My journey with adwords.

Review of The Adwords Miracle

2006-08-17T21:05:00.000-04:00

After being tempted by the sales letter for a week now, I finally caved in and bought the product. The product contains three e-books and three videos. Three things that make this product great are: the author goes into detail about how to select the right products to promote. Get this wrong, and you will never be able to have a profitable campaign. He even gives away five niches that he advertisers in. Second, detailed instructions are provided on how to write killer ads that will improve click through rate. Third, if you don’t understand some points, the videos help clarify things. I have not put his techniques to the test yet so I can’t vouch for them. But the information was very good and much different than what I’ve heard before. And if you read elsewhere in my blog you know I have purchased most of the pay per click products currently on the market.

Without testing the product, out of 10 points, I give this product 8.

New experiments and blogging to the bank.

2006-07-13T20:15:00.000-04:00

In my last post I mentioned I would be giving site build it a try. Well, I got side tracked and instead have purchased blogging to the bank. For about a month now, I've been creating a couple of blogs and testing what I learned in the ebook. Nothing amazing has happened yet. One blog I'm focusing on is averaging about 13 unique visitors a day. With more back links, I'm hoping to increase that to 100 unique visitors a day. When that happens, I'll experiment with adsense and affiliate links and see how much money can be made.

I have one google campaign running now. I can't count the number of times I've given up on adwords. What usually happens is I'll create a couple of campaigns and lose money and then I'll quit for awhile. Then a couple months down the road, I'll start another campaign. With this particular campaign I'm experimenting with the ad copy. I'm trying to keep free be seekers from clicking on my ad and only having potential customers click on it. The campaigns only been running for a couple of days so I'll post the results when its run for 100 clicks.

Site Build It and why I'm jumping on board.

2006-02-05T16:48:00.000-04:00

I'm waiting anxiously for February to end so I can start my marketing campaign again. I don't have high hopes for it. I've come to the conclusion the marketing products using paid advertising requires alot of marketing expertise. I'm still hoping my campaign will be profitable and that it will lead to many more profitable campaigns, but I'm tired of relying on pay per click advertising. Its just taking money out of my pocket. Instead, I'm going to give site build it a try. I'm looking forward to no longer having to pay for traffic. I've been falling for the get rich quick schemes for two years now and none of them have worked so I'm ready to get rich slow.

Site build it seems like its the best way to go. It will probably be at least 6 months before I start earning any money, but even if one website can bring in $300.00 per month. Ten websites can provide me with a fulltime income. Ten sites may take 10 years to create if I build them in my spare time, but in ten years I would be able to quit my job and live off the income. I'm only 26 so thats better than waiting until I'm 65 to retire.

I haven't forgotten about this blog.

2006-01-14T17:14:00.000-04:00

I meant to write this post back in December, but I got lazy. Back in November I was experimenting with my google campaign. I had made it profitable again, but at the beginning of December the sales stopped. I ran the campaign for another 100 hundred clicks, but no sale resulted, so I stopped it. I'll give you the specific stats in another post. I'm not sure why the sales stopped. It could be due to the Christmas season or it could be due that there wasn't a very big market for this product and the majority of people have bough it already. I don't know for sure. So what I'm going to do is restart the campaign in March. I figure I'll let January and February pass since most people are probably running low on money due to Christmas. So I won't be posting until March. Take Care.

Stats

2005-11-19T14:34:00.000-04:00

I'm sorry I haven't posted my stats in awhile. I've been busy for the past 8 days. I started a new job working for a company that sells electrical products. I'm their delivery driver/warehouse worker. My brother and I also share the same computer, so the only time I can get on is when he's not and he's on quit frequently.

I ended up stopping my google campaign, it reached 100 clicks and didn't have a sale. My overture one on the other hand is doing better. Last time I posted, the campaign had reached 100 clicks and it made a sale in the nick of time so I decided to keep it running. I made some changes to it, in case you didn't know, I posted the changes I made in an earlier post. The campaigns has had 55 clicks between November 11-18. I made another sale on 11/14/05. I'm hoping the changes I made will improve its conversion rate. I'm getting fewer clicks on a daily basis than what I was before the changes. Now my ads in the top three positions for relevant keywords and in the 5th and 6th for the less relevant ones.

