Inspired Affiliate vs Richard Bonner Competition Results

Sorry for the delay on this post guys, but I wanted to make sure that since I lost the competition I at least got some good value for you guys out of it.  Bonner ended up generating more than double the amount of revenue I did, so I decided to line up an interview with him to see if we can figure out what he did to cheat win.

I had a lot of fun during the competition and even though I lost, the learning experience I got out of participating in the competition has been invaluable.  In the end I think Bonner won because he had a bit more experience on me in doing Affiiliate Marketing.  I’ll regroup, learn a bit more and maybe we’ll have to do it again in the future.  In the meantime, here’s an interview with Richard Bonner of RichardBonner.net where he shares some of the secrets he used to win the competition.

(1) Hi Richard, lets start out with some of your stats. What was your final total for the month and how much did you earn from which networks?

Hey Paul, in total I generated $3,517.74 in revenue using 2 networks. It breaks down into making $2,498 (missed the ML $25 reward card by $2!!) with Market Leverage and $1,019.74 with Azoogle.

(2) $3,500 is an awesome accomplishment for a new Affiliate Marketer. In fact, when did you start Affiliate Marketing?

I can tell you the exact date, it was the 12th August 2008 as I remember setting my first monthly target at $1,000 and in those last 20 days I managed to generate ~$1,200 which took me by surprise. I actually made about $400 profit from my first real attempt.

However this was my second time attempting affiliate marketing, I had a brief go about 2 years ago but I didn’t have the right mindset and was still chasing that “easy” money online so I moved onto the next method without exploring it much. Damn I was so naive…

This time around I would say I have been reading up about affiliate marketing for a good solid few months prior to my first campaign because I didn’t have a great deal of cash to just throw myself in the deep end and learn the ropes. I understood what I had to do and howto go about it (sort of) so it gave me an advantage in my affiliate marketing rebirth .

(3) What made you decide to go into Affiliate Marketing?

Hmm good question… I feel that the best place to make money is online – I mean it’s uncapped and once you find something that works you can multiply it to make even more. I have tried other things in the past such as making websites and using Adsense but I don’t like the fact of having to wait a matter of months to see a return.

Affiliate marketing is instant, I can launch a campaign and begin making profit/loss the same day. I have a good knowledge of everything needed for affiliate marketing ie html, photoshop if needed, writing (I’m a part time copywriter) and basic link building – I guess I was born for affiliate marketing .

(4) So Richard, give us a few gold nuggets. What have you learned these last few months since starting, that could help other beginning affiliates? I know it’s a broad question, so maybe give us a few things you learned that you haven’t heard anyone else talk about, or something you tested and found to be true which was different than what you’ve seen people talk about in the marketplace.

I found a flawless plan actually which allowed me to win this competition, get the phone book out and begin ringing random people up if they would like a payday loan, a chance to win $1,000 for their email or if they want to lose weight .

On a serious note there probably isn’t anything that I can contribute that hasn’t been said by any other guru already. Some of the things that I feel helped me get off to a successful start is taking the time to research the niche. Don’t just throw some keywords together and knock up a few ads and expect to be successful, the more preparation you perform up front the less likely of having any unexpected results. I don’t mean every niche you try spend ages researching because you don’t know if it will convert or not so it could be a waste of time.

There are certain niches that will be here for a long time to come (you know which ones I mean ), they are still profitable and thousands of people make money from them – why can’t you?

One of the key characteristics of a good affiliate marketer is the ability to split test, you can split test everything from the ad, max bid or even something small like the call to action. You will not know what affect something has until you try it, it could be have a negative effect and on the other hand it could double your ROI. I must admit I am not doing as much split testing as I like but I’m revisiting my campaigns to ‘super affiliate’ them .

(5) What do you think is the biggest mistake that Affiliate Networks are making, or what could they do in order to better support beginning affiliates like yourself? For example, is there a wish-list that if met would make an affiliate network super attractive to beginning affiliates in your opinion?

Good question, I guess that an affiliate needs to feel wanted, some affiliate managers can be a bit cagey and not answer your questions to the best of their ability. I think a reward scheme plays a major part of keeping an affiliate loyal because at the end of the day, we are doing this to make money. If another network offered me a higher payout for the same offer, I wouldn’t think twice about switching it over at least to try it.

One thing I would say about this industry is that loyalty can pay in the long run, you may have seen Jonathan Volk blog about this but Azoogle pay for his affiliate summit tickets & hotel (I believe) and they sent him a plasma TV in the past for being a ‘super affiliate’ with them. I think that would entice anyone to keep a few campaigns running with a network.

( 6) What is the biggest mistake you made so far, and what did you learn from it?

