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For all of you who have been reading on my blog lately, you know that I have started into Media Buying as a means to grow my business. And, a lot of you have been asking me – “What is Media Buying” Well, today I am going to explain it in as much detail as I can.

Media Buying:

Media Buying is where you can buy ad space (Banner Ads) or place a text link ad (Like Adsense) onto very popular websites such as People.Com, MSNBC, Fox New, Nascar.Com and hundreds if not thousands of more sites.

What’s The Traffic Like On These Sites?

People.com has anywhere from 10million to 50 million hits per day. That is a lot of traffic you can target with a wide range of different types of ads and offers.

Sites like MSNBC and Fox News have just as much traffic as People .com but you are able to target niches more accurately. If your running a health related offer you can hit the traffic that reads the health section of the news sites.

The reason why this is such a good form of advertising is due to the fact this is where Internet traffic hangs out all day – on the popular sites, makes sense right! Don’t confuse Facebook with these other sites either, Facebook is a social networking site, not a media site.

There are two basic forms of Media Buying you can do – a CPC type (Cost Per Click) and a CPM type (Cost Per Impressions). When you start out Media Buying and if you have a smaller budget, it is best to start off in the CPC area as you can test your ads out better and get better data before committing your funds to a bigger media buy. Also, the CPM area is really for Media Buyers who have a big budget to play with and they usually end up buying media traffic directly from the website. CPC purchases are handled buy third party companies like Pulse 360 and Adsonar.

Depending on which company you decide to start buying media traffic from, you can expect to pay anywhere from .50 per click to $5.00 per click. In a later post I will list out all the companies you can buy Media Traffic from so make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed Here to keep updated.

Can You Start Media Buying On A $50.00 A Day Budget?

Dame straight you can! I have wasted so much money on Google Adwords because of only having a small budget and the costs per click are so expensive on Google, if I would of got into Media Buying 6 months ago – my financial situation would be a lot different right now – that’s for sure! Plus, there are a lot less restrictions on advertising on media sites then like on Google. All ads are manually approved so the chances of getting your account banned are slim. “There Is NO GOOGLE SLAPS to deal with at ALL!!!

Problems with Media Buying:

There are a few problems with-in the media buying space that I have found. One is that the big media buyers don’t care about there ROI’S as much as the little guys do so they end up over bidding to try and capitalize on the traffic from a certain site and make it harder for smaller people to get into Media Buying. To me, this is dumb and very stupid to do because if they worked on getting higher conversions instead of the most traffic – they would create much more room for new people (there still is a ton of room right now)  to break into Media Buying plus they would ultimately make more money with spending less. “More Money Then Brains – Type Of Thing”

The second problem is with-in the Affiliate Network space. Affiliate Managers are way to protective of the affiliates they have doing Media Buying and do not release nearly enough information to any affiliate looking to break into this market.

Funny thing is – Most affiliates will leave a network for only .10 cents more per lead, so why do networks show so much loyalty to these affiliates when they can and will be left hanging in a heart beat! The Networks have the information you need to get into Media Buying, if they won’t give it to you – find a new network.

Also, still with the network issues. If a network does not have a top converting offer – most will not tell you which offers are converting high on Media Traffic on other networks (and they know cause affiliates tell them) if there’s sucks so you are going to have to do a few things to find out on your own. Spy on your competition and see what there running then use Offer Vault (Free Service) to find out who has the offer, sign up with that network and go from there.

Huge Bonuses With Media Buying:

There is a lot more pluses to Media Buying that out way the negatives ten fold. One is, more traffic then most people can handle. The traffic is insane actually. Yesterday I fired up a campaign on People.com and was paying $1.51 per click and blew a $100.00 budget in ten minuets. God I love seeing that!! I did have a slight profit after that ten minuets too. (Now its time to optimize that campaign) which we will cover at another time, but a little hint here. It has to do more with how I price my ads then changing the site around.

The biggest feature I love with Media buying is the 3 to 500% ROI that you can get with this traffic source. Don’t let anyone tell you different – ROI’S that high are common. I had one affiliate manager tell me his affiliates were doing 20 to 30% ROI. I told him, his affiliates suck! LOL

Another huge plus is there is not a lot of competition right now in Media Buying because of how fast you can blow a budget and also there is very little information on it for people to learn. Also, many people think you need to have 5k a day to test out a campaign. That’s only true on certain sites “The Big Sites” and like I said above, you can start off with a small budget too.

Here is a video from Media Trust’s Jivan Manhas who runs through how to get into Media Buying and where you should start off from if you have a smaller budget.

I hope this clears up some issues some of you had understanding what Media Buying is and if there is something that don’t make sense – just ask me.

Well I am kind of glad that August is over with. Even though the last week I started into Media Buying, which I will post more on regularly, it still was a killer slow month and the first time I ran into a decrease in income that was out of my control.

The last week of August I did notice and increase in traffic, so it looks like things are going to get back to normal this month, or very close to it.

