Niche Affilate Marketting

PPC Marketing: How to get those keywords to convert

So, you are putting up campaigns after campaigns and can’t seem to generate a lead or more than few leads every time? One good rule of thumb is, you should do your keyword research before you do anything else…

These steps might help…

1. Compile a big list of what I call different “root” keywords. These root keywords are one to two words keywords from which you can compile a sub-list of 100s or possible even 1000s of more keywords.

Example: Say you are running a credit score/repair offer. You should have a list of all possible related and lateral “root” keywords like…

credit check
credit report
credit score
credit repair
credit help
credit fix
credit consulting
credit management
credit problems
no credit
poor credit
bad credit
etc

Amit Mehta of superaffiliatemindset.com has a more detailed process of how you can build this keyword list. Check it out here.

2. Take each keyword in the list (as your root keyword) and generate a list of keywords off of each keyword. Now each sub-list becomes a separate ad group in your campaign.

Hint: No, you don’t need any paid keyword tools for this. The free Google keyword tool should be enough for now.

3. Now create your customized landing pages related to you adgroups you created.

4. Create at least 2 ads for each adgroup.

5. Plug your keywords and ads in adwords or YSM.

6. Important: Set your bids higher than normal. Depending on the niche, when starting out always set your bids high.

If you don’t set you bids high then most likely half or even more than half of your keywords will NEVER show up on the first page, resulting in low impressions, low clicks and eventually poor quality score.

By bidding high, you are knocking off all the people on high positions. This gives you room to test your keywords, ad copies and landing pages. You accumulate enough data quickly to know what combination of keywords, adcopies ad landing pages are working. And that’s name of the game. Test Test Test. If you don’t bid high and lose money initially, you’ll never be able to figure out why things didn’t work.

7. Once everything is setup, let your campaign run for few days.

Advice: Stop checking your stats every 5 minutes. Forget about your campaign for few hours and find something else to do. When you check your stats every 5 mins. you are setting up yourself for disaster. Every time you see yourself losing money, you’re going to let your emotions/fear take over your brain. STOP altering your campaign like lowering your bids, deleting keywords or adgroups all together and messing up everything before you even have any stats to analyze the results. So let your campaign run for 4-5 hours on the first day before checking in. It is better to actually let it run at least 2 days before start altering anything.

8. Once you have enough data, clicks, leads, etc. go though each ad group one at a time. Look at the keywords that are costing you money. Do you think those keywords belong to another adgroup, may be those keywords need a separate ad group and separate landing pages. Try doing this before deleting those keywords.

9. Now look at the keywords that are making you money. Do what with them? NOTHING. Just leave them. With the combination of your ads and landing pages, they made you money for the first 2 days, chances are if you leave them they will stay keep making you profits. So you don’t have to do anything with the “good” keywords. What you should do is, compile more keywords similar to your winning keywords, create separate ad groups for them and test them the same way.

Final words…

So, now you tweak your campaign one adgroup at a time, weeding out bad keywords and expanding on winning keywords and keep testing. The whole process may take you one month, 3 months or more. My advice never, never rest, keep improving and expanding. Think of ways you can get your ROI higher. Nothing is instant, everything needs time so have be patient and do things the right way form the start and you’ll do fine.

Hope this was helpful.

PPC Marketing: Driving more traffic to your campaigns

If you keep your campaign running long enough on adwords with consistent CTR, conversions and good quality score, you should expect to see a boost in traffic from Google.

This is what I have been seeing from last few weeks now. I have had my campaign running for 2 months now. My traffic started from less than 100 clicks a day to almost now over 1000 clicks a day. After tweaking my campaign for few weeks in the beginning, I have done almost nothing to it in the last month or so other than monitored my stats.

My latest daily earning screenshot -
Earnings almost up by $150/day overnight. Thanks to the sudden increase in traffic:

Why did I get this boost in traffic and how?

The only explanation I have is that if you have your campaigns running for sometime with consistent data, that is, good ad-clicks relative to your ad positions, good quality score and so on, Google gradually lowers your ad positions (say from position 6 to position 3) and lower your CPC, resulting in more traffic and better cost/conversion over time.

Obviously this is my speculation and of course, some of you have seen this happen with almost all your successful campaigns.

Your thoughts on this?

PPC Marketing: Creating Successful Campaigns From the Start

How many times have you started a campaign just to see it fail in few days?

You may ask yourself – Now, why do my campaigns fail in the first place? The answer is simple. It’s a combination of fear of losing money, fear of failing and matter of giving up quickly before realizing its full potential.

The recipe of creating successful campaigns in any niche is basically the same when you look at it from the outside. Yes, every niche is different but the process of creating your PPC campaigns in adwords, Yahoo or MSN for almost every niche and offer is the same. Here’s what I mean….

Steps to take before launching a campaign:

1. Research Stage

Before blindly hammering keywords in adwords, research and compile a big list of ALL possible related and lateral keywords to your offer or niche. For more information, check out Amit’s post on keyword research.

2. Setting up adgroups

• Split your keywords into logical groupings/ad-groups – It doesn’t matter how many keywords you have in your ad group. Forget what you read on the internet about “only keep few keywords in your adgroups”. You just need to make your ad groups as tight as possible. It could mean 150+ keywords or 5 keywords. I have adgroups with 150 keywords and with as low as 5 keywords. It all depends on you niche and offer.
• Test all match types – Add broad, phrase and exact types in your adgroup. You need to test all match types. Broad match type will give you tons of traffic and in some cases it may also turn out to be more profitable as well. I have few adgroups where broad keywords are the lifelines of my campaign.

3. Keyword Tracking (most important step)

Before running your campaign, setup some kind of conversion tacking on your keywords. Yes, you need this. Don’t even think about it. Just do it!

4. Last Step – Running your campaign

Run your campaign for at least a week before you have substantial amount of data to analyze the results. Look at the keywords/adgroups that are costing you money. Take those out immediately. Keep the ones that are making profit and then compile even more keywords related to the winning keywords. Now just keep tweaking your campaign until you are satisfied with the return.

So, there you have it, a successful recipe in a nutshell for creating profitable campaigns from the get-go. Let me know your thoughts?