Photo by terren in Virginia

Let’s be honest here. For 99% of Internet marketers affiliate marketing sucks big time.

You spend a ton of time and effort and energy (and sometimes money) to send traffic to a sales page that isn’t converting any traffic into sales.

What a waste!

More traffic?

The solution is NOT sending more traffic to a sales page that doesn’t convert.

Traffic isn’t your problem; conversion IS your problem.

Unfortunately you have no idea what the conversion rate is for a sales page until you send a bunch of traffic to it.

Worse yet, once you determine that the conversion rate sucks, there’s nothing you can do about it because you’re just an affiliate.

How to fix this problem

The simple solution is to stop sending traffic to affiliate offers and instead send the traffic to your own email list sign-up page.

Once people are on your e-mail list you can test different affiliate offers to see how well they convert. If one of the affiliate offers converts poorly you still will have your e-mail list.

Get to know your list

Part of the problem with affiliate marketing is that you are trying to sell stuff to people without knowing what exactly they are searching for.  You have no idea what problems and needs people have.

Through your email list you can interact with your subscribers and find out what they’re really looking for.

You can invite them to ask questions and expect answers.  (If you go this route make sure you actually answer their questions!)

I have even bribed people with a free product if they simply ask me a question.

But how do you setup an email list?

I have several posts that show you how:

• 12 Steps To Setup An Email Newsletter, Get Traffic, And Make Money
• 3 things you can do with your e-mail list to build traffic and make money
• 8 Tips To Get Traffic And Make Money From Your Email List
• 11 Email Marketing Alternatives to Aweber

I would estimate that 3% of affiliate marketers make 97% of the money. This means that nearly everybody who starts out in affiliate marketing will never make any money. Those that figure out how to do it correctly can become very wealthy. There isn’t a lot of middle ground. Either you make it and do very well or you never make a dime.

Find a market

So one thing you need to do to be successful in affiliate marketing is to first identify a market (not a product!). Figure out what people are hungry for and then look for product to satisfy that hunger. Most people starting out do just the opposite.

How many units do you need to sell?

Once you’ve found a market and a product you need to figure out how many units you need to sell to make it worth your while. For example if your goal is to make $6000 a month and you are trying to sell $1 widgets then you will need to sell 6000 of widgets each month.

This means you have to sell 200 widgets every single day. If you have a conversion rate of 5% (5 out of 100 visitors buys) then you will need 4000 visitors to your website every day so you can make 200 sales. That a fair amount of traffic for most niches.

On the other hand if you are selling widgets for $200 then you only have to make one sale per day. If you have a conversion rate of 1% (1 out of 100 visitors buys a widget) then you will need 100 visitors to your website every day to make 1 sale.

100 visitors each day is far easier than 4000 visitors everyday.

Selling more expensive products can cut down on the amount of traffic you need.

Affiliate networks

There are many different affiliate networks and each one has great products that you can promote. Just find a market first and then look for product. I would select the network that had the products that best matched my market.

What most affiliate marketers do

The other problem with affiliate marketers is that they all do the same thing. They all put up the same banner ads and try to generate traffic with the same methods and they end up not making any money.

For example, let’s say there is $500 a day to be made in the widget market. So if you’re the only selling widgets then you should be able to make $500 a day with a single sales page banner ad.

But when 500 people start selling widgets with the same sales page and banner ad then that $500 a day is split between 500 people. The average person is going to only make $1 per day.

So to make it in affiliate marketing you need to do something to make you stand out. You need to figure out how to give more value than anyone else. This could be in the form of comprehensive product reviews. This could be in the form of the building a community where you answer peoples questions and they trust you and so they buy from you.

Caroline Middlebrook just posted a great article titled “Affiliate Marketing 101″

It contains great tips for anyone thinking about getting into Affiliate Marketing.

Check it out and tell her Nick sent you:
Affiliate Marketing 101

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/affiliate-marketing-101/

There is one big pitfall to affiliate marketing and all other pitfalls begin with this one big pitfall. I saw it myself recently when a local woman asked me for advice. I agreed to drop over and visit her and see what I could do to help her.

Well, she says, the guy who signed me up makes thousands every month and only works at this in the evening. I have the whole day to concentrate on it. But I’ve been at this a month and the only sale I made was to my sister.

