This is part of my 30 Days To More Traffic Series

Using pay-per-click you literally pay an amount of money for every time a web surfer clicks on your URL through PPC programs like AdWords and GoClick. There are numerous books written on using PPC for traffic. In short, although obvious, the key is to not get burned.

Some PPC Tips:

Do the research and the math. Find out how much it will cost per click in your niche (using a tool like the https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

If you’re pushing an affiliate program or your own product, test with organic traffic to find out your conversion rates. If it looks like you’ll make a profit with PPC, start with something like $1 per day and test.

As said, you can get burned badly with PPC. However, it’s a high quality source of traffic. If you’ve tested, I recommend giving it a shot.

When you are paying to send traffic to your product’s sales page, don’t risk a lot of money on any one product. Some products will cost you more money in advertising than you make from the sales of the product. I usually follow the Double Rule.

The Double Rule

The Double Rule says if I am selling something for $10 and I spend $20-$30 in advertising without any sales then it’s time to cut my losses and try something else. To break even I would have to magically make 2 sales without any additional advertising costs. This is very unlikely and that’s why it’s time to find another way to sell your product.

The Double Rule also says that if you have made 2 sales but have spent much more on advertising than you have earned it’s probably time to stop losing money and find another way to sell your product.

It’s critical you put limits on what you spend or you may lose your shirt.

Photo by jurvetson

Imagine what it would be like if you had a crystal ball that will allow you to look into marketing in such a way that you would already know what worked, long before you got started.

Actually, there is no need for you to imagine this because it already exists and it is available to every one of us.

If you are involved in pay per click marketing, you no doubt already realize that choosing the proper keywords is much more than half the battle.

As a matter of fact, far too much money is lost as we gamble away our opportunities with unprofitable keywords.

There is a way, however, that you can spy on your competition in such a way that you will be able to tell which keywords they are willing to pay for, month over month.

Armed with this knowledge, you can go into a new campaign or strengthen an existing campaign without having to worry about testing and tweaking in order to make things profitable.

Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine, Spyfu.com.

This is one of the best keyword tools that is available on the Internet which not only allows you to see pay per click ads for a keyword that you may be looking for, it allows you to look at them through a crystal ball.

Almost all of us that are committed to our pay per click campaigns are already scrutinizing the keywords on a regular basis by watching the competition that comes and goes on Google over time.

With this unique tool, however, there is no need for you to wait an extended period of time in order to see who is using those keywords and who is using them consistently.

Let’s start off with a simple search at Spyfu.com.

Type in any search term that you are interested in pursuing for your campaign and you will instantly see a list of advertisers that have purchased for that particular ad.

The interesting part about this is that those advertisers are not from a search that is done in real time. As a matter of fact, those are cached from about a month ago, giving you easy access to your crystal ball.

All you really need to do is to compare the advertisers that are listed on Spyfu.com with any existing advertisers that you find by doing a Google search.

When you do this, you will have a snapshot that will allow you to see who has been consistently paying for ads for that particular keyword over the past month.

Many of these advertisers test regularly, as I’m sure that most of you do. The trends among these advertisers will very quickly tell you if those keywords are profitable for them or not.

What would you do, however, if you wanted to take your research one step further?

After all, somebody could easily allow their AdWords campaigns to run for a month without turning them off.

If you want to be able to spy on the competition for up to a year, you can easily do this with a website called KeywordSpy.com

After you load up KeywordSpy.com in your browser and run your initial search, you will see a tab that is titled “Time Machine”.

Inside that tab, you will find a wealth of information that will allow you to spy on your competition for up to a year into the past.

This will help you to have a well rounded view of who has been paying for these search terms, where they have been sending the clicks and how long they have been sending them there.

There is one more added benefit of using the KeywordSpy.com service.

It will also let you see the ads that these companies have been using.

This will help you to get a good idea of what has been pulling in quality traffic for your competition and what you can do to pull them in as well.

