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How to Upgrade to an Adwords My Client Center

Stuart — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:11:21 +0000

Thanks for your emails & concern, yes I am still alive I’ve been taking a bit of a break recently, focusing on work & getting stuck into some of my own projects including finalising my Australian Residency. I try to answer all emails so just shoot me one if you have any questions.

Here’s a question from Jared:

Do you use an Adwords My Client Center? & if so what are the advantages?

If you’re managing multiple Adwords Accounts upgrading to a Google MCC Account makes perfect sense. You don’t have to log in & out to switch between them & also creating new accounts is a breeze.

I highly recommend making the jump across regardless of whether you have 1 account or several & also especially if you’re spending more than $500 a month.

There’s a few perks to having an Adwords MCC Account:

You can manage multiple accounts from 1 interface
You can split things up much better & assign budgets
You can bill each account seperately
If you spend more than $500 consistently you can take the Adwords Professional Exam
Get your own dedicated Adwords Professional Page
You can qualify for vouchers (only once you’ve completed the Professional Exam)
If you decide to take on clients you’re already set up

If you decide to take the GAP exam (which is valid for 2 years) you’ll be able to show it off on your sites. Not only that but I guarantee it’ll get you a much larger foot in the door if you apply for any SEM related jobs.

Upgrading your account is pretty simple:

Join as a Google Advertising Professional
Input one of your existing Adwords Account
Create a new Google Account to use for the login & you’re done

Now just log in & link any other existing accounts.

As a rule of thumb I normally create 1 account per website that I’m working with, I normally find that this helps me manage spends & budgets much easier.

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Explode your PPC Campaigns in 6 easy Steps

Stuart — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 11:15:27 +0000

Is your PPC campaign dull & lacking that oomph? Good, today is the day to take action & turn things around. Follow these simple steps & explode your PPC Campaign:

1. Try to avoid Phrases with less than 3 Words

There’s a huge difference between “affiliate marketing” & “affiliate marketing blog.” The more words contained within a keyphrase the more targeted your keyphrase is likely to be for that query. Put yourself in the shoes of the searcher, people looking for information will type “affiliate marketing” people who specifically want to read an affiliate marketing blog will type the latter.

The same works with all industries. Bidding on “doctor” is very different than bidding on “doctor in melbourne.” Start to think more about what phrases you’re bidding on rather than being lazy.

2. Don’t waste money – Lose the Broad Match

Whilst Broad Match generally generates more traffic you’ll often find that due to Adwords “Extended Broad Matching” that heaps of unrelated terms will sneak in. Unless your researching for more terms (by utilising the Search Query Report) you should not be throwing money away on keywords that you don’t pre-qualify. Don’t be lazy & do thorough keyword research before embarking on any Adwords campaign. My rule of thumb is always go phrase (with negatives) or exact. That way you know what you’re getting for your money.

3. Catch people in the late stages of the buying process

As I mentioned in point 1, there’s certain phrases that people will use when they’re in different stages of searching. Identifying these can mean the difference between paying $15/conversion or $5/conversion.

Helpful bidding ideas:

Bid on Brand Names of Products & Items
Bid on Company Names & Manufacturers
Use buy, compare & purchase keywords
Leverage product reviews

4. Watch the Search & Content Networks

Check your Campaign Settings to see if the Search Network & Content Network are switched on. I always switch off both initially as I don’t trust where the traffic is coming from. Once I get the campaign to a solid CTR, Position & Return I’ll then test the Search Network to see if it adds or removes value.

If you want to run a Content Campaign, I suggest that you run it within its own campaign. Alone.

5. Create Highly Targeted Adgroups

Theme your adgroups around a particular keyword. If that keyword is affiliate marketing blog then the adgroup may contain:

“affiliate marketing blog”

[affiliate marketing blog]

[affiliate marketing blogs]

Doing this allows you to write a highly targeted creative which relates specifically to the keywords that you’re bidding on. Keeping things highly related like this will increase your CTR, reducing your cost in the long run.

6. Use Highly Targeted Creatives

As explained in the previous point you can now write highly targeted creatives based around a small group of keywords.

Using the above ad group example your creative might look like this:

Affiliate Marketing Blog
Become an Affiliate Marketing Gun
with Earners Blog Affiliate Marketing Blog
Earnersblog.com/AffiliateMarketingBlog

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Adwords Keyword Flipping

Stuart — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 06:16:21 +0000

I hope you’ve all been busy creating your Ebay Affiliate Websites because I’m currently working on a Subscription based Promotional Tool to help you get Indexed & Rank faster. More details will be revealed soon so keep checking

This quick tutorial is on Keyword Flipping.

What is Keyword Flipping?

Keyword Flipping is perfect for Affiliate Marketers & also people running Multiple PPC campaigns at once. It allows you to set up Campaigns quicker, analyse your results quicker then make the necessary optmisation tweaks to increase your CTR once you know what’s already working. This technique saves you time, lots of time.

