Chris Barclay at Work

You heard me, I’m calling out the famous and sometimes infamous Shoemoney! Well not really calling him out, just telling him he needs to step down from his throne as Google Adsense king. That’s right kids! I got my first Google Adsense check.

How and Why? – It doesn’t matter.

How long did it take? – I signed up for Adsense years ago but never really did anything with it. To be honest I still don’t really do much with it, I don’t find it a good way to make money, others will disagree but to each there own. Different things work for different people in different ways. That’s one thing that most newbies don’t understand!

So how much did I get? – I received a check from Google for $128.68. That’s right, I’m rolling big now. Watch out, next month I’m coming after Ryan Eagle and John Chow.

Well I know I haven’t been around much recently. There has been a good reason I assure you. I have finally added a new employee to my business. Here she is, her name is Rachel.

This was definitely an experience. I’m always feeling the effect on my sleep. Luckily so far, she enjoys watching me work Hope everyone else had a good weekend!

That’s right folks!

For a limited time, you can receive $10 off your first month with PPC-Coach.

Just follow the link below, sign up, shortly after you sign up (usually 1-2 days, but can take up to a week) you will receive a $10 rebate.

Please follow the instructions exactly or you may not receive your full rebate.

Sorry $10 off has expired. Check out PPC-Coach reviews below.

PPC-Coach Reviews

So I’ve been getting a few requests for the PPC-Coach introduction Video, most of the time I have been just e-mailing it off to people but I’m going to add it to my site for people to refer to.

PPC-Coach Introduction Video:

There is a well known saying “Work Smarter, Not Harder”. This saying is to help people think of how to make their jobs (or businesses) more effective and get more work done by doing less actual work.

I take a different approach. I work Smarter and Harder!

It is very important in any small business that you not only work hard but you also manage your time and resources appropriately. The best way to succeed is to not only maximize your time, but also extend your time.

Many people think that the world works on a 8 hour day. Most business owners know this is far from true. What most people will do once they figure out they can compress there 8 hour day into 6 hours, will only work the 6 hours if possible.

If you own your own business, and beleive me affiliate marketing is a business. You need to not only work more than a regular office employee, you need to work smarter.

Well it looks like many people are finally catching on about the unethical automated re-billing of Acai products. Massive complaints have gone to the BBB as well as many high profile Review sites such as the Consumerist are starting to shed light to consumers on this trend, to read more check this link out:

Careful, Those Free Acai Products Might Come Attached To A Delicious Scam

Now will this effect your Acai sales? At first, it’s highly unlikely. The leads you generate with your Acai sales probably aren’t the brightest lights in the box. Read the fine print on any Acai page and you start to realize the reason for the fine print. A fair amount of people who want the free trial of Acai probably sign up on impulse – most will not want to go to the gym or take part in a normal diet per say. They want the quick way out, this is how affiliates advertise it and market it towards. The demographic isn’t likely to read reviews, they are likely to just jump into ordering a “free sample” instead of doing proper research.

Out of curiosity I looked at some of the fine print on a few Acai websites.

Here is some of the small print from one of those Acai websites;

Trial Periods and Cancellation Policies

You will be charged $3.95 for your free trial.

If you decide you want the product you will be billed $78.98 after your 10 day trial.

The following will be billed to your credit card each month as long as you are on the autoship program

* You will be billed $49.95 monthly beginning on the 50th day after the you ordered, and every 30th day untill you cancel

As part of this trial offer, customer is automatically enrolling in a 24 day trial of Power Tea. If customer wishes to cancel during the trial period and not be billed, customer must call 800-290-4944 or write to Power Tea, 16192 Coastal Highway Lewes, DE 19958. Should the customer fail to cancel its subscription, their Power Tea subscription becomes active and customer will be billed $29.97 on the 24th day after its trial begins and every month thereafter. Customer may cancel their subscription at any time by calling 800-XXX-XXXX

You have the option to cancel this program at any time. To cancel your Auto Ship program for this product, you must phone our customer service department at 1(866) XXX-XXXX

Now after reading the above, it is very clear that they do specify that if you do not return your bottle within 10 days you will be billed $78.98 and then you will be billed $49.95 every month. It may be in tiny print, but it’s there.

