This is a guest post by Amin who was the winner of Nickycakes’ Xbox 360. It’s not about how he won the contest, since he already posted about that on his blog, however, he decided to write about how he makes bank in another, area. Def some good ideas. Thanks dude.
I wrote a post on how I came first in Nickycakes contest by running debt relief offers on Facebook, which you can read on my blog. I eventually stopped the campaign because profit margins were shrinking, so instead of making that post here I decided to write a new guest post on one of my more preferred methods of making money through PPC.
It’s worth starting off by saying that I am much more of a product peddling affiliate than one who promotes the kind of offers found on CPA networks. I make most of my money through Clickbank, which offers a HUGE number of products across various different niches you can promote. If you thought the only way to make money through Clickbank was by promoting crappy ‘get rich quick’ eBooks, the kind of stuff that Nickycakes vomits over, then your dead wrong. When it comes to Clickbank, you’ve got to be creative and not just look at the top performing ‘high gravity’ products.
Now the idea here is to produce a number of different content based ‘review’ sites promoting the same products in a small niche of your choice. You would then advertise each review website on Google through a separate Adwords account via the Adwords MCC (My Client Centre), allowing you to have all your review sites displayed for the exact same identical keyword search terms you are targeting in your campaigns.
If you target the same keywords in multiple campaigns within a single Adwords account, only the ads from one of your campaigns will be displayed at any one time to a user searching for one of your keywords. However, by creating new accounts through the Adwords’ MCC, you will be able to create a new campaign in each account and have all your ads in all your campaigns displayed for the same keyword search terms.
While I have personally not had any problems with Adwords for doing this, I’m assuming this really depends on how you go about implementing this method. If for example, your review sites all use the same content, are all under one domain through sub domains, and are blatantly there to promote one product, then don’t be surprised if Adwords comes down on you with a ban hammer.
Take note of the following if you are particularly worried about having your Adwords account banned:
- Make your content high quality – the higher the quality, the stronger the pre-sell
- Use separate domains – a no brainer, you MUST have a separate domain for each site
- Have new content written for each site – that means new reviews for the same products
- Use a new Clickbank account for each site – so you aren’t caught out by savvy competitors
- Cloak all your affiliate links – you should always do this anyway for obvious reasons
I normally outsource all of my reviews to inexpensive ghost writers. I then check over all the content written for me by my writers and I always end up making changes to the content so it actually functions like a good sales copy. For the actual sites, I use Wordpress with a free theme slapped on. There are tons of themes to choose from, and you can easily have it modified into a review style site. If you can’t modify themes on your own or don’t want to hire someone to do it for you, there are a few review style themes you can choose from as well. Google it.
Three final points worth considering:
- I use this particular strategy to promote paid products as an affiliate. I’ve always been more comfortable investing my time and money into developing content rich review sites for products which don’t have an expiry date. This allows me to optimise my sites for the search engines without worrying about the offer expiring, in addition to gaining a large share of PPC traffic which would otherwise have gone to my competitors. Having said that, there is no reason you can’t use this method to promote CPA offers via the PPC > landing page > offer approach.
- This strategy works best for smaller niches which aren’t madly saturated with competition. Dominating small niches in the sponsored links section of the Google SERPs through multiple placements is far easier and more effective than to attempt to do the same for a much larger and more competitive niche.
- Don’t start all your campaigns at once. I had one campaign running for months before I started a new campaign advertising a new site on a new Adwords account. That put aside, you want to know your first campaign is generating a solid profit before you go onto expanding, otherwise you will feel like an idiot if your three new campaigns on your three different accounts fail en masse.
The main point of this post was to make you aware of how you can put your Adwords MCC to good use. I also spend as much time and money on PPC as I do on building links to my site and developing site content for SEO purposes. There is nothing better than having your websites listed at the top of Google’s organic AND paid listings, no matter how small the niche is. In fact, the smaller the niche, the easier it is for you to dominate it.
I didn’t really get into any real depth here, mostly because I’m lazy, but hopefully you should have gained several ideas from this post.
Cheers,
Amin
Published by nickycakes //
This is a guest post by Matt Marcin, the dude who came in 2nd place in Nickycakes’ xbox 360 contest.
Hey guys, this is Matt from mattmarcin.com. I recently came in as #2 in Nickycake’s contest and only lost by about 2 minutes. The Cakes asked me to talk about how I came from behind to earn $1k in under 24 hours and nearly win the contest.
