The other two:

• Part 1
• Part 2

For one, I have been developing tracking software to track my Clickbank sales. But now there is Hexatrack and Tracking202, both of which have free trials. Actually, it’s developed. It just needs cleaned up so that others can use it. You see, I build things as fast as I can to have access to the functionality, but that leaves the interface a little less than newbie friendly. It’s simple and I am still continuing development.

Another, I was really unorganized with my advertising during the time I ran this campaign. I have all the data, but the methods I used weren’t actually refined. In fact the methods weren’t really methods. They were shots in the dark based on logic but I was still learning.

But then I realized that may be the exact reason to write this case study. I ran this campaign haphazardly, without tracking and I still made a profit. If I can do that, just about anyone can.

Looking back over the keywords, I started vary specific, product name specific, and I expanded from there. I was initially going to intrepret the data only. But in the meantime, I found Blist. With Blist, I could upload the data and share it, which is exactly what I did.

And then I ran into issues and another day and found Zoho. Damn, how long has this thing been around with me needing it. I uploaded the ROI details of the campaign and messed with it for less than ten minutes and came up with this, which is a little squashed from the amount of data but it gives me a graph of the ROI I never had before. Originally I embeded it here, but the graph was too big for this layout. So above is the link and below is the screenshot:

Like I said it was kind of squashed, but you get the idea. At the end of the run there, my daily spending on the ads jumped over the $40 mark and that was right when the stall happened in my ROI. I saw it coming. The rise is where I started adding more misspellings and longer phrases. The two days before the $40 day, it started creeping up.

Sometimes this happens when someone new starts testing your territory. Which I how I learned the maximum bid for a keyword is $100 a click. Yep, I have bid that high. It’s like playing chicken. Who is going to turn away first? I had the benefit of my stats to know it was worthwhile. The guy coming in just thought it was too rich for his blood.

At the time though, I was running the ad through my own domain. The product’s name is Joana’s Guide. I bought joanasguide.net which has recently expired. It gave me the benefit of being on it’s own domain (i.e. no other competition from people bidding on their affiliate link) and an extra highlight from Google when people searched for the product name. The actual product’s domain was joanasworld.com. Now if that isn’t a chance to get more clickthroughs, I don’t know what is.

So what I happened at the end I am unsure of. I could pretty much hold my position because I had my own domain. So why all the clicks? A proxy clicker? Everyone bought their own domains? Who knows? I can’t remember now. I just chose another product.

But this was in my early day’s, shortly after I discovered the key to using a product’s name for Adwords campaigns, so I never went further than that for this one. But I expanded it with misspellings and phrases built around the products name, ending with a grand total of 199 keywords. Misspellings and longer phrases are usually cheaper due to less competition. Here is my keyword list near the end of the campaign. And for those that want to dig deeper here is all the Adwords data and the raw ROI data because I am about done looking at it.

When I started promoting this product, I really had no idea what World of Warcraft is. And to tell you the truth, I have never even played or been to the site. I picked up a few things from the sales page for the product. Jargon. Everything has it’s jargon and you have to learn a little of it.

I don’t have the details of the products position in the Clickbank marketplace when I started the campaign. I didn’t start archiving that data until August of last year. And the sites that track the data like cb-analytics don’t go back that far. But I can tell you one thing, it fell within the guidelines for choosing a Clickbank product that I set out at the beginning of this long tutorial.

But I do have all the Adwords data. I started the campaign 1/27/2007 with the following keywords:

• joanasworld.com
• joana’s guide
• joanas
• joanas 1-70 guide
• joanas horde guide
• joanas world
• joanas wow
• joanasguide
• joanas world
• www.joanaworld.com

Back then, I added each type for each word: broad, phrase, and exact. My max bids varied from $0.50 to $1.20. The highest actual click cost me $0.32. I only ran one adgroup with all the words in it.

The ads were pretty generic also. I started with two text ads and whenver I got enough clicks to realize people preferred one over the other, I would rewrite the one that got the lower CTR. This was basically part of the weekly checkup on my campaigns. But I used the title of the product in the title of the ad, like so:

{Keyword: Joana’s Guide}

The Keyword part with the braces tells Google to substitute the search term used in the ad if it will fit. And if not, Google will use "Joana’s Guide".

As far as the rest of the ad went. I used " A quick route to 70 in World of Warcraft", "1-70 in Wow in only 6 days."

