Nerdy Affiliate Adventures In Affiliate Marketing Land

Interesting Posts From My Google Reader

Posted by JasperP on August 31st, 2008

Just thought I’d post some interesting posts I found from my Google Reader.  I follow quite a number of blogs and found some of these posts to be very interesting.  I hope you find them helpful!

  • In addition to the 77 “silver bullets” above, here are more examples from PPCFool.com of great copywriting.  The idea is to impose “shock” to induce action from your visitors.  By using shocking keywords, you can startle your visitors to increase CTR.
  • How does the 20/80 rule apply to PPC Marketing? Basically, from launch to optimization, you should be left with a handful of keywords to optimize your campaigns on.  Derek at ClickConsultants.com explains how the 80/20 rule applies to keywords in your PPC marketing campaigns.
  • Here is something that I haven’t had too much experience with.. which is Facebook ads.  It’s pretty hot to get into right now, although, it’s getting much more saturated as more and more blogs talk about it.  Anyway, Zac Johnson talks about split testing different pictures in your ad copy. It’s interesting to see how each picture can make big differences!

So that’s it! Now go out there and make some money!

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Tutorial: Keyword Grouping With KeywordPad (Freeware)

Posted by JasperP on August 20th, 2008

I’ve been using this excellent free keyword tool called KeywordPad.  You can basically do alot of cleaning, grouping, and modifying with this tool.  The best part is that it’s ABSOLUTELY FREE! You can download it here:

http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/keywordpad/

What I’m going to demonstrate is how I do keyword grouping with this tool.  The first thing I did was get a broad range of keywords from Wordze.  I basically just typed in the word ‘debt’ and it returned a list of 3,334 keywords. You can check out that list here:

WZ_debt.txt

Anyway, the first thing I do is “IMPORT” this list into KeywordPad.

Then I “Delete …Duplicates” and “Clean… Unwanted Characters” and Clean… Trailing/Leading Chars”

At this point, I need to know what keywords to group it by.  So first I “Modify… Sort…Ascending” to view the list.

The next step is to start creating a “Base Keyword” list that I want to group my keywords by.  Since I’m using YSM to test my campaign, I can afford to have larger ad groups.  If I was using Google Adwords, I would limit my keyword groups to 100-200 keywords for each ad group.

Here are the keyword groupings that I chose for this list:

debt consolidation
debt collection
credit card debt
debt relief
credit card
debt management
debt free
debt reduction
out of debt
bad debt

In order to group, I use the “Highlight…Entries That Contain… Words Anywhere” function

Then I either “Export… Highlighted Words To Another List…” Or “Export… Highlighted Words To A Text File…”

I also have to “Delete… Only Highlighted Entries” to make sure the duplicate keywords don’t end up in other ad groups.

What I end up with is these keyword groups:

debt_consolidation.txt
debt_collection.txt
credit_card_debt.txt
debt_relief.txt
credit_card.txt
debt_management.txt
debt_free.txt
debt_reduction.txt
out_of_debt.txt
bad_debt.txt

RESOURCES

If you want to learn more about keyword research and keyword grouping, I recommend the following links:

Keyword Research : Go Deep or Going Wide First?

Keyword Research Secrets to Explode Your Affiliate Business

Uber Keyword Research

Think Outside the Box : Actually Don’t Think At All

Generating Pay Per Click Keywords

So that’s it! I’ve found KeywordPad to help a lot especially when working with huge keyword lists over 10k.  It’s a tool that’s great for newbies especially, since you don’t have to spend a dime on some complicated and expensive keyword tool.

Anyway, If you enjoyed this tutorial, go ahead and bookmark it or send me a comment with your thoughts!

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Top Blog Posts This Week From My Google Reader

Posted by JasperP on August 14th, 2008

Just thought I’d publish some interesting blog posts from my Google Reader that I’ve read in the past week.

Top Five Motivational Sales Speeches [NSFW]
http://www.afftoolbox.com/2008/08/10/top-five-motivational-sales-speeches/

5 Mistakes I’ve Learned from in PPC Affiliate Marketing
http://www.tylercruz.com/5-mistakes-ive-learned-from-in-ppc-affiliate-marketing/

Formula of a winning PPC ad
http://www.cdfnetworks.com/formula-of-a-winning-ppc-ad/

Ten Thousand Dollars
http://www.afftoolbox.com/2008/08/07/ten-thousand-dollars/

How I got started…
http://www.ppcfool.com/beginners/how-i-got-started/

Twitter Sets 2000 Follower Limitation
http://www.shoemoney.com/2008/08/12/twitter-sets-2000-follower-limitation/

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Free Pay-Per-Click And Internet Marketing Tools

Posted by JasperP on August 11th, 2008

This page will probably be a work in progress.. I’ll just add more and more links to this list as I see fit.

