Leason learnt! Run over your own landing pages as if you were a surfer. Click every link and make sure it goes where its meant to.

If you’re starting out (like myself) you don’t want to miss No Excuses Part 3 help by SEO Mike.  You can view the video here and the No Excuses Part 3 thread here.  The main two points I took from this video is how to use Google Ad Planner and the methodolgy SEO Mike used to find traffic to target his product.

No Excuses Part 3 Section 2

Choosing a niche and domain name - view

Spent:$78.47
Gross:$320.35

Net Profit of $241.88

Its good that the campaign is making a profit but what I have noticed is the sales conversion being reduced, for example ever X amount of dollars spend I make X back.

I think this is due to having some broad search terms, which do convert every now and then or maybe its settling down to a realistic level. As long as I can keep the ratio 2.0 and above I’m happy.

No love with Yahoo Marketing Solutions

I copied across my Google AdWords campaign to YMS hoping to drive more traffic but so far the results have not been pleasant. I know its only been a short period of time but the results so far don’t look well.

Clicks:58
Spent:$18.03
Gross:$9.00

Net Profit -9.03

The cost per click and the click to lead ratio seems a lot higher. Google sits in about 8-14 / clicks per lead where yahoo is sitting on about 25-29 / clicks per lead. Its taking me twice as much traffic at a higher cost on the same keywords with Yahoo so I have decided to remove any broad terms and really fine target keywords.

Will post the results over the next few weeks and let use know how YSM is going.

I have also pumped up the PPC cost of keywords in my Google AdWords Campaign to try and bring in more traffic, so hopefully the month of April will bring in some bigger numbers.

Convert 2 Media

I decided to join another affiliate Convert 2 Media and all I can say is wow. A very impressive back end, API to interact with your landing pages/website and very easy to navigate. There are only a few Australia products for sale but once I get the hand of things I will most certainly use these guys to promote to the American market.

They are very prompt with notifications about offers being ended and new offers being available. Support is great and I have received a reply within the hour twice.

Wicked Fire

Site is full of useful information and strong affiliate people, but be careful when asking questions or you will be crucified. Questions like “how much money are you making?”,”can you mentor me?” or “review my website” will leave you with a bunch of sarcastic replies. On a positive note they do have a newbie question section along with a great list of 2008 posts.  By far the best post i’ve read so far would be “creating ultra targeted ads” and would highly recommend the read.

Nicky Cakes

Very interesting blog to read, seems to be the Perez Hilton of affiliate marketing (But writes a whole lot better). Apart from whats happenning in the affiliate market in America (Events,Affiliate comments,etc…) he has a useful 8 part newbie guide that makes a a lot of sense. Its not a step by step guide to becoming rich but its a good strong outline to start off.

Hard Margin

Hard Margin is an Australia blog related to PPC affiliate marketing in the travel sector. The best part of this site is his experiments and honest results. It doesn’t seem to be updated to regularly but its a good read.

Campaign results for April

So after a month with no fine tuning I left my Campaign running and had the following results:

Spent:$12.14
Leads:13
Gross:$58.50

Net Profit of $46.38

Now you are probably thinking “great now get more traffic and scale the campaign” cause I am, but the problem is after doing a bunch of research I have read a lot of people complaining about Clix Galore and not paying. This has knocked the confidence out of me quiet a bit. I don’t want to scale a campaign and not be paid for the leads, who does? The good news is that I’m over the the $100 payout mark so lets see if I get paid.

Clicks:46
Click cost:$4.67
Leads:5
Gross Profit:$22.50

Net Profit of $17.83

Good news so far. So i logged into Clixgalore and viewed the 5 leads and I could see what search terms on google (from the URL match to the lead) people were looking for. I know have 5 more distinct keywords that converted and I have added them to my keyword list. I decided to increase my bid to a maximum of 0.15c per click and leave it exactly the way it is.

I am going to use this month to collect data on what people are searching for so I placed some really broad terms but placed low bids. I positioned myself one the first page, position 8 so i can see the impressions but hopefully wont have to many people click through.