Overview

As the Affiliate Marketing space becomes more & more saturated it’s important to test as many different offers (with multiple variables) as we can. Naturally it can be a time consuming process setting up very very targeted PPC campaigns without first knowing which keywords are going to perform best for us in the long run. Keyword Flipping basically allows you to test lots of targeted keywords at once then pick the initial performers out & create a more targeted adgroup. Thus further increasing the CTR & reducing the cost we pay per click.

Theory

It’s important to understand the Adwords Bidding Formula to really see why having a higher CTR & keeping things targeted is important:

Ad Score = CTR x Max Bid

Therefore if my overall CTR is 10% & I’m bidding 1 Dollar then my Ad Score is 10. However, if someone else has a CTR of 20% & they’re bidding $0.75 then their Ad Score is 15 therefore outranking my ad (even though they’re bidding less).

This is why people generally bid higher to start, get a decent CTR & tweak adcopy then reduce the bid whilst monitoring position & CTR to get more value per click.

Our aim is to get the highest possible CTR on the ads that are working for us. This allows us to attain this best possible return on our advertising spend. We could make very targeted adgroups & ads for each individual keyword but this takes up time & less time means we can test less offers.

How it Works

When you’re setting up a brand new campaign for a specific offer try to theme your keywords & put them in groups. Let say for example that we’re talking about Web Hosting. You might choose the following keywords:

Cheap Web Hosting
Affordable Web Hosting
Discount Web Hosting
Low Cost Web Hosting
Web Hosting Coupons
Cheapest Web Hosting
Lowest Priced Web Hosting
Cheap Web Hosts

In this group these keywords are themed by price. They all relate to one another fairly well so I can get away with either using Google’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion or Just creating some generic Low Cost Adcopy for them, then I’ll bid to position 4 or Above.

I’ll normally let the ads then run for around 24-48 hours. Once that period has elapsed I’ll go back to the group & check the stats. You will soon be able to see which ads are getting a good number of impressions & clicks. It’s also important to track the conversions on a keyword level, otherwise you won’t know which keywords are converting.

Flipping the keyword now involves grabbing the best performers & creating their own highly targeted adgroup (those that are converting & getting a decent amount of impressions). Say for example that Cheap Web Hosting had the highest CTR of about 8% & converted at 4%. We can then create a new adgroup called “Cheap Web Hosting” that contains that keyword only. We now create a much more targeted ad, such as:

You can see how we use the keyword in the Adcopy 3 times now. As people search for the keyword it highlights the text, thus highlighting their attention to the ad:

Doing this can sometimes double or triple your CTR which means you can hold a much higher position at a fraction of the price. This means that if we still convert at 4% on the keyword we can pull in the same amount of traffic at half the price thus doubling our ROI.

Conclusion

Keyword Flipping is a quick & easy way to find out & isolate your highest performing & highest traffic keywords then refine them further without wasting time optimising keywords that won’t perform.

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Increase Adwords CTR with the Trademark Symbol

Stuart — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 02:16:26 +0000

Well, Spring has just kicked in Down Under & the weather is beautiful. I can’t think of a better way to welcome in the new weather with a simple Adwords Tip.

Here’s a simple technique I’ve been using for a while to increase Adwords CTR for clients. This works well to help you stand out from the crowd. If you client has their brand term trademarked then start implementing this into your Title & Copy.

Use the: ™ & ® symbols in the copy. This creates a sense of authority & commands much more presence over the competing ads.

For example, have a look at the top ads for the popular Keyword Elite software:

Which would you click?

In a recent campaign for a client I’ve seen an increase of CTR from 8% to 23% whilst bidding in Position 3.

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Dominate Adwords

Stuart — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 11:26:16 +0000

This technique works well with the technique described in my previous post (Bidding on Brand Terms).

One of the main problems you’ll run into is when someone else is also bidding on the same brand term with the same display URL. You’ll need to outrank them to snag the spot & get your ad to show. The best way to do this, is to naturally up your Max CPC until your ad shows, but, when the other affiliate notices their ad isn’t showing then they’ll up their maximum bid. The last thing you want is a game of Adwords Tennis with someone who already probably has a pretty good keyword history (since they’ve been bidding on the keyword much longer than you have).

In an ideal situation we just want to blow this other affiliate out of the water, so that no matter what he bids he’ll NEVER beat us.

So how do we do this? Easy. Just bid $100 on the keyword.

Contrary to popular belief, bidding $100 on a particular keyword does not mean you’ll pay $100 per click. It simply means you’re willing to pay up to that amount. And on brand terms chances are you’ll very rarely pay more than $0.50 or so (unless the brand term has a high value keyword in it like mortgage or loan).

Still with me? Good. Look at the screenshot above, I’m bidding $100 on a particular keyword with a CTR of 57%. Even if a new affiliate comes into this space & tries to bid on this keyword with the same display URL he won’t be able to outrank me even if he bids $100. Why? Well in order to get a Quality Score he needs to show, he can’t show because he can’t outrank me & therefore my keyword is 100% safe from competition.

