Originally Posted by Wini23

It depends on the keyword. If you advertise on a phrase like "buy xyz" then I would say that the ads are better converting than the results of the organic listing.

@negative keywords: These are keywords that prevent your ad from being shown to "untargeted" users. For example if you SELL mp3s on your landing page and you don't offer mp3s for free, this
-"free"
would be a perfect negative keyword. If a user now searches for "free mp3s" or "mp3 for free" your ad won't be displayed.
So use negative keywods! It will raise your CTR and ROI.

This is prolly a noob question, but if someone bids on "mp3" as a keyword... will their ads only show up with "mp3" is the keyword that someone searches for or will "free mp3" "cheap mp3" "my mp3 player is broken what do i do" phrases also make your ad display?

Originally Posted by nam6641

This is prolly a noob question, but if someone bids on "mp3" as a keyword... will their ads only show up with "mp3" is the keyword that someone searches for or will "free mp3" "cheap mp3" "my mp3 player is broken what do i do" phrases also make your ad display?

The ad will also be displayed for the other seearch terms you mentioned. As long as you use phrase matching ("mp3") and not exact matching ([mp3]).

Originally Posted by tonlilaz

it doesn't have anything to do with how big you are or if you're a blackhat/white hatter/what ever

what are you doing on this board if you're so better than the rest of us black hat, thin affiliates promoting, useless cpa pushing, hacks anyway? it's obvious you're too good for this board.....or at least you're trying to make yourself sound like you're too good for us


to the op, you might want to try advertising with other programs like yahoo and msn as well

Thin affiliate promotion is a stupid business model if you ask me. I am sorry, but think about it like this. The person who created the product is the one making most of the money in the long run. He doesn't even have to write and pay to test his own campaigns, because there are a dozen suckers who will do it for him.

Let us take a look at KE2 and all the #*@(#*$$ promoting that program.

Here is what I would do. (besides creating a landing page that doesn't take a minute to load) I would create a program that is better than KE. Not that KE is bad but it has so many useless features and is kind of buggy.

This would not cost me a ton of money, I doubt brad writes the programs himself. Then I would post an adwords ad that is different than the dozen others.

i.e. Keyw0rd Elite Ripoff
Don't Spend $200.
My program costs $100.

Whatever, the point is that you do better selling your own product. That way you can design your own landing page which will actually sell the product.

This goes with anything though, why payout commissions to the person who created the product? How much money does it seriously cost to have an ebook or program written? A paltry sum compared to the amount you are making a day with a successful PPC campaign.

Not to mention you can recruit your own affiliates, so more money for you.

--------------------------------
You know what gets me too?

People who promote email/zip submit offers and aren't outright scamming affiliate companies. You realize that these email offers make money by promoting other CPA programs such as filling out a free credit report.

I would bet that at least 50% of all emails are frauds anyway after being shaved and yet these companies still make money.

A logical person would simply cut out as many middlemen as possible, thereby making the venture much more profitable for themselves.

Originally Posted by s0ap_

You are right on some points here. Most BH in general lacks a sustainable business model and I think this is the point that most fail to realize.

But a legitimate affiliate marketer's model as opposed to yours can be just as profitable. What I think you are failing to realize is that apart from a few hours invested in throwing together a landing page and doing some keyword research, we have no vested financial or personal interest in whatever product we are selling.

This means that my sunk costs are almost zero, and I can close up shop tomorrow on any of my offers if they don't convert or the advertiser starts jerking me around. On top of that, we have the resources to run 10-15 offers all day every day, where a full-on business is generally a full-time endeavor.

So in short they both have their pros and cons. Just because your cost of acquisition can be higher than mine doesn't mean that you are making more money.

Of course, maybe this is good to test. But once you find a winner, it makes sense to me to just create a replica of the product yourself.

There are people who make thousands a day with your method (because they also have thousands to waste in testing) but it is worth the sunk cost when you find a product worthwhile.