Although you would not want to copy their ads word for word, you can use it as a guide and really get a leg up where you need it.

Use these two tools in your everyday efforts to make your PPC campaigns productive and profitable.

Treat them like the crystal ball that they are and they will help to make your advertising future bright.

Note: This was written by Amy C. and posted with her permission.

I’m still somewhat a newbie and have learned lots from over the past while. To those of you who are starting out in IM, I’d like to share with you how I’m making decent profit with Google Adwords and Clickbank.

I’ve posted this in a forum recently and many people found it useful, so I’m posting it here too. The method is work-intensive but extremely simple – no rocket science, and most of this has been covered in ebooks in the past. Before I start, I’d like to say that:

• Everything I say in this post is just from personal experiences – your mileage may vary.
• Although I’ll be using “dog training” as my example product below, be forewarned that it’s a very competitive niche and that if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could lose big bucks in Adwords without seeing any returns.
• From what many publishers and affiliates and end customers are saying, there’s a glitch in Clickbank’s payment processor which causes customers’ credit cards to be declined. This may very well be the reason why so many people, including me, have been seeing sharp declines in sales. Therefore, you may want to avoid Clickbank unless they get their act together.
• Using frame redirects, I heard, is against Adwords TOS – so be prepared to have all your ads shut-down in one fell swoop one day.
• Using frame redirects is also against Clickbank’s TOS.

Anyway, if you still have your heart set on promoting Clickbank products, here’s how I make over 10k in sales (several thousands in profit) every month using Clickbank and Adwords.

1. Pick a Clickbank Product

I personally tend to stay away from the following types of products:

• Internet marketing – too much competition unless you put together a kick-ass landing page and give away bonuses (read: bribe) that are relevant to the particular product (or use other advanced tactics like that – but then I’m still a newbie!)
• Tattoo design products – extremely low conversion and fierce Adwords competition – I once promoted “tattoo chopper” and lost close to $200 in the first few hours after I started my campaign
• Gambling-related products – blackjack, Texas holdem, betfair, sports betting – any gambling related Adwords campaigns will be found and stopped by Adwords staff sooner or later – they don’t allow it
• Anything involving a well-known trademark, such as “World of Warcraft” guides, will be stopped by Adwords staff (World of Warcraft is a trademark)

I also check the following:

• That the sales page (or the squeeze page – whichever is the first page on the merchant’s site that the visitor lands on) doesn’t have a pop-up. Pop-ups are against Adword’s TOS. I’ve had more than a few campaigns stopped because of this.
• That the product has a low refund rate – to me, anything below 10%, because I don’t want to promote something that I know won’t help people and a good way you can judge that is by the refund rate, which can be calculated as follows:
  

  refund rate % =100*(1-(A/((B-B*0.075-1)*C/100)))

  A=$/sale

  B=Product Price

  C=%/sale

• Preferably, the merchant doesn’t have an opt-in form on the sales page, or have a squeeze page – because then the merchant could collect the visitor’s email, sell to them through email, and cheat me of my commissions.However, many merchants are honest and will credit you with your commissions even when they buy through an email sent by the merchant. I sometimes opt-in and check the first email they send me to make sure my affiliate link is in the email)
• That the product has a high $/sale – allows me to bid higher and be more competitive in Adwords.
• That the merchant’s sales page doesn’t contain any “leakage”, i.e. outbound links from which your visitor could “escape” from the sales page (for example, links to other products for which you don’t get any commissions).
• Preferably, the merchant doesn’t offer other methods of payment (if they order by mail or check, you won’t get the commission)

I usually pick around 30 products in one sitting, then move to the next step.