This is also a good method to use if you’re trying to protect your brand from Affiliates, I highly recommend doing this otherwise you could lose your brand keyword to someone like me

One extra thing to note, please make sure you have the content bids turned off if you’re using this technique.

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Lesson #12: Brand Leveraging

Stuart — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:55:56 +0000

What would you say if I told you there’s tens of thousands of Affiliate Programs out there that you can set up a campaign in Adwords for in 3 minutes & let it run, then come back 72 hours later & see if it’s profitable or not?

What if you could set up 30 of these mini campaigns?

I like to call this technique Brand Leveraging. It’s fairly easy & very straightforward, but there’s two condition’s that need to be met before you can start:

The merchant must not have a trademark on their Domain Name / Brand Name registered with Google.
The merchant can’t be bidding on their own brand terms (unless you want to fight them for it).

You can find heaps of good merchants to use for this on Commission Junction & Clixgalore.

Simply sign up to their affiliate program, start a new adgroup in Adwords & target the brand name whilst linking directly to their homepage (via your affiliate link of course). For example, lets say Earners Blog was the brand name, you’d bid on the keywords:

earners blog
earnersblog
earnersblog.com
www.earnersblog.com

Now write 3-4 compelling PPC ads & test for 72 hours. This will allow you to gauge the amount of traffic the brand terms get & will also allow you to split test the Creatives for the highest clickthrough rate. If you’re getting decent traffic then get rid of the 3 worst performing Creatives. This should also allow you to lower your bid fairly low (since you should have a decent quality score).

This technique allows you to leverage directly off people coming to the website purely on brand. This usually means they’ve either:

Bought something from the site before
Visited the site before
Been told about the site from a friend

Either way I’ve got some very profitable & very very cheap campaigns running that really exploit this technique. I’ve found this technique works best on Shopping Cart style stores, since users will always tend to buy more than one product at a time.

Enjoy.

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Having Trouble with Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

Stuart — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 11:47:34 +0000

I’ve come across an annoying problem lately using the DKI option in Adwords. Whilst I’m a big fan of keeping Adgroups as specific as possible there’s sometimes when using the Dynamic Keyword Insertion option really saves time.

However I’ve recently been noticing that even though I’ve set the DKI on the adgroup the default ad text is still appearing in the title.

For example:

{KeyWord:Buy Playstation 3}

if you use the keyword [buy playstation 3 ohio] you would then expect the title of the ad to appear as Buy Playstation 3 Ohio. However for every keyword in the Adgroup it’ll default to Buy Playstation 3.

This is damn annoying & forces me to create more specific adgroups for almost every individual keyword. So I emailed Google to find out what is going on, this is the reply I got:

As I mentioned, Quality Score is used as a positional tool for your ad. However, if the keyword that triggers your ad does not meet a certain Quality Score threshold, then yes, your default text will be used. However, this does not have to do with what the user queries. This quality threshold is dependent upon the keyword in your account.

Riiiight, lets blame the Quality Score on everything eh. Lets think about this logically. If I have the keyword [buy playstation 3 ohio] set to go to an ohio store that sells a playstation 3 then how wouldn’t this be more relevant than Buy Playstation 3?

So, how do we get around this problem? Well, the best way to increase the quality score is to Dynamically Insert the keyword onto the page content using a script.

For example in work I track everything like this:

http://www.website.com.au/page-name/index.html?kw=buy_playstation_3_online

So I use an excel spreadsheet to generate the string needed for Adwords editor & automatically append the keyword I’m targeting to the end of the URL. Firstly, this lets me see which keywords are converting & secondly, the code on the page then calls also keyword from the URL string & inserts it on the page (it also strips out the underscores).

This means that when the Google Quality Score bot comes along it sees the relevant term on the page. Voila! Welcome back Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

The only other way around this problem is to really narrow down your Adgroups & make the ad text really specific to the keywords. Whilst this is the ideal scenario it can also be pretty time consuming. Soon we’ll look at how Adwords Editor can speed up this process & make your life much easier. More time for tweaking then

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Is Adwords trying to filter out Affiliate Marketers?

Stuart — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 11:35:01 +0000

As many of you know Google has recently introduced a few new tweaks to the infamous Quality Score mechanism that calculates the minimum bid on particular keywords.

The Quality Score is a direct measure of the quality of your landing page in relation to the keyword you are bidding on. Like me, many Affiliates have noticed an increase in the minimum bid across the board:

It’s no suprise to me that Google is constantly trying to improve the quality of sites & landing pages, especially after the update to the Adsense page quality terms & conditions that was announced last week.

In the threads above you’ll notice that even people with relatively high performing keywords (8% + CTR) have been hit. For those of us that made a killing from sending affiliate offers directly to the merchants website a few years ago, you will know all too well that this just doesn’t work too well anymore, high minimum bids make profit margins very small. But we adapted & started creating highly targeted landing pages that brought the minimum bids down & made the campaigns profitable again.