Originally Posted by waynegm

Adwords Plan of Attack

1. Make a Landing page, dont use the CPA OFFER DIRECT, but get a 1.99 DOT INFO website from godaddy, and make it for your niche (ie: selling pet stuff, make a pet type landing page)

2. ON Landing page, get email and name on a form (I use aweber) and offer some kind of free ebook or something about the niche

3. When they signup, you got their name and email, and the autoresponder make sure its not double optin. First email just thank them, and then make an autoresponder series about the niche, keep plugging in cpa or cb or cj offers... whatever you got

4. Offer some more free stuff if you can in some email broadcasts

5. On the page they are sent too after they fill in the form, put your CPA offer that you would have used on Adwords

BuIld a List, find as many products as you can on the niche, and repeat for other niches

White hat method that works
ME

Yeah this method is full of win. A properly done squeeze page, which does take some experience, should convert at a minimum of 25%.

Just letting a visitor decide to buy or leave (depends on the topic though) is ridiculous and costs so many sales. There is no trust there.

---
What someone said about backend sales is true. It usually isn't as simple as I sold x product or got y lead.

Once someone has bought from you they are much more likely to do so again. This is why you can get magazine subscriptions for 95% off the first year.

I will give you an example. I work in lead generation.

Please read this right below, because it will explain a lot.

I was making about 50% profit on lead generation using adwords, and this is with a landing page that has undergone a lot of work. Then a thought struck me, someone who needs product a needs product b, so I started selling B as well.

My profit jumped to 300%.

Then I got the idea of adding the aweber form so I could get them on a email list. Turned out I could milk on average another 10$ per person through various cpa offers.

So in the end I make 500%+ on my adwords investment per click.

Never assume to know a person's business model, because usually it is more intricate than you think. I 10's timed my profit, meaning I can afford to outspend the competition by a lot.

But I actually underspend compared to them because I know how adwords works and my competition are morons for the most part.

Originally Posted by dreamluck

Does many people do a lot conversion with direct linking?
I'm still stuck to this wither to create my own landing page or do a direct link to the merchant site.

Excuse me for this question because I am still new to PPC Campaigns.

A landing page is better in most instances. If you are selling a popular product, two sites cannot have the same landing page via direct linking. Quality score can also be an issue. Even better I would say is to give away some sort of free product and get their email to have more chances to sell something.

Originally Posted by Wini23

It depends on the keyword. If you advertise on a phrase like "buy xyz" then I would say that the ads are better converting than the results of the organic listing.

@negative keywords: These are keywords that prevent your ad from being shown to "untargeted" users. For example if you SELL mp3s on your landing page and you don't offer mp3s for free, this
-"free"
would be a perfect negative keyword. If a user now searches for "free mp3s" or "mp3 for free" your ad won't be displayed.
So use negative keywods! It will raise your CTR and ROI.

I'd experiment with putting "free" in as a negative keyword, but I wouldn't assume that word is going to kill your ROI. Keep an eye on your analytics. I have my analytics running all day, and I periodically compile the data on Excel and analyze it till it hurts. If you find a lot of searches for "free" are bringing your conversion rates down, then out it goes.

"Free" is one of the most powerful words there is. It should absolutely be on your site for sure multiple times. Even if after investigating further, the guy finds out you're offering "free previews" of songs, or "free lyrics."

I've sold art, amongst many other things. People know they're going to have to pay for it. But the trick is to get them to look at the art, so it's best to have a sign that says "Looking is Always Free" or some such at an art show.

It could be that the guy is SO tired of looking for free MP3s and not finding them, that he'd pay for them on YOUR site, just because he's ready to give up. It reminds me of a technique some car dealers use. They drag out the entire quoting and sales process so long, that you couldn't possibly think of going through the same 2-hour horror again at another dealership, so they just buy the car and put an end to their misery.

adwords ate a lot of my money too...but i never had a quality score of 7!!

