My Click Bank Diary (Forex Diary)

I decided to start this diary because I am sort of tired of people saying they made $10,000 in CB then never share exactly how.

I am going to break this code, or at least try then give every keyword, article, and tenchnique I use step-by-step.

Before I begin a bit about me: I've made great money in direct sales, promoting home business programs that earn between $1000 and $3000 per sale. I've had months in upwards to 40k + however I am in a down turn right now and and the money is gone. No more 40k months. I am in between projects and creating my own opportunity, however I am burnt out from talking on the phone 20 hours of the day closing sales, so I've turned to CB.

I use to make about 4k a month in affiliate marketing before I got into direct sales, was never enough to leave my day job, but it helped. I promoted a product that sold for $300 and paid $150 per sale. All of it was done through article marketing.

I ventured out into PPC and maintained 4k a month until the owner decided not to sell the product anymore, that's when I turned to direct sales and began using my PPC skills to generate 20k to 40k per month and did that for 2 years.

Now, I am left with very little and turn back yet again to affiliate marketing simply because I no longer want to talk on the phone hours a day and it just seems easier to sell tons of little products w/o having to deal directly with people, there problems ect....

I decided on Forex CB products b/c I actually trade forex myself and know quite a bit about it.

I created a simple forex content site that sells my story.

I am by any means not a newbie to PPC marketing and I notice various affiliates maintaining top positions for keywords like "forex avenger" "forex autopilot" ect.... you know them all. The CPC for those keywords is approx. $2 a click. I sat my site on those keywords for 3 days straight and recieved one sale from the keyword "forex avenger" Basically wasted a lot of money for that sale. I've branched out into some long tail keywords in the content search, however not much luck yet.

So far I've concluded the only way to do this is PPC is to target content network at no more than 25-30 cents per click, and US traffic only. I am not even sure if 25-30 cents per click is even sustainable. I am thinking more on the order of 10-20 cents per click. To get that from all US traffic is next to impossible..... I've gotten 5 cents clicks believe me, but that's when you open up your account to countries like India, China, and Europe ect.... and most of that traffic only stays on your site for 5 seconds if your lucky. Anyone on your site for that short of duration they are not buyers.

I started targetted all countries and found that US traffic remains the longest on my site, therefore I've eliminated all other countries.

So far I've made 1 sale on the keyword, "forex avenger" and I believe I just got lucky, nothing has converted through the content network yet. I've spent approx $350 in PPC adwords to generate 1 $80 sale of Forex Funnel.

Now for the article side. I have written 9 articles thus far and have had 5 sales come from those articles. What I need to find out is exactly what keywords people are typing in to find those articles because they are converting.

My conclusion up to this point is PPC with CB is nearly impossible because the margins are not there. To make great money you need either a content site that ranks organically, or to promote about 5-10 products and push out 3 articles per day for each product.

So far I've only used articles and PPC as my test.


I'd appreciate any feed back.

What I am going to try to identify are the following things:

1)effective keywords for forex products
2)Article marketing Vs. PPC

I will post the keywords that convert.

I am going to be completely transparent, if I make 10k per month promoting CB products, your going to know exactly how I did it....

 

Hey man, thanks for sharing what you're doing. It's always helpful to see case studies. But you might want to go easy on your Clickbank promotion, at least for the short term. Clickbank publishers and affiliates have had a really weird month with much lower sales and there is a lot of buzz at it on all the webmaster forums. Empirical testing from a variety of highly motivated publishers and affiliates is showing that 1) there is a big problem with affiliate codes not tracking correctly - the affiliate id will be intermittently there but not there all the time when somebody goes to buy through your affiliate link and 2) they recently did a whole upgrade to their system, part of which is now causing people to land at a purchase page where the price is now displayed in the person's native currency....imagine thinking you're paying $50 US for something but you live in Singapore and you suddenly see the price listed when you go to checkout as $100 or whatever. At first, you might not realize that it's being listed in your native currency so you will balk at purchasing. Clickbank has been notified by people about these serious problems but so far no improvements appear to have been made.

This stuff could really be blowing your sales results, unfortunately. Maybe you should promote a Forex product from Paydot.com if they have them there? Or a Forex product on an affiliate network - there are some out there. Your conversions might be a lot better.

Another thing I'd recommend before you give up on PPC is site targeting in Adwords. This is where you manually enter the sites where you want your ads to display. So you could find some cool Forex or trading forums, information rich sites, and so forth which might be great places to run your ads. This is different from just displaying it across the entire content network. Pricing will usually be lower than regular PPC search ads but not as low as regular content network ads. Conversions can be very good when you site target, it just takes time to research good sites where you'd like your ads to be displayed.

Dan

 

I've actaully began site targeting a few days ago. In fact, my theory was this.

1) If most of my sales are coming from articles, then I need to site target all the article directories and use only "phrase" match keywords. Therefore I would essentially have my ads on all of the article directories and all of the forex articles related to "forex robots" "automated forex trading" ect.....

So far I've had 112 impressions in 3 days, 0 clicks.

I did notice this and this guy is going to hate me... again I am tired of people (hiding) the secrets.

On article based, there is one affiliate who has somehow managed to populate his "Forex Trace" banner ad on every single article that shows related to forex robots, forex automated trading, learn forex ect....

And the weird part is, he's direct linking to the publishers page and Google is allowing it!

 

You say completely transparent, so lets see your landing page...

