My dark little secret and a new plan.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, but have no fear. I have been working on new campaigns and twittering about it regularly.

My secret:
OK, here is my dark little secret.  From August 2008 to March 2009 I have been making a living with Adsense arbitrage. I was driving traffic with adwords to loans and insurance related sites with adsense on them. I was able to double my money to the tune of about $1800/mo average. 

It was doomed:
My sites were within terms of service, had original articles, privacy policy, contact us, terms of service, exit links, etc., but were doomed. What I was doing was legal, and the way I did it was within Google’s terms of service. Although Google can’t make it against TOS without shooting themselves in the foot, they don’t really want people doing straight Adsense arbitrage. In the forums, nowadays, you’ll read that most people think Google arbitrage is impossible. It used to be super-easy. Unfortunately I wasn’t around for that. I started after most people had been put out of business forever.For the last few years, they have been making it more and more difficult to pull off. I’m actually pretty proud to have made an arbitrage living for 8 months.

Google Slap:
I knew they would slap my domains. A “slap” is a penalty received on a domain (landing page) which causes all your adwords keywords to show up as ‘poor quality’ and your minimum bids to be $5 to $10. Google doesn’t notify you when this happens. More about slaps later. I hoped it would be months or years down the road. But about March 10th, they slapped my lesser quality domain. Two weeks later they slapped my domain with better targetted adgroups. I was left with zero income, but I had one more Adsense direct deposit ($4418.60) due on April 26 or so. Oddly, March was a good month with $2500 profit.

Terror:
So here I am, unemployed with no income. All I have is a very strong set of adwords skills. And a reserve of about $4000 before I’ll have to get a job.  I came up with a plan. I’d held off on CPA marketing, because I didn’t want to change anything in my Adwords account for fear of upsetting my working system. Didn’t want to add conversion tracking, or analytics. Didn’t want to draw the attention of an account review. It was all fear based.  But I have a wife and 4 kids to take care of. You heard me right. 4 KIDS!!!! I gotta pay the bills.  Homelessness is not an option.

The plan:
I know that I could probably take my arbitrage to the next level. I have some good ideas about what kind of landing page would work today. But it would be temporary. Google will raise the bar again, and it will eventually be impossible. I need a longer term solution.  So I decided to do what I could with Adwords driven PPC/CPA affiliate marketing. The plan is to try to achieve a living before I have to get a job. Plan B is that if I have to get a job for a while, it will only be a stop-gap measure until my affiliate efforts produce a living.  I should mention that I haven’t had a job for 5 years. I used to be a 911 dispatcher.

The sub-plan:
If I have money in my budget to spend, I’ll be working on new campaigns. Which is why you haven’t seen much action here yet. But if my budget is maxed out, I’ll be working on promoting my blog with the ultimate plan of having many affiliates sign up through my referral links. The network (not you) pays me 2-5% of what you make. I only profit from your efforts if you succeed.  This can build a lifetime residual income.  I will be making a newsletter only sent to people signed up underneath me. In this newsletter, I’ll share information about my marketing techniques that I won’t share with anyone. For instance, I’ll share exactly what offers I”m promoting.  I’ll also work one on one with you for free. I will tell you things that no affiliate marketer would share with his competition.  I will teach you to fish.

The Good News:

Good news 1.
I made campaign 1 in the health and beauty category which is doing pretty well. It is only about 10 days old and I’ve spent $1488.83 and received $2246 in conversions through Hydra. So I’ve made $757.17 in profit on campaign 1.  My ROI (return on investment) will improve over time as account history is built up which provides information that can be acted upon.
Good news 2.
Due to taxes we paid in the first quarter of 2008 and having 4 kids, we got a tax return of $4378. Much better than expected. I always wait until April 15 to file to reduce chances of an audit. (Even though I don’t cheat on my taxes, an audit would be a big hassle.) We got our refund deposit on April 24, and now I’m spending it on Adwords.
Good news 3.
I built another campaign in the health and beauty category yesterday. I worked 18 hours almost solid. Just ask my wife. I built a new website and Adwords campaign to promote it. Turned it on at 1:30am. As of this moment, when I’d be happy to break even, I’ve spent $25.56 and it has $108 in conversions.

Why work 18 hours in one day?:
I pushed so hard yesterday because I knew if I got this running that any income made the last 3 days of this month would come back to me on about the 20th of May. So I can reinvest it again. If I spend money today, I get to spend it again in 3 weeks.

I’m not getting a job:
With my tax return I have about $5K to invest. I have two promising campaigns. Hydra owes me $2482 due in 3 weeks. It looks like I’m going to make it.  I haven’t had a job for 5 years. Swore I wouldn’t get one again. And I think I’m going to be able to keep that promise to myself and my wife. She likes having me home. We are very much in love and nearly inseperable.

Tagged as: adsense, adwords, Affiliate marketing, affiliate referrals, arbitrage, CPA, PPC