Not being big headed at all but I haven’t made any big mistakes so far which is a good sign I guess. I have had one major problem though which took last month from being profitable and made it a small loss. I guess the problem was out of my hands but one keyword began to spend about $400-$500 a day, bear in mind it usually spent about $150 a day in total. It was quite a shock to see I’de spent over $1,000 in 2 days (it was the weekend and I was hung over ) and made a loss of about $500. I managed to pull some of the loss back after I had paused that keyword but there was nothing I could have done in my opinion. I guess where I relate this to my biggest mistake is not checking the stats every day.

(7) What’s your best performing keyword and what offer are you promoting? No, just kidding, I know you can’t divulge that, but maybe can you talk about the best keywords and offers your promoting in terms of stats not specifics? For example, what kind of impressions does your best keyword get? What kind of CTR? What kind of profit margin are you making on it? What does a good keyword look like?

Seen as it has just turned 12:00 midnight here my stats have finished for the day so I’ll base this on yesterdays performance. My best ad group had around 1,000 impressions with just under 15% CTR, that cost me just under $50 in total. The keywords inside that ad group (only about 2-3) generated $120 in revenue between them.

If I’m totally honest I have no idea what a good keyword look likes, that why you have to track everything because some of my keywords that seem to convert I wouldn’t even think of. But remember I’m from the UK and promoting an offer in the US, I’m not aware of some terms they use so that’s why I never delete keywords until I have tried and tested them.

(8) When you say do research on your niche and offers, exactly what kind of research do you do when picking an offer. Meaning, when you ask an affiliate manager about an offer, generally someone out there is making money with the majority of the offers out there. If they weren’t, the networks wouldn’t carry them. How did you end up deciding to pick your specific niche and offer to promote?

I’ll be totally honest when I say this but being my first campaign I actually just decided to go with what my affiliate manager suggested, I figured they would have a good understanding of what offers are working at that time so I put my faith into them. I did perform research of my own about the offer, what type of ads the competition are using and whether a review style, standard landing page or mini site was being used.

Note – when you are checking other people’s sites always copy and paste the url, you would hate it if your competition was clicking on your ads costing you money so I should assume they would too.

Doing this research will also make the keyword and the creation of your landing page much easier, you will know what terms to target in order to get a good quality score. If you have done enough you should be able to throw a quick article or 2 up to stick on your landing page with a few links to the offer.

(9) Lets talk about your setup for an offer. Direct linking, landing page, mini-site? Where do you send your PPC traffic to? You also offer a Landing Page package which you sell on your Blog, correct? Did you use those in your campaigns to give you an unfair competitive edge in the competition? But more seriously, briefly tell us what do your landing pages/sites look like.

I used a one page landing page for my campaign, I haven’t tried direct linking yet but I felt if I could pre-sell the offer it would convert better – I guess that’s something to test in the near future. I actually created 2 pretty basic pages that were similar but different colour schemes, pictures and call to action and split tested them. They both performed about the same but I would never have known unless I tried them.

I do offer a landing page creation service on my blog through another site/project of mine, I’m not sure if that gave me the advantage over my competition because in my opinion they wasn’t anything special. You have to remember that if you don’t like a landing page it doesn’t mean it won’t convert – it’s kind of annoying when people say this looks rubbish when they haven’t even tried it.  Obviously there is a line where you can see that the landing page won’t convert and doesn’t deserve to be paid for or tested.

Because I’ve had good success from it I’m going to revisit the campaign and build out a mini site with more content to try and get a better quality score and click through rate pushing it from a $XXX/day campaign to a $X,XXX/day

(10) Tell us one secret that you learned about PPC affiliate marketing that you don’t even want to say because it’s so good, but that you will tell us anyways because people will respect you for it and it’s a way for you to "Pay it Forward".

Tough question, if I had to give a secret away to help people get started I would have to say it would be to hire me for your landing pages . On a serious note the ‘secret’ if you can call it that is to build a relationship with your affiliate manager, not many people realize how much of a part they have in your success in affiliate marketing. I’m a great example of this, I was running a campaign and began to send a good amount of leads per day so I asked for a bump in payout – straight away they gave me a $2 increase. If I was sending them 5 leads per day that’s an extra $10/day for nothing, it’s a great way to improve your ROI or bring a campaign from making a loss into making a profit instantly.  It gives you more leverage with your keyword bids so that little bump may allow you to increase your bid on a few keywords to double your leads per day making even more money.

With that In mind you can use the networks to your advantage, I was speaking to my Azoogle affiliate manager and they stated they have a better offer in the same niche but it paid about $5 less (after my bump) so I was weary, they said that if I try them out they can match the payout – a $5 increase per lead which I thought was amazing. It turns out that it did convert better so I was better off for making a quick change.

Not sure if you all would class that as a ‘secret’ but I’m still learning the ropes as I go along but I feel that having a chat now and again with your affiliate manager will have a massive benefit in the long run.

That’s awesome Richard .  Thank you so much for sharing with us.  I’m now going to send ninja spies to your house to find out the rest of your secrets, so that I can beat you in the next competition.  I hope you don’t mind.

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