So after lots of reading and debating I decided just to jump in and try something. As long as the costs are controllable I need to start something or I will never learn or earn ! Here is what I did ... based on the advice from an ebook I joined clickbank and looked for a product to promote. I choose a product produced by Ewen Chia HERE I then went to google adsense and setup an add for it based on the hoplink that clickbank generated : Your own PC cash machine Earn that extra income you need now Turn your PC into a cash machine -affiliate link is here in ad- Then I setup a redirect off a subdomain I created to bounce the viewer through my subdomain and into Ewen Chia's site. Now tracking all this seems much harder than I thought. My cpanel doesnt seem to let me see the traffic through the subdomain redirect. So all I have is that clickbank says 11 clicks, from 16,818 impressions and the clickbank analytics shows 6 hops resulting in no sales. Also I am showing an average of 4.2 position on googles analytics. Now with 11 clicks in 2 days I havent spent much at all so I just increased my max ppc by $0.10 to see what effect that has ... if any. Currently working with 42 keywords in the campaign. Now, being a total noob this was about as much as I could figure out myself thus far. I am open to any and all criticism also very much looking for help advice here. Also I would very much like to figure out how to capture name/email in an optin (I have an aweber acct) off this traffic but my limited techincal savy keeps me from figuring out how to do that so far
you should create a landing page instead of a redirect. on your landing page you can do a pre-sell for the product you have chosen to promote. you can also collect e-mails via an opt-in form on your landing page. also by having a relevant landing page, google will charge you less for clicks (at least thats my understanding of the quality score, or whatever its called). i don't personally use ppc, so i cannot promise you thats 100% true, but i am fairly sure that is how it works.
by collecting email addresses off your landing page.. isn't that considered a "squeeze page" and I thought google was against that when using adwords. wikipedia quote "some marketers have seen their pay-per-click campaigns being penalized by restrictions that prevent "affiliates" from purchasing pay-per-click advertising to build opt-in lists for future sales."
That is what I was thinking of doing next. How do you promote affiliate products other than the adwords route assuming I have no site, no traffic, no list ?
Yo Merk... get a blogger.com account.... and you can link from there... article writing is good if you prepare and research well... use squidoo.com for direct linking too... hubpages.com too these are all FREE methods to get started without having to purchase domains etc. M/cr
Also, make sure your landing page has legitimate content otherwise Google will see it as poor quality and will either suspend the page or massivley increase your keyword bid pricing.
thanks for catching that. like i said, i was just throwing some thoughts out there, i don't personally use adwords (or any paid traffic) good to know if i ever decide to go that route in the future though.