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Since busting through my big blasting personal challenge, I suddenly find myself on track to spend more in Adwords this month than I have ever made in earnings in any prior month. Which, let me be perfectly honest here, kinda sorta freaks me out when I take a peek at the numbers!

Mind you, even at this early testing phase of the game this month’s results show me at just shy of a 70% return on that investment. In other words, for every $100 I spend, I would be getting back $170 in earnings.

By that logic, if anything even approaching that rate continues, I should be ecstatic to shell out many thousands of dollars a month. After all, who would possibly argue against trading $10,000 for $17,000?

Nevertheless, logic isn’t always the hands-down winner of one’s internal mind games. So until those earnings actually hit my account, I’m going to have to wage some mental battles to keep me on track…

The keywords in your account are nearing an unmanageable size.

You don’t say?

Looks like Google wants to slow me down a bit. Ah, well, they are right after all. With all the smooshes (ala ‘thisisakeywordphrase‘) in my account, I have far too many keywords with not so much as an impression in the mix. So it’s probably time to do a little housecleaning. Sure, I could just open another account, but why let things get really unruly before doing some cleaning?

So, I am going to tack on another day to my 50 blast goal deadline and spend that day pruning.

There most definitely is money still to be made as an eBay affiliate. Last month was, by a long shot, my most profitable month as one.

photo credit: ethorson

That said, my future eBay efforts will likely not involve creating any more BANS sites. I’ll certainly keep my current BANS sites as they are as long as they continue to make a profit. For instance, I have one site that I literally have not touched since I set it up last November that has made me a couple thousand, and it is about to hit its peak season again. Why mess with it?

But I just do not much care for building sites the BANS way anymore. Nothing wrong with the software, but I have found ways I just like better.

Off On Tangents

I have gone off onto a couple different tangents as far as eBay affiliate stuff:

• For sites built to get search engine traffic, I’m using a great little product called phpBay. It lets me take a Wordpress blog and quickly turn it into a store. With the billion or so themes available for Wordpress, I can make it look however I want.
• Lately I’ve been focusing on using Adwords to drive traffic to eBay mini sites. I used the API version of phpBay to build mini sites specifically for PPC campaigns. If you happen to join Earn $1k A Day, I can’t recommend these three threads more highly to give you some truly astounding ideas along these lines:
  1. My First 1K day, now 2nd and 3rd
  2. Questions for Gary
  3. How I choose my keywords from ebay listing titles

  I’ve been following Gary’s system since midway through September, and am more than thrilled with the results I’ve gotten so far.

Tool Recommendations

Here are a few recommendations for tools I use I’ve found particularly useful as an eBay affiliate:

• Irregardless of the route you’re taking, finding a good niche is a given. I really like Hot Item Finder to find what is actually selling on eBay. I’ve hit on some truly oddball niches using it that have done very well for me so far.
• Some software to pull eBay listings and format ‘em with your affiliate links. Whether it’s BANS or phpBay or any of the other eBay affiliate scripts out there.

Those are really my only indispensables. Now that I’ve gotten into pay-per-click to get traffic to my mini sites, I’ll tack on two more, but if you’re not going into PPC right now, ignore ‘em:

• Keyword Transformer to let me easily set up keyword tracking.
• My membership at Campaign Blast. This site has really kicked me in the pants. I set up 44 mini money sites in around a week recently because of this membership. And will probably put up another 60 in the next.

End of the Day Job?

So, have I made enough to replace the day job yet?

Well, no. At least, not yet. But last month certainly reduced the multiples required to do so!

Seeing results really gets you motivated…