Nerdy Affiliate Adventures In Affiliate Marketing Land

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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Project Yahoo: Campaign Progress And Dating Niche Launch

Posted by JasperP on July 31st, 2008

So 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:

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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