In a sense Adwords is bs if you're doing affiliate work and wanna turn a fast dollar. I'm not gonna talk theory. Only facts and numbers.

Example:

Affiliate product commission $20 per sale

You do your keyword research, find long-tails, let's say 15 tight related action keys with high commercial value. Say daily search is 4000 across all keys in your list. Your out to make a quick buck so Adwords quality score is also bs because when you do your keyword research on Google's tool it gives you DOLLAR amount per click and POSITION, not QS. For fast results you gotta pay for the clicks baby.

You average the dollar amount per click for positions 1-3 and take a realistic 1% CTR on your ads. That's roughly 40 prospects a day. At a buck per click thats $40 cost. Google's gonna sell you 100 prospects for $100.

At 1% conversion you make $20 at a cost of $100. You lose $80. Break even conversion is %5 which anybody who's done affiliate work will tell ya is unrealistic for most programs (especially these days and the economic slump). Profit conversion would be %6 and up.

So our friend Google sells fast traffic for high dollar.Too high for most affiliate programs to turn a profit. Back in the day when you could buy prospects at 10 cents a piece, you could turn a profit.

Now if you do the voodoo and pump your QS to get on top positions for cheap (not easy cause Google's a business not a charity, they wanna sell their inventory for as much as they can so QS ain't easy to get right, and most folks won't get the Alibaba spell down to open the QS door.) then maybe you can make a buck at the Adwords game.

Anybody saying it's not so tell'em to show you the numbers.

Just my 2 pennies.

$800 is quite a budget to outsource online marketing.. get articles done press release and etc.. you might get a better ROI than adwords. and copying the same campaign wont work. as long as you got competitors. you gotta be different from them to be able to sell.
i suggest that if you still wanna use adwords. look for keywords that are related to your niche and that is not included in your competitors campaign. it can be simple as adding one more word.

@Marketing Mark: Okay, it was only an example. I've realized that with credit cards I got an slightly higher ROI from using "free" as a negative keyword, but of course you must test it in your niche.

@blkhatman: I agree with your point - the ROI is only "good" if you are under the top advertisers for your niche. Otherwise you are losing often more money than you get from AdWords. AdWords is only profitable if you can scale your volume up with it. The ROI with SEO, SMO or other methods is much higher (at least in the long run).

I have a question...Im a content writer but Ive always wanted to dabble with writing and selling ebooks from a landing page and driving traffic to it. PPC seems like a really useful tool for something like this as long as I stay very very specific for the market im trying to target and start very small. I thought about adding this strategy to some article promotion and backlinking....does this seem like a successful strategy to get sales as long as the book is really good quality? what kind of CTR do you think I could realisitically set goals for? Obviously thats going to change with the niche and product but whats a good base number just for assumption's sake?

dont go by the position, go by the estimated clicks per day, the fact is postitions 1-4 normally run out their daily cash early and thats why the lower positions get moved up, you can be position 10, it just means that your ad wont be shown until positions 1-7 run out of their daily allowances. Hell at some point if they all run out of daily cash, you might end up at #1 position...

the position placement is based on a brand new day with all accounts having funds ready and going.

I am pretty experienced in adwords so i would like to share my opinions on your problem. I hope it helps.

The campaign you copied might really be successful for that person but it does not mean that you will get the same results. That's how google stays in business. If everybody could copy each other, do you think that people would pay millions of dollars to advertise?? The entire adwords campaigns would turn into a chaos! This is just a hype the snake oil salesmen are using to sell their softwares.

On the other hand, they help you to have an idea about where to start, since you will have some data right off the bat. This should be the only purpose of using those type of softwares. Otherwise you will fail miserably, as people fell flat on their faces with gcd.

