Gadooney.com

It’s pretty easy to chalk up any self-helpy lingo about “embracing failure” to out and out loser talk, but it’s pretty hard to succeed in affiliate marketing (or life, for that matter) without falling on your ass from time to time.

If you subscribe to the notion that experimenting with different types of affiliate content, models, and sites is a good thing, it’s inevitable that some don’t pan out. You wouldn’t know that from perusing most of the affiliate guru sites out there, where people effortlessly crank out sites that make $192,026 within the first sixty days, but the reality is that for every successful profitable site you spawn into the world, most affiliate folks in the trenches have five or six stinking corpses of sites, which actually cost them money.

I’ve been dabbling in the semi-sordid waters of eBook promotion (cough, outright shilling, cough), and had pretty surprising success so far. I wasn’t entirely convinced that people would really fork out cash for eBooks, especially some of the more outlandish, over the top titles out there, promising all sorts of things, but lo and behold, people do seem to actually buy them.

What with my tinkering with Adwords of late, I thought I’d take the eBook promotion to the next logical step, and buy targeted, related keywords. Based on the conversion rate so far from the natural organic search traffic I was getting, it looked like I could make a little extra money from buying clicks through Adwords.

$100 worth of Adwords traffic later and I had exactly 0 eBook sales to show for it. Umm, yeah, nice work. Go, me.

There are lots of moving parts to the above equation, so there’s really no conclusion to be drawn as far as the ultimate potential for sending Adwords clicks though landing pages for eBooks that you’ve created, but for the time being I’m sticking to what’s worked, which is simply going after search traffic the old-fashioned way, with no purchasing of keywords.

Simply put, you don’t know until you try. And the fact that you’ll have four or five failures for every success isn’t a reason not to try. If anything, it’s the best reason to try, as you’ll likely never get very far in the affiliate world if you stay in your comfort zone, exactly copying other approaches that you’ve read or heard about.

While I have babbled muchly about incorporating Google Adsense ads into your affiliate sites, I haven’t really discussed the other side of the equation at all, which is Google Adwords. In general, affiliate marketers tend to use Adsense to monetize their sites, while retailers and other service providers tend to use Adwords to market their products. In some cases, though, affiliates make quite a lot of coin by using the Adwords system, so today we’re going to look at a quick example of that.

Let me start out with a silly sort of warning, as the example I’m going to use is from one of my sites, and it’s something I threew together last night for an example, and is not well-optimized at all. So do as I say, not as I do, mmkay?

The Adwords system lets you create campaigns where you create ads and target certain keywords and keyword phrases. You set a certain amount that you will pay, per click, for your ads, and based on that amount the ads are shown in various positions on pages that are running Google Adsense ads. If you bid higher than anyone else, your ads show up in the top position; bid lower than anyone else, and your ads are on the bottom (or not displayed at all, if too many other ads are ahead of yours).

So right off the bat we’re talking about a bit of a different beast, as far as using Adwords for our nefarious affiliate marketing purposes. Up until this point, everything I’ve discussed is largely free (other than your web hosting and domain registration). Not so with Adwords. This costs you money, for each and every click, so keep that in mind. Tread lightly here, especially when getting your feet wet.

I’ve been experimenting lately with some CPA pages (cost per acquisition) on various sites, just to try some new things. CPA campaigns are a bit different from Adsense, as they’re basically a set fee that you’re paid when a user completes an action (such as submitting a web form for a car quote) or buys an e-book or subscribes to an online membership site. While CPA deals can pay out very well, they’re a bit riskier for affiliates, as it’s all or nothing; either you refer someone who follows through and makes you cash, or you get zero. With Adsense, you can pretty much bank on some revenue, if you run enough ads in front of people, but CPA campaigns have a lot of peaks and valleys and a lot more variance in general.

