PPC Affiliate Marketing Journal

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mahras2

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Feb 25, 2009
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This is going to be my journal on PPC marketing and getting a handle on this whole affiliate marketing biz. It seems keeping a public journal is a good way to get my thoughts together, ask for advice, and (possibly) serve as a guide for future starters (most likely doing opposite what I am!). I have been putting this off for a while because of other work but its time for me to figure this game out.

Little about me: 21 years old. I go to college. I have experience running a web related business. Currently manage a development shop that works with startups and does revenues in low (low) six figures. I have 0 desire to continue that because dealing with shifty clients sucks. I am devoting $3k per month to start off marketing and will write that off as tuition money until I get a hang of this.

I am using Ads4Dough as my affiliate network.

What I am doing right now:

Spoke with my affiliate manager and got a bunch of verticals to check out. I have chosen one and did the necessary research. As testing seems key, I decided the best plan was to get a good CMS and develop a template that lets me run split tests and update content easily. I did check out Affiliate Theme but I thought the themes themselves were horrendous. I had one of the developers get a all purpose Wordpress theme ready that lets me update banners, copy etc. Its almost done and will be ready to go by Tuesday.

Questions I am trying to answer now:

1. How to crack this whole bidding thing? I have been reading up on different bidding strategy and lots of contradicting information out there. Do I start off with a uniform bid across all the initial keywords? Do I vary them based on the estimated cost given to me by Google? Anyone with any insight in this matter would be greatly appreciated :).

2. Speaking of keywords, what sort of size are your initial keyword lists? I am focusing mostly on long tail keywords (3+) and mostly self generated (aka pen and paper). I am thinking of going with 200 keywords and casting a broad enough net so that if I can identify a decent adgroup I can go indepth on those. Again, anyone with insight in this matter?

After that the goal is to get copy written, finish up the Wordpress theme, throwing everything together and starting up. Hoping to go live by Thursday (shot for wednesday but seems too aggressive).

Will keep this thread updated with progress.
 
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Good luck. Wish I had $3k to burn when I was 21. Be careful with it and don't be afraid to hire PPC experts and learn from their keyword selection rather than make mistakes. Better to pay a commission and get a return than go down in flames.
 
$3k a month is a quite big budget to start with,
You can put away $1k, separate it upon 3 campaign, and - trial and error,
possibly the best way to gain knowledge and courage, to start profit.
After this, if done properly, u can turn these remained $2K into some profitable campaigns.

Try out PPC-coach, they're regarding the same type of questions there,
And it seems that many experienced affiliates use their tools also, so try it out.

good luck, just keep the updates comin'....
 
Thanks will need all the luck I can get. I should clarify, I am not looking to piss away 3k a month. However, thats basically my pain threshold. I am willing to drop 500-700 per campaign I test but I wont test so much that my losses exceed 3k for any given month. This is to prevent me from getting out of hand with any one campaign and put a self imposed limit for me to work off of.

However, I see a lot of people dropping campaigns after 100-200 bucks in losses which I feel foolish. If I am targeting a niche other affs are making money, the problem isn't with the niche but with me. So, as long as I am smart and spend my money on testing spending 3k is tuition to get myself up to speed rather than losses.
 
So the day's update:

So developer got the template ready and, although there are some adjustments to be made, it looks great. Best of all, I am not going to have to bug him and take him away from client assignments to make changes for tests.

Also got the offers I want to run for my vertical ready. Three different offers over two different networks. Once its started up and I can see some sales rolling in I have also got three other offers I want to split test.

Now for the things left to do:

1. Write copy. Already started to do this but need to complete it and run edits. Checking out the competition definitely helps to see what angle they are hitting clients for. Also another research tool that helped was keeping a log for the past two weeks of the biggest publishers in my vertical. I can see the changes they are making which I will assume have been beneficial (else they would have reverted). I have been keeping a lot of this in the 4 major verticals everyone wants to play in (bizopps, diet, credit, dating).

2. Get the keyword research done. I did a lot of research yesterday in terms of how to figure out keyword strings (particularly long tail ones). I have done this sort of work before so will be using similar research tools for this (build a subjective scraper a while back for this reason). Will see whether the market proves me right when I launch.

Going live will be delayed to Friday or Saturday. Need to go out of town till Thursday.
 
