Pursuit of Profit

Vancouver is an awesome city and I had an awesome trip to the Google Adwords seminar. To start the trip off we flew over in a helicopter which was amazing. There was a pod of killer whales as we were flying out of Victoria and we caught a glimpse of these amazing animals in their natural habitats undisturbed by humans.

Scenery from the flight.

After a quick shopping trip over at the mega mall Metrotown we headed over to our hotel and we checked in. We threw down our bags and headed right to the pool with some Coronas. It was a smoking hot day and some cold beers and a dip was just what we needed!

That night we met up with a friend and ate at a Mexican restaurant called Los Margaritas. The meal was massive and the margaritas were amazing. Then it was time to head back downtown for another quick shopping spree where I got a few t-shirts. It was getting dark and we were looking for something to do, so we popped in to a Irish pub/ club called Cailies. It was pretty dead on the floor where we had settled, but someone told us to head up to the patio for a special event. Once we got up top we saw a bunch of gorgeous girls on stage getting ready for a swimsuit contest.

The bikini contestants.

The next morning was pretty tough getting out of bed, but we troopered though it and got our seats. Our speaker was Brad Geddes of Local Launch, an adwords professional who has a deep understanding of pay per click marketing. He started us by walking us through the basics, such as keyword selection and ad copy writing. After lunch things really picked up and we learned about tracking and how to make the most out of our data, among other things. I even met one of my affiliate managers, who was also attending the seminar. More to come on the tips and techniques discussed at the seminar.

Our speaker Brad Geddes.

The end of the seminar.

The 3 day trip was just what I needed before heading back to university for the fall semester. The food was good, the seminar was informative and the bikini contest was amazing. I hope you enjoy the pics as much as we did taking them.

I’m off to Vancouver as soon as i wake up for the Adwords conference! The actual conference is on Thursday, but we are heading over a day early to do some shopping and dining. I’m pretty pumped seeing as this is my first seminar surrounding internet marketing.

I am heading over there with two friends who are also affiliate marketers. The conference is being held at the Burnaby Hilton, which is also where we are staying for the night.

Stay posted for some pictures and highlights from the conference!

The profitable days are starting to come more often and the stress of starting an affiliate campaign is beginning to fade. I had a few $150+ profit days now which is really promising this early in the game.

To achieve this I followed some simple steps and stuck with them:

Found a killer product to promote on clickbank. I had heard from people that this product converts well, so I decided to give it a go. When researching a product to promote you want

Set up a targeted adwords campaign. I found one aspect of the product I am promoting and found as many keywords as possible in relation to this. For example if you were promoting a product such as a car there are a few different areas you can focus in on (obviously you don’t promote cars for clickbank but the example works):

Safety
Efficiency
Style
Performance
Price
Warrenty

For this example lets say you chose style, because it is a selling point. You would find every keyword imaginable related to the style of cars:
cool car
stylish automobile
sleek
etc..

Then you go on to google adwords keyword suggestion tool and put them in get suggestions, take those suggestions sort through them then take the ones that fit and put them right back in the adwords tool for more suggestions and continue doing this till you have 1500 or more keywords.

Next step is making sure your landing page relates to the keyword searches that people are looking for. Have images and phrases that relate directly to style and automobiles. With multiple calls to action ie: buy now, free trail, take a test drive.

Create targeted ads to display on adwords. Small ad groups of very similar keywords with equally targeted ads work best and will increase your quality score (more on this in future posts).

Check everything over and get it live. This will get you going, once the conversions start you will be able to identify which keywords sell and which keywords stink.

Adjust your bids accordingly to the performance of the keyword.
If you have a conversion ratio of 2% and your commission per sale is $50 you want to aim for an ROI of 100% so you would multiply your conversion rate by your desired cost per sale. So you want to pay $25 per sale ideally, this would be .02 x 25 which equals $0.50 bids.

Keep on adjusting and tweaking and you will soon have a profitable campaign.

June was a rough month that had me second guessing this affiliate marketing game. I came pretty close to my stress threshold this month. I put my life savings on the line as well as borrowed money with high interest rates. I was losing money like no tomorrow, with no light at the end of the tunnel.

Now my losses are getting progressively smaller each day, while still spending the same amount of money. Yesterday I even turned a $30 profit! 30 bucks does not sound like much after losing up to $450 in a single day, but it is huge that I’ve tweaked my campaign in to the green! If this trend continues I’ll have no problem making my July goal, and I’ll be well on my way to 10k a month!

As my affiliate campaign continues to run my losses are gaining! I was running profitable for two days making about 70 a day, which was a mixed blessing. As soon as I saw a profit I bumped up my daily budgets on adwords and my conversion ratios plummeted for some unknown reason.

