http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/a-sneak-peak-into-my-adwords-account/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+superaffiliatemindset+%28Super+Affiliate+Mindset%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

I tend to agree with the person calling him a fraudster.

“Source says: Amit only had like 2 successful campaigns. One was a regcure campagin, and one was public records. Thats it. I saw inside his Adwords account and it was a complete joke. He basically got REALLY lucky. I mean he had adgroups and keywords stuck all over the place. It looked like some total newbs account, basically nothing like anything he teaches.”

After trying some of his techniques my campaigns started doing really poorly.  Eventually every one of the campaigns I set up using his techniques failed.  I would seriously suggest you do not listen to this guy.  He has no idea what he’s doing.  More keywords doesn’t guarantee better results.

Microsoft ’s move is no surprise, they have been trying to get search right since Google’s surpassed their marketshare over a decade ago.  Their first attemp, Microsoft Live Search, was a dismal desire.  The big question is, will Bing find an audience and does this new approach to search really work?

At least one other company thinks so.  The new strangely named Wolfram Alpha search engine which just launched around a week ago already tries to accomplish what Microsoft’s Bing promises to.  However all the hoopla proved to be misguided when users got a real taste of what Wolfram Alpha could actually do.  Plagued by outages and bandwidth limitations, Wolfram Alpha debut was less than impressive and its question-answering capability seems to be quite limited.  Not to mention the beauty of Google is its simplicity, something that gets lost when you try to treat a search engine like a smart-portal.

No one knows for sure whether Microsoft Bing’s new search engine will make any sort of dent to Google’s marketshare, but I’ll be watching closely for the next few months.

I don’t know when I started hating Google, but I do ….so much!

In any case, I need to do a lot more research to see if my theory is correct.  I had a blog that had a PR 4 and after installing the plugin it dropped to a PR3.  However, I’m not sure if this is directly attributable to the plugin or something else was going on.  The timing was a little misleading because the blog had a podcast that I stopped producing right around the time of the PR drop.  I also started updating more infrequently.  So was it the lack of updates, or the plugin?  I need to test and see.

If anybody out there has any inside info, please post a comment…

Anyway, I think I just stumbled upon something really exciting.  I love Facebook.  I didn’t get it at first, but once I did I was hooked.  I’m on there every day.  I’m an addict.

I decided to create a page for my business a while back, and at somepoint I decided it might be interesting to create a page for a business that I didn’t exactly “own”.  A few weeks ago, a so-called “expert” in my industry decided to go on daytime talk shows to talk about a subject that could potentially sell a whole lot more of the product I’m selling.  Yes, I’m being vague on purpose.

I created a facebook page for this personality and posted a single link and forgot about it.  A week later I have 25 people subscribed to my page.  My business has 3 people subscribed.  I’m one of them.

Here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m goign to create a shitload of pages, each pointing to a somewhat notorious company or “expert”.  After I reach a predetermined “critical mass”, I will post a very prominent link to my own site.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  I’m excited.  Here we go…

Let me rephrase that.  It’s not really that I’m lazy.  I don’t mind working my ass off, I just like to see an immediate reward for all my hard work.  ‘Pay Per Click’ let me do that easily.  I could create a new campaign, have it running in an hour, then test it the next day.  It’s easy to keep track of your efforts of ver the span of a few days or a couple of weeks.  The idea of having to wait months for the search engines to index your site and update didn’t appeal to me at all.

Nevertheless, I attended a presentation by a guy named Wil Reynolds called ‘Debunking SEO Myths‘.  Now, this guy was not a great speaker.  He was terrible actually.  Sheepishly, ackwardly he stumbled through his presentation, but something about it stuck with me.  He was basically repeating the same line: “The best way to improve your search engine rankings was to create quality, original content that others would want to link to and repost.”  But he added, “…while you’re waiting for your efforts to take effect, the fastest way to get your listings up there is to BUY LINKS.”

Now this I found interesting.  Maybe Search Engine Optimization wasn’t so long and boring after all!  Maybe you could really make an impact in SEO if you treated it like PPC.  Maybe, just maybe, you could get instant results.  This was something I had to try.

But I’m lazy, remember?  I want to find one place for all my link-buying.  I don’t want to have to spend hours compiling lists of sites to buy links from that may or may not improve my rankings, then spend days finding contact information for all of those sites, then contacting and negotiating a price for each link.  I want it.  I want it now.

So, now I’m trying to figure out what happens when you buy links from sites like text-link-ads.com.  Do you get penalized?  I don’t know yet.  I’m experimenting.  Will let you know soon…

Let me introduce myself.

I’m 34 years old.  I’ve been doing Internet marketing for the last 5 years.  Specifically, I’ve been an affiliate marketer.  For the last 4 years I’ve made enough money to quit my well paying job (with benefits) and work from home in my pajamas.  Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Last year the shit really hit the fan.  The economy started to deteriorate badly, and the beautiful six figure salary that I had achieved started to dwindle fast.  I started to panic and remained in a panicked state for the next 8 months.  Not to mention, I had some personal things going on at the time, the least of which was a messy and very costly divorce.

So here I am.  I survived the downturn, but things are far from back to normal.  At the height of my glory I made about $20k in one month with arbitrage affiliate marketing.  I never created a single landing page.  I simply bought traffic from Google in the form of adwords ads and sent the traffic directly to the merchant’s landing page through the affiliate link.  Basically the “Google Cash” method.  When I handed over my $67, I was certain that I’d be fighting them to get a refund because there was no way this was going to work.  But there was something so simple and beautiful about this idea.  It made so much sense to me.  I gave it a shot.  My life changed.

The first month was not great, but it was good enough to show me the potential of the idea.  Over the next several weeks I got little sleep, staying up late to create new campaigns and look for more promising merchants.  Month two, was quite nice, and I started getting very excited.

I think I got too excited when I quit my job on labor day.  Ironic, huh?

In any case, things started to really go badly for me after attending the Affiliate Summit in Miami in 2007.  I attended a presentationcalled “Secrets of a PPC Super Affiliate” by this clown Amit Mehta, who did his little schtick and showed us all his American Express Black Card.  I kept wondering just how much he was getting paid for this presentation, and why if everything he was saying was true, would he be here divulging his “secrets”.  But stupidly, I bought into his whole “more keywords are better” theory and bought subscriptions to the keyword generating tools he suggested.

Over the next year I completely changed my strategy based on what I had learned.  Guess what?  Everything went to hell.  I went from making $200k a year to $20k.  Now, I know this isn’t all Mehta’s fault.  The economy did change radicaly.  Plus Google upped their minimum bids quite a bit and the affiliate networks and merchants suddenly got wise to all the trademark bidding and search arbitrage that was going on.  Then again, if self-serving speakers like Mehta hadn’t gone from conference to conference spreading their secrets and making networks aware of what was going on just so they could get some measly speakers fee, then things may not have changed quite so radically and I wouldn’t be facing a bankrupcy right now.  Asshole.

In any case, that was then, this is now.  PPC has started to lose its effectiveness.  The future is SEO.  I’m convinced that the only way to go is to have a legitimate product to sell and to focus your efforts on getting organic traffic to that product.  That is what I’m working on now.  This blog will serve as a diary as I continue to learn and adapt to whatever challenges are thrown at me.  It is meant to be educational and somewhat entertaining.  It’s my way of giving a little back to the community, since it has given (and taken) from me.  I hope you will find it useful.  Talk to you soon…