My own personal views on the recent changes are that Google is trying to increase the quality of sites advertising on Adwords by pushing up minimum bids. In doing so only the Affiliates that are smart enough to adapt will continue. It’s no real surprise that there’s a lot of newbie affiliates out there all sending traffic directly to the merchant page bidding on hundreds of untargeted keywords that won’t convert & in the end driving up my costs. I personally think they are looking now at much more than just the landing page on its own but more the entire structure & theme of the surrounding website (if it exists).

So what can you do about the recent changes?

This is the question that everyone is asking, it’s also something I personally feel Google needs to be much more open about in the Adwords Guidelines.

Well, lets look at how Google defines a Quality Landing Page?

The whole article is a bit vague, however you can see in a round about way some of the things they are now looking at on Landing Pages.

So, here are my tips for increasing your Quality Score in accordance to the Adwords Policies:

Provide relevant and substantial content.

If you’re not using the keywords that you’re bidding on within the content of the page is it going to be deemed as relevant in the eyes of the Adwords QS bot?

Relevant content means:

Including Keywords on the Page
Having Content on the Page & not just images
Not using scraped content & dup content
If you have Ads on the page you need to distinguish them from the rest of the content

Number 4 is interesting, perhaps the Google QS Bot is now looking for landing pages with Adsense Ads & then checking to see if they are disclosed. Although this is merely a thought.

Be upfront about your services and offers and how they are provided.

Make sure your website includes the following:

About Us
Contact Page

Treat a userâ€™s personal information responsibly

This is short for make sure your website has a privacy policy. There are plenty of resources around the internet to help you create one of these.

Develop an easily navigable site.

I’ve personally found that my Quality Score greatly increases for a landing page when that page is part of a larger website. Landing Pages that exist without the presence of a larger structure don’t seem to do as well.

Other tricks that have worked well for me:

Masking Affiliate Links
Dynamic Keyword Insertion for Landing Pages
Using Adcenter more

It’s becoming harder & harder for Affiliates to take the easy route out. I can only see it getting harder & harder as time goes on.

My advice is, build quality websites & structure your Affiliate Offers & Landing Pages around the website. These types of sites generally don’t get slammed or banned. But this involves much more work than throwing up a generic landing page?

Which is exactly what I think Google is trying to weed out.

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Google finally cracks down on Arbitrage

Stuart — Sun, 20 May 2007 07:00:28 +0000

In a move that wasn’t really much of a surprise Google has finally taken action on Adsense Publishers that are using Arbitrage & MFA Sites to make money. Claiming that it’s an unfit business model.

Starting from June 1st many arbitrage publishers will have their accounts disabled & any remaining balance paid out. Even the big boys who are earning 70k/month are not safe. Some publishers have already had the dreaded email explaining that their accounts will be disabled as of June 1st.

So, If you are doing arbitrage & not had an email yet, now may be the time to stop if you want to keep your Adsense account. No-one is quite sure how Adsense are detecting publishers, even still which publishers they are targeting, but it could be a number of factors:

Those advertising on .info domains
Those with Adsense code on Landing Pages
Those with a high overall CTR
Publishers that are not converting well

After all, Adsense is all about providing value for the Advertiser. We’ve seen this in the past. If the Advertisers is not converting then they won’t use the content network. Simple.

So what does this mean for publishers?

Well it’s hard to say. Whilst I don’t doubt that the quality of the content network will increase greatly, there will be less advertisers & less inventory, therefore potential less earnings. That is until Adwords Advertisers start trusting the quality of the content network (which at the moment many are not advertising on).

Sources: Webmaster World, Jensense, Wickedfire, Shoemoney

Update: Check out the sources to read into this topic for yourself. Lots of conflicting stories. What we do know is that people ARE getting accounts disabled (not everyone), those people WERE doing arbitrage. Sending Adwords traffic to MFA sites with multiple 336×280 blocks of Adsense. What we don’t know is the criteria for the bans.

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Quick Adwords Tip #2: Quality not Quantity

Stuart — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 02:11:06 +0000

When setting up an adwords campaign it’s easy to get click happy & add heaps of keywords into an Ad Group.

One of the biggest ways to not only keep costs down but also track the progress of the campaign is to keep Adgroups highly targeted. Relevance is everything.

Quite often my adgroups contain very highly targeted keywords. I might only have anywhere between 5-25 keywords in one adgroup.

For example, the campaign is Playstation 3, the Adgroup is Playstation 3 Controllers, Keywords are:

“Buy Playstation 3 Controller”
“Buy Wireless Playstation 3 Controller”
“additional playstation 3 controller”
“cheap playstation 3 controller”
“buy ps3 controller”
“cheap ps3 controller”

Buy playstation 3 controller might convert 1 in 4, however playstation 3 controller might only convert 1 in 30

The advantages of keeping it so targeted are as follows:

It’s easier to keep track of bids & adjustments.
It’s easier to see which keywords are performing & which are not.
You can have targeted landing pages for each adgroup.
You increase the relevancy of each adgroup & the ctr because you’re using very targeted keywords.
You decrease your average CPC.

Conclusion

Spending that extra time really structuring your Adwords Campaigns can really save you a huge amount of time, frustration & money in the long run.

