Originally Posted by stevietee
If I was making half that amount I would use it to buy the biggest megaphone I could find..It's just a case of starting somewhere - I look at the objective of PPC to get 100% ROI. Start with £10 and turn that into £20 - once you find something that gives you the ROI it's just a case of doing it again until you build up a nice income.
This is just my opinion, obviously there's as many ways to make money as there are affiliates, but I like to focus on just 1 method. Perfect it in one market then replicate it another and so on. What I do is use databases and scripts to generate 10000s of ad groups with 1 or 2 keywords and a super targetted ad for just that keyword linked to landing pages for each keyword. This works well with any kind of product database as with the Amazon method above. It also works for services that are location dependant. For example say you want to promote dating, clearly dating keywords are super-competitive but dating is location dependant - if a guy is in London he's liable to search for something like "london dating". This is good because it means if you can get a list of towns, counties and regions then perm them with a basic keyword list and write a text ad for each keyword you should be able to get decent traffic at a much lower cost than just bidding on dating alone. This is just a simple example - not something I'm doing. The other key is to track every keyword, keep culling the losers and upping bids on the winners
The idea is once you can perfect your one method stick to it and keep replicating it - hopefully into bigger markets each time. I chose my method because I'm a programmer by background so it's easy for me, if I tried to do something that depends on marketing skills, or SEO or whatever I'd lose my shirt. Obviously you may have a different skillset so you'd want to chose one method that suits your skills then keep focused and keep replicating.
Hi JonSP...
Great advice there and very interesting.
I had one query about this method.
Do folks generally use more than one Adwords account for this? I use a lot less keywords but I'd imagine you'd fill up your Adwords 45,000 limit (or whatever it is) pretty quickly this way?
Thanks!
Tom
As long as you keep clearing out keywords that don't convert you should be able to last quite a while with one account. Because your account history factors your quality score you'd want to keep to one account as long as possible. I have 2 one in £ and one in $ - apart from size limits I find it much easier if selling in the US to pay clicks in $ and use a US timezone.
Cheers,
Jon
Thanks Jon!
Tom
Jon, did you say you used this method with Amazon? If so, don't you find it a headache monitoring ROI with their Tracking ID's? I just don't think their tracking method is scaleable enough for PPC.
Have you verified you're actually getting the 2.5% bonus? The links generated by their deep link generator do not count as direct link referrals. How are you generating your links?
I definitely do! I've asked them about being able to add in a unique tracking code but they said I could only have 100. That wouldn't go too far. They're in the dark ages with their affiliate links.
No. All the traffic I send to Amazon is from a price comparison site I have, it converts well so I can live without keyword level tracking on this.
I agree that doing direct to merchant with Amazon would be more difficult without the ability to track keywords. At least all Amazon products have a unique 10 char ID so one could track them
I agree. Amazon were pioneers in AM and they still provide great new things for content sites, but they've never really been geared up to cater for PPC or product feed affiliates. Lack of scaleable keyword tracking and a real product feed really lets them down.
Something that's always interested me since I starting reading posts on this forum almost a year ago is the simple question of how do you decide what area or products or services to promote??
Do you just choose 1/8th of Amazon's product range, create your ads, add your keywords and then delete the ones that don't work - or do you pick something that you're interested in, have some knowledge about or something you think will convert well?
I've been messing about with affiliate ideas since January with little to no luck and I'm now wondering whether I've been focusing in too much depth and whether I need to broaden my horizons slightly.
Rather than adding hundreds of products I've instead been researching into specific catagories to try a find a few products that have very little competition - I'm now thinking due to the lack of success I've had with this method that I should try the alternative strategy.
Just interested to see the kind of methods you guys find to be the most successful.
I think it would depend on yourself. If you're the sort of person that can judge which products are likely to be popular etc then it would be worth spending time chosing individual products. If you're more interested in the PPC side rather than the products then promote a wide range and be ruthless in dropping anything that doesn't convert sufficient to give a return - eg no sales after x clicks drop it. The other side of the coin is you'll find some real gems that you'd want to put more effort into, either because they convert really well or you just have no competition.
Basically everyone has different skills so it would be a case of chosing a method that matches your skills and sticking to it.
Tobman,
It's definitely not feasible to track individual keywords using Amazon's id tracking. I don't believe that's the purpose of them at all.
