So now that we’ve set hours and we’ve learned how important it is not to use your job as an excuse, the next thing I want to talk about is when you are actually working and how to set limits on things that could distract you while your working.

Email

Email is great! In fact, it’s probably the number one way that I communicate with people I work with…even more so than Social Media or Instant Messaging networks.  While email is great for business and essential, it can become distracting.  If you are anything like myself, I probably get close to fifty emails a day!

I love receiving emails from people and I try to respond to every single one of them, but the bottom line is that I’ve realized I can’t send a paragraph or two email back to every single person that writes to me.  It’s just not possible for me to do it!  There is just too much, so much in fact that I could spend most of the day responding to each one and I’d still keep falling behind!

So how do you do it then?  Well, I don’t really think there is a great way, I think you just have to admit defeat haha!  I try to write back to as many people as possible, and I even have a folder saved on my computer with answers to questions that I get all the time that I can simply copy and paste in to an email and send whenever I get asked that question.

Mostly, I’ve learned to simply hit the delete button on some emails instead of trying to answer them all…

Instant Messaging

This is probably one of the biggest distractions for affiliate marketers or any internet marketer that exists when they are working.

I use to be horrible at this!  I use to have my instant messaging program up all day long while I worked and even if I was just on doing recreational stuff online, I’d have it open.  I’d be chatting with people online all day long everyday!  It was a huge distraction!

Eventually I had to learn to set hours for having IM up, and now I don’t even do that, I only get on for about a hour late in the evening.  The funny thing is you hear people talk about how much networking helps them, and that’s their excuse for keeping their IM programs open, but guess what, I haven’t noticed a drop in revenue since I’ve quit using it…now my friends simply send me an email…

imagine that… haha!

Statistics

Another thing I see affiliates get hung up on is all the stats that are out there, it’s so easy to start looking at your stats with the affiliate network and offers your using, your Google Analytic  stats, split testing stats, heat map stats, etc, etc, etc that before you realize it, you spent the day looking at stats and never actually applied those stats on anything that will help you grow!

Stats are great and they are the key to affiliate marketing, but if you are always looking at stats and never putting those stats to use, it does you absolutely not good!  Glance at your stats then make the changes you need to make where ever you need to make them!

Conclusion

There are so many more distractions when it comes to working from home, but those are the ones that I think can take most of your time and are the most common for all affiliates.  If you have any others, I’d love to hear about them in the comments and also give us an example of how you don’t allow them to become distractions!

One of the biggest factors that keeps me from completing work that I know I need to complete is… other people!

While there are so many great benefits to working from home, there is one huge disadvantage!  That disadvantage is that no one else seems to realize that you do indeed… Work!

I’m sure this is something that most of you experience or have experienced in the past with family members and friends, however, I’ve come to realize one important thing about this phenomenon that I’d like to share with you today.

As much as we like to blame other people for the things that we don’t get done, it’s not entirely their fault!

I know I know I can hear you know… they should respect that you are working, give you your space, not interrupt you, show you some respect…blah blah blah!!!  The bottom line is that it’s your job to set limits on distractions that will inevitably come your way as a work from home entrepreneur.

I can’t even begin to express to you the number of times that I’ve been working hard on a new website, updating content, or working on an affiliate project and I’d get that phone call…my dad asking me to help him with something, or my wife (now ex-wife) needing me to do something for her, or even my daughter when she’d interrupt me.  It’s frustrating!

Of course I’m not trying to be a prude about it, and there are times that I welcome the interruptions, especially from certain people (like my daughter) however, the problem is that I enjoy helping those around me just as I’m sure that you do, and there are too many times when I ignore what I need to get done in order to help someone else with something that could wait until I have free time.

This is a sure fire way to have your affiliate earnings or websites drop in revenue.  If you’re not careful you’ll constantly have more and more distractions come your way and it will become easier and easier to put off stuff that you must complete in order to take your business forward!

So what are some things you can do to help avoid problems with family and friends?  How can you say “NO” without them getting upset or them feeling like you just don’t’ want to help them?

Set Work Hours!

I just heard the groan…I know lol, one of the greatest benefits to working from home is that you are free to create your own schedule, however, just because you have specific hours set does not mean that you always have to work during those hours!

If something comes up, by all means, change your work schedule for that day and enjoy the time with your family, friends, or other obligations, but by having a set time of when you work, your family and friends will over time become accustomed to you not being available during those times!  And those times that they do call and you are extremely busy you can simply say, sure I can help as soon as I get off work at 4pm!

Don’t Use Your Job As An Excuse!