I will also take this time to actually read up on affiliate marketing, try find some people to network with and somewhere I can ask questions. Affiliate marketing is a business, and in any business you need a good network.

So guys next update wont be for a month.

Following on from Affiliate Marketing, where to start? I have found my product and now I need people to sell it to. Once again google to the rescue with AdWords. I already had a AdSense account so creating a AdWords account took minutes. There was a $10 setup fee which they took from the $40 I deposited (ouch 25% already gone), leaving me with $30, an active AdWords account . For those who are thinking “You tight arse, why only $30″? Well I figured when learning to play poker you bet small till you know what you’re doing, then you start betting big, so if all else fails I only lose $40.

Adwords Campaign Structure

Instead of just diving head first into the world of  AdWords I decided to figure out how I was going to structure my campaigns, ad groups and ads. I created two separate ad groups for each country the product was allowing traffic from. I created a single ad group for each and made two ads and placed them in each group (see structure diagram).

Note: Each ad I added a subid which matched the ad name, for example for the ad AUPROAD1 the url had www.clixgalore.com/ Lead.aspx?…&OID=AUPROAD1&… so I can match leads to successful ads. I got this from the clixgalore FAQs for publishers.

Finding Keywords

I picked 10 broad keywords around my product for a max bid cost of 0.13c, both search and content network enabled and now waiting for the ad to be approved.

Round up

1. I created an AdWords account
2. Created campaigns, ad groups and ads
3. Gave each ad an custom sub-id for tracking
4. Selected keywords based on what I think matches my product
5. Set search and content enabled at 0.13c a click

Next update will be in a few days and ill let use know what happens.

Update: Next part March results

First off I will tell you a quick splur about my background. I’m a 26 year old Systems Administrator who can write code in PHP, Java, Javascript, Html and Xml. I have no idea how to market a product, I’m serious I couldn’t sell water to a man lost in the desert.  So i guess that leads to the question “why affiliate marketing”?

1. I can possible manage my affiliate marketing campaigns outside of work
2. Most of all I need a challenge.

I have no plan at the moment other from finding an affiliate company offering Australian promotions and trying to send sales though pay per click (PPC) traffic.

Find an affiliate

That being said time to find an affiliate to join. I google affiliate marketing and the first result was clixgalore. I looked through their program showcase which seemed to have a great variety of different products and services, so what the hell lets join. Filled out the forms, received my details and logged in.

First impressions of Clix Galore

I logged in to a simplistic looking program interface which looks like it was designed a good 5 years ago. Navigation is a little annoying but was able to find the merchant search pretty easily. I have nothing to compare to at the moment but i got an average feeling about the site and it did give me a touch of doubt. Then again I’m not trying to sleep with it im trying to sell it, so Clixgalore it is.

Picking a product to sell

After searching the merchants I noticed they had three types of programs: sales, leads and clicks.

sales: you get a fixed price or a percentage of the sale
leads: you get a fixed price per lead (getting people to sign-up for something)
clicks: get paid per click you send to their website

Getting paid per click (PPC) was out of the question since I will probably be buying clicks at a higher price then what these programs offered. I figured I would start out with leads, hey if i can’t get someone to sign up to something what chance do I have of convincing them to get their credit card out?

I came across a product that caught my eye that is a prize giveaway, pay per lead and cost the person nothing to sign-up to. This is my product to start with. If i can’t get somebody to sign-up to win prizes for free then I need to be a lollie pop man. So I have my product, now I need traffic.

Next Part: Finding Traffic

http://bfc.excite.com/search/excite_search_redirect.html?redir=http://www.talkingrhino.com/

Ben launched #URL removed# with an initial investment of just $40,000 from his office in Coffs Harbour. It has had more than 2.2 million hits since January

I decided to see what a $40,000 (AUD) investment gets you these days. After a few minutes I noticed if I typed in an area code that did not exist it would return “Sorry this area code ‘what_ever_i_typed_in’ does not exist”. I then decided to type in a simple piece of html code for a hyperlink to my surprised that the input ($_GET) does not get encoded allowing me to add a hyperlink.

This leads me to think is there any seo value in this? What if i get the exploited URL index and gain a link back?

url insert