Let me start by saying that without Geoff over at Advaliant I would have never found a good offer to run with. I always start by looking at the offer list and determining what would work with my traffic sources. Offers that perform well on search might not perform on a media buy so you definitely need to keep that in mind. In this case, my main traffic source was socialmedia.com
SocialMedia lets you buy banner space on about 80% of the Facebook/Bebo/MySpace apps that exist. 200 clicks a minute isn’t uncommon once you have the campaign tweaked correctly. I tested out about 5 offers that I thought might convert and ended up finding a couple that didn’t fail miserably. Socialmedia’s main demographic is 13-25 year olds so make sure your offers fit in that demo. I’ve tried debt relief offers and let me tell you right now, they don’t work. The offers need to be applicable to the general population.
I picked one of the offers that was breaking even and built it out into a full campaign in about an hour. Nothing too fancy since we don’t care about quality score. Try playing with both direct linking and a landing page. Remember it is all about split testing. My aim with SocialMedia is to get at least a 10% ROI. If after playing with it I can’t get it that high then I trash it. My real goal is to hit at least 50% in the long term.
It’s pretty easy to scale a campaign on SocialMedia. I created 5 text ads for the offer which were all slightly different and I tracked their performance using tracking202.com. When I found a text ad that was losing me money, I threw it out and replaced it with a new one. Once running, I was getting about 50-100 clicks a minute and earning a solid profit. With all those clicks coming in it was just a matter of time before I hit $1k. Looking back on my stats it looks like I was running the campaign for about 6-8 hours to hit $1,000.
With all that said, Socialmedia is a difficult beast to tame. It can be very unforgiving and their interface doesn’t tell you how much you need to bid or even if your ad has been approved to run yet. Going into depth on using it isn’t something I have room to talk about today but I will be doing an article on my blog this week that goes more in depth.
I wanted to say thank you to both Nickycakes and Advaliant for running the contest and sending an Xbox 360 my way. Been way to addicted to COD4!
Thanks for the post Matt. PS. Cut your hair:
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 26th, 2008 in General
Last week Geoff at Cant Get Rich asked Nickycakes to do a phone interview for the first in his series of weekly podcasts. After some technical difficulties, it finally got recorded, and today he posted it. The interview with the Cakes is about 20 minutes long and there are some pretty funny parts. Topics discussed range everywhere from facebook ppc to what john chow ate for dinner last night.
There’s another interview on the podcast from some boring moron from dubai who does some crappy article writing service, so that may be worth skipping (or listening to for a good laugh).
Anyway, check it out: Cant Get Rich Podcast - Episode 1
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 25th, 2008 in PPC Search
Several months ago the guys from Tracking202 let Nickycakes beta test their ppc campaign tracking service. It was pretty sweet. It let you monitor everything down to the keyword level in terms of traffic, conversions, ROI, etc. Pretty much everything you need to track and optimize your campaign. It even had a sweet realtime ajax traffic monitor that let you see the clicks coming in.
But when they asked Nickycakes if he thought the service would be popular, he had a few problems with it. Most importantly, it wasn’t self-hosted. It was hosted on the Tracking202 servers. People would obviously be skeptical of any ppc tracking platform that wasn’t self-hosted because it would allow the admins of the service to view anyone’s campaign data and easily duplicate profitable campaigns for themselves. They assured the Cakes that they wouldn’t be stealing anyone’s data and that the service was meant to help people and build traffic for their site. While this explanation was good enough for Nickycakes, he told them that it would NOT be good enough for the general public. Because of this, Nicky decided not to make a post about it. As predicted, the public release of Tracking202 met with mediocre results. The guys were even banned from Wickedfire forums for advertising it, just due to the possibility that they could use it to steal peoples keyword data.
To clear up any misconceptions, the guys immediately started working on a solution. A self-hosted solution. A FREE self-hosted solution. So it’s pretty much the exact same service now, except you install it and host it yourself, ridding yourself of the possibility that your keyword data can be jacked. Good deal.
As mentioned earlier, Nickycakes did have a chance to try Tracking202 out when it was hosted on their servers, and was really impressed, to be honest. He gave it a trial run with one of his own small campaigns and was really happy with the tracking. It basically lets you see graphs of each keyword and ad copy, and its profitability. So you can basically set up a campaign with a couple thousand keywords, dump a decent amount of money into it for traffic, look at which keywords converted into profit, and delete the rest, and you have a completely profitable campaign. Doesn’t get much easier than that.
Anyway they just released it so go check it out at http://www.prosper202.com. Leave a comment here and let everyone know what you think.
Published by nickycakes //
Nicky has spent a little time writing up a short internet marketing newbie guide to help new people to the industry and answer a lot of common questions. It’s going to be permanently linked right at the top of the page here, so feel free to flame any morons who post questions answered in that guide without reading it first. Please check it out and post in the comments here what you think, and if you have any suggestions on information that may have been left out:
Newbie Guide
Published by nickycakes //