2. Collect Keywords for the Clickbank Products

• I first browse the merchant’s sales page to collect relevant keywords, which I call “seed” keywords (e.g. for a dog training product, I may write down these keywords: “dog potty training”, “dog house training”, “stop dog peeing”, “stop dog scratching furniture”, etc. etc.
• Then I go to the Google Adwords Tool, type in the seed keywords (make sure to include synonyms), and click “Add” for keywords I know are likely to convert. For each keyword I’d ask myself “if I were a visitor and typed in this particular keyword phrase, what would I be looking for? Would I be interested in this product?”I’m selective – better safe than sorry as I don’t want to waste Adwords clicks on keywords that may not convert. If in doubt I don’t include a keyword that will probably waste me money, because I know there’s no shortage of products so I don’t have to squeeze every sale out of every product.
• Because I made sure to include synonyms in my search, the keyword results will include related keywords that I didn’t think of before. I would “dig” into those related keywords as well by typing them into the search box to return even more keywords.
• Think of words you can “tag onto” your seed keywords – for example, if the product is the solution for a kind of health condition, for example arthritis, I would do searches on “arthritis treatment, “arthritis cure”, “arthritis remedies”, “arthritis medications”, “arthritis medicine”, etc.
• While I’m building my keyword list, I also make a note of words that are completely irrelevant to my product. For example, say I’m promoting a product that teaches women how to make their husbands love them again, and the Google keyword tool results include “make my man love me again lyrics”, I would make note of the word “lyrics” so I could put that as a “negative keyword” for my Adwords campaign later
• Finally, when I run out of keyword ideas to type into the tool, I export the whole keyword list into a text file

3. Separate the Main Keyword List into Adgroups

I usually just use an Excel worksheet to organize my keywords into adgroups (if the keyword list is too large I use Keyword Companion (do a search for this if you want to know more about it). I separate them by common words.

Going back to the dog training example, I might have adgroups “stop dog barking”, “dog housebreaking”, “dog potty training” etc., where all the keywords in each adgroup contain the common words [adgroup name]. For example, in the “dog housebreaking” adgroup I may have the keywords:

House break a dog

House breaking dog

Housebreaking dogs

How to housebreak a dog

4. Write the Adwords Ad for Each Adgroup

The following is what I do to consistently achieve high CTRs for my ads. Continuing with the dog training product, say for the adgroup “dog housebreaking”, I might write an ad that looks like this:

Housebreaking Your Dog?

Only 7 days to housebreak your dog!

Learn how to housebreak a dog.

Dog-Housebreaking.domain.com

For the headline and second line description, I try to stuff as many common keywords (of the particular adgroup) as I could into them to catch the surfer’s eye.

As you know, the keywords that the surfer types into Google’s search box will appear in bold in your Adwords ad. I do the same thing to the display URL, which many people don’t bother to do.

I register a domain with a very short name – for example 1best1.com – and set up unlimited subdomains on that one domain. So in my example I would name my subdomain “dog-housebreaking” so that they would appear in bold to catch the surfer’s eye.

With all the bolded words in the headline, second description line and display URL, many surfers will look at my ad. I read somewhere that most people will only read the headline and first description, so in the first description line I try to stress a benefit.

I simply go through the headline and first paragraph of the merchant’s sales letter and find the most impressive point I can. If all else fails, you can always just say “100% guaranteed or your money back!”, since Clickbank has a refund guarantee anyway.

Using this simple method I’ve almost always been able to start off with an above 1% CTR for my new ads, which gives me a good headstart and keeps my bids low.

As for regional targeting, I don’t really do much with that – I probably should. I mostly just target the English-speaking countries – Australia, Canada, New Zealand,
United Kingdom, and United States. Some products are only useful to US residents, e.g. setting up a business in the US, so it depends.

I usual set my starting bids low to start with, usually at 1/100 of the sales commission or less. I also set my daily budget to $20/day to start.

When I first started I was setting the daily budget to $100, but several run-away campaigns and several hundreds of lost adspend later, I learned better.

Note: I find that it’s easier to first load my campaigns into the Adwords Editor (free download from Google) and then upload them to my Adwords account.

