Is It Hard To Make An Affiliate Income?

Affiliate marketers lead you to believe that making affiliate sales are really easy and that anyone can do it in their sleep, but those who make those claims have something to sell. After all they couldn’t convince you to buy their information if they said affiliate marketing is hard, includes long hours and you may never make a single sale, but buy my information anyway just in case your one of the lucky ones… right?

The Cold Truth About Affiliate Incomes

If your not familiar with article writing, web pages, html, hosting, servers, marketing, back links, SEO and many other subjects needed to master affiliate marketing, you may have a few setbacks. I am able to go from 0 to over $500 in my first month simple because I understand all these concepts already and can dive right in. The only thing I was missing was the recipe to get free highly targeted traffic. Now im not an overnight millionaire and $500 may not seem like much, but many of those who will end up trying to make an affiliate income will never see a penny. I even read a story the other day of a guy who has been at it for over 9 months, who finally gave up because after almost a year of research and development, still never made a single sale.

Affiliate Income Resources

If you really want to get started in affiliate marketing I can recommend the following information. There is a really great primer on affiliate marketing provided by a guy named Ryan Moran. He spent over 4 months putting together a video series that is called TAG or The Affiliate God. His online course is 100% free and its a great introductory to affiliate marketing. He breaks it down to 4 weeks of learning but you can jump ahead if your a fast learner.

If you have a little money, then I would recommend signing up at Wealthy Affiliate. Its a great online community of which I am very active in. So is Ryan Moran the creator of TAG, and also Travis Sago who developed the step by step guide to The Bum Marketing Method which is currently putting about $500 a month extra in my pocket with no advertising or hosting expenses.

Lastly there is one more great resource I would like to share with you that can have you making money by the end of the week. This person has helped many people get their first affiliate sale and she is also very active in the wealthy affiliate forums. She has an active blog called Pot Pie Girl and she developed a method called One Week Marketing. I have never seen so many first time affiliates make a first sale before, but using this method I seem to see new posts thanking this method every day.

I signed up with an online marketing group called wealthy affiliate almost a year ago. I signed up because I was getting a flood of PPC questions over on digital point about PPC and wanted to try and solve the problem at the source. This post however is not about PPC, its actually about something called bum marketing.

What Is Bum Marketing

Simply put its marketing anything, a product, service or affiliate program, using methods that do not cost the marketer a Penny. I am mostly a PPC guy. I have used PPC for over 8 years, but with the recent slump in the economy makes it harder to pick up clients, and more clients want to spend less, or they are having a hard time closing sales. So I decided to to look into SEO.

I found out that i have a major resource of information that i have been paying for anyway. The information is from wealthy affiliate. This site is not dedicated to bum marketing, but more affiliate marketing as a whole, but as you can imagine many beginner Internet marketers do not have the funds to dump into PPC, or even web hosting for SEO reasons. So they came up with bum marketing.

Why Bum Marketing?

I have become slightly fascinated with this method of marketing lately. To learn and test the methods being thought I implemented some of my own bum marketing sites, and guess what… It really works. Not only for my PPC teaching, but I have also been making a small side income using these methods from CPA affiliate programs.

I am no SEO or bum marketing guru, but i have been learning a lot, and since I love to teach and educate others I think I will start adding bum marketing information onto this site. Not only that but I will start applying what i have been learning to this blog as well.

This blog will always be dedicated to my thoughts, education and things I enjoy sharing, I just hope to put in more posts to this blog and hopefully even increase its traffic…

In this video I go over how to cluster your adgroup keywords for maximum efficiency. I have recently reviewed several Google Adwords accounts from online forum members that are having problems, and I noticed that many people are grouping their keywords improperly. Many are just bunching up large grouping of keywords into one large adgroup and thinking everything is going to be OK. This method is highly inefficient and will result in much higher average CPC prices.

I decided to pick out a random industry and show the process of keyword research, which is finding keywords related to a specific industry. I then show an extraction method on how to get those keywords off the internet and into your Google Adwords account. I go into detail on how to use excel to extract properly clustered keyword groupings and then how to upload those keywords into your Adwords account using Google Adwords Editor.

Please leave your comments, questions and suggestions.

Thanks everybody!

