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.

After about 2 and a half months of affiliate marketing I’ve realized that there are some easy traps to fall in to that can lead you to debt.

1. Giving up
You are going to hear this over and over again from anyone talking about the affiliate market “Do not give up!”. This is the biggest piece of advice I can offer to anybody starting out. My first month I lost more money than I would like to admit, I lost more money than I care to even say. However, I stuck with it tweaking, testing and retooling my way out of the pit that at the time seemed impossible. There were times that you are not going to be able to sleep because the fear of losing money is real and you will lose money. Just knowing that to get into the game you have to pay your dues and find what works for you should give you the hope you need to succeed.

2. Not tracking
Not tracking your conversions and keywords is like playing russian roulette with a 6 shots in the gun. It’s stupid and you cannot win! You NEED to track everything you do in affiliate marketing. Here are the most important aspects to track:

1. Keyword conversion tracking (your affiliate manager should be able to set you up, if not do not promote their programs)
2. Daily spending
3. Site conversions (google’s placement reports will show you which sites are sending you conversions)
4. Daily sales (don’t get caught up checking sales stats every 2 minutes)

3. Not using the tools
There are tools out there to help you succeed, it’s worth looking in to these and finding out what they can do for you. Mostly they will cut down on the time you spend working on your campaigns. The google adwords editor can save hours of your time by allowing you to make bulk changes to your campaigns.

Just learn from what you do, take what works and expand on it and don’t be afraid to leave non productive techniques in the dust!

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.

All I think about is my affiliate campaign. I check Clickbank constantly to see if I have made anymore sales, then cross reference that with my adwords account to make sure my budget is not getting away from me. The past week and a bit have seen a whirlwind of activity, here is a short list of a few things that have taken place since June 5th.

June 5th Site and landing page are completed traffic starts to flow in from adwords, no sales.

June 6th I got my first sale, now I know my conversion tracking and systems are working.

June 7-10 Sales are increasing, but I am still losing about $70 a day.

June 11-13 Adwords stop running because I have hit my limit on my credit card, time to move some money around.

June 14-15 Sales are still climbing, but my losses are staying the same. Which means this campaign is getting closer to becoming profitable.

June 16 My credit card has hit its limit once again, and my ads are down. I have just called to get an increase on my credit card limit. Also my first pay period in clickbank has come to an end, which means I will be getting my first check in the mail pretty soon!

Every penny I have is on the line on this campaign, I just hope it becomes profitable sooner than later!

May was a pretty uneventful month for me online, but made offline. I started a new job and settled in to a new place. I was lucky enough to make $15 through adsense which allowed me to complete my May goal of $10.

Here is a snap of the earning statement.

I have now realized that I am not cut out to be making big adsense checks and I am not wasting anymore time and effort trying.

I am soley focusing on Clickbank affiliate marketing at the moment. My site is now up fully loaded with keyword rich content, contact page, privacy policy, and a killer landing page.

I had to get out of my comfort zone for doing this. I am spending up to $300 a day on adwords in hopes that my campaigns will become profitable, but for the time being I am continually losing money each day.

Yesterday I had to go get a new credit card with a bigger limit so I can cover my costs while I wait for my first check from clickbank to come in the mail. Obviously I am stressed out and even contemplating pulling the plug, fortunately for me I have friends in the game and they give me positive reassurances that my campaigns are doing fine, and they will level out over time.

On the plus side with my new credit card I’ll be getting airmiles out the wazoo!

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.

Setting up an affiliate landing page is a lot of work! I once had the impression you just host a pre made site, slap some tracking on it, start sending ppc traffic to it and watch the money pile up. This is probably why I’ve had mixed results with ppc advertising in the past.

There was a time a few years ago that this way of marketing could net you a couple hundred dollars a day. This is when I launched my first affiliate marketing for a peer to peer music downloading program, and without much tweaking I was in the profit zone. I made sales of between $50 -$100 a day and a profit that would go from $10-$50 a day depending on conversion rates.

I tried promoting with this old school style more recently, and basically it just doesn’t work! Nowadays you need relevant content, you need a catchy landing page and you need golden keywords that have low bids. This doesn’t sound very easy, and I am 2 years removed from the game, so this affiliate site I’m making could be a very expensive learning experience if I’m not careful!

Well I’ve been working hard on the affiliate campaign, the site is really coming together. Adwords are set to run, but not feeding traffic quite yet. I have been talking with some professional affiliate marketers and getting some tips. There is a lot more to affiliate marketing than a nice landing page and some good keywords.

Keywords are a huge part of the campaign obviously, but so is keywords and keyword density on your site. If you are going to use the key word “ford f150″, for example, you will be charged more if you don’t have that keyword somewhere on your site. This only makes sense, we all know that google’s organic rankings are based on this same idea. Want to learn more about affiliate marketing?

When I was over at WickedFire forums, I noticed they had a free ebook sticky post. I clicked on it and found an assortment of todays top selling ebooks to download for free. I don’t endorse piracy, however if you want to check them out here’s the link to the WickedFire forums.

Time to stop focusing on my traffic stats and adsense flow. It’s time to buckle down and make some real money with an affiliate marketing campaign. These campaigns aren’t easy profit, but if your do your research and put in the time you have a better chance of running a profitable campaign.

I have run few affiliate campaigns in the past, some were profitable and others I ended up losing money on. The first hurdle in affiliate marketing is finding a product or service to promote. Take a look at ClickBank for a huge list of digital download products to promote. You can also find CPA (cost per action) campaigns through an affiliate promotion company like Neverblue (referral link) . There are so many offers out there it’s hard to know where to start and which ones can make you money. Some companies will try to entice would be marketers with huge commissions, but look deeper in to their product. Are others promoting it? If not why? Remember, huge commission is nothing if it doesn’t sell!

After you find a product or service you believe has some potential, start researching the market. I will usually go to Overture and see if there are many searches per month for the item. Then I mosey on over to Spyfu (a comprehensive keyword/ competitor research tool) and see what the competition is like. After taking a look at these two factors I ask myself a question that requires a truthful answer about the profitability of the item. Can I compete against these competitors, or is the Cost Per Click (CPC) too steep to make a profit?

If you deem it profitable, it doesn’t mean that it actually will be! Even after a ton of research and a good feeling, I’ve been dead wrong more than a few times. However, this could be due to failing in one of the following steps.

After you have your product you have to create an affiliate landing page. This can be as simple as embedding an I frame of your affiliate link or even just linking directly to your pre-made affiliate landing page. I have recently heard from a friend that just like organic SEO, there is sponsored SEO. So writing or buying unique content and having a few pages is a good idea. This is where I’m at with my affiliate project right now.

I have picked out a few products, purchased a domain name, and checked out the competition. The product I am focusing on comes highly recommended from a friend who showed me his daily revenue stats. So I know there is money to be made and room for a few more marketers in this genre.

I am also going to try something a little bit different from my previous PPC marketing campaigns. And it will be interesting to see how it works out. Direct details wont be released on the blog pages for the first month, this will give me time to get settled in my market without excess competition. However, more revealing details will be released via a monthly newsletter once it’s set up (if you know of a good email newsletter plugin for wordpress drop me a line)!