My $5000/mo Goal With ClickBank & Arbitrage

Hi Scott,

you have given me hope, I have read thru some post completely, some quickly. I am juggling a new baby here and trying to make some extra money with clickbank products and google adwords.

Just started two weeks ago, and my clicks have cost me $35.00 so far and no sale yet.

Am I being impatient? Is there a time line before considering problems with ad copy, target keywords and/or products?

I am so intent to make this work to some extent. If I can bring in $500 a month, not a big deal to some of you, but that would make a great difference in my and my baby's life. Am I climbing the wrong tree here?

I want this succeed, and from what I hear you guys say, there is omney to me made promoting other people's products.

I wish I had the time and talent to create my own ebook and have others spend money promoting it but hey....

I need help to get started, before I collapse of exhaustion and depression!

So the products I have chosen come from (3) distinct and different categories. I have my google ads on a monthly 100$ bdget and my click allowance is decided by google budget optimizer.

I have been following many advice on Titles and keeping my keywords very very relevant and some at exact phrases etc...

I am getting clicks, I see where I am getting more, but no conversions.

HELP ME PLEASE GUYS!

RACHEL

 

Hey Rachel,

Welcome to the forum!

Generally, the decision period for a go/no go on revisions to your ad strategy is when your ad has cost you what a commission would bring in but you haven't had any sales.

At 35$, I'd probably say it's time to re-evaluate. There's a number of key elements that might/might not determine whether or not you're getting conversions - let's look at a few of them:

-Ad Copy: Your keywords could be spot on, but your ad copy is appealing to non buyers. Using "Buy" as well as putting the price in the ad copy should help eliminate this, as well as just thinking through if your ad really applies to people who have decided already (or are quite close) to considering the products you're selling.

-Keywords. Even with relevant keywords & exact phrases, which are good, it's still possible to go wrong at times. I've advertised & paid a lot for some keywords that were right on the brand name sometimes, but gotten nothing out of it. Possibly do some more research to make sure the words you've chosen are the ones people who want to buy the products would be typing into Google.

- Landing Page/Direct Link: Are you direct linking, or using landing pages? There are advantages to both, but also rules that apply to both if you intend to be profitable. Maybe we can give you more specific advice along this line here if we have a little more info about your set-up

- QS for your ad setup. Hopefully, you've read how the combination of your ad text, keywords, and landing page affects the QS (Quality Score) that the G gives you based on your ad. With a good quality score, you get better positioning and pay less. With a poor QS though, you pay more, and conversions are worse.

- Ad positioning. Sometimes it pays to be higher for certain key phrases, sometimes it doesn't. This is kind of a try-and-see idea, but generally the closer the keyword is towards the buying cycle, the more I try to keep it in a prominent position (between position 2-5).

- Pricing - be vigilant on your bid amounts! It's super easy to spend 20 cents too much for a keyword that will never convert. Though you don't really know from the get-go what words will convert, you also can't afford to pay a lot to wait and see. Keep bids conservative, based on how well you think they will lead to a sale. If your ad position drops too low, and you are convinced the keyword really will likely lead to a sale, you can raise the bid slowly.

- Split Testing. Hopefully, you're trying multiple copies of your ads (2 at a time) and have the campaign set up to rotate ads evenly so you can consistently be testing out which ad results in a better CTR, which will lower your campaign's overall cost.

- Watching your History: Hopefully as well, you're monitoring your spend history. For instance, have you been spending too much on a keyword with really low CTR over the last few days? Might want to delete the keyword, or pause the ad group until you can re-evaluate.

- And of course the biggie, is the product worth it? Lots of merchants want to sell lots of products, but trust me, not everyone wants to buy something just because it's for sale. While I wouldn't recommend just slurping up the highest gravity product on Clickbank, there's something to be said for picking a product that does in fact have some gravity, so that you do know it sales and isn't a dud, wasting your money.

Hopefully these tips help -if you (or anyone else) want to PM me or reply here with more ideas, feel free!