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Quick Adwords Tip #1

Stuart — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 02:38:11 +0000

With the new quality score updates rolled out I can appreciate that now some campaigns are becoming less profitable, so I thought I’d post a few tips now & again to help you guys keep on top of things. So here’s #1.

If you’re using exact matching on a keyword & you’re averaging a 5% CTR constantly then you can lower your bid by 1c everyday & still keep your position. So if you’re bidding $0.30 to start after 15 days you will be bidding $0.15 & still keep the position.

Advantages of this is that you can half your running costs on some keywords & make them twice as profitable

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Followup to the 1c Clicks Debate

Stuart — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 01:41:06 +0000

I’ve had heaps of emails from people wanting to know how the hell the whole 1c clicks thing works. No-one seems to be able to get any & they’re all pretty annoyed that they can’t. Firstly, if someone gives you a piece of advice you don’t go around saying “It doesn’t work so he must be lying” why on earth would I want to give away a valuable piece of advice & lie about it at the same time? Perhaps information like this should be kept away from people that don’t know how to use it? Maybe check here for people putting this into real practice.

That aside, another real problem is that people go away & expect it to be easy. They expect to throw a few hundred keywords & a crap banner into Adwords & the clicks to come rolling in like hotcakes. Well you’re in for a serious reality check.

The main thing you have to bear in mind with the previous article that I wrote is this.

People are using this technique for ARBITRAGE.

They are buying cheap clicks on really really niche terms then forwarding them to pages with higher paying ads. I can guarantee that most of the keywords you may be bidding on are expensive terms that you’ll never get 1c clicks on (More like 2-5c).

So here’s a few tips:

Don’t just make one banner ad, make an ad for each size of banner. This will increase your impressions by around 500%

Bid on as many keywords as you can that are relevant to the content of your site, use the adwords site keyword tool then build on that.

If you’re doing arbitrage you’ll obivously have dynamic keyword insertion set up, so you can literally create hundreds of adgroups with thousands of keywords across many niches. Whenever you do that, you’ll start to see the value in the cheap traffic. So for example at the moment I have 1 adgroup filled with banners targeting around 780 keywords that’s bringing in around 5,000 impressions a day with a CTR of around 0.02%. Imagine this on a larger scale.

So if you’ve only got one ad up & you’re only bidding on 150 keywords then you come running to me complaining that it doesn’t work. EXPERIMENT FOR YOURSELF & remember that original post was made not for people with sites but for people doing this in mass.

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Learning not to Waste Money on Adwords

Stuart — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 10:54:42 +0000

I know I’ve made a lot of posts about Adwords lately, I guess it’s something I’m playing heavily with at the moment so I’m trying to give you an idea of what’s working & what’s not.

One of the hardest things about Affiliate Marketing is finding a campaign that profitable. There’s nothing worse than throwing 100 bucks into an affiliate only to realise that the market is too competitive or they just don’t convert.

The problem however is many Affiliate Marketers prefer to “Set & Forget” campaigns & get stuck right in, instead of doing the research & groundwork first. Thus wasting money instead of time (I know which I’d rather waste).

So what are the top techniques to make sure you’re not wasting money on Adwords:

Competitor Research: If you’re planning to bid on a particular keyword you should be watching the Adwords Ads for a high turnover. I.e. Do the top ads change often? If they do chances are they’re not profitable & have a high turnover. If the top ads stay similar over a 1 week period chances are they are profitable for the advertisers & you have more chance to profit aswell.

Bidding: When bidding it’s best to initally go in around position 3-4. You can outbid someone by $0.01 if you play smart. Once you gather up a decent CTR you can then start winding back your bid but still keep your position. Many people fail to do the second part & let the inital bid run. Winding back the bid is what makes the campaign profitable, you may need to however take a hit to outbid the compeititors initally.

Bad Keyword Choice: I never bid on broad keywords. I almost always use Exact or Phrase Match. See my last post on the difference between Broad, Phrase & Exact Matching. Never go too broad, try to keep it as targeted as possible. For example you’re selling an affiliate marketing ebook I wouldn’t bid on “make money online” I’d bid on something like “affiliate marketing guide.”

No Negative Keywords: Many people make the mistake of not utilising negative keywords properly. There are the keyword phrases you don’t want your ad appearing for. For example “free affiliate marking book.”

Here’s a small list I use:

guide
serial
hack
cheat
hacked
maps
set
cheats
install
nude
soundtrack
crack
installer
patch
torrent
demo
iso
preview
trailer
desktop
item
registration
tutorial
download
key
release
uninstall
keygen
release date
walkthrough
exploit
review
wallpaper
free
reviews
warez

You can obviously add your own to that depending on the product & service.

Conversions: If you’re not getting a conversion within 100 clicks pull the campaign, for gods sake. You want to at least be aiming for a 3%+ conversion rate. This also depends on how targeted your ads & keywords are.

Bidding Wars: Never enter a bidding war if you know you can’t win whilst still staying profitable. Again I normally try to keep my ads around position 2-4 there’s no point going to number 1 unless there’s little competition.

