Update: 1st Goal to conquer keyword "forex autopilot" Our webwire that we submitted yesterday is on page 3 for that keyword and now my site is indexed and has received 10 visitors via Google organic and it's on page 4 for keyword "forex autopilot" I just submitted a review to ezine articles. We'll see where it goes in the next few days. Did another sale today, but it was a backend sale from the sale made yesterday, so I can't really count that as new business. I've been running Google content network and that's where the sale came from yesterday. Tonight I am opening up my account to Western Europe and Australia... going to try to stay at about 30 cents a click. I need to increase volume, as 40 US clicks daily is not enough. Remember I want to get to 2-4 sales daily. We'll accomplish it I am sure, just need to keep pushing, but we are making progress. Todays Google organic traffic was great and next week we are writing 10 review articles where we will try to blanket Google for all competing Forex programs.
I Guess the problem is the landingpage. When visitors go to your site and get interested and decide to click at the end, you go to a complete different site with new content, new design and have to figure out where to click now, that's confusing to the visitor, they smell something and are gone. I'm figuring out whats the best tactic and i guess you have to made an intropage in the exact style like the landingpage, just one page.
I suggest you look at this site: http://best-teeth-whitening.com/ Make something like that and test if it converts better. PS: You can type all your keywords in google, click top 10 sites for each keyword and note down which ones use adsense. Then just site target that exact page and you'll get ultra targeted visitors.
Update: Did 2 Forex Autopilot Sales yesterday. Not sure where they came from. I submitted 2 ezine articles review forex autopilot and forex profit code. Though through Google analytics I am starting to get a lot of direct hits, can't tell where they are coming from and I am starting to get referrals from articles I've written that have been posted on other sites. I am still not convinced Google Adwords has converted to much. It still remains a mystery to me. I need to pick up a adwords tracking program soon. I've begun to outsource some articles, 5 to be exact. They won't be ready for 5-7 business days. This is just a test. On The Downside My site was indexed in Google last week, now it's not indexed at all and I am not receiving organic traffic. I don't know if this is because I replicated the site for adwords or not. I don't know if it's due to too many articles at once. Whatever the case it's not longer indexed. I changed the heading and tags to identify more with "forex autopilot" Google then crawled the site and updated it. Then the next day it was no longer indexed. I will buy another webwire PR for $19 and submit it this week. We'll see if that can get it indexed again. Yesterday alone I had 19 referring visits through articles and press releases.
You are missing the most important point in affilaite marketing - tracking! Track everything is the key, track your keywords, track your articles, track everything you do - even when you go to the bathroom (lol) Apart from joking, you "must" track everything so that you know from where the sales are coming from - then you just focus on those things. Good Luck & Keep us Posted
Don't worry about this too much. It is normal for a new site to rank initially and then fall in to the big G's sandbox for a while, especially on competitive keywords. If you work on the long tail you should still see some Google traffic and keep building your link backs to the landing page you will pop out again in time on your main keywords.
For every adwords campaign should I replicate my main site and place TID's inside the links. I get that, it seems like a lot of work too. I have over 20 different ad groups, that means replicating my site over 20 times and adding in a unique tracking TID for each site. Not sure how to track articles though. As most of them point back to my main site and can't identify direct traffic, organic or articles because they all go back to the same site with the same clickbank links. Any Ideas? What about Affiliate Prophet?
No no, basically all you have to do is assign a tid for every keyword you have, you can easily do this with adwords. Then on your landing page you can just make a function that get the tid from the querystring (the one passed from adwords) and add it to the hoplink each time. Let me know if im not clear enough or want some sample code how to do it.