For being new to PPC it sounds like you've got your shit together. I'm gathering you have some other marketing or sales experience in some form. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of your testing.
 
Yea dude this will be interesting. Like efeezy said, you really look like you're headed in the right direction. Good luck and keep us posted. I love reading this shit
 
Thanks.

So got most of the copy on the landing page done. Honestly, I find that my site already looks more legitimate and content rich than 90% of the competition that I have been tracking. I haven't even had a chance to get the other four content page finished yet. Really goes to show you how little the effort some AMs put into their site design. Or maybe people actually buy more from sites with shitty CSS with deadlinks? Either way with these bans going on left and right, there is good news for new competitors coming in who can differentiate themselves and raise the quality of the ads and sites.
 
Spend wisely my young padowin
yoda4.jpg
 
Quick update> Haven't made any progress because I was away from work. Very unproductive few days but I think a break was necessary. I did grab a client while in Philly so at least made some money on the break.

To dos:
1. Finish copy.
2. Finalize landing page.
3. Keyword research.
4. Ad group creation.
5. Launch.

Loads of stuff to do. Plan on finishing 1 and 2 by tonight and work on 3 and 4 tomorrow. Want to launch by the start of next week.
 
Ok 3 day update: Landing page is completely done. All copy, design etc have been finalized. In addition, I also have test variations to play with once I launch and see some promise in this. Honestly the site looks more comprehensive and content filled than other competitors but who knows whether it will convert well.

The goal of tomorrow is two fold:
1. Set up tracking. As this is my first affiliate campaign, I need to play around with Tracking202/Prosper202 to get a hang of things. I will contact my affiliate manager to set up pixels etc. Any pointers on the setup?

2. Keyword research. I am still confused on how many keywords to start the campaign off with. What do you guys suggest? I hear people doing 10k long tail keywords but I assume creating tight adgroups and ad copy is a bitch for something that size. Any help with this would be appreciated.

While I underestimated progress (thanks to the development business taking up my time) still moving forward and should be able to launch by this week.
 
Pardon the lack of updates but things kind of ground to a standstill thanks to development projects going amuck thanks to shitty coders. But things are back on track now and I should have enough time to devote to AM.

Here is where things stand:
-Site is completely finished (graphics, ad copy, everything).
-tracking etc has been setup. I played with Tracking202 and analytics program to find the best ones and learnt their functionality.

So now, I am focusing on getting keywords and ad copy research. Have a number of questions that I need to work on (any help with these would be helpful):

1. How many keywords should I start off with?
2. Is it better to start with a general (more expensive) keywords with a good negative word list or to just target the cheaper long tails?

Kind of the last spoke for the test campaign launch. Anyone with any insight on keyword research and bidding would be helping me out big time. Much appreciated and hopefully I get this whole thing going.
 
Each method has it's benefits & pitfalls, for example ...

Bidding on some general words on broad match is a great way to not work too hard on keyword research and pick up some serious long tails or alternative words that you simply would not have gotten going with a big list of exact matches. This can also get pretty expensive if you don't prune quickly. Quick pruning (negative words) isn't always the best method since conversions are really random. In many cases, you need really large data samples before making a truly educated decision.

Putting together a huge list of long tail keywords takes some time to come up with. Organizing them into tightly themed ad groups will take even more. This is typically done by noobs so they don't waste their entire budget in a hurry. The benefit is that you've got a lot of control over your spending and also ad copy / landing pages. The downfall would be that you'll never get that magic keyword this way that returns 500% ROI religiously since exact matches never send anything outside of your group.

I'd say that $3k is too low to use the broad match method unless you wanted to go with only a word or 2.

To make things more complicated, the real way to profit is to get inside the head of searchers and target your ads & landers based on their mindset.

http://www.wickedfire.com/affiliate...eted-ads-get-highly-converting-campaigns.html

But prepare yourself to get blown away, I&W really put together a great info thread there. It will make you realize you've got a lot more work ahead of you before you're truly ready to get started.

mahras2 said:
-Site is completely finished (graphics, ad copy, everything).
Click to expand...

I'd almost never consider ad copy to be complete unless you're getting 30% CTR & awesome conversions. Throw more ad copy at each ad group daily based on competitor's ads and your best performers.
 