She went on to explain that she had been laid off work and their only child had gone off to university and she had lots of free time. She did not want to have to go back to work but university was expensive so she was in a big hurry to make money and only had six more weeks before her savings ran out. What she wanted me to tell her was which affiliate program she should try next because she had obviously made a mistake choosing this one.

So? This is fine and dandy. But where’s the pitfall? It sounds like a reasonable question you say because this is just what always happens to you. You sign up and pay your fees and then wait for the money to come in.

The big pitfall that underlies all other pitfalls in affiliate marketing is not having a plan. You need to set up your affiliate program and then begin working your marketing plan and wait for the business to build slowly but steadily.

She had been in the affiliate marketing program for a month and expected to see money rolling in immediately. She actually said that she had anticipated making $1,000 her first month and she had made nothing other than the percentage on the sale to her sister. And she would not even get that until she sold more because the payout only came when she reached a commission figure of $100.

But what had she done to tell the world about the wonderful product she was selling? Just about nothing. She had business cards printed up and she emailed her friends and asked them to tell their friends about it. Oh, and she had posted on a forum about how she knew about this great product but no one replied to her. Lately she had been doing research to find a better affiliate program.

Trickling out of this pitfall is the other main pitfall which is wasting time doing the wrong thing which leads to spending time looking for another better affiliate program without learning what went wrong with the first program. Focus on the process, not the program and you will make a killing in any good affiliate program you can find.

You can run a dozen affiliate programs at the same time but you need to build up your target market list and create some traffic to your affiliate site. If you had the best affiliate program in the world and relied on emailing your friends about it, how much do you think you would make?

If you spend six hours a day reading about affiliate programs and searching the internet for a better affiliate program while waiting passively for your poor neglected first affiliate program to bring in the bucks, you are not working. You are wasting time. That is like putting a pot of water on the stove and not turning the stove on and then grumbling because the water is not hot and wondering if you used a different pot if it would help.

Many people make decent money with ClickBank but only a few get the big bucks.

Only a select few know the ClickBank Secret.

What these successful people do is create a product to sell on ClickBank. The product doesn’t have to be something big or expensive.

They sell the product on ClickBank and offer affiliates the maximum commission, which happens to be 75%. The seller is interested in recruiting as many affiliates as possible.

On the product’s sales page the seller gives away something of value. To get the free item the visitor signs up for seller’s newsletter.

The seller builds an email list from the visitors that come to the sales page. Nearly all visitors that come to the sales page won’t buy the product being advertised. But quite possibly half of the visitors that come to the page will sign up for the newsletter so they can receive the free item.

And here’s the best part: ClickBank’s army of 100,000 affiliates are the ones sending the visitors to your sales page. Your email list is created by other people’s efforts. It costs you nothing.

Once you have your email list you send ads for ClickBank products in every newsletter you send.

And that’s the ClickBank Secret.

Just so you know we will go over creating and managing email lists in future lessons.

The auto responder service I use to manage my email lists is AWeber which offers a free trial of its services.

Today we are going to go over some various ways to make an income online by providing value to your customers.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a commission based system where a company recruits affiliates (people like you and me). Every time an affiliate refers someone to buy from the company, the company will pay the affiliate a commission.

It usually costs nothing to become an affiliate.

Most companies pay their affiliates between 3%-15% commission.

Commission Junction has a huge list of products for affiliates to market.
http://www.cj.com

Most large companies with an online presence (e.g. Amazon.com) will have an affiliate program.

ClickBank
http://www.clickbank.com

Many people have informational products that they are selling online. ClickBank is a place where people selling those products can list their products for a small fee. They are currently over 10,000 products in its catalog for affiliates to market.

With such a large catalog ClickBank also attracts many affiliates. They currently have 100,000 affiliates. ClickBank connects affiliates and sellers.

A couple things are unique to ClickBank:

First: ClickBank only accepts informational products (e.g. Ebooks, Ecourses, or anything that doesn’t have to shipped)

Second: ClickBank sellers offer affiliates commissions as high as 75%.

Build a website

Many people generate an income by building a website.

Generally websites fall into two categories.

