The Unofficial DP Winter '06 Affiliate Noob's Challenge thread

I tried that a few months ago, waste of time and money.
It started off sort of OK but after a couple of weeks the the clicks just slowed to a trickle.....by that I mean a couple a day.

 

Anyone looked at Shoemoney's affiliate ad program?

 

I'm still lurking here and still haven't spent a cent. Not confident that I know what is going on .. yet.

Things I'm reading
1: This thread (every day)
2: UKoffer's thread at sitepoint
3: MookJon's thread at sitepoint
4: Andrew Goodman's Winning results with Google Adwords - a really good book and full of great advice.

UKoffer is PPClicker - he reckons he spends > $10,000 per day on Adwords
Mook Jon has a volume strategy - he reckons he has 1500+ domains/sites

Hope this helps someone else - couldn't post links because I am a Newb.

Cheers

 

It's good that you are reading up before leaping. The posts you mention (I haven't read 'em) sound like they are good for inspiration, but I'd be surprised if they had a ton of stuff helpful at this phase of your involvement.

Do check out eWealth, as Jimboot has suggested. The posting rate is slowish over there, but Jim recons it's because those guys are too busy making money!
Seriously, though, they are very helpful over there.

Don't stop reading DP, though, because there's still a wealth of info here, too!

 

Well im 5 days into my first affiliate campaign so i thought i'd share seeing as i have learnt alot by reading other peoples posts in this thread.

I set up a total of four campaigns each selling a different product (3 ebooks and a hosting service), i dropped two of them as i felt the competition was too steep. So now im left with just two campaigns both ebooks and both of which are running at a profit.

One campaign recieves a high number of impression but a low CTR (1%) the other campaign recieves a relatively low number of impressions but a high CTR (21%) interestingly both campaigns convert at around 5 %

so far i have spent a total of $8.97 USD on adwords on all 4 campaigns

the balance of my clickbank account is $72.46

I have joined comission junction and set up a pretty big campaign for one of their clients so i can see how cj compares to cb.

 

Been a while since I gave my last update. Campaigns running for 6 weeks now. Made about 600$ in commisions and spend 150$ in advertising.

450$ profit. Not bad, but the sales are a bit slow...

 

I experienced one strange thing during the last 6 weeks. I had an account with a prepaid budget. After 2 weeks the budget was zero. But since I already emailed google to ask if it was okay for me to open a new account with a credit card and they approved I didn't see a point in cancelling or stopping the old campaigns, since it was fine when it ran out of budget. So when the budget was zero I stopped receiving any hits to my landingpages from those campaigns. Then suddenly two weeks later I start getting hits again for 2 straight days, I was like wtf? so I checked the budget and it was still zero. Outstanding budget zero. Used budget 100%... Strange, google handing out free clicks?

 

Don't believe anything Mook Jon says, it's been proved that he is full of it .

Thats the problem with relying on what people say on forums, you don't know how much is true and how much is bullshit.

 

its been proved he was full of it? how so?

i'm interested because i also read that thread and it just didnt sound like he knew what he was talking about. great at dodging questions though, should go into politics.

 

I broke down and tried this yesterday on adsense, promoting a CJ product with a $50.00 commission. Got 5 sales in the first hour, all 1 minute apart. Total cost: 50 cents, $250 in commission! but ... I think it was the same person filling in the form 5 times and I beleive it will all be reversed. I have yet to get another.

 

but you spend 50 cent and make profit of $50
that is nice dude

 

I just got my first sale using Adwords for a CB product.

My sale snagged me $13.38. The campaign I was running has cost me a total of $16.55, but the specific adgroup that I believe generated the sale has only cost me $5.02 to date. I'm fairly certain which group it was because I paused the other group the night before. (I'm not certain how timely CB is about posting commision info).

That adgroup had about 58 clicks out of about 4100 impressions.

The Paused adgroup had 116 clicks and 11,991 impressions. No difference in ad copy, just keywords.

I have a lot of keywords. I went to two adgropups because including permutations with quotes and brackets, I had over 3,000 keywords. Adwords limits each group to 2,000, so I chucked 2/3 in the first adgroup and the rest in the second.

I'll next try paring out low performing keywords and breaking it up into more, smaller adgroups. OR, conversely, I may pare out the low performers and then try testing different ad copy.

What do you guys think is the better option for a next step?

EDIT: Ha- I just realized my comission should have been 17.95, but they started a 10 day sale on saturday, thereby dropping my take to 13.38. Phooey. I'm tempted to pause the campaign until the sale ends.

 

Started running some ads recently as well and I'm quite happy with the results. I didn't use CJ or CB but used an affiliate program from a website selling software. They give 35% for each sale.
I took Adwords for promoting those software. After 38 clicks got my first sale and earned about $35 for only $5 spend. The bad thing is that I have to wait for a second sale before getting paid. Are you only using Adwords for promoting your links?

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I would place the terms with the best CTR into their own group, or anything over 1% into one group, anything over 2% into their own group etc.
The terms with no clicks but impressions into one group and the the ones with no impressions and no clicks into another group.
As time goes by keep updating the groups.

Doing this keeps your high CTR terms together and helps keep them in the best positions. They aren't being dragged down by the poorer performers.

I don't know if it's because it's early in the week or people are paying even more for terms but I notice this morning that my terms which were in #3 to #5 position are now on the second page.
Adwords is just getting too expensive, I'm currently paying out $100 to get $120. The big winner is Google.
It really sucks .

 

Wow, what a simple and wonderful idea!

I made some minor changes so its hard for me to say for sure, but it looks like I am expirencing a similar trend.

 

Wow nice return!

I'm only using Adwords.
I wasted money on Overture but I know Sunchy has recommended Overture & Miva but I find them too restrictive - although he is earning a lot more than me

 

Have any of you guys tried pre-selling visitors by providing free related content? Opt-In Lists?

What about reviews of 5 affiliate products or more?

Do you think adding well placed google ads (CTR above 2%) would help absorb some of the cost or hurt affiliate sells too much?

 

I have tried reviewing 5 related products, and using adsense on the landing page. The first didn't work for me in the one instance I tried it. I think the latter is just a bad idea.

 

I've got a little site where I give free information and I only get like 15 Unique visitors a day. It's been up since Nov. 29, 2006 so it is new but still disappointing. I really want to build a community with the forum but no dice.

I've decided to try $25 dollars on Miva at 5 cents per click just to see if my site can convert (affiliate sales) using a combination of the rich jerk and "Make your content presell" techniques. I'm trying to presell visitors by giving out 4 pages of free information. I've got over 50 articles on the site but I put the 4 best (original) ones on the homepage.

Since I don't think Miva shuts down ads with a low click thru rate I will put the price of the books I am trying to sell in the ad. This way people will know I want them to buy something so CR might increase but my Miva Ads CTR will most likely decrease.

I'm thinking about getting rid of the google ads. They are on the first page with images (with black borders around them) on top of the ads.

 

Very New

It really depends on your niche. How many searches does overture say it gets/month? If it's 15/day then you have cornered the market already... I'm guessing it's more tho.

As someone told me recently.

How popular is your niche
How competitive is your niche
And what does it cost to advertise to this audience.

Hope that helps.