Update on Nature Cleanse

So the Nature Cleanse Trial through Copeac has been going well. I am making a slight profit with it, and quite happy with my lessons learned. The big thing I learned was to have a landing page!! I was able to get my click costs cut in half, unfortunately I'm having a hard time getting traffic on the keywords I can afford (some are priced way to high in the $2-10 per click range). The cheapest keyword ironically is just a simple plain "colon", unfortunately I get a lot of unrelated traffic there and it's hard to filter out just those looking for the body part colon and some health product to use with it.

Here are my up to date stats on this campaign:

Date	Commissions	PPC Costs	Godaddy Costs	Landing Page?
06/12/2009	$32.00	$49.03 (sale was in the first $20)		No
06/13/2009			11.17	Yes
06/14/2009		$2.09		Yes
06/15/2009		$.27		Yes
06/16/2009		$1.13		Yes
06/20/2009		$1.05		Yes
06/21/2009		$1.18		Yes
06/22/2009		$0.90		Yes
06/23/2009		$3.69		Yes
06/24/2009	$32.00	$3.69		Yes
06/27/2009		$5.29		Yes
06/28/2009		$1.85		Yes
06/29/2009	$32.00	$2.02		Yes

So far, I'm at a net profit of $14.64, however you can tell that I'm doing much better between click 2 and click 3, where the cost to convert was $9.16 and commission was $32.

Also, something important to notice here is how drastically my PPC costs changed after I spent the $11.17 at godaddy to get a landing page (and that costs covers 2 months worth of hosting!!). I can't emphasis enough, if you're serious about marketing a product, get your own landing page!

Lessons Learned:
Spending a few bucks on a landing page is worth it's weight in gold. You have to keep an eye on google, I did have a couple of google "slaps" where they basically made my keyword costs way to high and I had to re-start my campaign by tweaking it a bit. That's what explains the few dead dates with no clicks. And probably the last tip I learned, when you buy a landing page, make it a little generic. I named mine NatureCleanseTrial.com which means I basically can only market Nature Cleanse on there. I probably should have considered getting something more generic like ColonCleanseCentral.com or something along those lines (this example is already registered, and setup basically how I should have set it up).

For those keeping track, I've probably put about 10 hours into the nature cleanse promotion, leaving me making around $1.40/hr. Not all that exciting, and I'm not quitting my day job anytime soon, but I like to think the education I'm getting while doing this experiment has been amazing. I can't believe how much I know about this little known world now.

Experiments in PPC & CPA

I'm doing some experiments with PPC arbitrage, or sometimes known as traffic brokering, or in the industry terms, CPA (Cost Per Action). Basically the idea is to find a product to help sell, and take a commission on it. If your strategy works well, you pay less for advertising/marketing than you make in commission, and you're left with your profit as the difference.

The problem is that there are a ton of crappy products out there, a lot of scams, a lot of spammy stuff, but I've found some good networks of solid products that I can at least (on the surface) believe are not scams. Most are these As Seen on TV style products. I mean, if there is a store dedicated in the mall to them, how bad can they really be.

The first one I'm testing with is called Nature Cleanse, and it's a all natural colon cleanse system that you subscribe to monthly mailings. The first month is free, you only pay shipping and handling. I've bought several similar colon cleanse products in the past and have had good experience with them, so this seems right up my alley.

I also have a Nature Cleanse Trial blog going as well.

Tinkering with PPC Internet Marketing again

Back last year, I experimented a bit with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising with Google and a few different products on Clickbank.com and Amazon.com. I only lost money, but I did learn a lot about the world of internet marketing. Luckily I only lost about $50, so it wasn't a crushing defeat for me. I kind of put it on the back burner as something I knew was possible to make money with, but I just hadn't quite figured it out yet. I only sold a few things through amazon and never made a profit on it, and clickbank was a total waste of my money. I never sold a SINGLE ITEM!! UGH!

This year while networking with real estate investors, I ran across a guy online who was showing his affiliate accounts and Bank of America small business accounts in videos where he was clearing $20-50k a day (after google, yahoo, and msn expenses). I figured I had to have another shot at this.

I started doing more research with clickbank and decided to go with their top 2 products and try to market them. Here are the details of those tests.

Date	PPC Expense	Commissions	Product
06/07/2009	$2.00	$11.98	Twitter Traffic Machine
06/08/2009	$15.68	$0	Twitter Traffic Machine
06/09/2009	$12.38	$0	Twitter Traffic Machine
06/09/2009	$7.44	$42.13	Clickbank Code
06/10/2009	$37.48	$0	Clickbank Code

As you can see I experienced beginners luck on both of them on the first day, and the addiction drove me wild. I spent well more than my earnings (commissions column) to try and get the second sale on both those products for nothing!! UGH!! How frustrating.

Lessons Learned:
I was a bit too eager, I was doing direct linking instead of getting my own landing page (as almost every profitable PPC or CPA advertiser will tell you that you need). I think this led to higher than normal google adwords costs (twitter traffic machine was 34 clicks at ~$0.88/ea, clickbank code was 71 clicks at ~$0.63). I think if I could have got my click costs at $.40 or less for CBC and $.20 or less for TTM, I could have made them profitable.

Overall, I'm very satisfied I was actually able to convert some products, which I was NEVER able to do last year. Like I said, I've learned a lot. Net loss = $20.87.