My $5000/mo Goal With ClickBank & Arbitrage

No - you need to have your destination URL be <affiliate.merchant.hop.clickbank.net> where the affiliate & merchant are your ID and their ID. See more on Clickbank's FAQ here.

Then, you should be aware that Google only allows one ad per display URL. So, if anyone else is advertising the URL you want for the display URL, you'll have to beat them out by paying a higher price, which could or could not be lucrative, depending on your market.

-T

 

That's awesome. I wonder how much he spent on advertising to get a good ROI with arbitrage.

Do you have a link to the story?

 

On top of Telmari's advice, here's a quick tip for avoiding that situation but possibly raking in the same amount of click thrus:

Instead of advertising for www.dayjobkiller.com directly and paying the high CPC that is associated with competition, you could register a domain name like www.www-dayjobkiller.com and advertise it as www-dayjobkiller.com, thus bringing in the same kind of traffic with similar results.

As for dayjobkiller, I'm pretty sure that specific url is taken but this is a great method for non-competition as far as URL's go.

It's always good to be creative.

 

Argh, but this looks ugly as sin in the Google ad:
affiliate.merchant.hop.clickbank.net

So this means realistically I should have a separate domain for each product I am promoting?

Thanks.

 

So as soon as I made those changes my minimum bids shot up to $5-$10 per click. I just changed the URL in the ads, nothing else. I had no problem with minimum bids before...

Does this mean I need my own domain name to redirect...or does it mean I should immediately start setting up my own landing pages? How do people who don't use landers get around this problem?

UGH!

 

Here's Shoemoney's $10k adwords experiment part 1. http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/04/08/the-1000000-experiment-with-ppc-part-1/

There is of course a part 2 you should read also.

Christine

 

Yeah, it's always best to have your own domains or subdomains and use a redirect to the hoplink.

 

But will that solve the quality score issue?

I don't think re-directing it again will help that...

 

It won't solve it, but it will help it.

A good landing page with relevant keywords will help your quality score.

 

Right, but what I'm saying is:

at first (going to the websiteaddress.com/?hop=myuser) my quality score was high

then I changed that to the affiliate.merchant.hop.clickbank.net version and my quality score immediately dropped (due to the redirect I guess).

If I add a domain to re-direct to the affiliate.merchant.hop.clickbank.net page, I don't think that will help my quality score, because I'm just adding another redirect.

Is there a way to get around this without building a lander?

 

Good question, and I think the short answer is probably going to be no but I like to keep an open mind.

Hopefully someone else will clue us in here.

 

Thankks for your input, and don't apologize for length I really appreciate the details.

I am not afraid to invest more. But I sure didn't think I'd have to create over 50 campaigns#*$@(# OY!

But I am getting it.

I do have one more road block in my way, it's called landing page
how do I get a landing page?

If it is the better bet I certainly would like my own landing page as well!!

 

In general, landing pages are built by 'you.' And by 'you' I mean anyone trying to make money in this market.

You have the option to hire the work out to other people as well. You can use sites like:

http://www.rentacoder.com
http://www.scriptlance.com
http://www.projectspring.com/freelance/index.html

They will create your landing pages for you, but there are two caveats you should be aware of when you do this:

1. You will be essentially giving your coder the same idea you have
2. It might cost you around $100 or more

Another option is to start learning how to build web pages yourself, and then you can purchase hosting with a company like http://www.hostgator.com or http://www.dreamhost.com (both good hosts and cheap). That way, you can keep your hosting costs low while maximizing your profit.

OR you can learn how to copy other people's web pages, and then alter them for yourself. You should change it enough so that it's not recognizable as their page though, otherwise you're just being a lazy copycat.

I recommend a combination of the latter two ideas, as this will help you figure out what works for people. And after all, landing pages are usually just one web page so there isn't much worry of creating a whole website.

Good luck!

 

Firstly, which are we talking about here - Display URL or Destination URL? To my knowledge (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), your QS isn't affected simply by the display URL, unless it's a domain that's been 'blacklisted' due to other poor campaigns... in which case changing your display URL ultimately wouldn't matter (since it has to "agree" more or less with the destination URL, and that's where your landing page QS is based from).

Also, you said your QS dropped immediately - but that would be a little hard to determine, unless you changed absolutely nothing about your campaign aside from the destination URL, waited for a while, and compared numbers, since QS is updated regularly, but we don't know how often exactly (Google says at least once a month...).

Since this is the case (again, to my knowledge), as long as whatever your final destination page ends up being has a good QS, redirects shouldn't matter (unless you violate the Adwords TOS for display URLs - remember, you cannot use a hoplink as a display URL, even though you do see a lot of people trying it!).

So really the only way to get there without a lander (and avoid having your ad potentially pulled) is to use the actual product's sitename (could be with or without the www, or any other site they use) as the display URL, and have your hoplink as the destination URL.

-T

 

Thanks for that. It was strange, I had the actual product's site (plus =hop) as the jump to URL and there were no minimum bid problems. When I read your post on here a few hours later I went and made the change and immediately minimum bids started showing up. I think I'm going to build a lander...since that seems like the better choice anyway.

 

Good thinking, DLM.

You might not have had any bid problems using the http://productsite.com/stuff.index?hop=xxx style link, but if you use that link style directly, you also won't make any sales.

Good call on the lander. It gives you so many better options to track traffic, plus you can sell multiple items of the same sort

-T

 

Yup, I'm thinking reviewing several competing items using the refund & $/sale to rank them. Hopefully I'll be able to build the visitors trust and collect some emails at the same time.

I have a feeling spending some time/money up front will be worth it in the long run.

 

Good thinking! Opt-ins are a great bonus to any campaign. Some campaigns convert poorly up front, and richly after just the first email.

Spending time is definitely worth it, when you invest it properly. Money however should be carefully spent and wisely invested so as to bring about returns, and not just hopes

-T

 

Yeah, I'm very frugal, so I don't think that will be a problem. I'm going to put $50 to start each of my 2 landing pages and re-evaluate after I've spent that on Adwords and MSN and see where I'm at.

Thanks for the help, I'll post my results in a couple weeks.

 

That last sentence is what I'm basing all of my future income off of. I think if I spend the money now, the money later will come much easier as I will have a working knowledge of the system. The variable is how wisely you spend your money up front, and unfortunately, wisdom doesn't come automatically.