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.