So, I have been trying to think of ways to spice up this blog, and thought I would interview some of my favorite bloggers! This week I will be posting some interviews with some super cool bloggers/internet marketers (basically my favorite blogs I read every day).

 I am going to be updating the site a little. Nothing major, just cleaning up the logos and I am going to be adding a little bit of advertising. If you would like to advertise, go to the about page and contact me with that email.

On a different note, the blogosphere is just going crazy right now with all the conferences that happened last week. Everyone is posting about the crazy fun times they had and all the cool people they met, and I am stuck at home. They seem really cool, but since I am still not graduated from school I can’t just up and leave for a week. O well, next year I am going to be hitting up a few conferences for sure!

Stay on the lookout for the interviews this week!

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So I got an email from adCenter the other day saying I was accepted into the beta for the Microsoft adCenter professional advertisers program. Basically, it is the same thing as becoming a Google advertising professional, however with adCenter. Yahoo has a similar program, however they call it the ambassador program. There are different levels of certification; individual and company. Basically, you study for the test, if you pass you get into a directory, and you get a cool icon to put on your website showing that you know what you are talking about.

 I really have no desire right now to do the exam for Google, and really didn’t plan to do any of the exams for the big three search engines, however I really like adCenter so I am going to study up for this one! It is a really great idea to go through the classrooms and listen to the free tutorials. Google’s is free, and has the most information, Microsoft’s I imagine will be open to the public here soon, however Yahoo’s you have to pay $50 to access the classroom and then eventually take the exam later.

For anyone really confused on learning about PPC, check out these tutorials from Google. Basically it explains it all, and it is free. Even if you don’t take the exam in the end, it is still a super good idea just to study up.

Go and check out Google’s Learning Center! Maybe there is something in there you didn’t know.

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Many of my posts lately have not been very informative, so I am thinking this will be a good explanation of how I got started in this biz.

As I have said before, I started affiliate marketing back when I was 13, with my first website. The website was an incentive based website, that offered free gifts to people who completed certain offers, then refered (x) amount of people to do the same. This is really what got me hooked on affiliate marketing, and online marketing in general.

If you remember the days of freeipods.com and the tons of incentive based websites that actually sent out gifts, you have a good memory. I have not touched this part of Internet marketing for about 4 years, and most likely never will again. Ever since I got emails from the old affiliate networks I was with, saying they no longer support incentive websites is when I decided incentive was done, and it was time to move to something else. However back to the title of this post, I was able to turn pocket change into a nice chunk in about 2 weeks.

I was broke, and wanted to be rich. To tell you the truth, I really wanted a new iPod and since I was 13 no one would hire me, and my parents wouldn’t give me the $400 for one. So, I started looking online for free iPods, literally. I found www.freeipods.com, and after that an entire new community (which still exists to my knowledge) opened up. I was getting referrals for my freeipods, but could never get that last one I needed for the company to send me the gift. Then I thought, why would I spend money on completing these offers for other websites, making someone else rich, why not just open a website myself? Then I would have enough money to buy that iPod I really wanted. So that’s exactly what I did! I ran around the house, searching for loose change because I needed $25 more to buy the $75 script I needed, along with domain name/hosting etc. I found enough cash, took it to CoinStar, and I was in business! I launched the site, and with absolutely no advertising at all was able to make around $1500 that week! All I did was post on popular forums that my new site was open for business. I was extremely happy, and the money kept rolling in slowly but surely every day. It was around the $2500 mark that it stopped, and I needed to start advertising. However me being a dumbass back then, took the money, bought a new laptop and the iPod I wanted and closed down the site. I didn’t even sell the website to anyone, and I could have got some decent bank for it, I just closed it! With a little re-investing, I could have easily made it to 5 figures the next month, and I was only 13 years old!

Anyways, the moral of the story is you don’t need alot to get started in affiliate marketing, you just need to keep at it! If you want to make the big bucks, you must re-invest a few times if your starting out with a low budget!

Although this has nothing to do with PPC marketing, you could easily use this same method. Getting your hands on some sort of advertising credit towards a search engine such as Google or Yahoo is so extremely easy, and hell it is free money! I have something I tell myself alot when I get a check in the mail, and I just want to go out and spend it all…”get money invest, re-up with the rest, your bound for success” haha corny however I keep telling myself that.

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Finally adCenter has got with the program and added a daily budget feature in their last system update. The monthly budget feature was really the sole reason I did not advertise much on their system. Personally I love their interface, it is really clean and actually looks like “something”. It may sound weird, but to me Adwords does not seem like there is much behind the curtain, even though I know there is more than MSN and Yahoo.

Its simple, but I am just so happy that they finally did this. In my book it makes adCenter 100% better!

I have not posted in a week, been working a ton! Will begin posting daily this week from now on, if anyone reads..

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