Affiliate Marketing Income for August 2009

Regular Earnings

• Neverblue Ads – $1702.28
• Media Trust – $1177.70
• Unique Leads – $1196.06
• Azoogle Ads – $603.33
• Pepperjam Network – $64.71
• Lead Expose – $46.22
• Karaktr Media – $48.53
• Hydra Network -$43.91

Affiliate Marketing Regular Earnings Total = $4882.74

Recurring Affiliate Commissions

• Inlinks – $67.02
• PPC Coach – $150.00

Recurring Affiliate Income Total =$217.02

Monthly Sub Total = $5099.74

Expenses For Regular Earnings in August

• Dedicated Server – $154.00
• Unique Article Wizard – $70.00
• PPC Coach – $49.00

Total Expenses = $273.00

Media Buying Affiliate Income

• Media Trust -$584.73

Media Buying Costs – $200.00

Total Media Buying Profit = $384.73

Total Monthly Net Income = $5211.43

As you can see, there was one hell of a drop from the month before. Here are a few things I can contribute to my decrease in earnings that was and is completely out of my control. (nature of the beast type of thing)

1. Holiday season in full effect = less traffic
2. One of my major advertisers did a complete re-brand of all his offers which meant I had to redo all of my biggest earning sites.
3. Oprah Law Suit regarding health offers and people using her name and Dr. Oz’s name – that really shook things up this past few weeks.

So with that said, I am pushing for a way better month this month and should have no problem (I Hope) getting back to where I was. The nice thing is, once you do something once, it’s easy to do it a second time!

How was your month for earnings in August?

So a couple of days ago I posted my results for my first media buying campaign that I started running on Monday. Today I wanted to give you another small update on how things are going seeings how what I allowed for week one for my spending budget is gone.

Before I get to my media buying stats I wanted to say one thing first. What I am doing to restrict myself from going nuts and wasting money on media buying by over spending which is common in PPC is that I am using a secured credit card. There is a very small amount of a security deposit on the card which helps my spending control. (Cause it’s secured – there is no debt)

There is nothing worse to me then getting excited after a good day with a campaign and then dumping a bunch a money into it with out having all the right data or knowing fully what your doing. So for me, it’s better to take baby steps, plus I am sure my son would appreciate me thinking of his well being instead of my own greed.

Ok now to the money part of my 3rd and 4th day having a media buying campaign live.

Wednesday

• Spend – $50.00
• Earnings – &90.71 ($41.71 Profit)

I never really made any big changes on Wednesday to my landing page so everything stayed the same as Tuesday as far as profit goes. That’s about a 80% ROI if your wandering.

I did make some changes to my landing page  half way through the day after a few phone call conferences with a few affiliate networks. Here are the results of those changes.

Thursday

• Spend – $50.00
• Earnings – $272.14 ($222.14 Profit – that’s about a 300% ROI)

So as you can see, talking with a few people on the phone who have lots of experience with Media Buying, kind of helped a lot.

My goal with Media Buying was to be at 100% ROI before I started to up my daily spend on a campaign or landing page. As you can see, I am a bit above my goal.

What’s my next step?

Well, as per the phone calls yesterday there is still a few things I needed to change to the landing page that I want to try out but I have reloaded my credit card to handle a $100.00 daily spend next week. If things stay the same as today or very close, I am off to the races with a whole team of horses!

I am still going to inch my way up the Media Buying ladder until I am very comfortable with what I am doing, but after week one going this way – I can see myself at $1000.00 per day profit buy the end of September. Man I am looking forward to that! (and when that happens there will be a trip to Toronto for me and a few good parties to be had)

Affiliate Marketing – Media Buying

Ok so last week when I was getting back to work after my extended holiday I started developing my first Media Buying site. It was a bit tricky to do as the approach I took was to review sites that I saw through current ads on the sites I want to advertise on and then put my own little spin on it. While I was building this new site I was splitting my time with my current work load to get that back on track. Was a bit of a challenge to say the least to jungle both types of affiliate marketing.

After two days now of running my first media buying campaign, here are my results so far.

Monday

• Spend – $50.00
• Earnings – $41.00 ($9.00 Loss)

Last night after I saw this in my tracker, I decided to take a look at a few other sites again and make some changes. One problem I noticed was that my bid was to high for a new site. I lowered it and go a bit more traffic today to my site which proved to be worth the move.

Tuesday

• Spend – $50.00
• Earnings – &90.71 ($41.71 Profit)

So as you can see, the changes I made, made the campaign profitable for me today. I have once again lowered my bid (how much I pay per click) to see if tomorrow I can get a bit more traffic to the site.

My goal is to double everyday what I spend – 100 in and a 100 out type of thing, and I am just about there so maybe a bit more traffic would help that out.

The problem with bidding high in media buying is that you get a pile of clicks in a very short period so testing your site or optimizing it can be a bit of a challenge. Back in February when I first looked into media buying I went with a max bid on a 100 dollar spend and to my surprise that only allowed my ad to run for 10 minuets and then it was off. You can’t test shit all with ten minuets of traffic in my opinion.

So as you can see, my first challenge is to really learn how to bid right with a smaller budget. Once I get the site doubling my spend everyday, then I am going to dump more money into the campaign and see what that does – after!

I’ll keep you guys posted on that for sure!

Ok, so last month I seen a decrease in earnings by a few grand and I was ok with that because it was summer time and all. But this month has been nothing but pure death.

I was told that the heavy holiday season starts the last week of July and goes until the third week of August. If that is the case, which it appears to be – I don’t like it.

Currently with how things are looking for my earnings for the month it is looking like I might hit 1/3 of what I normally do. That is not cool, but, if this is the normal slow period then its not to bad at all cause I am still going to hit the minimum amount I need to make per month.

What Have I Been Doing In My Slow Time?

I have been studying Media Buying and researching the heck out of it. Media Buying is ultimately what I want to be doing as the rewards are just huge, the risks are huge as well but it will be worth it in the long run.

So with that, I am back to the grind stone updating sites and studying!