This will sound like a strange question, but I will ask it anyway.... How confident would you be that you could create a landing page and drive traffic soley from google adwords PPC with the keywords etc of your choosing and break even or better over a 3 month period? I know it is an open ended and broad question, but any honest answers would be great.
I can say first hand it's doable. Prior to getting started years ago (after getting burned by AdWords when it first launched), I spent weeks studying, researching and generally being a pansy about getting started. Eventually it got to the point where I just decided to actually put some money down so I whipped up a landing page in about 5 minutes, grabbed some random content and chose a good offer to promote and stuck it up on AdWords. People often make the mistake of thinking that it takes 3 months to break even on AdWords, from that first major campaign I saw a return within 12 hours (and I'm still running that offer till this day). The very essence of PPC means you can find out within a day if the offer you're promoting is viable (or if your campaign is poor). It's doable, but like anything involving money - just don't be careless. However, we will not discuss my first careless foray into Adwords when it first started.
Are you two guys referring to having a landing page promoting an affiliate product from another site?
Oh its definitley doable. Tons of guy are making huge amounts of money doing it. Of course tons of guys are losing huge amounts of money as well.
I have had success and failure with PPC in the past. But I am trying to gauge exactly how confident you guys are that you could at least break even on a new landing page for a new product. Lets presume that I was to pick the product and you picked the keywords and wrote the landing page. On a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 = I guarantee I would at least break even Where would you be?
Haha, probably about a 2.5 or 3. I've had some success in the past, but the majority have been failures. I think that I'm not too too bad at writting my ad copy and choosing keywords, but I am horrible at choosing products to promote. I just have no idea what makes a product marketable...
Deano, if I may be so blunt, in business there is no "breaking even" if you haven't made a positive ROI after 3 months, you've wasted a substantial amount of time, in internet years ALOT of time.The time=money mantra is never more apparent than with online marketing. , To me adwords represents the purest form of market research and also the fastest, what would normally take eons of focus groups,research,ect is accomplished with blinding speed. And your failures and successes are made glaringly obvious in a matter of days if not hours. That was virtually unheard of a short while ago.
Google is too expensive to make money on most affiliate offers, because most companies offering affiliate programs are also bidding on thie own stuff. Example - bidding on an overstock white down comforter: Comforter $100 Your comission $7 That means if you spend $7 or more to make the sale, you lose money. Well if overstock is selling that comforter for $100, they are buying it for around 50. That mean they can spend $40 to sell it and still make money. Another example from first hand knowledge. AllSat pays $110 to affiliates per signup for DISH network. AllSat get $400 from DISH for each signup. How can you complete with that? You can try long tail keywords, but you'll never make much money with 'pacific down 300 thread count white down comforter'. The traffic just isn't there.
Indeed. If you ever want to test out the validity of an idea or the size of a niche market, you simply have to put up a quick Adwords campaign pointing to a squeeze page and count the numbers. If it looks like a winner then hurrah, if not then send your sign-ups an apology email telling them so and give them a freebie bonus for their effort. I remember hearing Perry Marshall use the same technique to research product name ideas ... Adwords, you gotta love it, eh? Regards Howard