Have a unique Display URL: This will mean that you don’t have to outbid the other URL to get displayed. Sometimes you can get away with things like www.ebay.com/uk/ or www.ebay.co.uk/us/ & the editors won’t catch you out. Sometime they will & that’s when you need to change things up a little.

What’s working for me at the moment?

At the moment I’m trying to concentrate outside the US market at less competitive niches & countries. I can still make the same amount per conversion but the competition is less & I’m paying less per click but getting a far better CTR.

Good example of a less competitive affiliate: Amazon Canada

For those that are new I’m still accepting Reviews of the Blog so get cracking if you want a chance to win. There’s been some good submissions already, but not nearly enough. It’ll be a good chance to get yourself some exposure on a blog that has more than 500 regular readers (according to feedburner).

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1c Clicks from Google Adwords for Arbitrage

Stuart — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 01:08:57 +0000

Getting cheap clicks from Adwords can be frustrating sometimes. This particular method was revealed in Wickedfire last week but it’s something a lot of us have been doing for a while.

It’s so simple it’s not funny.

If you’re advertising a product go into Photoshop & make a 728×90 Banner & a 468×60 Banner. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but make it as appealing to click as possible.

For example:

Then just fire up all your keywords & create Image Ads instead of Text Ads. Now import as many keywords as you can into Adwords & set them all at $0.01 CPC. Don’t worry about it saying they’re inactive for search, it’s the content network we’re worried about here.

You should now find yourself getting heaps & heaps of cheap clicks to your Arbitrage Sites which you can then either convert into affiliate sales or monetize with Adsense. If not you can also use it as a nice cheap branding exercise for your new site. Happy Photoshopping

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Learning the Difference between Broad, Phrase & Exact Match Bidding

Stuart — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 04:26:34 +0000

When you’re playing in the realm of PPC & especially when you first get started many people usually just slap in a load of keywords & hope of the best. However, as you become more accustomed to the way PPC works & the searching habits of your prospective buyers you’ll learn to keep your campaigns much, much more targeted.

This article will explain the difference between Broad, Phrase & Exact Match targeting within Google Adwords.

First when choosing keywords for a PPC campaign I usually use Keyword Elite to help me narrow down the variants of keywords I want & the different phrases I want to target.

When you’re inputting they keywords into Adwords there are a number of different options you can use:

Broad Match: This is the most primitive form of keyword input. An example would be:

online playstation games

But since it’s a broad match it would also trigger for the following phrases:

playstation games online

games online playstation

playstation online games

The problem with this is that often when the words in a particular phrase a rearranged they can become untargeted & mean something completely different to what someone is actually searching for. Thus reducing your CTR & potentially losing you money in clicks.

Phrase Match: Phrase Match is a much more targeted way to pinpoint exact phrases that someone might use to search for a particular product.

For example:

“playstation games online”

Would also trigger for the following phrases:

buy playstation games online

order playstation games online

purchase playstation games online

However this particular type of targeting can also match for certain undesirable keywords such as:

free playstation games online

download free playstation games online

So it’s important to utilise Negative keywords for the words download & free to avoid you paying for ads in which people are looking for free games. This again will increase your CTR & save you money.

Exact Match: This is the most targeted type of match & the one I prefer to use most often. With this match you can target the exact keywords you want to trigger your ads. The more targeted you are the higher your conversions will be.

For example:

[buy playstation 3 in texas]

[buy playstation 3 memory card online]

So now you have know how all the matching type work, if you’re already running PPC campaigns load them up & see how you can increase your CTR on certain words be being more targeted with your matching types & using negative matching to get rid of the words you don’t want appearing.

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Using Brand Terms & Part Numbers to make Affiliate Sales

Stuart — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 02:10:29 +0000

As a smart affiliate marketer & someone who utilises PPC I know that nothing really converts better than brand terms. These are terms relating to the brand of the company or the name of the product, especially if it has a part number.

The main reason is that people are already aware of the brand & have probably carried out some research already. People also trust a brand name. No Microsoft jokes please :p

For this reason I love creating PPC campaigns that focus on brand terms only & send them straight to the merchant page. Brand terms get a great CTR (Clickthrough Rate), they’re very targeted & they convert very well. This obviously depends on the product & also the landing page too.

What I’ll normally do is pick a merchant in CJ (Commission Junction) & focus on their top 50 highest revenue earning products.

I’ll set up the campaign in adwords with an adgroup for each product.

I’ll always concentrate on terms like buy & purchase, sometimes things like cheap & discount if there is a special offer on.

I’ll then try & fit detailed information in the creative that will urge them to click on it if they’re wanting to buy.

If I can get merchants that have part numbers or product numbers then I’ll definately use those keywords too. Below is a picture of a great ad that’s focusing on a Part Number:

These types of ads that are by far the most profitable for me. Using Part Numbers of things like Laptop Batteries & Car Parts then showing the price of the product & the specs it provides. You’re almost giving the customer all the info they need to buy before they even click on your ad.