Back to my example (I know, finally). I’ve been playing around with some campaigns on Azoogle that pay out when users submit their email address, along with name, address, telephone number, and sex. To be honest, most of these are really annoying for the surfer. as they promise a free KRZR phone, but you have to wade through a kajillion survey pages with offers, only to finally find out that you need to complete six subscriptions with people like Columbia House and Stamps.com just to get the damn phone. On the affiliate side, though, you get paid when the surfer reaches the second or third page, which is usually after they’ve submitted personal details, so for some deals it doesn’t matter if they ever buy anything.

I poked around for a deal involving a product that should get decent search traffic, that also wasn’t too godawfully annoying and didn’t ask for credit card info early in the process, as that’s typically a deal killer. If you dangle a nice enough carrot in front of people, you can get email/address/personal details enough for it to be profitable, but it’s insanely hard to get more than that.

I ended up finding an offer to promote a sweepstakes entry for a free 2007 Mustang Shelby, that paid out upon submission of email/personal details only, and pays $2.55 per lead. That’s not great but decent enough, so I decided to give it a whirl. I had an old domain lying around where I created the following page:

Get a 2007 Mustang Shelby for Free

Now, like I forewarned, that page and site are NOT well-optimized. Successfully using Adwords to make money as an affiliate is tricky, as you’re suddenly very much in the world of marketing. I went with a fairly honest pitch on that page, and did little to pretty it up, and it’s very possible that it’d be more successful if it were more shilly, just upselling the free car, doing anything to get people to click through the links. Do not mimic my approach, as it’s pretty clumsy and un-tested, and I just wanted to get something up and run traffic through it and see what happens.

After I created that page, I went to Adwords and started building my campaigns. First you have to create your ad, that shows up in Adsense ads, and again, this takes much practice, refining, and skill, as far as writing ads that attract clicks. This isn’t something I do much of, and honestly, I ain’t that good at it. So keep that in mind. The biggest single factor with using Adwords is to tweak, refine, and analyze your campaigns, until you find what works. Here’s the ad I created for my keywords:

Free 2007 Mustang Shelby
Too good to be true? Find out for
yourself, if you can handle it!
www.bonusbug.com/freemustangshelby

Once your ad is created, then you need to input your keywords. A book could be written on this subject, so I’m just going to show you how to find a big honking list to start with. Refining your keywords and how they’re displayed is important, so again, success here takes some practice and work. For my initial keyword list, I used the Google Keyword tool and simply input “Mustang Shelby”.  I exported that list to CSV, then copy and pasted it into Adwords.

The next step is to set your daily budget limit and your maximum bid foryour keyword terms. I set my daily budget limit to $20 and maximum bid of 0.26. The estimator tool will give you a rough idea of what you should expect to pay each day, but keep in mind it’s a rough estimate. Again, these settings take refining moving forward.

Okay. I did all of the above and let it run. The campaign has been up for about 24 hours and so far I’ve spent $9.56 at Adwords, as far as what I’ve paid overall for the clicks on my ads. At Azoogle, I’ve made $10.20. So, after a day, I’ve made a whopping $0.64. Not going to retire anytime soon, and given the time I spent on setting it up, I’m still in the hole. Due to the nature of the CPA deal, I could easily have made $0, too, so I’d need a better profit margin than the quick, 24 hour results to justify continuing to run the ads, more than likely.
But that’s not quite the entire picture, as I also made $2.60 from clicks on Adsense ads on the Bonusbug website yesterday, and all of the traffic came from the Adwords campaign. To be completely honest, I hadn’t considered that, as far as the people inclined to click on an ad for a shot at winning a car for free also being inclined to respond to other content on a website devoted to free offers, coupon deals, incentives, etc. So that’s something to keep in mind, as far as the possiblity that a break-even Adwords campaign (where your expenses offset your profits) could actually be worthwhile for you, if the traffic it sends to your website sticks around enough to respond to other things there.

