Read Ling’s Affilorama Mini-Course: Revamping your Google Ad

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Mini Course 4 Notes: Revamping your Google Ad

Welcome back to Day 4 of Affilorama.com 6 Part mini course!

In this lesson, I’m going to give you four quick and easy ways of ramping up your Google Adwords campaign to increase your conversion rate.

Yesterday, we talked about the basics of setting up an Adwords campaign. If you have any questions about that lesson, or about the lesson today, please feel free to send me an email, and I’ll make a video especially for you on your area of difficulty.

Without any further ado, let’s get straight into it!

1. The first way in which you can ramp up your profits from Adwords is by having a low cost per click.

I know we talked about this a bit yesterday, but this is a really important point and I want to emphasize it again before we move on any further.

Let me give you an example from one of my current affiliate campaigns.

At the moment, I’m promoting a product called CatchSpouseCheating.com.

So far, I’ve spent $8726 promoting this product.

From my statistics, I can see that it only costs me $12.46 per conversion to promote this product. For each sale I make, I earn a 75% commission, or $24 per sale. So essentially, I’ve doubled my money!

Now, the interesting thing is that other people have tried promoting this website and have had a lot of trouble making a profit.

So how on earth do I make so much money from it?

The answer is simple. I only spend 5 or 6 cents per click for this product. Instead of throwing cash at Google, I work very, very hard on making sure my ads have high click through rates.

I’ve helped heaps of affiliates turn their profits around for this product simply by telling them not to spend so much per click.

What I didn’t say in the last lesson, is that to get high profit rates, you should start promoting a lot of affiliate programs rather than focusing on just a few.

The reason for this is that if you are focusing on just a few programs, it takes a lot more effort to get visitors. And you have to work a lot harder.

But, if you are promoting a product which only gets 1 sale every 2 weeks, and it’s only costing you $5 for that sale, then that’s fine. I just promote lots of affiliate products, and a few sales from a lot of programs quickly add up!

Extending your focus to more affiliate programs is also a good way of testing the waters too. If you find that over a period of time it’s only costing you $5 per conversion, you might decide to increase your cost per click and pay $10 per conversion to see what happens.

The point is, don’t spend too much per click. Spend less on each ad, and promote more programs instead. This ensures your profit rate is always a lot better.

2. My second big tip for this lesson is to categorize your keywords.

What this means, is that I put my search terms into groups.

Just to quickly explain what search terms are, for those of you who are completely new to affiliate marketing, search terms are the words that people type into their search engine.

Categorizing my key words means I would have a separate group for say, stop dog barking and a separate group for stop dog biting. By separating out these different audiences I get a lot more useful and specific information, compared to just running a generic ad for dog problems.

By categorizing my search terms, I can work out how much it’s costing me per conversion.

For my affiliate campaign for Catching Cheating Spouse, I’ve divided my keywords into Catch cheating husband and Catch cheating wife. If I hadn’t, it would be very hard to tell how much each category cost me.

****Google’s Keywords Suggestions****

Lots of people ask me whether Google’s suggested keywords are effective.

The answer is yes, to a certain degree. While the keywords Google suggests are good, they are a bit limited. On top of that, all other affiliates of your product will be getting the same suggestions. I strongly recommend using Wordtracker and Overture to give more scope to your keywords rather than relying solely on Google’s suggestions. There will be a lot less people bidding on keywords that Google doesn’t supply.

****

Here’s a bonus extra tip!!

To increase the effectiveness of your ads, add negative keywords to your keyword lists.

For example, if I add ‘-free’ to my keyword list, then my ad won’t show for someone’s search for ‘Free Maid of Honor Speeches’.

Someone searching for that term clearly wouldn’t be interested in paying for my affiliate product, so I don’t want them clicking on my ad and costing me money.

You can add as many negative keywords to your keyword list as you want. It’s a great way of targeting your ads and making sure they are seen by the right people

3. One of the most important things to do with your ad campaigns is carry out split testing.

Essentially, split testing is when you create two ads that are exactly the same, apart from one component.

This could be a keyword, the title of your ad, using capitals, exclamation marks…and so on.

When you have two ads running at the same time, Google will send approximately half of the visitors to this ad, and half to the other.

If I set up two ads now for a split test, I’ll be able to see statistics tomorrow showing me which ad has had the most clicks, and how much each ad is costing me.

It’s particularly important to find out which ads get higher click through. Especially when you’re paying 20 or 30 cents per click.

You’re not limited to two split tests. You can have up to 9 or 10 going at once. Personally though, I think 2 or 3 is ideal. If you are testing too many components at once, it can be too confusing to tell what is effecting a change. Your visitors will also be spread more thinly, so it’ll take more time to see what’s happening.

I’d just like to point out another secret here. This is something that not a lot of people know – I basically stumbled across it by accident.

When I write my ads, I put the word ‘Keyword’ in the title of my ad inside braces. This means my ad looks like this:

{KeyWord: Maid of Honor Wedding Speech} in the ad creation box in Google.

What this does is, if anyone searches for Maid of Honor Wedding Speech, then in Google, your ad will show up with Maid of Honor Wedding Speech highlighted as the title.

If they type ‘How to give a fantastic maid of honor wedding speech’, then that won’t fit in. So your heading will just say Maid of Honor Wedding Speech. But, any search that they make that does fit into the heading will show up as exactly what they searched for.

Amazingly, this technique increases your click through rates by at least 20%, often more!

Don’t forget to capitalize the K and W in Keyword. Otherwise, the heading title will appear in lower case. I can’t emphasize enough how brilliant this technique is. By using the word keyword in braces in your title you can skip a lot of the crap and increase your click through rate!

Nothing in Google tells you about this keyword tool! To find out these tricks of the trade, you’ve got to check bulletin boards, forums, and talk to, or email, people who are experts in Google adwords.

4. My next tip is to limit the countries you target.

I strongly suggest that you limit your focus on the USA, UK, Europe, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Chile, Bahrain, Trinidad and Tobago, Qatar, Bermuda, Kazakhstan, Zambia, Antigua, and Barbuda, South Africa.

Don’t bother with the other countries. I honestly find that it costs double, or sometimes even triple the amount you’d spend otherwise, and you don’t get the sales in return.

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, it’s just different cultures looking for different things. Also, residents of countries with poor economies just don’t have the money at their disposal. I’ve found that a lot of traffic from these countries is tourists, and they are not looking to buy online.

People from non-English speaking countries are not usually going to buy a product in English. In Germany they’ll buy products written in German over those written in English. Understandably, there’s a much lower sales rate for English products in non-English speaking countries.

However, if you want to try marketing to Germany, or another non-English speaking country, have a separate category set up so that you can track the sales.

My final point for this lesson is to get help with your marketing campaign. Don’t be afraid to email us, or other experts, or go on the Affilorama message board and ask a question. I’ll be on the message board every day answering questions.

And don’t be afraid to spend money on education products from other Affiliate marketing experts. Perry Marshall also has a great course that you should try. Remember that spending money on educating yourself is never wasted.

See you tomorrow!

Mark Ling

Make Money Online from Affiliate Programs This will take you direct to the Affilorama website where you can sign up for Mark Lings free e-course plus newsletter, and also find out more information about Affilorama Your Essential Guide to Becoming a Super Affiliate. Affilorama Blog

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