Last week on Sunday I lost $450, 450 DOLLARS IN A SINGLE DAY! I know in my heart of hearts I will not be making my June goal of $20 profit.

I am a little over $2000 in the hole right now, and things haven’t even begun looking up. I know I won’t be able to get my affiliate campaign back on track and becoming that profitable in the next 5 days. But I am glad I have tried this, I’m learning more each day about affiliate marketing. The hardest part is not pulling the plug and cutting my losses, but I’m in too deep to turn back now.

Even though I won’t make this months goal, I hope by next month I will be a little bit closer to my 10k quest!

Well first off thanks for continuing to follow my journey. Month one is now complete and the $5 goal was met and surpassed! A lot happened in the first month of this journey.

I started with a free blogger blog

within a week I had made enough money to get a domain

a domain was donated to my by Dylan (another blogger).

I started up an affiliate site through clickbank, and began sending traffic through google adwords

I have began re tooling the affiliate site!

That brings me to today!

May is another big month for me. I have to make a big $10 this month through my efforts. I know that the momentum will follow from the previous month. Got any suggestions for more revenue streams?

Well my affiliate site is up and running, but it has a major flaw: It is not converting. There is no sense in keeping it the way it is praying for a lucky purchase. So I have just paused my adwords campaigns and am working on a new landing page.

This is pretty frustrating, especially after putting in hours and hours of work making the original site. However this time around there is a lot less work to do. I already have my unique content, privacy policy, and campaigns all directed at the site.

The only real changes I have to make are going to be on actual landing pages and the actual URLs that the adwords point to. I am aiming to get longtail traffic, which are very specific keywords that relate to your product. For example, going back to car stereos, a longtail keyword would be a product name and model number such as ‘Alpine 9857′ as opposed to a general keyword like ‘car stereo’.

Longtail keywords are generally cheaper due to lower bidding competition, but they generally do not convert as well as name brands and very general product keywords. There is a trick to making them work for you though! Tailor your landing page to the longtail keywords. Use your imagination on ways to do this. That is what I am trying to do right now!

For this I am going to assume you know the basics of how Google Adwords work.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a way of increasing visibility and relevancy to a search engine user. You have probably seen this trick done on google for years by bizrate.com and ebay affiliates.

It tailors the ads served to match the keywords in the search to the ad copy. Also if the ads match the exact keywords those keywords become bold in sponsored results.

Here is an ebay example search for car stereo:

Now for a slight alteration in the keywords lets search for car stereos:

Same ad copy with one slight difference, it is a plural, but this difference creates a much higher click through rate.

How to do it:

Write the ad copy with the dynamic keywords:

{Keyword:default}
Fantastic prices on {keyword:default}
Deal with Canadians and save
www.ebay.ca

Notice that in the title the word Keyword is capitalized and that it is not in the ad content. This differentiates when the dynamic keywords will be capitalized. The word default in the insertion code can be what ever you want it to be, when your ad does not display the keyword it will revert to this default keyword.

This is a very simple way to bump CTR, however some claim it will decrease your quality score and increase your bids on keywords.

I am using it and have not noticed any decrease in quality score, but there is a definite increase in CTR.

Try it out for yourself.

After about 2 weeks of building, studying and drinking massive amounts of coffee, I have built my first affiliate site that I would call ‘good’. It has tons of related content, a privacy policy, outside resource links, and a contact me page; all absolutely necessary with Google’s PPC quality score.

I will be tweaking and split testing in the future, but it feels damn good having done the bulk of the work on the site. I have set up a few campaigns with Adwords after hours or researching and copying, pasting and categorizing my keywords.

I am trying dynamic keyword insertion for a small portion of the campaign, which will see a high CTR hopefully.

That is all for now!

After talking about spyfu in a recent post, I started doing some digging around to find other useful keyword tools. These keyword tools will give you the background information you need, so you can decrease your risk when investing in an affiliate or arbitrage campaign.

5. Wordtracker

Very powerful keyword research tool, and it has a free trial that is worth trying out.

4. Niche Taxi

Allows you to isolate a niche and gather information on it before you start getting down to work.

3. Keyword Discovery

Probably the top choice for professional web marketers, I have not tried this service out yet because of its price tag. If anyone has used this service let me know!

2. Google Keyword Tool (Site down right now couldn’t grab the logo)

This Google tool shows the search volume and suggested keywords. This is a very strong tool and you do not need to be logged in to your Adwords account to access it.

1.
SEO Book Keyword Tool

This tool pulls from multiple results and displays information like monthly search volume, and links to more suggested keywords to target.

New Addition:
KeywordSpy.com
This site allows you to see your competition’s keywords. This tool is capable of creating massive keyword lists that only take a few minutes. For more info check out the full post here.