So, in a very cursory nutshell, that’s one way to use Adwords as an affiliate to potentially build traffic and profits. Again, playing with Adwords is very tricky and potentially expensive, so poke around on Google and od more research before you try it out. I’m just trying to explain the basic framework here, and this should in no way be seen as a guide to how to do it right.  Just some fodder to get you started and an example of another way that affiliate marketers ply their trade online.

If you want to get a rough estimate of what you might make per click for running Adsense ads on certain terms on your site, check out the link below:

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Put in the keywords you want to check then go to the pull down menu and select “Cost and add position estimates”. Pull in “100″ in the next box as Max CPC and hit the button.

That’ll generate a full list of estimated CPC amounts for certain positioning in Adwords, which you can use to extrapolate what you’d likely receive for each click for those terms on your pages running Google Adsense. The figures are a little bloated, as they’re an estimate of what it’d cost to be at the top of the ads, so it’s not showing what currently is being paid, just what it’d take you to be on top. Google also takes its cut, so you wouldn’t receive that full amount anyway. And for other reasons I’m not quite sure of, the figures for many keywords seem too high in general.

It’s a decent tool, though, to gauge in general how much you might make running Adsense ads on a site devoted to certain keywords and niches.

Pay-per-click (PPC) programs pay affiliates each time a link is clicked on their site. Google Adsense is the most popular PPC program, and in many ways it revolutionized the affiliate marketing arena, as it opened ip a whole new way of making money.

The way PPC programs work is that merchants or advertisers (basically people selling things or trying to draw traffic to their website) sign up, and agree to spend a certain amount of money for each click that is generated by an affiliate. In the Google world, merchants and advertisers sign up at Google Adwords and create a campaign in which they make their ad and set their budget, as far as how much they’re willing to pay per click for certain keywords.

So that’s where the money comes from that pays you, the affiliate, when you display Google text ads on your site and someone clicks on them. Google is the middleman man and pockets some cash each and every time, as they don’t pay you the full amount the merchant or advertiser is paying.

We’re all pretty used to the PPC model these days but the reason it was such a game-changing event when it rolled out is that suddenly affiliates could make money on topics that they could never monetize before. Before PPC, the only way to make money as an affiliate was to refer surfers on your site to a retailer via a link, where they had to buy something, at which point you’d get a piecce of it as commission. But that involves a sale, and it’s notoriously hard to convert surfers to buyers, so it was harder to make money, and you usually only started making real money months down the line when your affiliate site had lots of traffic.

Not so with PPC, as you can immediately start generating income from something as simple as a click on a link, with no purchase required. It also opens up all sorts of areas for affiliate sites, as you simply have to write about a topic that people search on (and that advertisers and merchants bid on, on the Adwords side of things) in order to potentially make money. Suddenly sites about pet rats or the Civil War could be profitable, even if there are no merchants out there with affiliate programs to hawk products for. Create the site, add some Adsense links, and presto, you can make some money from people clicking on the Google ads on your pages.

One thing to be aware of, though, is the potential trade-off of PPC versus traditional affiliate programs. If your site is about home theater systems, you have to be careful that you don’t go with PPC and unintentionally cost yourself tons of money. With a traditional program, you get paid a set commission based on what people you refer buy. For a lot of retailers, it’s typically something like 2-6% commission. Some programs pay you that for the life of the customer, some don’t, the details vary from program to program. What you need to be aware of, though, is that if your affiliate site is geared towards relatively high-ticket items, you probably want to avoid PPC, even though it’ll give you a more immediate return, as far as making money. While it’d be great to make $20/month from Google Adsense clicks, it doesn’t take too many surfers going on to spend lots of money with the retailer to cost you money, as you might otherwise be receiving 5% commission on their purchases for life.

Your monthly earnings are steadier in PPC programs and much more dependable (as they’re really just a function of your overall traffic), but they also don’t have the potential upside that traditional programs do, if you land a few whales that go on to spend tons of money.