My first 80$ comission and few questions

Hi everybody!
I am a reader of this forum for a long time.
I would like to share my first success and maybe ask for tips.
So I built a site that compare few products with affiliate links,paid for content, built and design the site myself using a basic WordPress theme (I am a web developer)
I drove traffic to it using bing ads, which is relatively cheaper than adwords.
Today my first commission of 80$!
I still spent around 400$ on ads, which makes me still unprofitable, but I am researching and hoping to find cheaper ways to bring quality traffic to my site.
I would appreciate if some of the experienced ones here could give me some advices:
1) What is the best tool (free/paid) I could use to track the keywords of my competitors
2) Is there any other PPC network that is worth checking other than adwords and bing ads?
3) How can a campaign in bing/adwords could be profitable? it seems that the bids are so high and a profit is almost impossible to make.

Thanks a lot for any answer!

Definitely not my area but maybe look into reddit ads, as they could be niche specific. I'd think an ad at the top of the right subreddit saying reviews/comparisons etc would get clicks, just my 2 cents though, goodluck!

Thanks alot Fog for your comment!
Actually I once used reddit ads for another site I have. it wasn't so successful, I think for my niches it has to be searched related ads
so the clicks are very focused.
I will look into subreddits related to my niche anyway and try to see if it worth trying to publish there again

profitable campaigns are created, not found.
my advice is do 5 ad copies. 2 landing pages. 2 offers. set your daily budget to $100 and you'll get a lot of data very fast. ditch the poor performers and keep optimizing the winners.
you can also swipe other peoples creates rather than making your own.
there's some tricks to increasing your conv% by hijacking the back button for a downsell. almost all the top performing clickbank offers do this and it works well.
lastly, be sure you're using negative keywords to filter out people without intent to buy.

Thanks a lot uncuto for your detailed comment, I really appreciate!
I am aware of split testing and I do take ideas from other people's ads
About the negative keywords, with time I collect more and more. I hope to improve and learn during this process.
About the method you suggested about the back button thing, could you please elaborate? I don't really understand what you mean

Thanks!

kingambit said:

Thanks a lot uncuto for your detailed comment, I really appreciate!
I am aware of split testing and I do take ideas from other people's ads
About the negative keywords, with time I collect more and more. I hope to improve and learn during this process.
About the method you suggested about the back button thing, could you please elaborate? I don't really understand what you mean

Thanks!

Click to expand...

basically when a visitor leaves your page, they usually press the 'back' button to go back to where they were, right?
well with a back button hijacker script, the user will go to another page of yours instead of going back to where they were. you're hijacking their back button.
that other page of yours can be a down-sell, a coupon, or anything you can think of to try to persuade that visitor to become a lead. basically another attempt to sell them.
a bhw member is selling a tool called 'backjacker' but price is kind of steep, you can find a free script that does same exact thing on the forum by searching a bit.

uncutu said:

basically when a visitor leaves your page, they usually press the 'back' button to go back to where they were, right?
well with a back button hijacker script, the user will go to another page of yours instead of going back to where they were. you're hijacking their back button.
that other page of yours can be a down-sell, a coupon, or anything you can think of to try to persuade that visitor to become a lead. basically another attempt to sell them.
a bhw member is selling a tool called 'backjacker' but price is kind of steep, you can find a free script that does same exact thing on the forum by searching a bit.

Click to expand...

Thanks a lot, this is very interesting indeed!

1.Forget about Adwords/Bing Ads.The cost per click is insane.Use Facebook Ads.With very good targeting you can get $0.03 per click.
2.Never use direct affialite links,even on review websites.Use Opt-in pages and autoresponder to build email list.
Bad marketers send traffic to aff links and wait for sales,good marketers build email lists and make more $.