Bankruptcy to Millionaire

*note there are ZERO affiliate links in this post*
this post is a follow up to How I Accidently Made $88.50 with First Try On Online Affiliate Marketing

I am going to uncover the secrets that many affiliate marketers do not EVER reveal. I’m going reveal my successful adwords campaign keywords. I’m going to show you EXACTLY how I achieved a 6.7% CTR. I am going to reveal the offer, and the exact method I used to turn a profit using Online Affiliate Marketing. Then I’m going to reveal MY COSTLY MISTAKES so you don’t make them!

You can take these tips today, and implement them TODAY to improve your already existing PPC affiliate campaigns. Or start a new one–and start making money tomorrow.

Step One - Find a Hot Niche

This one was easy. Christmas time. I wanted to find a Christmas offer. So I logged onto my newly opened CJ.com account.

Step Two - Find a Hot Offer to Promote in the Hot Niche

After about 15 minute of research if found Vistaprint.com was offering 50% off select items and free shipping on Holiday Cards. Commissions are 16-20% of each sale and 3.50-5.00 for each free claimed. Looked good to me to test.

Step Three - Start Adwords Campaign - Writing Your Ads (with your search terms in mind).

Ok, so I started my campaign. The offer was obviously a hot selling point, 50% and free shipping. So that should go in the ad. My ad looked like this:

click photo to enlarge

I knew my keywords would play around the “discount christmas card” search phrase (and variations on it. More on search terms in a second). So that was my headline, I didn’t want people to think they were free. But if they click on something that says “discount” they are likely to be looking to purchase something.

The ad accomplishes more than that. They also see that they can get them “LAST MINUTE” with “FREE SHIPPING”. This ad is chock full of features.

There is One More VERY important part of this ad to recognize.

Notice the URL. I’ve done numerous testing on other PPC ads and here are the secrets I’ve discovered with the URL. Capitalize each word in the URL. It’s not www.vistaprint.com it’s www.VistaPrint.com. This is MUCH easier to read what it is–some URLs look better than others.

But even more important is the appearance of a Sub Folder. The /christmas_cards portion of the ad. Now google is kind enough to allow you to put anything you want after the Slash (/) as long as the root domain stays the same as the destination URL.

This /christmas_cards will HUGELY increase response and Click Throughs because when they search for “discount christmas cards” (my #1 search term as you’ll see in a second), they /christmas_cards will be bold. This lets the person searching know this is a site that is RELEVANT to them.

Use the www.YourDomain.com/[primary_search_term] as often as possible when setting up your campaigns.

YES! This means more WORK when setting up your ad campaigns. Because you will need NEW ADS (and ad groups) for each of your primary search phrases.

Step Four - Adwords - Choosing Your Search Terms

click photo to elarge

These are the keywords I ran with my campaign (yes. There have been MANY mistakes made. I’ll touch on those soon). Notice really only two received any amount of searches. “Discount Christmas Cards” and “Cheap Christmas Cards”. Also Notice that my CTR is between 6.7 and 7.0% but my ad placement is a miserable 5-6! (This is because of the very strong ad/offer).

Also notice, that I bid 1.05 but only paid an average CPC of $0.90. I bid 1.05 because I thought it was likely that many advertisers bid an even $1, so I wanted to leap frog them (I have not tested this theory, so it may be completely invalid).

Because my primary search terms are located in the Ad. This ad is VERY ENTICING to the person searching. Not only that, because the way it is written, the person click is VERY LIKELY to buy, because the ad explicitly states they are clicking on something to buy!

Step Five - Check Your Results

click photo to enlarge

These are the sales I made after 5 Days of Running this offer. With a direct link to the offer. I did not use a landing page.

Step Six - Get Campaign Canceled by Google because they do not allow affiliate link re-directs.

These ads got canceled because Google does not allow your affiliate link to redirect to the home page. Lesson Learned - pay more attention and capitalize when something become profitable.

Where were my Errors?!

During the implementation of this campaign. I made MANY ERRORS. But I will say this in my defense. I thought I paused the campaign the second I had launched it, thinking I would make some tweaks. Then I completely forgot that it was running until the Big G sent me an email telling me it was “disallowed”.

I plan on doing an entire post on the errors I made, so you don’t make those same mistakes, and can start your own successful affiliate campaign.

But first I’d like to open it up to all of you.

Where did I go wrong. Did you notice any errors that I made, that I may not have noticed. Disect this campaign. Where did I go wrong? What would you have do to make it better?

- Tevin Anderson

P.S. If you liked this post, and think it will make you more money in the future–and you feel in the Christmas Spirit. Feel Free to Paypal me some Christmas Shopping Money :D.