You can pull most of the ideas for your ad from the highlighted parts of the sales page. The vendor is out to sell his product and he sells a lot more than what you are selling for him. Trust his judgement on words he uses to get those sales.

The first day:

Cost:$5.36

Sales:$33.22

Profit:$27.86

The first week:

Cost: $34.75

Sales: $66.44

Profit: $34.75

Yes, the first day can make you think you have a good average going. What a while to see the actual profitability of a campaign. But this one has a few twists and turns which is why it is multipart and I will eventually wrap it all together in a PDF file for download.

This campaign popped into my head because I actually bought a domain specifically for it and it just expired. I bought the domain because I was running a direct to affiliate link campaign and I wanted to stop the ups and downs of bidding against other affiliates that were doing the same thing. So I bought a domain that was closer to the product’s name than the original was.

Clickbank Vendor ID: joanaguide

Homepage: www.joanasworld.com

Length of Campaign:1-27-2007 – 8-23-2007

Sales: $4161.20

Adwords Spend: $2093.30

Profit: $2067.90

This is about the average campaign I run. Some of the shorter run ones are more profitable and burn out more quickly. Stack up enough small ones and those short ones can be icing on the cake.

That’s all for now. I will be covering more of this campaign is future posts. I still have all the data and will be taking it down to keywords and cpc. But it’s a lot of data to go through, so look for the upcoming posts. I plan on doing a case study on every campaign that I have run that is no longer active. Workhorses like this one, fast profitable ones, and ones that I never had much luck with no matter what I did.

So I am going to go back to historical campaigns. Campaigns I have run before, that were profitable, but for some reason I stopped them. It could be because the competition was too much, I knew less then than I do now, or it was better to spend the advertising on a more profitable campaigns.

I have dropped campaigns while they were making money. They didn’t make enough money for the amount of babysitting I had to do to keep them going. The more campaigns you have going, the more profitable each one has to be in order to be worth your time. Look at it this way. Would you rather spend an hour a week on something that brings in $20 or something that brings in $100. Well, when you start, $20 is great. But you will need 50 of those to make $1000 in a week. You will only need ten if each campaign is bringing you in $100.

So, tomorrow I will look through my campaigns from the past. I have 3 years worth. I will try to find two or three that are good examples. And we will continue this Clickbank case study. After all, I am teaching a process. The process is the same whether it was a year ago or today.

So I wrote some software. It logs into both Clickbank and Adwords downloads both reports, imports them and gives me this, while I write posts:

I also track all keywords and hits and this goes in the mix. It’s not ready for release and I am not sure if it will be any time soon, but Jeremy Palmer over at Quit Your Day Job has a great set of Excel spreadsheets along with an ebook on affiliate marketing that I have only browsed so far, but it’s definitely worth a read.

I have yet to mention any keyword tools in any of my posts. That’s because I believe they can mess up your Adwords campaign if you use them wrong. You can end up with so many keywords that you don’t know where to start. I see them as brainstorming tools. To prevent misuse in the early stages of your Adwords training, just make it a practice to never copy and paste the results. Look at the results and keep a notepad and write down the phrases that seem like a good fit for the product you are promoting.

Having said that, here are some keyword tools:

Google AdWords Wrapper

Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

keyword lists | geo targeted lists

Mistypes.net

Typo Generator

SpyFu

Overture- Keyword Selector Tool

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker

Wordpot – Free Keyword Tool

KeywordSpy

How Do I Find Good Keywords?

One good way to start noticing the way other people search is to watch the way you yourself search. Sign up for Google to save your web history for you. Of course, this won’t help you if you want to get started now, but it will help you in the future. You can see how your own mind works when you are searching for something. It will give you insight on other people’s searches.

On the other blog I run, I write about what I am doing currently whether it be seo work, affiliate work, WordPress issues, ecommerce work, programming work. In my day job, I am the swiss army knife tech guy. If the network goes down, I fix it. If we need a whole new inventory system, I write it. Writing about what I have done pays off. Much of the work I have done I had no idea how to do until I did research first: xml conversions, filemaker remote access, creating WordPress themes. But I knew how to find the information. Before I write the post, I look through my Google search history for title ideas. Every step of my research is in there, as well as every phrase I used when looking for the information. I pick titles from the words I used when it was obvious that I found nothing assuming there has to be like minds out there taking the same route I did. I have been rewarded with a lot of number one rankings and traffic by just doing this little bit of research.