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Erect> Thanks a lot for the great pointers. Definitely realize I have ways to go before launch. I think right now my best idea will be to go with a wide net, exact match list of long tails. I am going to try and cast a wide enough net in terms of ad context (for example: if my niche was TVs...hit every brand name before honing in on one specific brand and building a deep list). Hopefully this will let me at least figure out which categories of keywords my conversions are coming from so I can expand those.

Thanks a lot for that thread. Thats a fantastic reference source.

As for the ad coy comment, I meant the copy on the landing page/website itself. Haven't even started getting the adcopy ready until I get the initial keyword list sorted out.

Ideas and pointers from other members are also much appreciated.
 
So here is progress and details on how I did my keyword research.

I decided to not pay for any keyword tools. Felt that doing it manually at least for this first campaign will be a great exercise in getting into the buyers mindset than just downloading some long assed kw list. First thing I did was identify the big categories of people that would benefit from the product. So say, if I was promoting some all-purpose pet cleaner (random product cause a dog just walked past me) then the main groups this would help with or would search for it could be: owners of dogs, owners of dirty dogs, owners of dogs with flea problems, owners of dogs with dandruff problem, owners of furry dogs. After that, I just grabbed the free keyword list from Google for the particular categories to give me an idea on terms to bid on. After that its just a matter of packaging those keywords with the primary root with command phrases and descriptors.

My hope for doing this is that because this is an initial launch, I will be able to test a broad net of categories to find one which is converting and then maybe I can expand on that list even more. For example, ideally I will find that say owner of dogs with dandruff problems are generating disproportionate amount of conversions so I can really hone in big time into that category.

The current keyword list is standing at ~750 primarily 3-4 word lists. They are organized into 75 ad groups which seems like a lot but I know this niche makes money and I want to come into the market as targeted as possible.

Next step is to write up ad copy for all 75 groups. My goal is to get 2 ads per group that I can split test with right from the get go. So, I have the fun activity of getting a 150 ads written up this weekend. But all goes well I will be ready to go by this monday. Love how I thought I would be able to do all that I did within a few days when I started this journal. Goes to show the sheet amount of work needed to launch somewhat respectably.

Comment away.

P.S. I found a few facebook offers that are looking really interesting. I am going to run a few of them as a side project cause that looks like an interesting traffic source. Building up an image gallery right now for ads when I launch.
 
A few quick thoughts for you:
1. Don't always assume that "bad" LPs are bad. You care about conversions, not appearance and some (many) landing pages that look like ass convert well.
2. Don't over-extend yourself. Facebook is a beast these days. You have to spend lots of time submitting and resubmitting ads and basically praying that one or two get through. Even when they get through they generally won't last very long. Either your cloaker will fail for a FB employee or they'll eventually just realize what you're running and shut your traffic down. I'm not saying that Facebook isn't a great source of revenue, but just realize that there is a lot (a lot!) of work involved in running a big PPC campaign and a Facebook campaign, especially if you're just starting out.

Best of luck
 
Hey Tireswing...thanks for the tips. I agree with #2 because I actually started with Facebook yesterday. I waited all of last week to get my AdWords account approved and it still hasn't been. Dont understand why either...I just recently opened a Google Merchant account with them to accept payments and that went through promptly.

So, got set up with a Facebook campaign. Last night (well 3AM today EST) I threw up 30 ads on Facebook. All of them had very similar ad copy but different images. Wake up today and was surprised that all of them were accepted. So I got going and threw up 70 more ads (different images...similar ad copy). And just to test out the stupidity of Facebook's approval system, I took one of the approved ads, changed the bids in the "Edit Ads" tab and resubmitted it.

Well what do you know, 71 ads disapproved including 1 they had approved earlier. Kinda kicking myself for not submitting them all at 3AM like I did with the first 30 but oh well. Resubmitted 30 of the disapproved ads just because I feel like it reduces the chances that one ad image looking off won't lead to rejection of all ads.

Right now with Facebook I am targeting pretty aggressively. This batch of ads is targeting an audience of 160k people. Once these are up and running, I will get the bids up to get the necessary impressions and figure out the legs on this offer. I can easily expand the audience numbers (Just target another geographic area) so not too worried about having a narrow audience profile right now.
 
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