Showing the price like this can prevent “curiosity clicks” of people wanting to find out what price is. Also if you are selling the product cheaper than other Sponsored Links then of course you will get the sale over them. Chances are if they don’t have the price in the ad they’ll also lose the price they paid for the “curiosity click” too.

If you keep a steady CTR then your price will drop improving your CPA even further.

The thing to remember with this type of technique is that we’re not going for volume. This is “precision.” Don’t expect hundreds of sales per day unless you have hundreds of successful products. Building up to that level takes patience & a lot of testing. The good thing however is once you get a product right, it’ll run on autopilot & not need much tweaking at all.

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Lesson #8: Finding Profitable Niches Easily with Adwords

Stuart — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 01:59:26 +0000

This is something I’ve been doing for a long time now & it’s probably by far the easiest & best way to find profitable niches on the web.

It’s so simple that you’ll kick yourself for not doing it first. Really, you will.

Sign into Adwords then click on Tools.

Next click on the Keyword Tool.Then click on the Site Related Keywords Tab.Now you need to start finding niches from sites with dynamic content. I’ve created a list of pretty Dynamic sites over the past year. These are sites ranging from things like Holidays, News, Sports, Financial, Religion, Technology, Health Insurance.

For this example I’m using Yahoo, so fire in www.yahoo.com as the site. Make sure you group the keywords by common terms & search by cost as shown below.

Now you should get a list like this:

Now I have a list of around 100 keywords that range from about $8 up to a whopping $60 Average CPC. Ouch.

Bearing in mind that a lot of the keywords on the page are very competitive you can still find some real gems if you delve a little deeper.

I now start picking the more obscure terms & fire them into Google to see what the competition is like, for example Middletown Auto Insurance, this has a competition of around 3,000 terms or so when you target the title in quotes.

The competition heats up a bit when you remove the quotes however you can still see there’s not too many people who use the actual full term “Middletown Auto Insurance.”

So you have a term that’s paying around $28 a click on the Search Network & a half decent chance to rank for it if you’re willing to put the legwork in. Obviously there are millions of other niches out there that have much much less competition. I was able to find 20 in about an hour.

Whenever I find a nice list I then fire everything into Keyword Elite to see if the keyword gets traffic. Sometimes you can find keywords with NO COMPETITION that get over 1000 searches per month.

Now I simply create a blogger blog with the keywords in the domain i.e. middletownautoinsurance.blogspot.com then I’ll make a dedicated page that’s highly relevant & gives good information about Middletown Auto Insurance.

I’ll use Bookmarking Demon & some other programs to generate enough backlinks to get the domain indexed. Then I’ll figure out how I want to monetise it.

I’ve literally set up anywhere close to 500 blogger domains within the last year using this system & it works. Finding the niches with traffic & little competition are the best way to dominate that market.

Don’t forget that you can win an SEO Audit of your site by Reviewing Earners Blog on your Blog, I’ve had about 5 sent in so far so keep em coming!

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Adsense Arbitrage Made Simple

Stuart — Sat, 16 Dec 2006 03:54:03 +0000

I’ve been doing bits & pieces of Adsense Arbitrage for about 6 months now & I can confess that’s is one of the smartest ways of earning money online right now.

In a nutshell it works by buying traffic cheap then sending it to your own site which is highly optimised for Adsense & High Paying Keywords. So say you’re buying clicks for $0.06, your ctr is 50% & youre average click price is $0.20 then essentially you’re making $0.08 Profit for every 2 visitors. Get 1000 clicks in one day then you’re averaging $80 Profit.

Now it’s not an easy thing to pull off, it takes a lot of trial & error. Over the coming months I hope to delve a lot more into successful models that I’ve put into practice on this blog. However, in the meantime I’ve found a really interesting Report that shows how one guy made $4,000 in one month through Adsense Arbitrage.

It’s an interesting report, maybe not as detailed as I would like but it’ll be a good insight for people who:

Don’t know anything about Arbitrage
Don’t know anything about successful Keyword Research
Don’t know about Split Testing

Download the Adsense Arbitrage Report:

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Five Tips to Increase Adwords Conversions & Lower Costs

Stuart — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:23:31 +0000

With the Rising CPC & Cost to Advertisers on Adwords many are now trying new techniques to help lower their CPC & also increase qualified traffic & conversions.

Here’s a list of things I’ve implemented lately that have increased my conversions & helped reduce my monthly spend considerably.

Redirecting to a Squeeze Page, not directly to the Merchant Site

A Squeeze Page is a Presell Page. A page that co-exists between your ad & the merchant site. Generally the rule of thumbs is that if you have qualified traffic that is looking to buy then all they need is a push in the right direction to make the decision. You want them to make that decision & buy through your Affiliate URL.