The same is true for PPC. Allow Google to save your history and before you promote a specific product. Read the whole product page. Some are long, I know. As you do, write down words and phrases from the sales copy that someone may use when they are looking for solutions for the issues that the product solves.

Write down the products name.

Brainstorm how someone may screw up the products name. If a product is called the Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Blueprint. Switch it up a little. Go with the Ultimate Affiliate Marketing Plan and the Ultimate Marketing Blueprint

If the product creator’s name is on the page, write that down. I have even written down the names of some of the people who gave testimonials, if they were well known in the product’s niche.

Then find some forums that relate to the subject matter the product covers. Look for questions. Find out what people are looking for. Write down those words and phrases.

If you have yet to get a feeling for the person who would buy this product. Find a few blogs to read through Google Blog Search. Use the knowledge from your research so far to search for specific answers.

Eventually you will have become the person with the problem and if Google is tracking your history, you have all the keywords you need.

Do I have to do all of this?

Nope. And I don’t do this every time either. But it gives you a lot of options.

If you have a website that deals with the product and gets search engine hits, use your stats to find keywords. Keywords are everywhere. The biggest problem a newbie will have choosing them is that most newbies use too many general keywords and most internet users don’t use general terms for long. General keywords are a very big target.

• First I asked him to choose a Clickbank product to promote.
• Then I briefly went through the logic of choosing keywords for the Adwords campaign.
• I went over the importance of negative keywords in your Adwords campaigns.
• And finally I went over some things that might scare a newbie away from Adwords.

The following is a report on potential Clickbank products to promote. I will pick one from this list or another I have on my own list and go step by step through the process of starting a Clickbank campaign.

Case-study

My objective: reach the mile stone of $20 / day

My status: Work full time and spend about 25hrs a week on the internet

January 9, 2008

Not knowing much about IM (Internet Marketer) I asked around for some help to see If I could be tutored on that matter. Pleasantly, my offer was accepted by Stephan. Together we decided to aim for at least ($$) a day and see how fast I could reach this goal assuming I don’t know nothing about Internet Marketing.

1.

I am pretty excited about it! I wonder how fast thinks will happen, but in the meantime. My first tasks is to go over the marketplace in Clickbank and do a little research about products I would like to make a campaign about it. I am told to pick products ranked between 20 and 100 so I don’t have fierce competition.

Now that I have picked my 20 products I do not know what to look for as to help me decide which one I will start a campaign with.

Now here’s my question.

WT: Once I pick my products, what’s next? What do I look in?

So here’s my list of 20:

Here’s my list, that we don’t have to show to everyone.

34) Xbox 360 Repair Guide – Off The Charts Coversions W/ Google And Yahoo. Our Conversion Rate Is @ About 1/10. And Our Profits Are Above 100%. Optimized For Great Quality Score W/ Many Keywords. Snatch This Up Now – And Be One Of Our Elite Affiliates! Millionare In 12 Months? Maybe.
$/sale: $18.37 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $18.37 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 90.0% | grav: 23.72
view pitch page | create hoplink

29) New Products Available! Affiliates Go To: www.SatelliteSoft.com. Satellite Tv . Games . IPod . Psp . Zune . IPhone . Movies . Music . Mp3 . Tv Shows . Google = www.SatelliteSoft.com = Go To www.SatelliteSoft.com = Go To www.SatelliteSoft.com = Go To www.SatelliteSoft.com = Go To www.SatelliteSoft.com = $$$.
$/sale: $16.96 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $16.96 | %/sale: 50.0% | %refd: 68.0% | grav: 55.32
view pitch page | create hoplink

37) PCTV4Me. Worldwide Internet Radio And Internet Television.
$/sale: $17.96 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $17.96 | %/sale: 60.0% | %refd: 75.0% | grav: 22.79
view pitch page | create hoplink

32) Gamer Testing Ground. Get Paid To Beta Test And Play Games. Get Free Game Copies, Learn How To Get A Video Game Tester Job.
$/sale: $25.03 | Future $: – | Total $/sale: $25.03 | %/sale: 75.0% | %refd: 88.0% | grav: 40.41
view pitch page | create hoplink

The list was shortened so we didn’t create any competition. His goal is easy to reach. In fact, I think he could shortly be making $100 a day with only about 5-8 hours of work and then cut that time down even more with experience and the right software.