This is pretty self explanatory, but in order to avoid any confusion, let me give an example from my own personal life…

There are going to be times when you simply don’t feel like helping the person that is asking, whether it’s because you are extremely tired or maybe just in a foul mood, it’s imperative that you don’t use your job as an excuse to get out of it, especially if it’s with your spouse or children!

I remember one time my wife was asking me to help her with the dishes and to pick up the house, I didn’t feel like it…at all! So what did I do?  I told her I had some work that needed to get done and needed to be done as soon as possible.  I then retreated to my office, shut the door, and loaded up World of Warcraft (if you don’t know what game that is, your an idiot! Just Kidding!!!).

Of course, no sooner than I started to really get in to it, my wife comes barging in to make sure I was actually working…okay fine she was just trying to be a good wife and bring me something cold to drink…and busted me!

Needless to say the next time I had something important to do and she needed help with something, she didn’t believe me!

So, if you are being asked to do something by someone else and you don’t feel like doing it, then tell them your grandmother died (for the 30th time) and hope they don’t bust you, but never ever use your job as the excuse if it’s not true because when the time comes that you actually need to do something important your family and friends won’t believe you when you need them to!

Stay Tuned

If you’re not subscribed to my RSS feed, I’d suggest you do so now so that I can charge more for advertisements on this…errr actually I mean so that you don’t miss Part Two of Setting Limits on Distractions!

You will fail, in fact, you will most likely fail a lot!

There isn’t much you can do about it, oh wait…there is one important thing that you must do with failed campaigns…

Learn from them!!!

Seriously, if you are expecting your first campaign to be successful in this business you have a ton to learn.  Failure is part of business and in this business it’s amazing just how much you’ll fail.  In fact, 90% of the campaigns I start never make money.

There is no formula to always have a successful campaign, there are so many factors that stop a campaign from becoming profitable, including factors that are completely out of your hands.

Don’t give up, instead keep learning and pumping out campaigns and your time will come and you’ll make a ton of money from this business.

With All Sincerity,

Good Luck

We already know that they care about bid prices and quality score, and I’m pretty sure most of you realize by now that the higher your bid the better, but we also know that you can’t just bid extremely high cause you’ll lose money, thus, just like with the search network side, there are things you can do on the content network side to raise your quality score in order to get a higher position with a lower bid.  This will allow for higher profits margins and more traffic from being in higher ad positions.

So let’s take a look at a couple of the factors that affects your quality score on the content network side of Google.

• The Ad’s Past Performance On The Site & On Similar Sites – Just as Google takes your ad CTR and stuff in to effect on the search network, they also take this in to effect on the content network.  However, the major difference is that with the content network, Google looks at it on a more site by site basis instead of across the board.  This means that maybe on one set of sites that are similar to each other you are getting a great CTR while on another set you aren’t doing as well.  Google most likely (it isn’t always the case) still give you a great position on the one set that is doing well, and will only penalize you for the sites you aren’t performing well on.

• Relevance of Ads and Keywords to Site(s) – If you remember in the last post, the search network post, we said that Google looks at how relevant your ads and keywords are to your landing page.  On the content network, Google is more concerned at how well your ads and keywords relate to the website they are being displayed on and not so much on how well they match your website (landing page).

• Your Landing Page’s Quality – Even though Google looks more closely at how related your ads and keywords are related to the website you are advertising on in the content network, they still care that you have a landing page that is of high quality.  There are tons of factors that determines if Google sees your landing page as a quality site or not, so the best I can do in this post is link to a page at Google about landing pages.

Those are the three main factors that Google takes in to account when determining your quality score for the content network side of Google Adwords!  You can see pretty easily that Google doesn’t have near the amount of stipulations for the content network as they do for the search network.

It’s a pretty well known fact that they are more strict on the search network then they are on the content network, however, it’s still imperative that you are using the above factors to your advantage when bidding on keyword or placement targeting on the content network.

In affiliate marketing most of the time, it’s the little things that boosts your ad over your competitors ad…the extra time you take that your competitor doesn’t!

In this article I’ll discuss the factors that determine your ad position when you are bidding on keywords on the search network of Google Adwords.

In the next post I write, I’ll discuss the factors that determine your ad position when bidding on keywords on the content network of Google Adwords.

The formula for Ad Rank is pretty simple…

Ad Rank Formula = Max CPC Bid x Quality Score

Most of you know what Max CPC bid, it’s just the maximum you are willing to spend per click and is a number you set in your Adwords account on either an ad group level, or if your smart on a per keyword level.  It’s the biggest factor determining in what position your ad will appear within the search results Sponsored Links section.