I have been using tracking IDs to track individual categories I'm promoting. This way I can tell which sales came from with campaigns.
I have named my adgroup groups with the same name as the product. So what I have done manually is match up my adwords spent by adgroup with earnings per product. This is time consuming.
You can use an Excel plugin called digDB to match two tables up. I'm using Linux so that's not an option for me. I plan to write a macro in OpenOffice Calc to do this for me.
top5kit.com,
Yes the bonus percentage is shown in the reports. My performance percentage (nearly 5.5%) plus 2.5% = 8%. hehe.
See http://affiliate-program.amazon.co.u...=assoc_help_t5 for direct linking instructions.
It's basically:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/ASIN/ref=...OURASSOCIATEID
Just replace ASIN and YOURASSOCIATEID with the respective details:
A quick update.
My baby campaign is not getting any traffic at all. I haven't the time to work on this now. The other category I was promoting for a month before I started this is gathering good speed. Yesterday, I spent 10 pounds and earnt roughly 10 pounds profit on top. I shall give stats on this campaign later on.
Here's some juicy stats.
These stats are from another Amazon category (not baby) I started promoting at the start of October. I'm giving stats for this as I have given up on the baby stuff. It is not getting enough impressions/clicks and I don't see it as worth my time to spend on. I would much rather work on this, and some Facebook stuff I'm just starting to do.
Everything I've said on here still applies to this campaign. Infact,it probably applies more.
I have attached the October stats. The overall October Loss/Profit is:
Clicks CPC Cost Sales Revenue APICosts Profit
452 13p £51.59 27 £36.40 £15 -£30.19
A CTR of 2.93%
I got disheartened at the stats at the end of October and paused the campaign. A week and half into November, I did a review on the campaign. I realised towards the tail end of October I was actually breaking even. With more tuning and Christmas shopping I could very well make a profit. I resumed this campaign at the start of this week around the 11th of Nov.
I was pretty happy this morning after I found out I had made 14 sales yesterday on spend of 12.59. A rough estimate of 1.20 a sale gives me £1.2 * 14 = £16.80. This is a very conservative estimate.
I have driven 42 sales this month, and with performance referral rate, I'm now on 5.5% as standard. For direct sales (I link to a product and customer buys that one, rather than something else on the site) I get 8.15% give and take.
My november stats are attached in this Google Doc.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?k...nBrFA&hl=en_GB
Please note these numbers are not adjusted. Amazon tells me what I've earnt once they're shipped. There are currently 14+ orders waiting to be shipped.
Note that $ = £. I'm using OpenOffice Calc and the dollar comes as default. I didn't have time to change it.
I'll make a follow up post later on the lessons I've learnt.
I was performing an end of project postmotum for this campaign, and it just occurred to me I owe this thread a post.
So, what did I learn from this campaign?
Two main things:
- the Importance of Cash Flow, and how Amazon Suck At This
Cash flow is incredibly important to me right now. My aim is to become a full time affiliate marketer in 6 months. To do this, I need to be able to reinvest my revenue as soon as possible.
Amazon deposits my earnings 2-3 months after I make them is ridiculous. I am now in the search for affiliate networks that pays out sooner. Suggestions here are very welcome.- Profit Margin and the Pitfalls of Promoting a £30 product
Don't what I did. My project margin was razor thin. I made some money some days, but most days I barely broke even. I'm hoping with higher priced items I will see a sizable monthly profit.
Thanks for all the advice and motivation guys! It's been incredible. I shall enjoy getting to know everyone more in the future.
I'd agree about Amazon - they certainly convert but when you're starting out they're not viable from a cashflow standpoint. If you want to get going quickly why not start with Clickbank? I know it's a dirty word sometimes but you'll learn PPC skills, get some cash in the bank quickly and most importantly get the confidence to really get after this business - then you can use what you've learnt to move into other areas.
My first PPC campaign was with Clickbank, took about 2 hours to set up back in March still making $200/day profit. Personally I've found the hardest thing with PPC is getting to your first consistent profit and keeping cashflow going - if you start with something easy that you know is going to pay quickly you're going to be in a good position to grow your business.
Tip: if you go with Clickbank you'll be paid in $, ask your bank what their policy is re clearing $ cheques. If they tell you cheques will go forward for collection rather than negotiation open a $ account with Citibank UK - you can do this online and it will speed up your cashflow.
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