Many people have been managing their Google Adwords campaign portfolios the old hard way. Using the web interface to manage a Google campaign is very slow and time consuming. I decided to do a little Adwords editor beginners guide for you so that you can see how easy it is to setup and manage your campaigns with this software.

The video tutorial is a little over 15 minutes long, but if you have no knowledge of Google Adwords editor then this tutorial will explain a lot. This is only a guide to the basics and I will go into more advanced stuff in the near future. If you have any questions on anything that is done in this video please let me know. Post a comment or drop me an email at tutorials@robdogg.com

I have received a lot of questions about how Google Adwords works, so I put together this video on the basics of an account and campaign settings. The video is a little long, running about 23 minutes, but the information is well worth watching. I will post some more videos in the near future with more in depth details and explanations, but this video covers some of the basics. I mostly cover the campaign settings and the overview screens in a Google account so you can get the idea of where everything is at.

Here is are some main points of interest

Account Summary Page
Campaign Overview Page
Campaign Settings
Campaign Budgeting
Ad Scheduling
Ad Rotation Settings
Search Network Settings
Content Network Settings
Language Settings
Geo Targeting

Now that I am getting the hang of this Camtasia studio software, I will start including many more videos and how to videos for the Google Adwords system. Next up I will go into detail and explain the Google Adwords Editor program and explain where everything is at.

I hope you find this information useful and helpful. If you have any questions please send them on over to me, or post a comment. I will also try to incorporate your questions in my upcoming training videos.

Most internet searching is primarily done for research and education, in this process of the buying phase the conversion ratio is extremely low, therefore we want to ensure a good balance of exposure in the research phase, and with the sales purchasing phase.

Example, assume we were looking for a new bike tire. You go to Google and search for “bike tire”. You visit some sites but then you realize that is too broad of a search, so you search for “BMX tire”. After looking at some sites you find that you want a “Michelin Mambo BMX” Tire, so you search for that, find the tire you wanted at a good price and make the purchase.

That entire string of searches was used in the research and purchasing phase for a new bike tire. You want exposure at all levels, since level 1 and level 2 of the research phase is mostly branding, market exposure and familiarity. Once the internet user has gone through this phase of research, they will make the commitment to make a purchase on a highly defined and targeted keyword. If you allowed yourself the right amount of exposure, you may very well have familiarized yourself with the user so much, that when the purchase is made, it’s done from your site on the final keyword search phase.

Take into account this will make some keywords look like they are highly profitable, with a high click through ratio and conversion ratio, making you want to eliminate those broader terms and just focus on those long tails. An even balance of all keywords and a commutative cost per acquisition will help keep this in line.

When choosing your portfolio of keywords also remember to try and think as those that are searching for something on the internet. What is the relationship between keyword and product? If you sold antivirus software, would you use the keyword virus in your keyword portfolio? What about using the keyword, computer protection, or internet security? Is there a relationship between keyword and product? How about including the keyword computer or internet? Remember Google rewards for relevancy.

Thinking outside the box can be very challenging because we know and understand our product in depth and many times we become simple minded or single sided. We know what it does, and what it doesn’t do. The problem is that we don’t really know how others will perceive your product and how they will associate it with what they are attempting to search for.

In the next articles, I will explain how to develop your keyword portfolios, how to do keyword research, how to estimate bids, and how to predict the volume of searches done per month for your keywords.

Adgroup Name – I like to name my adgroups based on structuring from the previous article. Internet Marketing Google Adgroups Logical Setup Strategies. Then I like to add the match type to the end of the name so I know what is contained. Example: “Ipod Touch – Exact” and “Ipod Touch – Broad”.

Status – The adgroup status can only has 3 options, Active, Deleted and Paused. Since this is self explanatory I won’t go any further

Max CPC Bid – This field is where you set you default CPC bid. I always set it to $0.10. This is because I do all bidding at the keyword level. Since I most likely will have anywhere from 2 keywords – 1,000 keywords within an adgroup, the one pricing fits all does not work. I set it to $0.10 just in case I forget to bid on one of the keywords within the adgroup, if this happens it will default to a very low and safe bid.

Maximum CPC Content Bid – I am not sure why this option was even created, but it was placed there to separate content bids from search bids. Best practices tells us that we should separate content completely from search and place it within it’s own campaign, so in my scenario’s I will never have to separate search and content bids. Also when content is separated within it own campaign, the Maximum CPC Bid can be used, thus eliminating the need for Maximum CPC Content Bids.