To sum it up, this is not the signs of a scam. It is just immortal business tactics with consumers who (as usual) did not read the fine print.

I’ve never been too fond of Google AdSense, nor have I ever used it as a primary (or any) source or type of income nor have I ever really tried to optimize any sites for it. With that being said you may find it as odd as I do – I’m very close to receiving my first AdSense check.

My current AdSense earnings are at a whopping $89.02. When I first started throwing AdSense on some of my sites, it just never took off, people just never clicked on the ads.

So I did what everyone else would do, and got my friends to start clicking on them……. just kidding.

So when creating a new site I often play with the idea of throwing AdSense on it, if it looks like it goes with the site I will normally do it, if not – I wont. You’ll notice there is no Adsense on this site – that’s because I am confident anyone visiting this site doesn’t really care about those ads and knows if they need to find something to just use Google directly. In other words I have respect for you guys and think you are an intelligent bunch.

So what happened? One of my sites which I had no idea would do any good with AdSense started to bring in consistent money. Not a lot, but some and it was consistent. So I just let it ride. I don’t want to go into too much detail of this site, but it’s not a blog nor is it a site full of rich content. I still can’t figure out why this site of all of them has the most consistent Adsense earnings. It definitely is an interesting beast.

Going forward I’m thinking of trying Google Adsense on more sites just to test out and if it doesn’t work out well, just yank it. Maybe it’s time you tried it too! Don’t be affraid to try it on any type of site either, you never know what will work.

Well the month (and year) are almost over. One thing that I found kind of odd, December 2008 was my highest earning month for EPN (Ebay Partner Network) to date!

I just started promoting EPN products June this year. It was a test at a low budget project to see how much I could earn with spending the bare minimum. I created several sites and did not promote them PPC or any paid advertising, I just tried to promote them with SEO.

The costs were very simple and relatively small – domain name(s), phpbay and webhosting. Since those were so low, ROI was very high. However it’s very difficult to scale. I found the best way was to whip out many sites, once they looked good and were working leave it and start another.

For anyone looking to break out into the affiliate marketing industry should considering start off with EPN sites. It’s very cheap and easy to do.

One thing to keep in mind – if you are strictly using SEO to promote your sites, it will can some time (a few months) to start seeing significant traffic, so patience is required.

Hope everyone else had a good month!

I for one am a firm believer in keeping business lives and personal lives separate. Unfortunately I found that very hard for the past few weeks. I got sick, really sick. Sick to the point where some days I couldn’t get out of bed.

Now how do you run a business when you’re the boss, employee and everything else? You gotta prioritize and just do what you can do. Now I don’t get sick often and normally if and when I do get sick it isn’t too bad, however this time was different.

With limited time and energy you really need to focus that much harder on what needs to be done. I personally started out by working on stuff I knew that needed to be done, eg – making sure all the bills were paid, while that doesn’t seem too big, it can be if your running multiple hosts and domains. The last thing you need is your campaigns/sites going down due to lack of payment or a late payment. So for me this was one of my biggest priorities.

Next would be watching current campaigns to make sure they the offers were still active on the networks and still turning profit. There would be no point in sending a bunch of traffic to a campaign that was no longer converting.

Unfortunately that was about all I could do for the past few weeks, I did however manage to tweak some campaigns, but not to the amount I would have liked to, however now that I’m getting better again I am glad that I was at least able to monitor a few campaigns and make sure all payments were made to keep the incoming coming in!

Stay healthy!

When working with PPC or any advertising your looking for the ultimate ROI and Profit. Normally you try to achieve this by keeping your cost per click down (for PPC advertising). BUT… Sometimes a lower CPC is not always better.

Affiliate Marketing isn’t that simple. Cheaper isn’t always better, nor is it always best to have your ads in the number 1 position. Like everything else in this industry, it’s all about testing.

Recently with one of my successful campaigns I had my clicks so damn low I didn’t think it could get any better. One day I was thinking, how can I squeeze more out of this campaign? I raised my bit by quite a bit (in comparison to what it was at). A day later, my profits had doubled.

My ROI had gone down a little, which is to be expected, but for the extra profit for this campaign it was worth it. Sometimes you need to spend a little more to get A LOT more back.