-T

 

I believe I will pause everything at this point and read on these forums. It seems this google adwords campaigns are not as simple as they seem, a lot to analyse.

Yes I have variations on ads, yes they rotate evenly.

As far as bidding, I believe it is automatic, as I have chosen the budget optimizer. I only have chosen my monthly budget. You think it would be better to assign my own cost to keywords?

I get a lot of inactive ones, It always asks for more, why can't I just bid what ever I want?

In any case I sure appreciate your input "T" and will often return to the forum, because I would love to come in and announce my first sale one day.

You asked how I am set up, landing page or link, please explain because I don't understand.

Simply I have a clickbank account, I have a google account. the two link and create my ads and hop links.

PS: How long ago have you been in affiliate programs and how long it took you before your first results?

Rachel

 

Rachel!

Fear not, for it is highly possible to generate that kind of income. In 5 days, I will be a month into this and I'm already generating an average of about $30/day income (over the entire span).

If you've read my recent blog posts, you'll see that recently there's been a few jumps in daily income as I've been taking bigger risks. And, yes, I agree with all of Telmari's advice. He always gives great advice.

But on top of what he's saying, I'm going to give you some pointers from my own experience-

1. The fear of losing money will hold you back - A friend of mine who is helping me to get to the level he's at tells me two things constantly: continuously evaluate and add new campaigns for different products and don't be afraid to lose money in the process. He's making around $1k/day+ gross sales and that is obviously where most of us want to be. And he got there because he's not afraid to take big risks. Did I mention he's 17? Anyway, the problem becomes obvious once you've thought it through- how else will you know what sells well unless you try them all?
   
2. Continuously add new campaigns - You've got to do this on a daily basis to really get a better grasp on what works and what doesn't. If you give each campaign (advertisements for a product) about a week or more to prove itself, you will have a better understanding of whether or not pouring your money into that avenue brings sufficient returns.
   
3. Always split test ads - Like Telmari says and the thing I hear all the time is, you've got to try to beat your ad for a product with the best CTR (click-thru rate). This is a game I like to play on a daily basis, because the more clicks you get, the less you pay per click to stay in the same ad position. Also, getting more clicks leads to more sales (obviously). But the next trick is generating INTERESTED clicks, not just curious clicks.
   
4. Adjust ads toward interested clicks - You might be getting 3000 curious clicks every day, but unless they are interested in your product, chances are that you're going to end up spending a lot of money for $0 in sales. Make sure your ads are geared toward buyers. Don't try to trick people into clicking on your ad. Trust me, there are enough interested buyers out there to make it worthwhile. Think about it, what would you rather have: 1000 curious clicks or 100 interested clicks? This is also something I'm perfecting as I go along.
   
5. Choosing keywords - My first instinct when I started promoting products was to use obvious keywords, like the product name and that's not a bad idea but it shouldn't be the only keyword you're advertising from. Now that I track which keywords actually generate sales, I know that 90% of the time, they are coming from keywords that aren't exactly like the product name. For instance, if you're pushing a product on birds, you might want to add keywords like: blue jay, hummingbird, ostrich, owl, etc. This would be best in combination with obvious keywords like: birds, bird watching, bird food, etc.
   
   At this point, I'm not exactly sure whether using fewer, highly-targeted keywords is more profitable than using a wide variety of keywords that broadly match my subject matter, but once I do find out I will let the people know!
   
6. Landing pages vs. direct [hop]links - I won't push you either way on this topic, as I'm not completely sure which is a more profitable medium. But so far I have made tons more profit from having a landing page vs. using direct links to products. I would say that 90% of my sales come from landing pages and the rest are hop links in ads. That is not to say that I don't actually get sales from the hoplinks, but they are fewer. Landing pages (for me) are a better bet, because you can pre-sell a product and give your own take on it before a user goes there. This helps instill trust. Also, as your landing page becomes more popular (it will naturally over a couple of weeks), it will start getting more and more organic hits (from searches) and you don't have to pay for those.

