Feb 10
I’ve always read that testing & tracking are essential tasks that when done religiously make all the difference between a profitable campaign and a dud. I guess I’ve always known that but it never quite occured to me that I was doing it all wrong. Well I wouldn’t say all wrong - I was just not doing enough of it. For instance I would simply track keyword conversions and scrap keywords that weren’t converting and I thought it was enough.
For some strange reason (I can’t remember why) but I decided to test different aspects of my landing page. I tested different layouts, graphics, headlines and anything else I could think of. That was 3 weeks ago. Since then I’ve increase my conversion rate drastically. In some cases I tripled my conversion rate just by tweaking my landing page. I’ve now put a hold on creating new campaigns and am working on testing and tweaking my existing ones. So if you really wanna squeeze out every last drop of profit from your campaigns - test, test, test!
Dec 20
Ooh I’ve been slacking work the past month. Just been so caught up with the Christmas spirit that I hardly spent any time on my business. Am gonna give myself a break till next year and then its full steam ahead. Another reason why I’ve been slacking off is because I’ve finally plucked up the courage to delegate all ad group creation work to my virtual employee. It took me awhile to make that decision as I was really worried about privacy issues. I mean think about - they have full access to all your profitable keywords and landing pages etc. All they have to do is duplicate what you’re doing! How did I get around that?
In Yahoo I created a sub account and isolated developing campaigns from mature ones so that my virtual employee only has access to campaigns that he’s working on. I still haven’t figured out if this can be done on Google Adwords but will certainly find out soon. Don’t you just love outsourcing? I feel almost like I’ve cloned myself…my business is also really beginning to flourish and grow exponentially thanks to my dedicated virtual employee.
Back to the title of this post - the 80/20 rule. I’ve done some analysis on my PPC affiliate marketing business and have found that it stays true to the universal 80/20 rule. 80% of my profits come from 20% of my campaigns and similarly 20% of my keywords bring in 80% of my profits (for any specific campaign). I’ve also been given the opportunity to peek into the business (legitimately of course) of super affiliates who make USD1million over a year and I’ve found this rule to be true there as well. I just find it so amazing how Pareto stumbled across it. Kudos to the Pareto!
Nov 12
I just got back from a holiday in Bangkok to find that 5 campaigns had been blasted with the dreaded $5-$10 min bids. Looks like Google’s done another landing page algorithm update. I still have 1 campaign going strong so compared those landing pages to the ones that got slapped. The main differences were that on the Great QS landing pages I cloaked all my affiliate links and it was a very non-competitive market. All the other campaigns that got slapped were for products in super competitive markets and had no masked affiliate links. One more important difference that I forgot to mention is that the Great QS landing pages had unique content. I used the PPC Riches software on the slapped landing pages and PPC Riches basically scrapes together related content from ezine articles.
I spent all of today rebuilding my landing pages and hopefully these will stand the test of time. I made sure content was unique and I had at least 5-6 internal links with the usual recommended pages such as Privacy Policy, Contact Us and Disclaimer. Software such as PPC Riches and LPGen that build loads and loads of pages with ezine article (duplicate) content work well initially until the Google spider detects duplicate content. Can’t say for sure if this duplicate content issue resulted in high min bids but from my previous experience with my failed blog project Google does take duplicate content quite seriously. Am gonna stick to building landing pages with unique content.
Oct 18
I am sure a lot of people would beg to differ but I honestly feel that after a year of full on PPC affiliate marketing is getting easier. I have a system in place and all I do when I wanna start a new campaign is to follow my system. The reason I find it easy is because my system works. It has proven itself and now I just gotta replicate. Now I don’t always make money from a campaign right away. Some campaigns require tweaking and testing but to date I have always been able to profit from a campaign. Here’s a peak at the overall flow of my system :-
Select a niche –> Monitor competition –> Build landing pages –> Build campaign –> Test & Tweak
Monitoring competition is probably the most important part of my system as I can be almost certain that if an advertiser is running an ad for a month or more then they must be profitable. I then start a full blown campaign and by being slightly better than the competition I’m able to not only take over the campaign but also make a nice profit.
What do I mean by doing things slightly better than the competition? Study their landing pages and improve on them. Create tighter ad groups with super relevant landing pages and ads. Eventually when you’ve been in PPC long enough you’ll develop your own system that works for you.
Sep 22
Its the weekend…yipppee…I usually try not to work over the weekends but I’ve been taking it easy over the past few weeks so decided to put my nose to the grind today. I received an email the other day about domain flipping and it kinda sparked my interest.
Domain Flipping is basically the art of buying and selling domains. I do recall hearing something about John Reese making $xxx,xxx by reselling a domain name he had purchased. The concept seems simple enough - buy a domain and resell it. The domains that were purchased for 5 or 6 figures were of course domain names such as Chinese.com or BestBuy.com. I’m gonna try my hand at domain flipping. I’m already working on my blog with the intention of reselling it and domain flipping seems to fit in nicely with that. I’ll write more about what I’m doing with domain flipping over the next few posts..
On another note, Anik Singal & Jeremy Palmer are releasing a home study course called PPC Classroom. Jeremy is a big time affiliate who apparently made $1.4 Million purely as a PPC affiliate. The PPC Classroom course claims to pull back the curtain on Jeremy’s business. Based on the free videos that were sent out, Jeremy promotes Clickbank, CJ, Link Share products as well as CPA networks. The course is pretty costly at $497 and will be launched on the 25th of Sep. I haven’t quite decided if I’m gonna get it…just seems like an awful lot of money to spend on a course..we’ll see.
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