 

Gladly, Ive actually been reading silently for the past month and see you everywhere and respect your input. I can't post in sig. Yet but my site is forextrading-4x dot com.

I wrote it that way because we are not allowed to post live links

 

Google lets you direct link to pubs landing page btw.

 

Google Stats today so far:

Clicks 78 - Mostly from content network. 80% US traffic
Hops 32 - 0 Sales

58 hops yesterday and 0 sales (This traffic yesterday was garbage from all countries today's traffic has been narrowed down to mainly US)

That's 90 hops with 0 sales and nearly

1 Article submitted to submityourarticles

So far it's taken 122 hops to get 1 sale of forex funnel with PPC and that sale came from the keyword "forex avenger" which is approx $2 a click.


Total spent in PPC on forex $399


The only thing still keeping me going is the fact that I made 4 sales through articles and another CB product made a few sales from me blasting to my money maker list.

I don't care if I break even in the forex arena to figure this out, then I can slowly narrow it down to what converts.

 

Damn, that's a lot of cash to be throwing around in the forex arena. Especially when you consider that there tends to be a high refund rate on those types of products.

You sound like you know what you are doing so I won't offer any advice but wish you good luck!

 

Damn I need to sell one of these things, freak man I gonna start today!!

 

Good for you mate, nice intro and great effort. It's nice to see someone being transparent +rep.

 

He's only being transparent because he's not making any money and needs help. I did the exact same thing on the wealthy affiliate forums with my water4gas campaign when I first started.

You would have to be a complete idiot to go completely transparent about your campaigns that are profitable. You are just shooting yourself in the foot. I have learned my lesson the hard way about this.

 

As for your page, just skimming through it I found a ton of spelling, grammar and other mistakes that would be killing your conversions. Who is going to trust someones opinion that can't even spell, yet was a science teacher?

 

Index page updated and spell checked. When I created the site it was created in DW, and DW doesn't have a spell checker. I didn't even think of spell checking honestly. Believe it or not it converted 6 sales total up to now.

Thank you for pointing this out, hopefully it will increase conversions.


85 total clicks in Google $0 sales.

$56 spent for 85 clicks today.

I am getting a good idea on what keywords people are spending the most time on the site now and will have some good feedback tomorrow. Plus I am going to share my 1 hour video course on affiliate marketing I just created.

I've always made all my money by giving away and providing real answers, just a tip

Again, any information or feedback within the Forex prorduct arena is appreciated.

See you tomorrow!

 

Haven't tried my hand at the Forex niche so far but it seems like one that is a little tougher to crack than many, but obviously the rewards are higher also. Anyway good diary so far sp33dr4ge. Keep it up.

 

Hey, well done Sp33dr4ge for being transparent,its an inspiration for all of us - dont worry about the competition in forex (from me @ any rate) you've certainly put me off with those numbers - hey maybe it was a double bluff by you - anyways keep up the good work, but watch those refunds, I've seen a thread on here recently where some guys were getting $1000+ refunds on Forex in a month! Good luck

 

good posts there sp33dr4ge ... will be interested to see how it all works out ...

i think forex is very tough and crowded market to make good money in, especially through ppc ... but that doesn't mean it's impossible

 

Update:

Google is started to irritate me. I've sent 252 clicks through the content and an avg CPC of 46 cents and still have $0 sales. All traffic has been lazer traffic related to forex robots, automated trading, automated trading sytems, forex funnel, marcus leary, meta trader 4 ea, meta trader expert advisor's ect... I wont' get into the entire list yet but you get my point.

I now know why I was never really attracted to clickbank and the reason being the COOKIES! There are none. I've always had my success in affiliate marketing when cookies were tracked for a good 90 days, this way I was compensated for my efforts.

However, I refuse to give up. I am launching a new plan of attack next week starting Monday.

My goal: To populate all my URL or Article on the front page of google for all competitor forex programs from both CB and paydotcom... starting with "forex autopilot"

My analysis tells me that "forex avenger" keyword is pretty hot right now and recieves decent traffic I may tackle these 2 at the same time.

1)I will outsource 2 reviews of each forex product from both clickbank and paydotcom. A total of 20 articles. The ones that rank I will submit to social boomarking sites.

2)I will link these up and SEO my main page for "forex autopilot"

3)Continue posting 1 blog post a day anchor texting competitor keyword names.

4)Build a unique page with unique title and description for each competitor and tie it into my site map.

Firsts Objective to conquer the keyword "forex autopilot" with the authority site.



Today I bought a $19 press release from webwire and placed anchor text on the PR "forex autopilot" I also created 2 more hubpages with anchor text "forex autpilot"

Today, I also did on site optimization for keyword "forex autopilot"


Let's hope I am stay focused as my other project is building our own direct sales opportunity.

I'll let you know when I make a sale.

I will not lose!

 

Update,

Sale generated for Forex Autopilot. I switched back to Forex Autopilot b/c the conversions are much higher than Forex Funnel.

Sale came from PPC, the state of Ohio.

I did get 2 articles approved today, however none of the traffic from the articles even came from the state of Ohio.

I am soon to buy Affiliate Prophet Conversion to begin tracking more in depth.

$15 spent in Adwords today to Generate a $54 forex autopilot sale.

Lets keep going1

 

Keep it up dude. I have tried PPC maybe 3 times but pulled out due to lack of sales and worrying that I cannot tweak the campaign to profitable in time. Sounds like you have enough funds to cover such situations though plus you've done PPC successfully before.

Thanks for the education, I'll be watching this thread.