This means that you can’t bid .10 cents on a keyword like auto insurance even if you have the best quality score possible and expect to show up in position one… it just isn’t gonna happen…

Moving on, so what affects your quality score?

The quality score you receive is based on a number of factors, however, once again there is one major factor that tends to be the most important.  That is your CTR (click through rate) of your ad.  The higher your click through rate, the higher your quality score.  The reason for this is because Google is out to make money…I know…shocker…right?

The only way that Google makes money is when someone clicks on your ad.  If you write an ad and Google shows it yet no one ever clicks on it, then they make nothing.  So naturally Google desires for you to have the highest CTR that you can, which also benefits you!  It means more traffic for you, and more money for Google as their being paid per click and the higher your CTR the more clicks you are getting for the same amount of impressions.

So the two biggest factors is your Max CPC (Max Bid) and Ad CTR (click through rate), however, what happens when you have a competitive bid price and a great Ad CTR but yet you still just can’t seem to beat that one competitor that is outranking you?

Well, there are several other factors that Google uses to determine your quality score, and while they may not give you as big of a boast as having a high CTR would give you, they can still help you tremendously.

• Your Account History – Not only does Google care about your CTR that you are currently getting on a campaign, but they also take in to account the overall CTR that you’ve received for all your campaigns, ads, and keywords.  The better CTR you have long term, the strong your account becomes.

• Ads Relevant to Keywords? – Google also takes in to account how well related your ads are to your keywords.  If your writing ads about selling a dog training ebook, yet your keywords are on ringtones, that will lower your quality score.

• Ads & Keywords Relevant to Landing Page? – Another factor that will affect your quality score is whether or not your ads and keywords are relevant to your landing page.  Again, if you are bidding on keywords and writing ads on things that aren’t related to the actual product or service you are promoting, it will negatively affect your quality score!

There are several other factors that will affect your quality score, however, the ones listed above are the ones that I’ve found to affect your quality score the most.

While Google doesn’t show the actual quality score you have, they do now give a number 1-10 to help you see how a keyword is ranking quality score wise.  You can see this quality score by going to an ad group and looking at the keywords and turning it on by click the show/hide columns button and selecting it.

In the next post I write, I’ll discuss what factors determine your quality score when bidding on keywords on the Content Network, so make sure you subscribe to my feed if you haven’t yet to make sure you get an update when the next one is posted.

Update – Understanding How Google Ranks Ads on the Content Network

Most people, however, when referring to scaling are talking about getting more traffic to your affiliate sites.  So this article is about that…traffic!

Once you take a campaign and fine tune it and it’s making money the first thing you’ll get told by 99% of gurus would be to increase the traffic you are receiving.  How so?

Well, let’s say that you are running a campaign in Yahoo, they may tell you to run the campaign in Bing or Google, or maybe they’ll tell you to start using facebook ads, or start looking at 3rd tier ppc sites like ask.com or 7search, etc.

Maybe you’ll get told you should start PPV or run the content network if you are only using the search side of it…or whatever!!!

Now I’m not saying any of that is wrong or that you shouldn’t get traffic from other sources…however, I feel that way too often people realize or are told that they need more traffic and very quickly they decide to start messing with other traffic sources…often times way too early!

Let’s just get right in to it!

You should not move on to other traffic sources until you have exhausted the maximum potential of your current traffic sources.

You see, the problem I see when consulting affiliates is they start an offer, in our example let’s say online dating…  They start running a campaign for online dating in Google Adwords on the Search Network.  After fine tuning the campaign, split testing, etc…they start making a profit.

Let’s say in this example that they start making about 10 dollars a day profit.  They are proud of themselves, yet even more importantly they want to make more money!!!  So they decide to open up their campaign and starting running it on the content network as well…

One small problem…The more sources you start using to bring in traffic to your sites the more separate campaigns (even if it’s really the same as each have to be optimized for each source of traffic) you have to manage which takes more time and eventually what happens if you spread yourself too thin!

If you are making 10 dollars a day from the search network side of Google Adwords, there is no reason that you can’t continue to optimize that campaign and increase the amount your making substantially more.

Before you move on to other traffic sources, even if it’s as simple as running the content network alongside the search network, you need to make sure you are first making the most amount you can from the traffic source you have already got working.

See, the problem is this…too many affiliates get something that is working for them, yet they then want to spend time on working on other traffic sources that they may not be able to get work…Why wouldn’t you increase and milk the source you already have working first?

So while it’s important to use other traffic sources in order to increase your profits, it’s more important to first increase the amount of traffic you are getting from your one source first, in the case of this example, from the Google Adwords search network side.