If you want an example of a good squeeze page simply just type any popular product from Clickbank & view the sponsored results. Here’s an example of a Squeeze Page for Affiliate Project X

Notice how this particular type of page is more of a review from a consumer point of view. He’s not trying to sell you the product because 99% of the time you’re already sold on it. He’s trying to win your trust to buy through his link. To do this he writes phrases like:

I was starting to get anxious, and so I started to browse through the forums, looking for others’ experience with the product. I wanted to see if I had really been suckered by another over-hyped product – or perhaps I had finally hit on the crown jewel of affiliate marketing… After I purchased, it was time to find the real truth.

By doing this he puts himself in the same situation the buyer is in right now, limbo. Not sure whether to actually buy the product or not. The Squeeze Page addresses & rectifies all the doubts the buyer may be having before asking them to buy.

This technique can increase your conversions by anywhere up to 5%

Bid on Brand Terms not Generic Ones

Many people make the mistake of going for very generic terms. Lets say for example I’m running a campaign to promote Adult Friend Finder.

You could go down the patch of promoting terms like:

Online Dating
Meet People Online
Find Love Online

However I find that much too generic. You may get the traffic, it may convert for you. However I’d rather get the high converting traffic.

Nothing converts better than capturing the Brand terms. So for example if I was promoting Adult Friend Finder I would bid on terms like:

adult friend finder
“adult friend finder”
[adult friend finder]
“adultfriendfinder”
adultfriendfinder
[adultfriendfinder]

You get the idea? Not only can you usually get a reasonable price for these terms but also because they are so targeted you usually can get a HUGE click through rate. Anywhere up to & above 20%. The higher your clickthrough rate is the less you can afford to pay per click whilst still keeping your position.

This technique can increase your conversions by anywhere up to 10%

Give away something for Free

Giving away a free gift whilst promoting something on Adwords is a great way to win the sale. You’ll notice on the Squeeze Page I spoke about earlier they are giving away a free video explaining how to use the product.

The more relevant you can make your free gift or bonus item to the product the better.

I usually write my own PDF document with about 10 tips in it, I make the tips relevant to this product but they also secretly sell another product too. I also make the PDF Rebrandable & stress that they can give it away as their own free gift as they like (but it has my affiliate URL’s in it).

Some people also offer discount off the product. You get the idea.

This can increase your conversions by up to 10% & also increase your Offline Conversions (Which is free $$)

Use Subdomains & Folders for Products

We all know that you can’t have the same Display URL as another affiliate. I’ve also found that having the keyword you’re targeting in your Display URL will help increase your Quality Score. Bear this in mind when promoting a product. Perhaps have a look at my previous post about Adwords In Iframes.

So for example for your main creative about toys you may use the domain www.toys.com.

You may want to promote baby toys so you set up a separate group using the url baby.toys.com & so on. This allows you to do a number of things.

Keep track of each niche more closely
Increase Keywords in your URL’s
Increase your Quality Score as each create will also be more targeted

Mirror Your Adwords Campaign

There’s nothing better to knock your competitiors out of the top 10 than to Mirror your campaign & have two Creatives on the front page. If you already know what’s working for you then why not copy it & take advantage of that?

Adwords & Iframes, Outsmart your Competition

Stuart — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 04:23:29 +0000

If you’re new to Adwords you may not be aware of this simple little pierce of information:

Two Ads that have the same display URL will never show at the same time, only the ad with the most relevancy will.

This in itself proves a problem, especially for affiliates that are all trying to promote the same URL.

Lets say for example you are trying to promote PPC on Earners Blog here. Your ad may look something like this:

Now what happens if I’m already promoting Earners Blog myself? That means that we both can’t promote the same destination URL. The destination URL must be the final URL that the user ends up at which in this case is http://www.earnersblog.com

However, all is not lost. There is a way for you to still promote that URL:

Firstly you need to have your own domain.
Create a subdomain similar to the destination url (i.e. earnersblog.blogspot.com)
Show a mirror of the original page in an Iframe

To show the original page in an iframe copy this code into an file called index.htm, replace the values to your own affiliate sites or the site you want to show in the iframe then place it in the subdomain.

Now when you set up a new creative in Adwords make your destination url whatever the subdomain is & also your display url will be the same. Now you can compete with other affiliates without worrying about CTR & your ad not showing.

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$50 Adwords Coupons for Christmas

Stuart — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 11:00:44 +0000

Once again (incase you missed it last time around), Google is giving away $50 Adwords Coupons to new publishers for the Merry Shopping season that’s fast approaching. Get in quick!

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Adwords Landing Page Quality Update

Stuart — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 23:44:07 +0000

Google has posted about the implementation of a new Landing Page Quality Score update:

In the next few days, we will be making two changes to how AdWords evaluates landing page quality. First, we’ll begin incorporating landing page quality into the Quality Score for your contextually-targeted ads, using the same evaluation process as we do for ads showing on Google.com and the search network. Advertisers who may be providing a poor experience on their site will notice that their traffic across the content network decreases as a result of this change. Second, we’re improving our algorithm for evaluating landing page quality and incorporating landing page content retrieved by the AdWords system.

I’m assuming that this is to crack down on the growing number of MFA Advertising sites that are driving down the revenue of Adsense Publishers & also to make the results more relevant.

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