Note 2: To create a large number of subdomains on autopilot, download the free Subdomains Creator at: http://www.zubrag.com/scripts/cpanel-subdomains-creator.php

5. Write the Frame Redirect Script

I use frame redirect scripts, because landing pages take too much time to set up, and using my hoplink directly in my Adwords ad would put me at risk of commission theft and would also decrease the chances of my ads getting served, due to the double-serving rule that Adwords has (i.e. they won’t allow two Clickbank affiliates to promote the same product using the same keyword).

Remember I used “Dog-Housebreaking.domain.com” as my display URL? Now I will prepare my frame redirect script, name it “index.php”, and put it into the “dog-housebreaking” subdomain folder. My redirect script would look something like this:

<HEAD>

<script>window.status = ”;</script>

<title>Successfully Train Your Dog in 7 Days!</title>

</HEAD>

<FRAMESET border=0 rows=”100%,*” frameborder=”no” marginleft=0 margintop=0 marginright=0 marginbottom=0>

<frame src=”http://myclickbankID.merchantID.hop.clickbank.net” scrolling=auto frameborder=”no” border=0 noresize>

<frame topmargin=”0″ marginwidth=0 scrolling=no marginheight=0 frameborder=”no” border=0 noresize> <body></body>

</FRAMESET>

House break a dog

House breaking dog

Housebreaking dogs

How to housebreak a dog

House break a dog

House breaking dog

Housebreaking dogs

How to housebreak a dog

You can cut and paste the code above into a text file and edit the title, your hoplink, and the keywords for your purposes. I include all the keywords from the main keyword list for the campaign, because I don’t want my Adwords quality score to go up due to my redirect page being “irrelevant”. I don’t actually know whether Adwords can read the actual contents on my redirect page or not, but I do it just to be safe.

Optional but Highly Recommended: Use Xtreme Conversions to track your performance!

I strongly suggest that you use Xtreme conversions to track everything. If you do use it, all you need to do is to insert a couple pieces of code into the frame redirect file above.

The best and most inexpensive tracking I’ve used, which I’m still using, is Xtreme Conversions, which can be found here: http://www.xconversions.com

I endorse very few products but this is one of them. In fact, I was so impressed I sent the owner Amir an unsolicited testimonial after I’ve used the tool.

This tool automatically tells you where your clicks are coming from (e.g. google.com, google.com.uk etc., google partners such as ask.com, or particular Adsense websites if you’re using the content network), which keyword the visitor typed into Google to find your ad, and most importantly, which keywords and adgroups are making you the sales.

In the past, to track which keywords are resulting in sales, you had to ask the particular Clickbank product publisher to put a code in their thank-you page that’s specific to you. With this tool, this is no longer necessary.

What I do is, I would start a new campaign with lots of adgroups, run the campaign for a few days, then check my stats. I would first look at my Clickbank sales and make note of the tracking ID associated with each sale. Then I would check my Xtreme conversions stats to find out the keyword associated with each tracking ID.

For example, say I’m promoting a dog training product (fierce competition by the way), and I may have the adgroups “chihuahua puppy potty training”, “golden retriever agility training”, “adult westie house training”, etc.

Say when I check my clickbank stats, I see that I’ve made 3 sales, 2 for “chihuahua puppy potty training” and 1 for “adult westie house training”. At that point I can compare, for each adgroup, how much I’ve spent in ads and how many sales I’ve made as a result.

If an adgroup is costing me too much money without making a sale (for example “golden retriever agility training” which hasn’t made a sale – say that it’s already cost me $30 in adspend, way more than the commission for one sale), I would pause that adgroup.

Whereas for the adgroups that are pulling a profit, I may bid more to get more sales, and/or spend the time to tweak my ad to increase CTR -> increase QS -> lower bid. Over time, the only adgroups I’ll leave on are those that are turning a profit for me.

If I was not tracking, I would only be able to tell whether the campaign was profiting or losing money OVERALL. For example, the campaign may be losing money overall, but in reality perhaps only a couple of the adgroups are making all the sales and the rest are only costing me but making no sales.