Your thoughts on this?  What do you think?

PS: Don’t forget that you can join the Click Consultants Paid Affiliate Forums (which normally costs $29.99/month) for free for a limited time!!!

If you’ve ever spoken to me via social media sites or via Instant Messaging for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m not the type of person to say one method is better than the other.  Unfortunately in this business, certain methods work for some people, while completely different methods work for others.  There is no clear cut solution or any clear cut path to follow in order to succeed in affiliate marketing.

However, I received an email about two weeks ago with a very specific question about split testing.  I responded to the person with the same advice I’m about to talk about in this blog post.  The email asked…

I know split testing is important, in fact, from what I understand it may be the single most important aspect I can do in affiliate marketing to influence the scaling process of my campaigns.  However, I’ve seen several methods for split testing and I was wondering which method worked best.  Some sites I’ve read say that you should split test two versions of whatever your testing at the same time, while others suggest split testing one type one day and then another the next day.  Which method do you feel would have the greatest impact on my split testing efforts?

Now, when I started split testing, I always used the A/B method of split testing which means that you split test two variations at the exact same time giving both equal exposure.  In fact, it’s not something I have even really thought about thus my reason for never writing a blog post about it before now.  However, after thinking about it, I felt that it was worthy of a blog post because I do believe there is a very clear cut way of doing it that will yield the best results!

The other, most common, method you see affiliates use is the AB split testing method.  The only difference between the two is that with the A/B method you are split testing both things at the same exact time giving them both equal exposure.  With the AB method you are split testing them at different times, or days.  For example, you may split test a landing page on Monday, document the results, and then put up a new landing page on Tuesday, compare the results and pick the best one.

The downside with the AB split testing model is that unfortunately data can be very different on different days and even on the same day but morning vs. evening.  Some campaigns do really well during the evenings, but horrible during the mornings, if you are running one page in the morning and one in the evening, your better landing page may actually be the one that you are running in the mornings but because conversions suck for your niche in the mornings, it looks like your landing page doesn’t do well at all.

However, if you are using the A/B method you know that both items you are split testing are getting the same exact data.  They are sharing visitors equally and both are being displayed both in the morning, afternoon, and evening.  This insures that you aren’t receiving data that is skewed because of changes in the visitors you receive throughout the day.

Now, as I said in the opening paragraphs of this blog post, not every method works best for everyone.  There is one other method that I’ve found works decent and that is the ABAB method.

This works just like the AB method, but there is one major difference.  You split test landing page one on Monday, then landing page two on Tuesday, however, you then continue on giving each one more time.  So you’d split test landing page one on Wednesday for the second time, and then split test landing page two on Thursday for a second time.

Personally I still don’t believe this is the best method and when compared with the A/B split testing method, I’m not sure why you’d choose it, however, there are some that believe that the ABAB method is the best choice.  In fact, it is a common way of split testing in other fields like Pyschology.  These fields use the ABAB method for most experiments.

Ultimately the choice is yours, however, I’d highly recommend going with the A/B method or at the very least the ABAB method.  Using the AB method is in my opinion simply being lazy and it will impact your business in a very negative way!

A question I received a lot after writing that blog post was how you could tell what sites your ads were showing up on while running on the content network.  The reason so many people are curious about this, is because if there is a certain site that your ad is showing up like crazy on, yet you aren’t receiving any conversions, it will suck your account dry!

Now personally, I only mess with the content network with Google, so I’m only familiar with how to get to it from within their interface, however, I’m sure the basic procedure is the same on most networks if they offer the feature.

First, you need to log in to your Google Adwords account.  After you have logged in, you need to click on the Reporting Tab, then click on Reports.

Next, click on Create a New Report.

Going off subject for a minute, this next screen will allow you to select from a ton of a different reports that you can run, each on has a small description as to the info you’ll receive.  I’d definitely recommend checking out some of the other reports, but since this post is specifically about finding sites your ads are running on when using the content network, lets move on…

If you scroll down just a touch, you’ll notice that one of the radio buttons says Placement Performance.  Click on the radio button next to Placement Performance.

There are a ton of options now that you can select like level of detail, date range, etc.  Pretty self explanatory stuff, so I won’t go in to detail on all the settings.  If you want more details on all the different settings and stuff you can visit Google’s page about Placement Performance Report Help.

Once you finish editing the settings, you’ll come to the last section which is called Templates, Scheduling, and Email.  This place simply allows you to name your report, save the report as a template for running it again later, setting the report to run automatically every so often, etc.