Before, I was getting alot of clicks from the less relevant keywords because my ad was in the top three positions. Now the opposite is happening, I'm gettting more clicks from the relevant keywords and less from the less relevant ones. This should result in a better conversion rate. If it does, I'll apply the same changes to my google campaign and start it up again.

Take care for now.

Review of The Affiliate Cash Vault

2005-11-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

I purchased this product the other day and I returned it the following. The product is not worth your money. It introduces you to clickbanks website and then explains briefly how you can market clickbank products using adwords, newspaper classifieds, ezines, and safe lists. It also explains a little bit about using adwords to make money from adsense ads. The problem with the product is it doesn't go into much detail about any form of advertising. For example, with adwords, it doesn't explain how to write effective ads, how to research keywords, or which clickbank products work best. I don't think it even touched on clickthrough rates, ad position, or how much you should bid for keywords. And safe lists are pretty worthless. Most of the people who join them are advertisers. They don't bother reading the email they get from them. Once in a while a subject line might catch their attention, but do you really want to count on that kind of advertising.

Out of 10 points, I give this product 1.

Another Sale

2005-11-12T01:09:00.000-04:00

On November 9 my overture campaign had run for its last 100 clicks. I was going to stop the campaign, but I ended up making a sale that day. This campaign's averaging about a 1% conversion rate. I'm paying .12 for the keywords and the commission is $13.35. Not going to make any money with a 1% conversion rate so I'm going to lower the bids on the general keywords and increase them on the more relevant ones and see what happens. Since I did make a sale, I will continue to run the campaign on overture for another 100 clicks.

Here's the stats for November 8-10

Google:
33 clicks
No Sales

Overture:
75 clicks
1 sale

Tip of the day: I've read several google adwords blogs, not to mention adwords ebooks, and the one blog that has continued to stand out the most is Barry Stein's. He started marketing clickbank products with google adwords back in November 2003. He kept a blog from December 13, 2003 until March 22, 2004. He's had alot of success marketing clickbank products. His blog is inspirational and contains alot of advice. Check it out for yourself by visiting http://www.awebbiz.com/marketing-blog.htm

Frustration

2005-11-09T00:49:00.000-04:00

I haven't made a sale in the last three days. Combined clicks from both overture and google equal 100. I'm going to run this campaign for 100 clicks on both overture and google and if it doesn't produce a sale, I'm going to drop it.

Here are the stats for November 5-7th.

Google:
40 clicks and 0 sales

Overture:
60 clicks and 0 sales

I'll continue running this campaign for another 60 clicks on google and 40 on overture. If no sale results, its gone.

Tip of the day: You have to hold each of your campaigns accountable. If you need a 2% conversion rate to make a profit, then your campaign needs to average a 2% conversion rate. If the campaign breaks even sometimes, but then is profitable again, I would keep it running. But don't let your campaign run for 100 clicks without a single sale, otherwise your playing catch up and now you need a 3% conversion rate in the next 100 clicks to make a profit. Odds are that won't happen. Your best bet would be to lower your bids so that you can profit even with a 0.5% conversion rate. That conversion rate is alot easier to achieve, but keyword cost often don't allow us to do so.

The Biggest Kept Secret About Google Adwords!

2005-11-08T01:40:00.000-04:00

I want tell everyone that reads this post something very important. And that something is that promoting affiliate programs with google adwords is very difficult and odds are you will not be able to make a part-time or full-time income doing it. I know you've probably heard that other people are doing it and having alot of success at it, but the majority of people will not. Here's why: Pay per click advertising can work well for business owners that have a good sales model. What I mean by sales model is that they don't just get one purchase per customer, but can rely on repeat business from customers. The problem with affiliates is they only get one purchase per customer. If your promoting clickbank products, the only commission you get is from that product. Once the customer makes a purchase, you'll never sell them that product again.

The other problem for affiliates, is that most products they promote using pay per click advertising, they'll be lucky if they get 1% of people who click on their ads to make a purchase. Plus with keyword cost increasing, its hard to make a profit. If I'm getting a $20.00 dollar commission and my conversion rate is 1%, I need to spend less than .20 cents per click if I want to make a profit. But what if .15 cents per click only gets me on the second or third page of google's search results, I'm not going to get hardly any traffic.

If your serious about making money utilizing the internet, if I were you, I would sell my own products or look into selling other peoples through Ebay instead of becoming an affiliate and using pay per click advertising for your traffic means.

