“Hey man, do you want a free iPad? How about a $500 gift card? No strings attached. You just have to fill out this quick survey, and we need your email to contact you.”
That was essentially my first hustle online.
After my Korean clothing business idea, I wanted faster ways to make money online without entry barriers. My next stop was joining PPC Coach, a paid membership site. As a member, you got access to a private community of old and young hustlers along with information and tools. One of the advanced hustles they taught was selling information to new hustlers on how to make money online….Internet marketing at its worst is just figuring out how to be the hustler rather than the hustled.
PPC Coach taught monetized surveys as the first month hustle. First, you make a fake survey website such as, “Do you think Susan Boyle will win American Idol?” Once the user selects yes or no (it really doesn’t matter) then you redirect them to a real advertiser’s survey. The advertiser would pay around a dollar for each completed survey with an email address.
You might be asking a lot of questions now. How do you get visitors? Where do you find these advertisers willing to pay for email addresses? Why don’t you just directly send the visitors to the advertiser’s surveys? All this and more will be answered.
Getting Traffic – Pay Per Click (PPC)
Traffic is the life blood of the internet. There are different types of traffic including organic, paid, email, social, and so on. Most marketers specialize in just one or two types of traffic. PPC Coach focused on the specific paid traffic method of pay per click with Google Adwords.
Pay per click (PPC) means you are paying for each visitor that clicks on an ad and comes to your website. Google Adwords is split between the search engine ads and content network ads. The search engine ads were too expensive to make a profit. A search keyword like “car insurance” could easily cost $20+ per click. So, we focused on the content network where you see ads on people’s websites and blogs:
The cost of an ad depends on many factors including the quality of your website, quality of your ad performance, and most of all, your target keywords. To get the cheapest possible ads from five cents to twenty cents, we would create ads around recent news and gossip such as Susan Boyle. It was an art and science to tweak your ads to get the lowest possible cost. Even at the low cost of five cents per click that means a hundred visitors costs five dollars. So, how do I turn those hundred visitors to a profit?
Getting Paid – Cost/Commission Per Action (CPA) Networks
Luckily, dozens of CPA networks exist whose sole job is serving as middle man between the big advertisers and “publishers” like me. OfferVault has a database of networks and offers:
Each ad offer has its own rules and stipulations. Often, they won’t accept any direct traffic visitors which is why you can’t just send the paid traffic to them. That’s why we need a fake survey question first to filter users through.
To join a CPA network, you often have to be telephone interviewed to prove that you’re a legitimate “publisher” and not just some spammer or newbie. Luckily, PPC Coach helped teach the newbies like me what to say to pass membership. For example, a typical conversation would be:
Me: “Hi there, I’m calling because I just applied to join your CPA network. I’ve been an internet marketer for about three years and just started making a real profit in the past year.
Network: I’m glad you called. Do you have a website?
Me: Well, I sold my previous business and no longer own the site. It was an online shop for Korean clothing. It did pretty well, but I didn’t like the hassle of handling inventory and dealing with customer complaints. So, I’m looking to become an internet affiliate instead. I can send you my old business website though if you want.
Network: Sounds great, you’re in.
Once you pass membership, you have access to dozens of ad offers from email surveys that pay out a dollar to car insurance quotes that might pay $10+. Now, it’s just a numbers game. Traffic comes from my paid ads on Google’s Content Network. At its lowest, an ad would cost five cents per click. So, 100 visitors would cost $5. My CPA offer pays out a dollar for a valid email address. So, to make a profit, at least 6 of those 100 paid traffic visitors need to complete the form to make $6 in revenue or $1 in profit.
Of course, that would be too easy. All CPA networks are known to “scrub” profits aka lie to you by under-reporting the number of completed survey users. Sometimes, I could send over a hundred visitors to the CPA offer, and I’d get zero commission. The only way to find the profitable ads was by trial and error, all the while losing money because you’re paying Google for the traffic.
In fact, this entire hustle was a precarious balancing act. There were so many moving pieces that even when you struck gold, it only lasted minutes or hours before it died, or at worst, started losing money. Here are just some of the factors involved:
- A new, popular keyword without much competition (I would probably do Syria Conflict, NBA Playoffs, or GitMo)
- Tweaking your ad copy and website content to get the cheapest possible ad cost
- Look through your CPA networks to find a suitable offer
- Rotate through the CPA offers to find one that pays out and hasn’t begun scrubbing you yet
- Rinse and repeat
Here’s a horrifying scenario. Imagine you find the perfect ad with a ton of cheap traffic and a CPA offer that’s paying out really well. For every $5 you spend, you’re making $10. It’s already 2am as you’ve been spending the last four hours watching and tweaking the numbers. You lost $100 on your last ad so you need this one to make up for it. So, you ramp up your Google Ad budget to get more traffic and thereby more money. You go to sleep dreaming of the riches you will wake up to. But when you wake up, you find that your CPA offers had stopped paying out, and now instead of $500 in profit, you have no revenue and owe $500 to Google.
When everything’s working, PPC gave the same rush of playing at a casino. There’s a lot of random factors outside your control, but you can see others are cashing out huge so you believe it’s possible. But, unlike a regular card game, everything is changing constantly. Any single piece could fail and ruin your entire empire and then you have to start all over.
After a few months and a few hundred dollars down, I stopped pursuing PPC and sought out a more legitimate method of making money online via search engine optimization (SEO) aka ranking high in search engines.