If I wasn’t tracking, I would have stopped this campaign thinking it was a dud (or the product wasn’t converting). But because I was tracking, I would know to keep the couple adgroups making me profit and stop the rest.

But that’s only one of the ways I’ve been using Xtreme conversions. For some of my campaigns, I’ve found that clicks coming from Google’s search partners weren’t converting at all, whereas the clicks directly from Google WERE, so I turned the “search” option off – and was able to turn my campaign around.

The same goes for clicks from the content network. With tracking, I know exactly how many sales are coming from Adsense ads. If it’s profitable, I may increase my content bid (and I would know HOW MUCH to increase it by because I know what my profit margin is!). If it’s not profitable, I simply stop the content network.

I also check to see whether the same keywords are consistently resulting in sales for me. For example, I may have an adgroup that’s performing well and when I check my Xtreme conversions stats I may find that one single keyword in that adgroup has been making almost all the sales.

In that case I would “peel and stick” – take that keyword and start a new adgroup for it. That way I could better target the ad to that specific keyword, for example by using the keyword a few times in the ad to make it bold to increase CTR.

When I’m in a REALLY good mood and am feeling particularly bored, I sometimes look through all my Xtreme conversions keywords to pick out those that I know do not match my product and therefore will not convert.

For example, I may be selling a “make your wife love you” type of product. I might be checking my Xtreme conversions stats to see which search phrases my visitors are typing to find my ad, and I might see the phrase “your wife loves you lyrics” – in this case I would know I probably wasted that click because someone who’s searching for lyrics was probably not interested in that product.

So I would add the negative “lyrics” to my adwords campaign. This has decreased wasted clicks and therefore adspend for many of my campaigns.

That’s all I can think of for now…I’ve probably been using the tool for other analyses, but I should stop my ranting before I turn this post into a book. But yes, I HIGHLY recommend this tool to anyone who’s serious about tracking their adwords campaigns!

Word of Caution: Whichever domain you install the tool on, make sure to NEVER, NEVER accidentally let that domain expire….I made that stupid mistake a month ago and didn’t find out for almost 24 hours.

None of my Clickbank sales were recorded during that time and I lost several hundreds of dollars in adspend before setting Xtreme conversions up on a new domain and changing the code on my tracking pages.

I believe Xtreme conversions is responsible for inserting cookies, so when the domain it was installed on was down, no cookies were inserted, so none of the sales were credited to me.]

As you can see, this is no get rich quick method – a lot of work is involved. The beauty of this method is that it’s simple to implement. The flip side is that you’ll have to go through lots and lots of products to find a few that are profitable – that’s the case for me anyway.

If you’re an Adwords expert you’ll most probably do better than me. Usually, I set up campaigns for 30 products at one time. Of each batch of 30 products I may end up keeping only 4-8 that turn out to be profitable, and stop the rest.

This is why tracking is so important – you need to know exactly which keywords in which adgroups are making you money so you’d know which adgroups / keywords / campaigns to keep and which to turn off.

As using frame redirects, as far as I know, is against Adwords’ TOS, I suggest for you to eventually replace redirect scripts with actual landing pages. This is the stage I’m at right now.

Since I already have about 40-50 campaigns that have proven themselves to be consistently profitable, I can now replace their frame redirects with landing pages / squeeze pages, still send the visitor to the merchant’s page after opt-in, then follow up with autoresponder messages to sell that product plus other backend products.

If a niche does really well, I may even develop my own products to sell to my list and then put it on Clickbank too, and also other affiliate networks.

I may even go one step further and set up white hat sites for the specific niches, using those keywords in my Adwords campaigns that are making the most sales (write an article for each keyword etc.).

There….not rocket science. None of what I’m doing or planning is new. It’s just a straight forward method that will get you results (that is, if Clickbank fixes their payment processor soon…).

Thanks for bearing with me and I hope that this information will be of help to some of you!

Amy