This is how I believe you can start profiting from ClickBank and if you need to profit at least $17/day to make that $500 per month, I would shoot for around $20/day profit to cover the fees that ClickBank takes out. So on your current budget of $100/mo, you would need to generate an average of $22 in sales every single day to meet (or exceed) your goal.

If you are only spending around $3.33/day on average on advertising and you are paying $0.10/click (for example), you are only generating 33 clicks. If you don't make 1 sale in 33 clicks, you just screwed yourself out of a sale that day; however, if you CAN get a sales ratio of 1:33 (1 sale per 33 clicks), then you are doing an awesome job!

Realistically, I think your ratio will be somewhere in the 1:50 to 1:100 range on the average, so take that into account when coming up with a spending budget and when setting your Max CPC (Cost Per Click). In other words, you might want to increase your budget up to around $10/day and set your CPC to something like $0.15. That way, your chances for ad impressions go up and your odds of getting more clicks go up as well.

However, unless you are generating $800+ in sales from $300/mo in advertising, there's no way you can reach your $500/mo goal. You may have to spend $700 to generate $1200, depending on your sales:click ratio. It's all very relative, but you have to understand this in order to profit properly. Otherwise, you're just making other people rich.

But as I said before, if you can increase your CTR for interested searchers, then your sales:click ratio will be closer to that 1:33 and you won't have to spend as much to reach your goal.

Some of these things are insanely obvious, so I apologize but I just wanted to be thorough.

Good luck and I hope this helps!

 

scott: very useful information.

After a month "off" internet work I think I'm going to start playing around with my Clickbank account. I have the internet experience required...and your posts in this thread have given me some valuable extra info.

Cheers!

 

Thanks!

Yeah I agree, there's been some awesome feedback on this thread.

And great idea, getting back into the ClickBank groove. You won't be sorry you did.

Cheers back at you!

 

Well dang! I was going to hop into answering your questions again, Rachel, but I see Scott beat me to it! Fine chap, he is! He also gives great advice, I'd definitely consider what he says, and go by that when it comes to refining your campaigns for max ROI!

Feel free to ask if you have any further questions, however!

-T

 

great advice from telmari and scott!

 

I was about to post something similar to Rachel's post but your reply really helped I have also lost more than $28 but no sales. Its very hard to find the correct products.

 

Haha.. thanks man, but you should definitely give your two bits as well. I think you're more successful than I, no?

Either way, continue on.

 

Hopefully it actually helps someone to get where they want to go!

 

I know you were probably asking Telmari these questions, but I'll let you know my response to the last question-

I had my first sale on the first day I started promoting (1/15/07). Whether or not that was luck, I'm not sure but that proves that it's possible. In general, I had one sale per day after that, sans a couple of days. Then I started making two. Now I'm up to around 4-5 and it's been on the rise ever since. Notice I always speak in averages, because some days it's been 8 and some days it can honestly be 0 (though rarely now). You can't let market fluctuations shake you if you're going to be successful, so power through those low days with the knowledge that you'll come out on top. I can definitely tell you that most of those first sales came from my first landing page I made.

Hope that helps.

-Scott

 

Well, that's still no sales yet. Don't know what happen. After the 3 sales made, i still using adwords but no sales after that. Now i try to use landing page, no sales also. Did that any problem with clickbank tracking? Or that's really no one buy with my link?? Anyway will keep trying, but did you able to provide sample of you landing page?

 

I totally agree with you. When first i generate 3 sales, i try narrow down adwords. Eg. tell people it is something regard a best service and will charge you some amount rather than hiding something. In this case, click will be less but when people click it, they will more willing to buy. But unfortunately no sales after that. Maybe something happen with Clickbank tracking or i choose the wrong products. Any advise to selective product? Base on gravity? Popularity?