There are many factors that might seperate a successful campaign from an unsuccessful one. One of the most important factors is your landing page. Maybe the problem is not your keywords. It might be your landing page. That will dramatically affect the conversion rate of your adword campaigns. Pay attention to your competitors landing pages and try to find out what they have different. Maybe they have a great headline that encourages the visitors to read more. Pay attention to detail.

Instead of targeting keywords that have high search volume, go with the keywords that have a volume between 1000-6000. This will dramatically decrease your cpc. While 10-20 uniques a day might seem low, once you find 10 of those keywords you will start getting 100-200 uniques a day which will help you evaluate the product with less cost per click. Plus, your ctr will be much higher.

When starting your campaign, always start with phrase "keyword"and exact match [keyword], do no use broad match. Broad match keywords will bring you too many irrelevant untargeted traffic and in most cases it is a reason between a success and a fail.

For people who don't know what those mean: broad keyword can be a combination between your keyword and any keyword insterted before or after or both. Ex: tennis shoe keyword will bring you traffic for anything related with tennis or shoe, such as red tennis shoe, shoe sucks, tennis shoe is gay, basketball shoe, tennis bag etc.

Phrase match: can only be combination of your keywords plus another keyword before or after or both. Ex: "tennis shoe", "best tennis shoe", "tennis shoe is comfortable"

Exact match: Your ad will only show up if the visitor types your keyword exactly: tennis shoe (shoes tennis, your ad won't show up). tennis shoes, your ad won't show up. So it is best if you start with phrase match and exact match first, then once your campaign becomes successful, you can include broad keywords to get more traffic.

Do bid shifting. This is very important. Start your bids high rather than low. You will have a higher ctr which is one of the most important things in adwords account history. Once you get the high ctr, start lowering your bids daily. 10 cents a day is ideal. Starting low puts you in the mid and low level on sponsored rankings which will decrease your ctr. When your competitors get more clicks, their ctr will be higher and you will have to pay much more to rank up even for the same keywords. Don't think that an ad ranking 1st is always paying more than the ad on #6. This is a very important factor that separates the winning campaign from a losing campaign. While $1 per click might not be a profitable a campaign, 30 cent per click sure can...

Your keywords might be information keywords rather than buying keywords. There are three phases in online shopping. Information, research and buy. Let's say someone is considering to buy a new tv but does not know whether to buy a plasma or an lcd. So this person makes a search on google and clicks on several ads to understand the difference between a plasma and lcd. Comparison, in this example is the information phase. Let's say he decided to buy an lcd tv. He then starts a search to find the best brand for it. This is the research phase. Now he wants to buy a 52" LG Lb5df, this is the buying phase where the person is searching with a credit card next to him.

Now these are the visitors that we want to catch (in buying phase). Plasma tv, lcd tv (informational), Best plasma tv, best lcd tv (research), buy 52" lb5df, cheapest lg lb5df (buying) keyword.


Split test your landing page. Send 50% of your traffic to lp1 and the rest to lp2. Change one thing at a time. This is very important otherwise you will not be able to know what caused the difference. Test it at least for a week to gather the results, then keep the better performing lp, drop the bad one and create a new lp2 and keep split testing to create the best converting lp possible. This is how super affiliates sell that much.

Split test your ad copies. It is free and google will let you run two ads for the same set of keywords. Rinse and repeat as you do with your lp.

Track your keywords and drop the ones that are not converting. Once your campaign becomes profitable, you should then start scaling it up. For example, if you are making $30 profit with a $100 a day budget, you will make $120 a day with a $400 a day budget. That's how super affiliates scale up the campaign when it becomes profitable. Most of them have AE credit cards with very high limits so they just increase the daily budget 10-100 times once they have a successful campaign. Imagine you having a $100 campaign with 100% ROI (return on investment). This would mean $1 profit for every dollar you spend. That's how they become millionaires.

All in all, sometimes there's nothing wrong with what you are doing. The product just doesn't convert enough to be profitable with ppc. In this case, don't waste your time to try to make it profitable. There are thousands of other offers that are profitable. Just move on to the next one.

