Hey Scott, good words! I agree - it is definitely important to keep very careful track of everything that is going on with expenditures and sales vs outgo and adspend on revenue! I started up a spreadsheet when I began for this exact purpose, and it has a very clear impact on my success - being able to figure out when I should continue with a campaign or when I should drop it! Bummer you found yourself in the red, but it could definitely be a lot worse. I bet it won't happen again! Keep on truckin'! -T
Haha thanks! Yeah, it will never happen again but in a way, I'm glad it did. It's a good wake-up call to see how far in debt you are. It's a good excercise to then get yourself OUT of the debt. So yes, I'll try and give updates on my progress towards my goal. It's not so far away, I think.
Some good tips Scott...I'm still in the hole myself but slowly climbing out with this product I'm promoting. It seems like it's a good product I just need to keep tweaking everything. I don't know if you've had enough experience with this but maybe someone else can tackle this one if not. If you are seeing conversions for certain ad groups in Adwords let's say and you move the same ad groups over to Overture or MSN do you still see the same results? I mean there might obviously be some fluctuation but generally would the same ad groups/keywords convert on all networks or would you find maybe one that's doing very poorly on one but pumping out sales like mad elsewhere?
Thanks! Yeah, I've promoted what seemed like good products. What ultimately determines (for me) if a product is "good" or not, is whether or not it sells. You're right. I haven't had the experience required for this. Perhaps someone else will reply with wisdom, but my guess is that it depends on the traffic of the PPC Network you're switching to. Now let's hope someone experienced comes along.
Generally if a keyword works well on google then it will perform well on yahoo and msn as well. The CTR can vary alot tho depending on the quality of the search results for each specific keyword/phrase
Glad to have you. Just a correction from my last post, btw. I thought I was down to only YSM but apparently my Microsoft adCenter ad was still running. I shut it down and now I'm testing to see if Yahoo can bring in the same returns with $5-15/day. So far today I'm at $36.64 after $6.96 in YSM spending, plus $7.26 from AdSense at the moment so I'm at about $37 profit today. I'm about to start a new campaign with my friend though, so I'll let you know when these numbers start picking up!
Thanks for sharing amnezia, I may give them a shot shortly but I want to tweak my Adwords some more and currently am spending all my budget dedicated to this there. On a side note my earnings are quickly catching up to my spending simply due to the tweaking and the fact that my subscribers are slowly converting into sales.
Could you track which sales are coming from which program and then give us some results once you have some decent evidence pointing either way? That would be great...
Why not ask to give you guys his money too to cover your PPC costs? Were all trying to learn here not using our money to test things so we can tell you which products sell...
Yet another update for yesterday's stats, just to give you an idea of what's possible with product(s) that are winners for you on a low budget. So, as I stated earlier, I stopped using all PPC services but Yahoo because I found it to bring me the best ROI. I cut way back on advertising all campaigns and started, instead, to focus on the ones that actually gave me DECENT returns. That is to say, even if I got one or TWO good sales on a project, that wasn't enough to keep it. It had to make me over $100 over a period of about a week to be considered a keeper. That narrowed my products to about 5 and reduced my spending to about $15/day on average. Remember, this is all part of my plan on inching my way up to maximum profit. So just to give you an idea of where things seem to be settling, here are my stats for today: Spent on PPC (all running ads): $13.65 ClickBank revenue generated: $53.25 Additional AdSense revenue generated: $8.53 Grand total for today for current campaigns: $48.13 profit True, I'm not making close to what I was making only a couple weeks ago but if you'll notice, my profit margin has since doubled to about 70% whereas it was 35% before. In addition, I'm being very careful to research products before I even attempt to place them in my advertising queue because I know anything I advertise will eat away at my profits should it not be successful. In fact, I'm right in the process of doing that tonight. On top of that, a friend and I are putting together a product that we will both start advertising but more on that later. Anyway, although I'm making more on other projects I'm doing, I just felt I should share what is possible if you are willing to spend $20/day max as a learning experience. I know that if today, I were to cut out all products that don't sell on a daily basis, I would increase my profit margin to about 83% and it would be fairly constant from there. It's all about building up those successful campaigns. Yes, I'm sure there are people who have money to toss around that are building their successful product list up much faster, but for now I am starving myself of that luxury to gain necessary wisdom without that hole in my pocket.
Good advise. I also thinking Adwords is too many competitor and expensive keywords. But currently Yahoo only allow US resident to sign up with them isn't it? Further more, research will be good, but and you give more detail what you will on the research?
Thanks for the tips everyone! I set a daily budget of $20, alot of people are tempted to rush and spend/lose hundreds before they discover how to start making money. Why rush? Make money first then increase your daily budget. Another tip is pay as little PPC as possible. Yahoo doesnt allow under 10 cents, I bid that and a little more and get lots of clicks with the right keywords. scottmweaver was paying like $120 to make $150 and now he pays $20 to make $50. Same profit but a MUCH better safety margin with the 150% ROI($20 becomes $50) I still have to learn which websites are converting good. Many websites claim to have 1:40, 1:20 some even 1:5 converts. I try to make my keywords targeted but more importantly, I make my description targeted. This saves alot of "wasted" clicks because they can read what the AD is about before actually clicking. Question: when someone clicks, does the cookie stay and if the person orders later, will clickbank still credit me? What if he is a repeat customer?
Yep - you will get credit long as you were the last affiliate he visited for that particular product and he purchases within the cookie's expiration period. -T
Careful with your PPC amount, because yeah it's smart to pay less but you want to find that happy medium. From the research I've done, it's best to be either at the top or the bottom ad positions on the first page when people perform their queries, because these are the most likely places to receive your clicks. If you can pay less than $0.20 and receive the bottom position for a keyword or a group of keywords that get a ton of targeted traffic, you'll do well. From what I've seen, the cookie will stay most of the time and you'll get credited if they come back later. I'm not sure about multiple purchases from the same user. That's an interesting question. Hopefully someone else can chime in on that.
This is an amazing thread with so much useful information. I think I too would like to begin some arbitrage. Cheers, Josh
I just join YSM hope can get much better result compare with Adwords. But that's few impression with zero click. And seem like the position is very far behind with my bidding pricing. Need to figure out how to use YSM. Still new with YSM and not able to see advertisement eg since YSM not targeted Asia, but I'm in Asia.