Once you finish that last section, click on Create Report and voila your done!

After you click on Create Report, it will take you back to the Reports Tab Section within your account.  If can take several minutes for your report to be processed.  You can either wait or feel free to move around your account till it’s finished.  It won’t affect it if you leave the page.

After it’s finished the name of the report (whatever you named it in the last section) will become a link and you simply click on the link and you’ll see all the domains/urls that your ads have appeared on.

What’s the Difference?

One of the first questions I get all the time is what is the difference between the search network and the content network, so real quick, the difference between the two is that when you are strictly bidding on the search network, your ads show up only on search pages, which could also include search results of partners that the search engine may have.  When you are bidding on the content network, you ads may show up for any site that is signed up for their ad program and have ads on their websites.  If you are bidding on an ad for car parts, your ad may show up on a website about cars.  If you are bidding on the search network, you ads would only show up for keywords done about cars on the search engine.

Search Network

When running your ads on the search network, which is the most talked about method on this site, you are bidding on groups of keywords and when those keywords are typed into let’s say Google, your ads show up in the results.

So with the search network you are dealing with keywords, bid prices, and figuring out which keywords convert well.

Content Network

When you are running your ads on the content network, you are bidding on keywords that are related to your niche, but your ads will show up on websites that pertain to those keywords as per the example I gave above.  If you are bidding on keywords about car parts, your ad may show up on a website about cars.

With the content network, you are still dealing with keywords, but you’re also dealing with finding out which websites are converting really well and which ones aren’t, then excluding the websites that aren’t.  So it takes a bit more work, and you have no control where the ads are shown, so if the owner of the website changes these ads around, it could make a site that does great, go really bad.

Running Both?

Most affiliates start off running one or the other, but eventually, most affiliates start using both methods as a way of getting traffic to their affiliates sites, especially once they get a campaign that is doing well and their trying to scale it out.  They may get stuck on one or the other so try out the other in order to increase their traffic.

Personally, I recommend using both as both can be extremely profitable if done right, and both can drive huge amounts of traffic to your affiliates sites.  I know the search network is favored more, but honestly, I’ve seen the content network perform pretty consistently for me as well and sometimes even better in certain niches.  So by running just one or the other, you jeopardize your earning potential.

One Important Note:

This article isn’t really an article detailing exactly how to go about doing the content network, although if enough interest is expressed in the comments, I may write an entire article detailing how to use the content network, however, there is one very important point that I want to make to those that may be thinking about running both the search network and the content network.

The important point is that if you choose to run both, you need to make sure you create two separate campaigns.  One campaign that only runs on the search network, and one campaign that only runs on the content network.  These two networks are completely different and require totally different things in order for them to work.

In fact, most of the times, I even run separate domains and landing pages for my content network stuff and search network stuff.

Bottom Line:

If you’re not using both methods to drive traffic you’re really losing out!  They are both excellent methods of driving traffic, and I honestly don’t think you should only pick one, sure it’s more work working with both the search and content network, but it’s so worth it!

Affiliate Marketing is not easy to get started in, in fact, it’s actually quite difficult for most people.  Of course, there are those rare occasions where someone launched a campaign and see immediate positive results…(like me )  However, this is very few and far in between.  Most people start off losing money, that’s just me being honest my friends!

However, if you are serious about doing this and making a living by working from home online, then you can’t quit.  If you truly are passionate about affiliate marketing then again, don’t quit!

This business changes rapidly, in fact pretty much any online type business does, but it seems that daily there is something crazy going on in the affiliate marketing space.  You took all the time to learn, read, etc about affiliate marketing and if you “take a break” you are going to throw that all away.

Now I’m not saying if you run out of money to just keep charging away, but don’t stop reading, studying niches, etc.  Why?  Because if you do, you’ll come back later only to realize that you’re basically starting from scratch!  I’m not kidding, that’s how fast things can change in this field.  Of course, you may still remember the basics, but that’s about it.

There are new types of landing pages, new techniques, new search engine requirements, etc that don’t stop changing and evolving while you’re “taking a break” from affiliate marketing and when you come back it will suck having to relearn how to do affiliate marketing…

I’ve seen it time and time again and in fact one of the reasons for this post is because I just had someone that emailed me about a one on one counseling session and they had done just that and I decided to blog about it.  And the crazy thing is, it’s not something new, I’ve heard people tell me this over and over that have come to me for advice or counseling.

The bottom line is, even if you go broke and can’t run a campaign, keep up on what’s going on in affiliate marketing at all times…that is if you even think for a moment that you may try it again when you get some more money!