Saturday at Midnight

2005-11-06T02:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I stopped my second campaign. It had 48 clicks and 0 sales. The product I was promoting was www.montessoriparentsguide.com. When I started promoting it, I didn't think it was going to do well. The sales letter was ok, but not great and the whole product was about information that could probably be found for free on the internet. I decided to promote it because it was moving up the ranks fast in the home and family/parenting category. According to affiliates alert, it was ranked 61st on October 9, 2005 and on November 3, 2005, it was ranked 20th. That's a pretty significant increase in about 4 weeks.

So as of right now, I'm only running one campaign

Here are the stats for November 3, 2005

Google:
20 clicks
0 sales

Overture:
17 clicks
0 sales

Here are the stats for November 4, 2005

Google:
12 clicks
1 sale

Overture:
19 clicks
1 sale

Posting my stats on a daily basis is becoming a little monotonous. So I'm going to post them every 3-5 days instead.

I going to start a little section called tip of the day and it will contain adwords advice. Please note, read the tips with a grain of salt. I'm not an adwords expert, far from it. I've never had long lasting success with adwords, but I have started enough campaigns and read enough ebooks to share some insights. With that being said, heres today's...

Tip of the day: When starting a google campaign, its probably a good idea to turn off the search and content network. If your campaign doesn't have a profitable conversion rate running on google alone, then odds are it won't have a better conversion rate running on the search and content network.

Stats for November 2,2005

2005-11-03T17:12:00.000-04:00

Campaign 1

Google:
15 clicks
1 sale

Overture:
15 clicks
0 sales

I've made one sale so thats encouraging. To early to tell if it will continue to be profitable. I'll cross my fingers.

Campaign 2

Google:
3 clicks
0 sales

Started a New Campaign

2005-11-02T23:22:00.000-04:00

Today I went ahead and started a new campaign. I'm going to continue running my other campaign and I'll continue to document its progress. I'm only running my new campaign on google and I'm only using two keywords. I'm bidding .40 cents per click so I'm only going to test this product for 35-40 clicks. I'll start documenting its progress as well.

If any of you have any tips or advice feel free to share them in the comments area.

Yesterday's Stats

2005-11-02T12:48:00.000-04:00

I currently only have one campaign running. The product comes from clickbank and its called zone training your weimaraner. It can be found in clickbank under the home and family category, subcategory pets. I'm running the campaign on both overture and google. I've heard that in some cases, overture will give you a better conversion rate. Here are the stats for November 1. 2005.

Google:
9 clicks
0 sales

Overture:
16 clicks
0 sales

Documenting Campaigns

2005-11-01T01:08:00.000-04:00

About a week ago I started four new campaigns. I stopped all but one. So far I've made 2 sales in the first 100 clicks. I'm going to start documenting the number of clicks I get each day and any sales I make.

Adwords Help

2005-10-23T22:33:00.000-04:00

Its been several months since I posted on this blog, but I'm finally ready to get back to it. One of the reasons I haven't posted is because before I jumped back into adwords I wanted to read Perry Marshall's ebook, The Definative Guide to Google Adwords. That ebook took a couple of weeks to get through and I was pretty busy during the summer doing contracting work, but to make a long story short, To Late!, I'm ready to start posting again.

adwords help

Using website addresses as keywords

2005-07-16T14:50:00.000-04:00

The amazon campaign taught me two important lessons. Make sure you read the operating agreement before advertising a companies products and two, using website addresses as keywords tend to convert well.

I followed up my amazon campaign with a campaign for Walmart and Target. The only keywords I used again were their website addresses. Both campaigns had similar conversion rates. They both averaged about 2.9%. Unfortunately, the campaigns were not profitable. I was only paying 5 cents per click, but the commissions I received would range between .30 to $20.00. It just depended on how much stuff a customer ordered. The Walmart campaign was profitable for awhile, but the orders kept getting smaller and smaller so I stopped it before I lost any more money. I couldn't rely on how big a customers order was going to be. In most cases they were small.

I tried to figure out why Amazons conversion rates were so high and Walmarts and Targets were so low. My thought process went like this. All three websites are similar. They all are basically department stores online. Customers tend to trust the store names so trust probably wouldn't be an issue. The only conclusion I came up with was that Amazon is strictly an online retailer, while Walmart and Target are both offline stores as well. Lets say that a customer went to Walmart to see if they carried a certain dvd player, that customer wouldn't have to order online, they could simply run down to their local Walmart and purchase it there.