Anyway, i hope this long post was useful for people who were seeking some information. Thanks for reading...

Great post Mr Ex, thanks for the information,
You have any solutions for whats happening with google nowdays? they'r slapping lots of affilates for making review sites.

Hey jellyfish, np at all. I hope it was a useful post. Google started de indexing one page authority (review) sites because of the fraud complaints. Actually promoting ac*i berry, c*l*n cleansing and g**gle m*ney tr*e stuff caused this problem due to excessive amount of fraud. I know there are still many review sites out there but they will disappear from the search indexes sooner or later.

Besides the organic search, google now slapps ppc campaigns related with cpa offers and review style pages. It's getting harder and harder to make money from affiliate marketing. I'm not saying that it's dead, on the contrary there's still a lot of money to be made. It's just not that easy as it was used to be.

I observed and experienced a solution to this problem. I don't really know how this affects the overall success of a ppc campaign but the results i am getting so far is quite satisfactory.

So what do i do? I find out the keywords first, build my website, optimize it for seo, submit my xml sitemap to search engines and then i wait to be indexed and ranked. This usually takes 10-15 days.

Once my site gets indexed, i then start building quality backlinks. I usually buy them, don't waste my time actually building it manually. I outsource my articles and just post it on my website (not waste them on ezine, squidoo etc.). So, when google bots crawl my website, all they see is just relevant content with NO affiliate links. And all my high pr backlinks point it back to my website. Now google recognizes my site as a high quality information site, not a lousy affiliate website with poor structure.

Then i continue building sub pages and increase my content. After a month, i start a ppc campaign. Now because my website is already search engine optimized and ranking on the first page with high pr backlinks, i usually get an 8-9 quality score. I setup 2 landing pages and start split testing. After 2 weeks, i have enough data to decide if the offer is converting or not.

What do i do if the offer is crap? Well, i just throw adsense code and make money that way or i just flip it and get my investment back with profit. People pay nice chunk of money for websites which are pre built, already ranked and receiving daily traffic

I know this is not the quickest and easiest way to make money from affiliate offers but at least you end up having a long term solid online business property and your account history with google stays healthy. Plus, if you wanna get rid of it, you can just flip it any time you want.

I alwase check if I will profit by 1% leads of the traffic before running a campagin ;>

Originally Posted by newmanhia

But I actually underspend compared to them because I know how adwords works and my competition are morons for the most part.

I have been ruining a fairly successful adwords campaign over just the past month or so and really appreciate all the info here.

But regarding the above quote how do you determine how much your completion is actually spending ? Seems like that would be really useful info to have...

There's Two ways to do it: Direct linking or using a Landing Page.

I love Direct linking and this is what I focus on.

BUT, MrEx has given a great way to go about using a landing page and doing what very few people do which is using a LP and building an opt in list for long term profits.

Also, a Big tip IMO is to target the content network for categories that offer very low CPC then advertise a HOT product with image ads

Your daily budget does not affect your qs. Qs is related with your keywords and your lp. The more relevant are your keywords with the lp, the higher qs you will get.

Check out the average cpc and decide what to set max cpc. If it's around $2, start with $3.50 Now, bidding $3.50 does NOT mean that you will pay $3.50 per click. That's the MAX cpc you are willing to pay. G will calculate and determine and then you can see how much you are paying per click.

Now this will put you in top 3 position and you will start getting a lot of clicks. Once your ctr is over 1% (i suggest 2%), start lowering your bid slowly. 10 cents a day is ideal. After 10 days or so, you will end up paying between $2-$2.50 per click with a high ctr. When you have the top 3 spot with cheap clicks, your competitors will have to increase their bids to adjust their ad positions. But because your ctr is higher, you will mostly maintain your position with the same price, while they are paying much more for a lower spot. Do you understand now how important this is?