When you are all done, you should have something that looks like this

Product Grouping – This type of Ad grouping is based around the product keywords. In this method you plan on creating ads that specifically target one product. This will allow you to create highly targeted creative that could include specific product pricing and promotional messaging.

Service Grouping – This type of Ad grouping is based around the specific services your company or products offer. Promotional messaging would include how the grouping of keywords solve or fix a specific problem.

One To One Grouping – Some high volume keywords may require complete separation due to volume of impressions and clicks. When this happens you want to make sure that keyword performs at its best. Singling it out to its own adgroup is called one to one. Now you can make sure no other keywords affect it’s performance, and you can really target its messaging and controlled multivariate testing to increase performance.

Call To Action Grouping – this type of ad grouping is specifically targeting to keywords that contain a call to action. Buy, Sell, Purchase, Download, and etc are call to actions. You’re telling your visitor to do something, and many times they are searching for the call to action, meaning they are ready to do what you want them to.

Promotional Grouping – this type of ad grouping is targeted to some sort of discounted promotional messaging. Cheap, discounted, wholesale, liquidation and etc are all promotional messages. The visitor wants something for less or a greatly discounted price.

This covers the most commons ways to setup your adgroups. Adgrouping is not rocket science, but it helps to be prepared, and set things up logically in advance. It will help create more highly targeted promotional messaging, and allow for greater control for optimization.

I will pick a product that draws my attention on shopping.com and give you some examples of keyword adgrouping

And the product is…

The Apple Ipod Touch

Now let’s write out a few examples to get a clearer perspective.

Product Grouping

apple touch
apple ipod touch
ipod touch
apple 8 gig touch
apple ipod 8 gig touch
ipod 8 gig touch

Service Grouping

apple touch mp3
apple ipod touch mp3
ipod touch mp3
apple 8 gig touch mp3
apple ipod 8 gig touch mp3
ipod 8 gig touch mp3
apple touch mp3 player
apple ipod touch mp3 player
ipod touch mp3 player
apple 8 gig touch mp3 player
apple ipod 8 gig touch mp3 player
ipod 8 gig touch mp3 player
apple touch music player
apple ipod touch music player
ipod touch music player
apple 8 gig touch music player
apple ipod 8 gig touch music player
ipod 8 gig touch music player

Call To Action Grouping

buy apple touch
buy apple ipod touch
buy ipod touch
buy apple 8 gig touch
buy apple ipod 8 gig touch
buy ipod 8 gig touch
purchase apple touch
purchase apple ipod touch
purchase ipod touch
purchase apple 8 gig touch
purchase apple ipod 8 gig touch
purchase ipod 8 gig touch
sell apple touch
sell apple ipod touch
sell ipod touch
sell apple 8 gig touch
sell apple ipod 8 gig touch
sell ipod 8 gig touch

Promotional Grouping

sale apple touch
discount apple touch
cheap apple touch
sale apple ipod touch
discount apple ipod touch
cheap apple ipod touch
sale ipod touch
discount ipod touch
cheap ipod touch
sale apple 8 gig touch
discount apple 8 gig touch
cheap apple 8 gig touch
sale apple ipod 8 gig touch
discount apple ipod 8 gig touch
cheap apple ipod 8 gig touch
sale ipod 8 gig touch
discount ipod 8 gig touch
cheap ipod 8 gig touch

As you might be able to see, since the keywords are in line with each other writing a highly targeted promotional message will be a lot easier, and Google will most likely give you a better quality score due to higher keyword and text ad relevance.

In my next article I will cover all the attributes of an adgroup, what they mean and how to use them like a pro.

Campaign structuring is step one, which I covered in my last article Internet Marketing Campaign Structuring Tactics. Now that you have a properly preconceived structure in mind, the campaign settings menu has many attributes that you will want to take advantage of.

Campaign Name – The campaign name is used to identify the contents you are marketing. Name this something that is memorable and helpful to you. Google does not consider the name of your campaign when determining pricing or quality score. You can name it “My Google Campaign 1” or anything else, but it’s helpful to name it something that you will understand what’s inside that campaign.