 

Well, it all depends on how many clicks it takes you to generate a sale on average. Unfortunately, it's really hard to tell that number without getting a few sales first and then averaging it over that amount of time. Like anything in statistics, the more data you have, the more accurate your guess will be.

Anyway-- you figure out your average, you figure out how many clicks you need to generate a sale. This way, you can figure out what your budget needs to be in order to make your campaign worthwhile. Otherwise, you're just wasting money.

 

Very much agreed on this point - finding that balance/sale budget can be a nightmare, ESPECIALLY when you make changes to your adspend campaigns which you think are for the better based on your data, and then the next day you make no sales, and think "Oh nuts, I just totally screwed up my pattern"... but really it's just an off day, and the next day you hit bank and have a new record.

But like Scott says as well, not only should be you be fairly vigilant with your budget so you know exactly what keywords are getting users to your page - and getting them off of it to the merchant (it's worth doing Google Conversion tracking of course for this purpose) -- but you also have to leverage this with the fact that a single day, maybe two.. in some cases even a whole week is hard to judge data by, so you have to give it some time.

I'm definitely a bad example of this, I'll adjust settings for a keyword in the morning and by noon I'll be thinking "ooh I wonder if it's converted yet!!!!" when really, some of the most targetted/best sell-oriented keywords may not even produce but a few (quality) sales a month.

Ultimately, I'd say while you can choose the wrong product, it's probably choosing the wrong audience that most people get wrong (including myself, at times for sure). We think "Oh, this product sounds exactly like what group A would want" and in reality, group A could care less, but it's totally what group B is looking for, yet we advertise, spend money, and see no returns.

It's a tricky game - it's more about learning the basics of how to break into a market & manage your budget than it is trying to learn very exact specifics of how to do everything a certain way.

This thread rocks, though, by the way - people are giving lots of really great advice, so keep it up

-T

 

I am new to this like Rachel. I have lost about $60 on Adwords and closed my account. I set my bids high one day and then the Adwords site was down for almost the entire day after I did that so I couldn't go in and change my bids! When it was finally up and running (I checked constantly and finally just closed my account because I was panicking about the amount that I was spending) my balance was like $58.
So I am back to square one. I first started by just advertising on FREE classifieds and got nothing, then adwords and well you just heard how that went.
The question I have is the landing page. Are you creating a webpage for each product? Will a blog act the same? I was thinking of creating a blog since it is free and I don't want to spend any more money right now.
Any help would be AWESOME
I have enjoyed reading all of the previous threads and feel like have learned some new info. I am going to clickbank now and picking a new product and starting over
Sandy

 

Again, you can't be afraid to lose money in the beginning phases of your campaigns. You have to think of it this way - you're paying Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or whatever to figure out which products work and which ones suck. In all honesty, I'm not profiting very much at all right now because all the money that would be spent on profit is going toward new campaigns. It's only later that I will profit, but I will profit a lot.

I know *I* am not using a landing page for every product, but only those products with landing pages bring back constant sales. So I recommend the landing page.

Using blogs vs. regular landing pages is still up for debate in my head. Once I'm well-grounded in the industry, I'm going to do a couple of tests; however, my instincts tell me that using a blog will distract visitors away from the intended goal. When I build a landing page, I only want clicks that lead to sales to happen. On a blog, you can view other posts and comments, etc. On a landing page, they only have what you put there and only the links that lead to monetary gains. I'm not saying don't use a blog, but that's my immediate feeling. If anyone tests it, let me know! I'm spending a lot of money on making landing pages all the time.

Anyway, just keep this in mind- always think long-term in this business.

 

Shoemoney tried it out last summer with very good results. From his testing he said the best ROI were adbrite ads.

Christine

 

Quick question:

If you are not using landing pages, you would put something like this for your URL in your Google ad, correct:
http://www.dayjobkiller.com/?hop=myidhere

and then make it so the URL appears:
http://www.dayjobkiller.com

in the ad?

That seems logical to me, I just want to make sure Clickbank will track sales properly via that method.

Thanks