with Viperchill it is one of the two most directly useful resources that I have found, with tons of good advice and a healthy dose of inspiration.

The competition involves picking a niche from scratch and building out and monetizing a niche site, explaining all the pitfalls and techniques used along the way. Super educational.

My site is already up at www.Spanishexamples.com, and I am going ok so far in terms of the building. Lots has been learned. The blog you are reading now details my progress from the beginning and I'm hoping that joining the challenge will give me even more motivation to get things moving. Nothing like a bit of public scrutiny.

This is actually one of the reasons that I picked the Spanish language niche, as I wanted to put more pressure on myself to study Spanish. My study has dropped off quite a bit in the last year or two, and I seemed to have reached a plateau.

Back to the challenge, the site has some content, it is attractig small scale organic traffic from keywords that are attractive to me, and I am feeling positive. The next steps are to write more content and start to promote it. My monetization strategy is Adsense for now, Amazon soon, and hopefully a subscriber list in the near future. This is all new to me so it may take some time.

Here are my previous posts that talk about the process of choosing my niche and setting up the site.

Let the peer pressure begin!

Not being inspired to write any actual content today, I thought I'd spruce up my site appearance a bit. Although I have not got a flood of visitors yet, there have been a few comments left and the 'geometric pattern' icon next to my name was starting to look a bit lame. So a quick Google later, and I learn that these blog comment icons are from a company called Gravatar , which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. You just sign up for free and upload a photo. Then I refreshed my site page and there were my new photos. Lovely and simple. The one hitch was choosing a unique name without using spaces or punctuation. My actual name had gone already of course so I have ended up with a bit of a longwinded combination of my name and the site name.

When I reach the backlink building stage I will be commenting on lots of other sites so a nice picture will be important. As you can tell from my alias and icon above I am not a big fan of putting my face on the internet, but I said I would try everything to make a go of this site, so there my face is. By the way, my blue monster Parleo avatar icon that I use here and on Squidoo was done by an illustrator friend of mine. Check out her illustration site if you like it.

Short answer, very easy. Long answer, Veeeeeeeeery easy.

I had a free theme installed form the Wordpress built in theme gallery I think. It was OK but a bit dull. I chose it because my Spanish Examples site will be more of a slowly growing reference and resource site built using pages, rather than a regular blog. I have included a blog (covering my own progress learning Spanish), but it won't be the main focus of the site. Lots of the cooler themes are made for blogs with regularly updated posts appearing on the front page, but there are free Worpress themes out there which are designed to manage pages like a Content Management System (CMS).

Anyway, a friend sent me a link to his new page and I liked the theme he was using, and it was free too so I decided to swap. Don't worry about changing between Wordpress themes, your writing is always saved. You may have to tweak a few settings to get everything looking nice again but essentially you can experiment a bit without worrying too much.

My new theme is called Arras, and there are two versions. The one I am using has a rotating carousel display on the home page which displays various posts or pages, plus a nice customisable layout for the rest of the page. There seems to be an active community of users plus a forum to help answer any questions, and the developer seems to be actively looking after things, so I felt confident that if I got stuck I would be able to unstick myself without too many problems. Well I have had a few configuration issues, and I still don't understand quite how to get exactly what I want, but it's servicable for now. I will need to get some images together as well, which is good as I like my photography and should have a bunch of suitable photos already. The site is slowly looking nicer.

A year or two ago when I first started thinking about trying to make money online, I registered my very first domain name www.parleo.com. When I read that I could use my own domain on a Posterous blog I got pretty excited. A new thing to learn. Well, it hasn't gone smoothly at all. The posterous end seems simple enough. You just click Settings, then Edit on the first section (Name Your Site). Scroll down until you see Setup a custom domain I already own and there you can enter your own domain. There is a link to this help page which is where I read about the other end of the process.

My domain was originally registered with eNom through Google, and I read up on their instructions and logged in to my domain managing page and tried to figure out all this business of A Records. The Posterous help page says to make it for IP address 66.216.125.32, but I saw another page which had a different address. Anyway. Neither seemed to work, so now I am stuck. Anybody know what I am doing wrong?