The first is informational. The value they offer their visitors is by providing valuable information to them. They make money off the advertisements on their pages. The more information people get from the website, the longer they stay at the site, and the money the advertisers pay the website owner.

This is the model is used by newspapers.

An example of this is Digg.com
http://digg.com

The second way people earn from their websites is by selling actual products. These products can be created by the website owner or be affiliate products.

We will delve into the pros and cons of these two types of websites in future lessons.

Email Marketing

The most lucrative method is by having an email list of people that you send a periodic newsletter to. The value provided to the customer is the information given in the newsletter. If the information is crap then people will unsubscribe from the newsletter.

Like informational websites, the owner of an email newsletter earns money by the advertisement in the newsletters.

Of the many places to find affiliate products, ClickBank is one my favorites.
http://www.clickbank.com

ClickBank has over 10,000 products for you to promote.

ClickBank sellers offer affiliates commissions as high as 75%. This is much higher than most affiliate programs.

ClickBank only accepts informational products (e.g. Ebooks, Ecourses, or anything that doesn’t have to shipped) so there are no shipping & handling charges or hidden fees. The price you see is what you pay.

ClickBank allows you to sort products by what it calls gravity. Gravity is a measure of how many recent sales the product has had.

According to ClickBank, Gravity is:
“Number of distinct affiliates who earned a commission by referring a paying customer to the publisher’s products. This is a weighted sum and not an actual total. For each affiliate paid in the last 8 weeks we add an amount between 0.1 and 1.0 to the total. The more recent the last referral, the higher the value added. ”

So the products with a highest gravity have been making the most sales recently. This is important as some products sell better than others and you want to be sure the product you choose to promote is going to sell.

One drawback of promoting high gravity products is there is going to be a lot of other people trying market the product. This makes it especially difficult if you are purchasing traffic as you face a lot of competition. As always I recommend you follow the Double Rule mentioned in the previous lesson.

Before promoting a product I recommend taking a look at the product’s sales page. Would you buy this product?

Also look at the $Earned/Sale. ClickBank defines this as “Average net amount earned per affiliate per referred sale. Note that this is the net earned per actual sale, and so it is impacted by refunds, chargebacks, and sales taxes.”
ClickBank has made it easy for affiliates to be successful and that’s why they have 100,000 affiliates.

Affiliate marketing is a commission based system where a company recruits affiliates (people like you and me). Every time an affiliate refers someone to buy from the company, the company will pay the affiliate a commission.

It usually costs nothing to become an affiliate.

Most companies pay their affiliates between 3%-15% commission.

Some of the best places to find affiliate programs are:

Commission Junction
http://www.cj.com

Share A Sale
http://www.shareasale.com

Click Bank
http://www.clickbank.com

There are literally thousands of products for you to choose from. You can find something to market to virtually anyone.

When searching for a product to advertise on your website make sure the product matches the content of your website. If you have a website on baby names you wouldn’t advertise for computer equipment.

Be sure you feel comfortable about the product you’ll be selling. Would you want to buy this product?

Frequently it’s a good idea to purchase the product that you’ll be promoting.

After the product has arrived you should ask yourself these questions:

• How simple was the checkout process? How difficult would it be for someone new to the Internet to checkout?
• Did the product come as advertised?
• Was the shipping price reasonable?
• Were there any extra or hidden charges that were not advertised or expected?
• How long did the product take to arrive?
• Did the charge on your credit card statement clearly indicate that the charge came from this company?

If you had any problems with the purchase of the product or problems when it arrived then you should not market this particular product. If you had problems then so will people you refer which will result in fewer sales and more refunds & charge backs.

If you are paying to send traffic to the 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 says if I am promoting something for $10 and I spend $20 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 something else to promote.

The Double Rule also says that if you have made 2 sales but have spent more on advertising than you have earned it’s probably time to stop losing money and find something else to promote.

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

Be sure you understand your program’s terms and conditions. What are their exact rules?

Make sure you check how often they pay you. Some programs pay every 2 weeks while others wait 120 days after the sale to pay you.

Some programs pay you no matter how much money you have earned. Others wait until you have earned $100.

The morale of the story is make sure you understand the program, policies, and the product you are promoting.

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