Feb 28
Yesterday I kicked off a new campaign. Thought I’d keep a journal of my step by step blueprint starting with product testing all the way to maximizing profitability. Here goes…
Not sure if any of you who are promoting music & movie download sites have experienced getting their ads disabled due to copyright infringement in which Google seems to be clamping down on ads for P2P download movies/music websites. I’ve had a couple of my ads over the past few days disabled and have decided pretty much to start promoting less riskier products.
Product Research
#1 Min Earned Per Sale
Now what product should I promote? I am currently only promoting Clickbank products so the first thing I did was head to the Clickbank marketplace. I then casually browsed each category looking out for products that met my criteria of > $15 earned per sale. From experience I know that certain products such as dog training, make money & anti spyware products are super competitive on adwords. Do a quick search on Google and you’ll find over 40 advertisers. I prefer to scout out the less competitive markets even though I know for a fact that if theres competition then theres money to be made. I’ve tried competing it these markets and I burnt a lot of cash testing and tweaking before i could make any profit. I just don’t have that kind of upfront cash to burn…
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Feb 26
I just purchased a new Dell Axim X51V and it arrived about a week ago. I’ve never been a huge PDA person but I needed internet connectivity on the go and I much prefer the larger screen size of PDAs as compared to smart phones. I’ve used the Dopod 838 pro and although laden with great features I found the screen a tad too small and it was also a little too heavy and thick. So far I’ve installed the Netfront browser that I purchased online from PocketGear and its a superb browser. It not only supports tabbed browsing (ala firefox) but also supports Javascript, Flash and virtual screen rendering. The layout of your web pages are almost identical to when you’re surfing on your PC. Great stuff! Will put up some photos shortly…
The Dell X51V comes with a built in wifi and has worked great so far. I now need 3.5G so am considering signing up to Maxis 3.5G (I would prefer Celcom but since I already have a Maxis line…) and will also need a 3.5G phone. I’ll then use the phone as a modem and connected to the PDA via Bluetooth. That definitely sounds like a plan. Now to save up some cash to get that new phone!
Feb 26
Its been almost a week since the new quality score algorithm was supposed to have been rolled out. I’ve been experiencing a couple of adjustments of minimum bids. 25% of my keywords had increased minimum bids but only by 1 or 2 cents. Nothing drastic! I’ve found that I’ve had to check everyday for changes in minimum bids and increase them accordingly. Looks like things have yet to stabilize.
I did visit some adwords forums and it seems a couple of people did get hit by the slap but it doesn’t seem to be as severe as the November 06′ Google slap. I’ve also noticed an increase in traffic. Probably due to the effects of the slap and the lost of competition. I guess this only goes to show that if you’re willing to follow the great Google rules there is a lot of money to be made. I’m going to wait for the algorithm to stabilize before I test out a new campaign. Will post up my blue print on how I go about testing a new campaign, conducting keyword research and tweaking it for maximum profitability…see ya soon!
Feb 22
In my last post I talked about how landing pages really turned my campaigns around. Here’s why :-
1) By using a landing page you’d need to buy your own domain. As you know Google only allows one advertiser for the same domain so a landing page helps you get round this problem. You don’t have to outbid your competitor just to advertise in the same space. Of course there are always redirects where you purchase your own domain then redirect it to the merchant site. The problem with redirects is the tendency to get slapped with $10 min bid prices. Before the Nov slap all my ads were redirects.
2) Super low min bid prices! Now this in my opinion is the #1 reason I will always use landing pages instead of direct links. With landing pages you can optimize the content to include your specific keywords. Google then views this landing page as highly relevant to your keyword and your ad and you get a high quality score. High quality score = low bid price. I pay as low as $0.01 for some of my keywords. I’ve never experienced bids that low with direct linking. I’ll talk a little in my next few posts about how I optimized my landing page to get these super low bid prices.
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Feb 22
When I first started affiliate marketing with Adwords about a year and a half ago I used the Google Cash method and direct linked all my ads to the merchant page. In November 06′ all the keywords in all my campaigns were slapped with huge min bid prices. My income went from $$$$ to nothing overnight. Needless to say….I panicked big time. I then signed up to Wealthy Affiliate and went through the material meticulously.
Wealthy Affiliate is a PPC/affiliate marketing coaching club run by two internet marketers Kyle & Carlson. K&C as we like to call them preach the landing page model where instead of direct linking to the merchant you build a landing page with your affiliate links embedded in the content. I quickly learnt via one-on-one consultations with K&C that building a landing page at the time was more profitable then direct linking. It initially took me awhile to build my first landing page as I wasn’t sure of a lot of things like the type of content I should include or the number of affiliate links etc.
In a week or so my landing page was up, my bid prices had reduced drastically and I was making profit like never before. Since then I haven’t looked back and now I only use landing pages. Gone are the days of direct linking. I’ll explain a little more in my next post about how landing pages saved me from the pit of despair…
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