Or and I just thought of this, most of the products that Amazon sells are pretty small, books, movies etc... Maybe customers felt more comfortable ordering small itiems online as oposed to big itiems like dvd players. I can't say for sure. I do know that most of the itiems ordered from my amazon campaign were books and movies.

Important Note: Most of the companies I've checked out do not allow affiliates to bid on their trademark name or website address. However, you can bid on trademark names and website addresses for clickbank products. So far I've only tried one campaign and it currently is profitable.

Here's the campaign:

Data Hound Detective
Sniff Out Information on Anyone
Investigate Anyone, Anywhere.
www.datahounddetective.com

Here's the list of keywords I used:
datahounddetective
data hound detective
datahounddetective.com
"data hound detective"
"datahounddetective.com"
[data hound detective]
[datahounddetective.com]

Important Note: I have stopped this campaign because it is no longer profitable. The main problem with using clickbank vendor website addresses and trademarks as keywords is that alot of affiliates are doing this and for most products the keywords only get searched a couple of hundred times a month or less.

Taste of success

2005-07-16T14:44:00.000-04:00

I have had two brief successes. The first one was promoting an ebook from clickbank that contained a home remedy for Trichotillomania. In case your wondering what Trichotillomania is, I believe its a mental disorder where people pull out their hair when they feel anxious. If your interested in taking a look at the sales letter for that product, it can be found at http://www.123trichotillomaniafree.com.

I had made 8 sales with the product and all was going well. The campaign was profitable. I don't remeber what the conversion rate was, but I do remember that I was making a profit with each sale. Then the strangest thing happened. The next three sales I made I recieved no commission. I found out that the author of the product reduced her commission from 50% to 0%. Shortly after that she decided not to use clickbank as her payment processor. To this day I do not know why. I do know that she and I both were using google adwords to market her product and we both were bidding on the keyword Trichotillomania and other keyword phrases that contained the word Trichotillomania. My quess is she figured she didn't need affiliates to use adwords to promote her product when she could do it herself. She probably made more money promoting it herself to.

That was my first profitable campaign and a huge dissappointment when the author decided to no longer accept affiliates. My next profitable campaign was a huge success and also a big let down. I started a campaign promoting amazon.com.

The only keyword I used was amazon.com. I used phrase, exact, and broad matching. That campaign had the best conversion rate I've ever seen. If I ran it all day long, the conversion rate would average about 30%. If I ran it during the evenings and nights only, the conversion rate would average about 38%. Within 5 days I had made over $3000.00 in profits. I was estactic. I started thinking about all the things I could buy. It was a fantastic feeling.

On about the fifth day of the campaign I recieved an email from amazon stating that they do not allow affiliates to bid on their trademark name, website address, or any variation thereof. I was ordered to stop my campaign immediately. I finally hit it big and I was shut down. For a couple of days I was really upset, but I realized there was nothing I could do so I just let it go.

A little about me.

2005-07-10T23:53:00.000-04:00

I'm 24 years old and I live in Bunker Hill, WV. I've been involved with affiliate marketing off and on for about 1 and 1/2 years. I've spent most of my time marketing clickbank products with google adwords. I've expermented a little with solo emails, free classified ads, and forum postings. I've lost more money than I've made and sometimes I wonder why I keep doing this.

I'm sure some of you are thinking, you've been trying this for a year and a half, give it up already. I can't really argue with you. The one thing that keeps me going is the fact that I can't stand the idea of working 40 hours a week at a job I hate until I reach retirement age. Plus the moneys not that great either.

The other reason I keep trying is because I believe that google adwords works. Theres no other form of advertising that I know of where you can pin point your target market and only have your ads shown to them.

I think the people who succeed the fastest are the ones that have a sales or marketing background in the offline world. Unfortunately, I don't have either.

Welcome

2005-07-09T23:36:00.000-04:00

Hi, my name is Kevin Emswiler and welcome to my blog. I created this blog to document my google campaigns. My blogs going to be a little different than some of the others I've read because I'm going to tell you what products I'm marketing and some of the keywords I'm using. My hope is that by documenting my progress I will be able to figure out whats working and what's not and eventually find a profitable campaign.