Here’s a list of free PPC and Internet Marketing Tools

Keyword Research
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook
http://kwbrowse.com - finds related (LSI) kws

Keyword Tracking
http://www.tracking202.com
http://www.prosper202.com (self-hosted version)

SubID Tracking
http://subids202.com (Shows you how to construct subids for different affiliate networks)

Keyword Manipulation
http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/keywordpad

Keyword and PPC Campaign Export (Adwords, YSM, and MSN right now)
http://www.export202.com

Landing page analysis (with heat maps and click tracking)
http://www.crazyegg.com

Keyword Spy Tools
http://www.keywordspy.com
http://www.keycompete.com
http://www.spyfu.com

Web Traffic Analysis
http://www.compete.com
http://www.alexa.com
http://www.quantcast.com

Online Commercial Intent:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/OCI.aspx - predicts a visitor’s probability that a kw leads to a sale (cool!)

Search Engine Optimization Tools
http://tools.seobook.com

Domain Suggestion Tools
http://www.bustaname.com

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Project Yahoo: Campaign Progress And Dating Niche Launch

Posted by JasperP on July 31st, 2008

1038472_45709527.jpgSo I’ve been trying to test out traffic on Yahoo with the purpose of taking the profitable keywords and moving it over to Google.  I’ve only been testing out the traffic for about 2 weeks using a specific method of testing broad keywords and text ads.

The general guideline is 10,000+ keywords (grouping <1000 keywords with 1-2 common keywords for each ad groups) and 10+ ads for each ad group.  The main purpose for testing like this is to get a broad view of what types of keywords convert as well as what types of ad copy converts best.

I optimize these campaigns every day by using the following criteria (These guidelines come from Artarmon42 and Keliix06 of ClickConsultants):

  • Sort by clicks and delete keywords that make absolutely no sense
  • Sort by impressions then by CTR and use the following guidelines
  • Delete keywords with less than 250 impressions and no clicks
  • Delete keywords with less than a 0.4% CTR

The exception to these rules is if the keywords appears to be highly targeted but I just need more data to verify.  I will let those type of keywords run until I reach 1-2x the commission.

So far I’ve learned quite a bit from this project.  I’m learning to micromanage a bit more and I’m paying close attention to the details of my campaigns.  I’ve also constructed my own keyword-level tracking script from the tips at the guys at ClickConsultants.

I might as well reveal the niches that I’m working on right now with Yahoo.  I think there’s no point in hiding the overall niche.  So instead of telling you Niche #1, Niche #2, etc, I can just tell you that I’m currently focusing on the following:

  • Debt Consolidation
  • Dating
  • Online Games

Here is the summary so far:

Project_Yahoo___July_2008.gif

As you can see, I’m still in the red with a negative ROI. I expected that because of the fact that when you’re testing a wide variety of things, it’s really difficult to pick out the good keywords and text ads on the first try (unless you’re either damn lucky or a super marketer!).

One thing that I noticed, though, after studying my debt relief offer in great detail was that my traffic was being sent to the Smiley Central International offer! Usually when that happens, it’s because the offer doesn’t accept traffic from a particular country.  In my case, I was sending traffic to Canada! I just changed that yesterday and now my CTR went from 1.0% to 0.5% overnight!  So I’m basically starting over again with the whole tuning process.  Oh well.  Lesson learned.

I did get my first lead for the debt relief campaign and this was after removing Canada from my geo-targeting options.  I’m probably going to re-import this campaign since the stats are all screwed up now due to the different traffic sources.

On another note, the dating niche that I’ve been working on is finally being uploaded to my YSM account as I write this.  Here are the stats on that:

  • 16,665 Keywords
  • 26 Ad Groups
  • 16 Text Ads per Ad Group
  • CPC: 0.10
  • Daily Budget: $5.00

I’m probably going to let this one loose tomorrow as soon as everything gets approved.  I’m just waiting on my text ads to get approved.

Anyway, that’s the scoop on this project! Hopefully I can start making profits on these new niches soon!!

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