I just clicked on a spam comment and it redirected to some adult website.  At first I got a little annoyed, but then I came to quick realization.  The people who create spam will suffer a great problem at some time.  That is the fact that it is not sustainable.  At some unknown time, the method they are using to make money will fail and they will have to start from scratch again.  Not only that, but look at the guy who recently got caught spamming Myspace.com.  $230 million dollars I believe is what Myspace wanted from the guy.

Why I Hate Spam…

These people are not providing any form of value.  Instead they only exist for one reason- the bottom line.  The spammer is only after one thing and that is money… and at any cost.

I don’t think you can base a business off of spam.  Yes, you can make money, but it won’t last for long.   So do you think it is worth it? - I don’t.

Would you like a business you can tell your family and friends about?-  A business you have built from the ground up, that continues to grow and also gives you the chance to meet new people.

Or would you just like to scrap by and make some quick money, see that quickly fade away, and then start all over again?  Would you be able to justify what you do to your Ma, Pa, or Grandma?

In the end, I feel that everything we choose to do defines our character and philosophy on life.  Like Jim Rohn says, Liars are called “liars” because they LIE.

Every since I began working in the PPC industry I am amazed that I learn something new every day. Lately I have been putting a lot of thought into spending money on campaigns and how to get the most of what I spend.

With my current process I setup a test for an offer, throw some ads up, and then see what happens. At first I was tracking all the stuff I had to track and optimizing what I had to optimize. However, after about the second time of doing this, I noticed that there was a lot more information that I should have been keeping track of than I was.

I have read a few times that you should track everything, but always took the advice with a grain of salt. But once I looked at the money I was spending on PPC and not feeling like I had enough in terms of research to show from it, I changed my mind and my process. For example, if you have two different Ad copies and you delete one that isn’t performing very well, maybe you should log the bad Ads so that you can learn what isn’t working. As opposed to just trashing the Ad and creating another Ad to test against the good Ad. The same goes for landing pages. Put all your bad landing pages in a folder and every so often go back and analyze what you are doing wrong.

After all, you are spending money to show both Ads, so you might as well get your money’s worth from both. Think about it, after optimizing the campaign a few times and building up an excel sheet of a handful of bad Ads, wouldn’t it be nice to go take a quick look at it and see what ISN’T working?

If you think you are wasting a bunch of money on PPC, just keep in mind that there shouldn’t really be any “wasted” money in PPC. All that money you just gave the search engine and didn’t get any commissions was for research data- don’t disregard it or throw it away.

The thing I am quickly learning in PPC is that the sooner you learn from your mistakes and correct them, the more money you make. A lot of PPC marketers say that you have to lose money before you can make money – but why? You have to test something, spend money to do it- then learn what you forgot, didn’t know, and what you could have done better.
I’m still intermediate to PPC and still learning a lot about the industry and I hope this information helps you.
-God Speed-

I noticed early this morning that Yahoo Search Marketing went down around 4am and about 20 minutes later it came back up.  However, later today I logged in and noticed that I only had one click and only a handful of impressions.  Now I know that I should have had a ton more impressions by this time of the day, so I logged in Tracking202 and noticed there were clicks coming through.  So I shoot an e-mail off to Yahoo because I can’t get a hold of any other affiliates to see how their accounts were doing.  To my surprise, I get a phone call from Yahoo to inform me of the outage.

Now I have two takes on what just happened.  Either Yahoo is calling each and every person with a problem instead of e-mailing them - which seems highly inefficient.  Or they are calling everyone as sort of a customer service move to show that they care.

I did a couple searches, hadn’t checked any forums, but couldn’t find anything about the outage.  You’d think that such a large company would send out e-mails or at least post on their own blog about this outage.  In the end, it would have been a lot less leg work on my part.

Here is a list of what I have read this week: (all related to affiliate marketing and PPC)

Basic structure, tactic, and strategy of PPC campaigns.

How To Properly Structure Your PPC Campaigns ? DerekBeau.com

PPC Affiliate Marketing: How & What To Promote ? DerekBeau.com

How to Track Keyword Level Conversions - JonathanVolk.com

Using Brute Force to Find Profits in Affiliate Marketing - DerekBeau.com

MarketingExperiments.com

This site has a lot of good examples of landing page optimization by screen shot examples.

I hope that by listing my resources, that I save other affiliate marketers a lot of time in searching for this type of material.

First of all, I apologize that I haven’t posted in a few days, but I had to “go off the grid” this week and get some work done and do some reading.

Do you ever feel like your hard work isn’t showing any results, you are losing a little hope, and in the back of your mind you are contemplating changing direction?  Suddenly out of nowhere, something you did shows hope.  That little prayer you made to see some result was answered and something positive happened.  That scattered puzzle in your mind comes together a little, and you have proof that what you are doing is going to produce results.

This past week for me has produced a coctail of these feelings and I just wanted to share with you some hopeful advice.  If you find yourself losing hope and wanting to give up and start again- DON’T.  Stick it out a little longer and if you are passionate enough, you will undoubtedly see something happen.   Don’t let all your hard work go to waste.  Yes, sometimes you have to overcome pride and learn from your mistakes.  But other times you have to get your knees dirty, your knuckles blooding, and stick it out.