Affiliate Marketing Business ProjectsProjects And Case Studies In Internet Marketing Using Pay Per Click And SEO Link Building

(Go back to Part 3 of Dog Training Project Study)

Preparing Adwords Campaign For The Project

Creating the campaign in search marketing is not the last step in affiliate marketing with PPC. This is just the beginning of the almost never ending testing and modifying of an affiliate marketers promotion - where the ultimate goal is to produce a highly converting, cheaper costing campaign.

In short, more money in your pocket and less in advertising.

In the short time that I focused my attention to PPC - reading affiliate marketer blogs, testing my campaigns and promotion, following the tutorials in pay per click advertising from PPC coaches, etc. - one thing that I noticed is that, there is no single working formula to be successful in this industry. All, and I will say all of the successful PPC marketers have always different ways of finding his or her own success in this very exciting field.

All of them have developed their own methods, created or outsourced tools and/or other legwork and have even spent large amounts of money in PPC to find that high performing campaign. It always seems to be different from affiliate to affiliate.

But one thing is for sure. If you will involved yourself in this, be prepared to work hard, be patient and persistent until you discover your own method of creating a successful campaign and product promotion. Do not be afraid to fail or to keep testing or even change your work because only through constant monitoring and modification will you be able to reach your goal of making money almost automatically.

With that out of the way - let us now go to the last leg of the campaign I created for this case study. There won’t be much to write anymore because most of the important topics were already posted in part 1, part 2 and part 3.

I will only show 3 keywords - broad, exact and phrase - for the screenshots and the video for now because I didn’t really researched thoroughly the keywords to use because it is very time consuming.

I’m not touching the topic of keyword research here because I admit that I’m not very good at this part yet although I pretty much have successfully chosen undiscovered keywords through repeated research. Like most who have aspiration in this field, I’m still learning like every rookie marketer.

Watch The Quality Score Video By Clicking Here

Google Adwords Keyword Selection (Screenshot 5)

Google Adwords Pricing Set (Screenshot 6)

Screenshots 5 and 6 will show how I set up the Adwords campaign for BitingPuppy.net but I was not able to capture the screen from the beginning and missing were “Target Customers” and “Create Ad” - although the ads I wrote shows at screenshot 5. For this campaign, I targeted only the U.S. and Canada.

That’s about it for this campaign project, and I want to add that though I only showed only 1 keyword, I am going to add more keywords to this campaign using the same landing page and I will use any number of keywords I will discover as long as those keywords will keep Quality Score at acceptable levels. I’ll keep it online, too, until I have used up a budget of $100 and see if it make any sales.

(Go back to Part 2 of Dog Training Project Study)

Creating A Landing Page

For this case study, I intend to use just 3 articles relevant to “biting puppy” keyword and its derivative. I will also search some cute puppy pictures to include in the website. I’m not very good in designing websites and not proficient in CSS, so my website will be a sucky one for testing purposes. It will also be created using tables.

The live site can be found by visiting http://www.bitingpuppy.net. Below is a checklist of all important things I consider are necessary before making the site live in a campaign:

1) All links are directed to a TRACKING LINK. This is one of the mistakes I did when I started PPC marketing - not tracking the clicks on my campaigns. I probably wasted a lot of money on my initial campaigns because I’ve been running them for months without any idea of how I can make my offers or keywords convert. I was too lazy to setup or learn an accurate tracking software that all I do is check my stats at Clickbank, CJ, eBay and other affiliate networks stats result. Little did I know that if I wanted to make the most of the money invested in affiliate marketing - tracking your conversion as accurately as you could will not only save you money but would also give you an idea which of your keywords are making the sales.

The best tracking software for this project is the one that is available at PPC Coach tool chest - a PPC training and coaching membership club. There’s quite a bit of learning curve in setting it up but once you get to setup 2 campaigns, the next ones are easier. I have written a review of this PPC coaching program here but I plan to write another review in the future.

Other than that tool, I probably have 3 other statistics tracking script in any website I deploy so I can compare my traffic and conversions. It’s a bit of work but at least I’m not running blind on any of my web properties.

2) The tracking link redirects to the right AFFILIATE OFFER (redirecting offer away from landing page). Now, this is an added advantage if you are using a tracking software with a redirection feature for some reasons:

There’s talk in affiliate marketing circles that some affiliate networks and merchants, are “stealing” an affiliate marketers converting keywords.

I think this happened to me, though I cannot prove it. Plenty of times in my past campaigns and promotions, I got lucky to find the keyword/s that convert. The first 3 days mostly, I was ecstatic to find that the keywords are sending in the sales and I get them cheap because my Quality Score is good.

Afterwards though, clicks and conversions start to decline until it totally disappear. Even the position of my ads went from number 3 position to number 8/9/10 and cost per click (CPC) which were initially low (sometimes I only start at $0.20 and at number 3 position) is priced more than 3 times the original!

I kept wondering why this is happening so I researched what other affiliates have to say about this in forums and blogs and found out that it happened not only to me but to others as well. Most of those affected by it says that some network affiliate managers they talk to admit that “stealing” keywords do happen. Specially if you are direct linking to an offer, where merchants can see in their stats what keywords sent the traffic to them - it’s so easy for them to beat an affiliates’ CPC cost.

After reading about it - I also found out what other affiliates are doing to counter it. Their solution - redirecting the clicks from the landing page to the offer. It’s not 100% foolproof but it’s better than not having safe provisions at all.

I also avoided direct linking to merchants after this incident not only because of suspected keyword theft but also because new Google adwords rules about one domain URL in Google ads per offer. But in all my campaigns thereon, redirecting is always a part of my setup.

3) The articles, meta tags and alt tags for images contain the keywords of my campaign. I maybe over doing this project for just a test setup but if you’ve been online for a while like me, on-page Search Engine Optimization will always be a part of setting up a new website. It’s taking me longer to setup my landing page but I don’t want to lose the habit of making sure that all my sites - test or not - are SEO’d properly. But, that’s just me.

After all three criterions are incorporated in my landing page, creating the campaign in Adwords or in any search marketing platform is the next step - which is what the next post will be…..

(Go to Part 4 of Dog Training Project Study)