Affiliate Marketing Plunge: Month 2
July 18, 2008 Posted by Tyler CruzI’ve been so busy with my Affiliate Marketing Challenge and countless other projects lately that I haven’t posted an update on how my personal plunge into affiliate marketing in over two weeks.
In fact, I haven’t done any work on my campaigns except for 4 changes I managed to have the time to implement about a week ago.
First, I removed several ad groups full of a certain type of related keyword I had been running since near the beginning as they were performing horribly. I kept them for so long because they showed early signs of being profitable, but that turned out to be false in the long run.
Secondly, I simply lowered a few of my ad group prices by 5 cents. It’s funny how such a simple and obvious change can have such a positive impact.
Thirdly, I added a new ad group with a bunch of keywords that included US states in the keywords. I had tried adding my keywords with US cities, but ran into huge technical issues with the AdWords editor after trying to add 90,000 keywords at once. I’m going to try this again in the future, but with only major US cities to cut down on the keywords.
Lastly, I found 4-5 new keywords that I can’t believe I didn’t think of in all my research and keyword generating before. It’s amazing how some can get past you.
So, here are my latest results. I’m now breaking down my stats on a monthly basis. Please try to keep in mind that I only worked on my campaigns 1 day in the past 2 weeks:
My last update from two weeks ago showed a -25.67% ROI, so while I’m still in the red, this is actually an improvement for me.
Here is the progress of my total average ROI, taken after the first week and then every few days thereafter: -57.12%, -53.42%, -43.71%, -36.83%, -31.76%, -25.67%, and now -19.57%.
I’ve lost $90.26 this month, but to me that’s money well spent. That works out to only $5 per day for experience and lessons learned. It also formulates more data for me to be able to analyze trends with my campaigns better.
And if you look at the data from the past week only, I’m actually up around $55.
We’ll see how much more I’m able to tweak things and if I can continue to improve my ROI. Wish me luck!
On a related note, I received a FedEx package yesterday which contained my first cheque from MarketLeverage.
While I actually spent more money than I made, it’s always nice seeing your first cheque from a new network you started using. Hopefully my next cheque will turn me out a profit!
Good luck next time!
Very nice! Congrats man! Keep up the good work.
Hehe…youre right… its a gr8 feeling to see cheques! 😉
Your stats are improving nicely! You should start seeing a profit soon enough.
Awesome stats man… I know cracking the first positive income is the hardest…after that it’s all just about scaling up.
Nice! Glad you are still improving with your ROI. And you profited in 4 of the last 5 days, so you are definitely getting better.
Your stats are improving every time. That is a great sign. Why not use advanced match for keywords instead of manually entering the long tail keywords? Unless you have the time to geotarget each of the states you enter, I’m not sure there’s much benefit there. I am new to affiliate marketing so take my advice for what its worth, but my first adgroup I put in hundreds of keywords and just got the feeling that wasn’t the best way to go about things. Now, I keep my adgroups to less than 10 keywords each and focus on the volume keywords.
Hi Dave,
Can you explain what “advanced match” for keywords is? I’m using the various ones on http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/text/19135.html but am not aware of any dynamic keyword matching…
Well, I am referring to Yahoo. I just assumed it was the same on Google. But, on Yahoo, you choose either Standard or Advanced. Advanced would match long tail keywords like “keyword *” or “* keyword”. Standard match just matches exact keyword, misspellings, and I think common phrases like “how to keyword”, but it wouldn’t match “keyword descriptor”. I hope that makes sense. Like I said I am also new, but I believe the Yahoo and Google will do the long tail matching for you.
Ah, yes, Yahoo has an Advanced matching option, but not Google.
For the long tail keywords, I actually don’t generate all of them by hand. I use programs such as SpeedPPC to help me do this, being able to generate thousands of long tail keywords quickly.
I think Broad Match on Google would be the same as Advanced Match, but I am not sure. It seems hard to believe Yahoo could actually do anything better than Google lol.
Broad match is similar, yes, but from my experience (which isn’t much), Yahoo’s Advanced Match takes a lot more liberties into what it displays.
I actually prefer Google’s match types over Yahoo’s. AdWords allows you to be much more specific on match-types, while Yahoo seems to be much more simplified…
Congratulations on receiving your first check from us! I am sure there will be many more behind that one with more zeros on the end. ~ Debby
I’m amazed on how you earned that money even if you’ve got a negative revenue.
It’s because of the method of PPC affiliate marketing. I use PPC advertising networks like AdWords to purchase advertising, and affiliate networks like MarketLeverage to run offers.
My ad money is spent on AdWords, and money generated comes from MarketLeverage.
For June, I spent more in AdWords than I received in MarketLeverage. I just need to switch that.. 🙂