Nerdy Affiliate Adventures In Affiliate Marketing Land

Niche Research: Brainstorming and Mindmapping

Posted by JasperP on August 15th, 2008

I had a consultation with Derek at ClickConsultants and he advised that I create a mind map in order to brainstorm all the possible phrases and keywords used in the debt relief niche I’ve been working on.  Since my campaign hasn’t been performing as I liked, I started from scratch in order to get a good idea of my niche.

So I went through Google looking for phrases to discover more about my niche.  As I was doing that I put them in a mind mapping software called Freemind.  This software is free and you can get it at:

http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Anyway, here is the mind map that I came up with for the debt relief campaign

Now, I didn’t just combine words and just throw them in a list.  I basically used these to create a base keyword list and started plugging it into keyword tools like Wordtracker, Wordze, and the Adwords Keyword Tool.

I ended up with around ~50k, but after grouping them by 1,2,3-kw phrases, I ended up with a list of ~27k keywords.  I just re-imported them back into Yahoo and YSM declined about 6-7k, which left me with 19k in my campaign.

To sum it up, it really helps to discover the terminology and wording used in your niche.  Use it as a guideline and start plugging them into the keyword tools.  Use your brain, use the search engines and then use the keyword tools.

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!!

Project Yahoo: YSM -> CPA Networks

Posted by JasperP on July 22nd, 2008

I just started working on a new project which involves working with Yahoo Search Marketing and CPA Offers.  I’m not going to state what niches I’m working on, but I’m going to share some of my experiences with it to see if I can make a profit from it.

I’m sharing this info with the guys in the ClickConsultants Forum.  So if you want more information on this project, you can follow along with me in more detail in the forum.  I haven’t made a profit with this project yet, so I’ll keep updating this blog and in the forums in the meantime.

Here are the project guidelines:

• Pick 2 Offers from the CPA Networks.  The network I’m working with is AzoogleAds and maybe NeverBlueAds.
• Generate a huge list of keywords: (at least 10k+ keywords)
• Group keywords with a common keywords 1-3 words long.  For example, if my keywords were “blue dog collars”, “red dog collars”, “black dog collars”.  Then my common keyword is “dog collars”
• Write at least 2 ads per ad group.  Use the common keyword for each ad group name and try to use it in the text ads.
• Upload to Yahoo Search Marketing and optimize campaign everyday.
• Write down impressions, clicks, CTR, # of Leads on daily performance.

Niche #1 Updates:

• 15,257 Keywords
• 36 Ad Groups
• 14 Ads per Ad Group
• CPC: 0.15 (now 0.25 after today)
• Daily Budget: $5.00

Niche #1 just became live today. I uploaded it on Saturday, July 19 and it barely just got approved today.  I guess they don’t approve anything on the weekends.

More updates soon!

How To Study Your Competition With Compete.com

Posted by JasperP on June 18th, 2008

Studying your competition is a skill you should master if you want to make more money as an affiliate marketer. By understanding your competition, you can create better sites, and better copywriting to outwit your competition.

The immediate benefits are:

• It’s easier to understand the visitor since some else has already done the research.
• Headlines and other web copy has already been tested for sites with months of history.
• Web sites has already been laid out for you, just take the elements from various sources and put it all together for a highly converting site.

Now here’s a tip I use pretty much all the time when I study new niches… I hope this doesn’t bite me in the end… but I study my competitors VERY CLOSELY with compete.com…

Why do I do that? Well if a competitor has been advertising in a niche for awhile, then he’s probably profitable right?

So how do I do that? Well… let’s take a popular clickbank product like Fat Loss 4 Idiots.. I think everyone is familiar with this product right? (A VERY expensive niche by the way, which I don’t recommend for any beginner/newbie)

And I use the product name “Fat Loss 4 Idiots” as the keywords:

Now here’s my little secret… I use Compete.com to determine their history!

In the screenshot above, you can see that FatLoss4IdiotsFlaw.com has been advertising since December 2007! If you are advertising for that long and getting traffic, then he must be getting something back. It would be a waste of time to just continue trying to create more traffic for the site.

Now he might be getting traffic from other sources, but from the screenshots above, you can see that he was advertising in the #2 spot for the product keyword name! I’m guessing to be in that #2 spot, that keyword must be REALLY expensive, but at the same time it MUST be converting into sales!

At that point, I would study all the different landing pages to determine what marketing angles they are using. You can then make it better than the original sites and add your own elements make it your own. Or you can even take the best elements into one awesome landing page site!