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More than two years ago I began my quest to make money by Blogging.  At the time I knew very well that statistically speaking the odds were against me and chances were that much like 99.99% of all other Bloggers out there I would never make even $100 total from Blogging before giving up.  Even still, there was something about Blogging that inspired me way more than the income potential and the minute I started playing with it I was hooked.

Today my Blog is growing in leaps and bounds at an exponential rate and I’m loving every minute of it.  I’ve learned enough about Blogging in the last two years to fill several encyclopedias.  I’ve experimented with so many different things and have found what works and what doesn’t.  I’ve read eBooks, taken courses, listened to countless audio’s, watched video’s, hired mentors and coaches, and have done an insane amount of studying and personal research to really immerse myself and understand this whole Blogging thing.

Although I am nowhere near the levels of income of Pro-Bloggers like Steve Pavlina, Darren Rowse or John Chow yet, I have absolutely no doubt that it’s just a matter of time before I’m earning a six-figure income from Blogging.

Now, the next piece of the puzzle to the whole Internet Marketing world that I’ve been really inspired to learn has been the whole Affiliate Marketing game.  I honestly can’t even say why I’m so drawn to it, but the whole concept of Affiliate Marketing just inspires me.  I think I can be really good at it.

Affiliate Marketing to me seems almost like learning to solve a Rubix Cube.  If you have no idea what you’re doing you’ll just sit there and spin the sides back and forth and eventually get frustrated and chuck the thing across the room into the garbage can.

With enough fiddling thought, you can eventually start to notice the patterns involved and maybe even solve one side of it.  That’s usually where most people give up.  However, there are a few that learn the rules by which the cube works and by following things in a disciplined, logical way they can solve the entire cube.  Then of course there are those who can do it in a matter of minutes.

Affiliate Marketing to me is just like that.  You can sit there and play with it for days or weeks or even months and really get nowhere, but once you “get it”, I think it becomes so much easier to reproduce positive results.

The first type of Affiliate Marketing I decided to start playing with is PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing.  Essentially it’s where you use something like Google AdWords to drive traffic to an Affiliate offer and make a profit on the difference between the offer payout and the amount it cost you to generate the sale.

My first lesson taught me just how quickly you can blow $157.97 on Google AdWords and make no profit.

What I did was I created a test campaign to play around with some PPC marketing for an eBook I decided to promote from ClickBank.  I created a quick AdWords campaign and came up with about 30-40 keywords.  I set my maximum bid per keyword to $0.25 and my daily budget to $5 to see what would happen.

The next day I logged into my AdWords campaign and I saw that I had no clicks on any of the keywords.  So, like a dumbass I wanted to compete for the #1 spot in the paid ads so I jacked up my maximum bid to $1.05 and my daily budget to $25/day just to see what happens and how long it takes to start getting a click.  A couple hours later I still saw no movement… nothing.

So, next I went back into my campaign and tried searching for a slightly more broader keyword that gets searched for more often per day and found one broader one that gets quite a bit of volume.  I added that one in there and waited until the next morning.

I logged into my AdWords and still saw nothing happening so I stopped paying attention to it because I got busy with other things on the Blog.  I also started looking around for some resources on Affiliate Marketing, and more specifically PPC Affiliate Marketing strategies, AdWords Strategies etc.

Well, yesterday I logged into my AdWords account and all of a sudden my account shows $157.97 owing!  I clicked through to my campaign and it turns out I’ve been paying like $0.87 and higher for the #1 spot on Google for some of my keywords and especially for one slightly broader one.  The campaign ended up sending 195 clicks to the eBook page, and converted to $0.00 in sales after costing me $157.97.  Doh!  Rookie mistake.  Never set your AdWords daily budget to $25/day and then forget to login for a week.  This is why I heard someone say that AdWords has a really high “stupid tax”.

Oh well, it’s all part of the learning curve.  Sometimes we need a lesson to sting a bit so that we learn from it.  One thing it made me realize is that I needed to get some resources (eBooks etc.) to learn some of the basics of this so that I can leverage the wisdom of those who’ve come and done this before me and can teach me all the pitfalls of AdWords and PPC Affiliate Marketing.

One eBook I found that I ended up buying today is called Google Cash by Chris Carpenter.  I did some research and the eBook was highly recommended by a few Internet Marketers I have a lot of respect for so I figured it was a safe bet to try it out.  It’s sold by ClickBank so it offers a Money Back Guarantee anyways, so I figured it was a no brainer at only $67.

I downloaded the eBook and all the bonuses and extra goodies and dove right in.  The eBook is fairly thick sporting 201 pages full of PPC Affiliate Marketing Wisdom.  It goes through all the basics from start to finish of exactly what you need to do in order to learn the whole Affiliate Marketing Game.  There are already a few dozen things I’ve learned from it that will probably save me thousands of dollars and a lot of wasted time if I continue on this path of trying to learn PPC Affiliate Marketing.

From the research I’ve done I heard that there is another eBook called The Definitive Guide by Perry Marshall which is kind of a companion eBook to this one that teaches you everything to do more specifically with Google AdWords.  So I’ll be picking up that book as well, as soon as I finish digesting everything in Google Cash.

So far I’ve read through the Google Cash eBook once and now I’ve gone back and completely re-did my AdWords campaigns to do some testing now that I understand things a lot more.  Hopefully things work out a lot better than my previous effort of spending $157.97 and having exactly $0 to show for it.