Clickbank - My first two weeks

So after about two weeks dabbing with CB, I've had limited success. I'm a total noob at IM, but figuring it out as I go along -- trial and error.

Basically I picked out a niche that I'm pretty strong on, and decided to roll with it. Created a WP site, hosted a whole bunch of CB products from my niche with basic reviews. Created a number of Google AW campaigns by product and let it rip.

1st week - learning experience. Actually earned about $160, but AW costs outpaced revenue by at least 2:1 -- yikes. A $400 or so loss for the week.

2nd week - dialed in my AW campaigns, reoganized by country and reset keywords to phrase instead of broad. Paused a couple campaigns that are either converting terribly or I'm getting a lot of invalid clicks. Week has just started, sales are at like $65 -- basically a wash with AWs costs. Starting to test blog posts in message boards in another niche I found, so far decent of clicks, no sales. Still down about $400 or so.

Will see what the rest of the week brings... AWs is a whore. Is providing better traffic now, but some of the keywords are still pretty expensive even with a pretty good CTR and QS. Thinking of how to find better sources of organic traffic.

AW = adwords ?

Ayomav said:

AW = adwords ?

Click to expand...

Yea..

Try optimizing Adwords and use remarketing too...

stay away from adwords if you possibly can or learn the ropes first as those guys will rape you

Clickbank + AW almost never works. I suggest you set up a small budget for each product. Like $10 see how much each makes for that ammount of AW cash and sift out the ones that are anti profit. Then get some more products, invest more in the successful ones.

Rinse and Repeat

Good Luck!

wat niche are u in?

raven123 said:

Clickbank + AW almost never works.

Click to expand...

I disagree with this statement. Adwords gives you targeted traffic. As long as you have a great landing page, you will be able to sell. Selling CB products through Adwords used to be very easy, and the ROI was incredible (at least for me); however, they stopped allowing marketers to sell and link to CB pages, so people who did that had their account banned. They're pretty strict about selling CB products now.

Adwords usually bans landing pages that have CB product affiliate links on, the ads will run for about 24 hours then the landing page score will drop to zero and the ads will be banned and stop running.

People should always make sure their landing page does not contained affiliate links or Google will slap you and your website and ban your adwords account.

I know it happened to me and it took me lots of correspondence with Google to get my landing page to pass their landing page policy and my account unbanned.

So watch out!

Knock on wood, but I've been running Adwords with Clickbank for a few weeks now with no issues. However, I don't really have a traditional landing page per say... maybe that's the reason why I haven't run into an issue with the big G. Also, my niche is not one that is 'questionable'.

Even so, Adwords + my niche has not been very profitable. A lot of competition from seo sites as well as some competition from sites promoted via adwords. Thinking about dumping adwords and starting to promote via forums.

Try to do proper SEO or link-building for the website (which you're use for the click bank affiliates) instead of Adword Campaign because when you're trying to optimize your website with proper keywords then you'll get the traffic direct by the search engines and more traffic means more sales. Try to understand that thing, you really succeed in that online business.

JackSparrow said:

Adwords usually bans landing pages that have CB product affiliate links on, the ads will run for about 24 hours then the landing page score will drop to zero and the ads will be banned and stop running.

People should always make sure their landing page does not contained affiliate links or Google will slap you and your website and ban your adwords account.

I know it happened to me and it took me lots of correspondence with Google to get my landing page to pass their landing page policy and my account unbanned.

So watch out!

Click to expand...

You cant have a CB affiliate link on your landing page? What about if its a CB product but your own product?

You can't have a bridge page, meaning a page that is meant to simply link the surfer to CB affiliate links.

If you add reviews, detailed descriptions, have multiple competitive products, etc as well as cloak the links you'll be fine with AW + CB... that's my experience thus far.

The SEO said:

Try to do proper SEO or link-building for the website (which you're use for the click bank affiliates) instead of Adword Campaign because when you're trying to optimize your website with proper keywords then you'll get the traffic direct by the search engines and more traffic means more sales. Try to understand that thing, you really succeed in that online business.

Click to expand...

You know of any good how-to articles on SEO? The only thing I did thus far is register my sites and install a SEO optimization plug-in into my WP theme. I know I need to do a lot more.

Are you displaying different ads with different headlines and ad copy? Also custom landing page is good if you haven't implemented yet.

JackSparrow said:

Adwords usually bans landing pages that have CB product affiliate links on, the ads will run for about 24 hours then the landing page score will drop to zero and the ads will be banned and stop running.

People should always make sure their landing page does not contained affiliate links or Google will slap you and your website and ban your adwords account.

I know it happened to me and it took me lots of correspondence with Google to get my landing page to pass their landing page policy and my account unbanned.

So watch out!

Click to expand...

Thats really helpful. I have this feeling that Google is very smart to detect these landing pages.

This is very helpful. I have used Adwords in the past, but the profits were only marginal. Now, it seems way to expensive, unless you have a huge budget to work with and trail and error techniques.

Hey Gang,

An update for week 3...

I broke $300 in sales this week. I also got my AW costs under control so I actually earned $120 this week... would have been a little more, perhaps $150 but I wasted some money testing advertising a couple of new products.

I'm also working on a very organic method of drawing people to the site. Not sure if it's going to work, we'll see. It will cost a little money, but if it works will bring super targeted traffic. It's niche specific though.

After that, I think I'm going to move on and create niche site. Not sure what yet though.

Great man.I have just staarted on CB and I dont have much money to start with AW...Will surely take some help from u once I have the budget to invest

Thanks!

Really useful info mate.

I take it you are an affiliate rather than a vendor. If so, how do you track conversions in Adwords as you aren't able to add the code onto any of the vendors pages in order to track conversions? Do you just head over to Clickbank and check out if you have any sales?

I've never used adwords for affiliate sites, only for my work.

I would recommend never to use broad search for longer than a few days, you get poorly targetted traffic which bring low conversion rates and pointless clicks. Phrase match is ok, better conversion rate than broad but still not ideal. It's all about the EXACT match.

I only run broad match keywords for a couple of days and that is for keyword research. What i do is;

1) Let an ad run on broad keywords,
2) after a few days check your search term reports found under 'Dimensions' and there you can see which keywords have the best conversion rate and most conversions.
3) Grab those and put them into a separate ad group under EXACT match.
4) Delete the keywords that aren't converting (again can be found in the search term report)

Basically you want to catch your highest converting keywords and get them in under exact match. Never broad match (apart from above) and sometimes phrase match. Always exact match.

However, this is only useful if you can track conversions IN adwords.

Hopefully this came across clearly