I wrote a post a few days ago about newbie adwords mistakes and got a little big for my britches. I currently make mistakes. The biggest one being taking anything for granted. Like dropping some of the practices that created all of my profit for me.

Always split test. Use at least two ads in each ad group and once you have enough impressions to notice people favoring one over the other, replace the ad with the lowest CTR. I admit I slack on this one, tending to go after quantity rather than quality with my limited time.

I have the goal to keep pushing past the plateau I have been at for a while. But when I see monthly sales going past the average I am used to, I slack.

I am my biggest enemy.

You will have to learn to recognize the same things in yourself and figure out how to disarm them or bypass them. If anyone has a clue about mine, chime in. I will continue to chip away though.

At first I thought this was strange. How could something that was responsible for increasing my income so much be thought of as little more than trash by others? But in the last few days I have been thinking back to when I was a newbie.

I tried Adwords two times and gave up before I actually made money. The third time was a charm. But the point is I didn’t give up. But I had to look more closely at the third time to see why. This might help others along the way. I could go through step by step, 1-2-3 style, but that’s what all these books do. A newbie has a different point of view than someone who has been doing this for a while. Things that I may think is common knowledge may not be so. And big lessons I have learned may lack the emphasis they deserve if I used a 1-2-3 format.

So I figured I would go over a few things that I learned that made my third run at Adwords the charm:

• Don’t be a cheapskate. Before I started using Adwords, my only bill for this business was hosting or about $20 a month. So it was a little hard for me to let go of the money. My first two trys, I bid as low as I could. In fact, I don’t think I bid over 10 cents on any keyword. These days I bid up to the max, which is $100. Not that I spend that on clicks. It just fends on competitors for a while. I watch the amount I pay go up and up as others bid against me for the same url. And then back down again as the ROI just about hits negative. Of course, I don’t advise using this method until you know what you’re doing.
• All keywords are different. When I started I slapped a bunch of keywords in the box and priced them all the same. If the ROI dipped, I dropped them to the same amount. It didn’t work. The closer a keyword moves from general to specific, the more you can spend to get the same ROI. You might bid 10 cents on "make money online" but $3 on "Profitlance".
• Use negatives. I didn’t use negatives when I started either. Then I discovered how to use them. The next day my advertising costs went down 30% and my sales stayed the same. In the downloadable product business, there is always someone searching for a freebie. You want to bypass those guys.
• Set your campaign budget high. Set it higher than you need to and watch your sales for three days like a hawk. Setting it too low will have you missing out on clicks. I have found that whenever my actual spending for the day starting bumping into the campaign budget, not only was I losing out on sales, but it seem to come with a drop in ROI, but that may just be me.
• Set content bids seperately. I still do this on accident. I start a new campaign and forget to set the content bids low. Three days later, my spending jumps through the roof. It takes about that long for content bids to kick in its seems. You will know when it happens and it can wipe out a couple of days of profit.

Well, the list started getting long. I think this subject needs more addressing. I will continue with it in another post.

That’s why it pays to track the hits you get. If you have "spyware remover" in your ad group and check your tracking and find that you are paying for hundreds of hits via "cheap spyware remover", but not one sale, then it is time to add that word to your negative keyword list.

The following is a list I have gradually built for promoting downloadable type products. It has cut advertising costs close to 30% at times. I don’t use them all for every campaign. For example, if I am sending hits directly to the vendor’s site, then I use the synonyms for "review, scam, etc. But if I am sending the hits to a review I have written, then I leave those in.

"no charge"
.exe
.pdf
.zip
aaa
affordable
bad
bargain
bargin
cheap
cheapest
classic
complaint
complaints
complamentary
complementary
complimentary
crack
crackz
crime
criminal
crooked
dirty
discount
download
easy
exe
exotic
federal
found
fraud
free
frugal
ftp
full
gratis
hacked
history
hoax
illegal
immigration
inexpensive
international
iso
jokes
keygen
keygenz
legitimate
lost
low
meso
my
off
password
patch
patent
pdf
prank
priced
rating
redux
repair
review
rip
scam
serial
serialz
sham
subscribers
testimonial
tools
torrent
trustworthy
tutorial
unclaimed
unexpensive
unsalable
used
warez