Here you go, so basically your setup needs to be as below: - Each Keyword have a tid querystring associated to it. (Example: www.LandingPage.com?tid=1234) - Instead of placing your hop directly on your landing page, place it in an intermediary page that just redirects to your hop. This page should be named something like: productname.php and it contain the below code: <?php $tid = ""; if(!empty($_GET["tid"])){ $tid = $_GET["tid"]; } header("Location: http://AffiliateID.PubisherID.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=".$tid); exit; ?> Obvioussly instead of just linking to your hop directly you can just link to productname.php now, which will automatically set the tid to the hop and pass it to the merchant page - whenever present. While doing the above you will be hiding the hop as well in the process
Update: Got a sale last night, that's 2 nights in a row now. Also had a refund though. Wrote articles last night and submitted to ezine articles. My direct traffic is starting to pick up, and I've gotten an organic hit today so far, yet I am still not indexed. Can't figure out how that happened. Spent $36 yesterday in PPC. I've copied my landing page and placed TID's on 20 different pages to track which campaign sales are coming from. We'll see if this helps narrow down what's converting in PPC. All sales have been from the US thus far. I've increased a lot of my bids to $1.00 - $1.50 just to drive traffic and see what's actually converting. Once I find out I'll back off on the bids and begin to seo for those keywords... that's if my site comes back in Google. Monthly Totals As Of Nov. 1st $604 spent in PPC 8 Forex Autopilot sales, 1 refund Articles Written And Live: 12 Article stats: Views: 588 Click Thrus: 176 Avg. Return per article: $30 A lot of money was wasted early on testing countries and different campaigns and I wasn't doing any tracking on the PPC side. I didn't expect to come out on top, just to find out what's working. I believe most of my sales came from articles and direct traffic. I am now tracking PPC with TID's just to let you know.
Thanks for the samples of the php tracking. I'm going to add this to my sites. It will be a big help thanks again.
Your site is indexed in Google - just do a search for your domain with quotes. "Forex Autopilot" has over 200,000 results - will take some work and time to get a good ranking there. Personally I would go after "Forex Autopilot Review" as my main keywords, lot less competition and you know those people are getting in to a buying frame of mind and they just need a nudge. Keep up the good work with the diary.
Many thanks for compiling such an interesting thread, here! As only a soon-to-be affiliate marketer (read "I know nothing"!) with very, very much less technical/internet skill than you, and a great interest in forex-trading myself - forex is actually my main source of income at the moment, I must say this Forex Autopilot is a product I wouldn't want to become an affiliate for, myself. I have three main reasons for saying this: (i) I don't like the "opt in to the newletter" boxes on the publisher's sales-page (I foresee many people using my link to make first contact with the publisher and my earning nothing from the eventual, future sales generated that way), (ii) I hate the "Can we offer you a discount?" pop-up on exit, partly for the same reason - it invites contact to which my affiliate-link isn't a party, (iii) I understand there's a rather high refund-rate. If you don't mind questions from the audience at this stage, especially an audience like me with no real experience but still some "attitudes", what made you choose this particular product?
I've never really taken those things into consideration, I suppose my ignorance got in the way. I too do not like publishers pages that colllect the name and e-mail only to lose the sale later. I really didn't analyze the page enough I suppose. I chose the product because of the strong sales page, it looked believable. The only turn as you already pointed out is the publisher collecting all the optins from potential buyers. Now, I am not sure if even after they optin we get the credit or not. If we did that would be wonderful, if not perhaps I should consider a new product. I am starting to get the feeling that being a publisher compared to an affiliate is much much more lucrative.
I still don't know why CB doens't allow cookies. All the hard work of the affilaites going down the drain. I could easily get 500 clicks related to forex products per day, only for the potential buyers to just Google that product when they are ready to make the final buy. In Theory just sit at the top of Google with a really good review of that product and capture all the sales from everyone else driving the traffic back to that keyword. Or.... Use a capture page and collect name/email yourself then send them to publishers page. I've actually thought of this, just been too busy to sit down and do it. It may be my next step.
Hi, Thanks very much for your reply and for taking my questions in the spirit in which they were intended and not as any sort of criticism! Yes, good point: it's certainly a well-written sales page. So am I, really; but still intending to get some affiliate experience before writing my own first product. It's always in the back of my mind with such endeavours that "if it were that easy to promote it as an affiliate, why wouldn't the publisher be employing someone to do that for him and keeping that extra money himself?". I know there are some decent answers to this question along the lines of people dividing the labour according to their relative talents, but sometimes it still makes you wonder a bit. Having said that, I know that some good affiliates can make fortunes from the right products, of course. Wishing you very good luck with this enterprise, and looking forward to reading more about it. Again, many thanks for producing one of the most interesting forum threads I've seen!