Start and End Date – This setting allows you to choose when the marketing will start and end. If you decide you want to set up a campaign for next month’s advertising you can set it to day 1 of the next month and allow it to run forever. This is really helpful if you are building out a holiday campaign such as Christmas. You can choose the campaign start date the day after thanksgiving, build out the campaign months in advance and schedule it to end a few days before Christmas.

Budgeting – Budgeting is controlled at the campaign level and you set it according to how much you want to spend per day. Now that we have a highly controlled campaign structures we can also have highly controlled spending. Budgeting is very important, and must be used for each campaign to ensure you do not blow a year’s worth of marketing expenses in one day. Since some industries have a really high search volume it can become very easy to spend $1k – $5k by the end of a day, so ensure that you only put what you can truly pay for.

Delivery Method – This allows you to pick how your ads are displayed over the course of a day. Since some industries have a high search volume, and you may have a very limited budget that cannot allow it to remain on 24/7, you can set a standard or accelerated method of delivery. Standard will attempt to space out the ads throughout the day, and accelerated will show the ads as quickly as possible. If you choose accelerated and have a budget of $50 you could end up only being shown from 12am – 1am, which is only 1 hour of non prime time marketing. If you choose standard delivery you may get some spurts of traffic during the busy hours of search.

Keyword Bidding – This feature is automatically set to Maximum CPC bidding. If you plan on being an aggressive internet PPC marketer you will want to use this option, since it will allow you the greatest control over your campaign. However if you cannot dedicated much time to optimizing your campaigns you are given a couple other options as well.

Budget Optimizer – If you choose this option you basically tell Google how much you want to spend in 30 days and they will control CPC clicks for you. They will attempt to drive as much traffic to your site as possible for the given monthly budget. However, the main issue is that you no longer control any variables such as positioning or bidding, and you are not really sure if you are getting the best price as possible.

Preferred Cost Bidding – If you are unsure what to bid for each keyword but you have a target CPC you want across your entire campaign then choose this option. Assume you want to pay $1 per click, simply put that into this setting and Google will send you traffic that costs this much per click. Again there are many issues with this since you are leaving everything up to Google at this point, and you really have to put complete faith in them that they will give you the best traffic at the best costs.

Conversion Optimizer – This setting is not available for all Google Adwords users, especially since your campaign has to have a prerecorded conversion volume of 200 within 30 days before this option is available. If you do happen to have this option available then you have a really high producing campaign. This setting in theory allows you to choose a CPA (Cost per Acquisition) and Google will basically only charge you on this factor instead of per click. The idea behind it is great however, you should always be looking to lower your CPA over time and changes to your creative’s and landing pages could really affect your conversion ratio. If you successfully increase your CR you will end up paying more and more to your campaign monthly budget.

Since we want to take advantage of Google and not the other way around, I recommend sticking with Maximum CPC bidding and have complete control over the outcome of your campaign.

Ad Scheduling – This feature allows your ads to be limited to a certain time of day. Since it is possible for limited budgets to spend their entire day’s worth of advertising within 1 hour of starting a new day, you might want to limit the ad exposure to prime time hours. However, if your budget is too small, and bids are too low for competitive prime time advertising, you may end of with no traffic at all.

Position Preference – Many times an advertiser will discover that only a specific position will get conversions. Say over a period of testing you discover position 3 and 4 have the highest conversion ratios and greatest ROI. You may want to limit your exposure to only these specified positions so that you only spend on highly targeted and convertible traffic. This is especially great if you have limited budgets and are able to make this discovery.

Ad Serving – It is best practice to always be running 2 ads for each Adgroup at all times. You should be testing against a current creative and attempting to beat it with another. Google allows you to optimize your ads based on better performing ad giving you the options of Optimize and Rotate. Optimize will display the better performing ad more often and rotate will always split the ad delivery by 50% each. If you choose optimize you could run into the problem if a good ad trumping any news ads you try to test against. Since the longest running ad will always have more performance data than a new one, testing against a new ad could become challenging. Using the Rotate evenly option allows for quicker A/B testing, but will require that you are more responsive to turning off underperforming ads.

Networks – Google gives you the option to display your ads on 3 different networks, Google Search, Google Network and Content Network.

Google Search – If you choose this option your ad will only be displayed on google.com and no other websites.

Google Network – The network is made up of all the syndicated search engines that Google has partnered with. The network includes sites such as AOL, EarthLink, shopping.com, ask.com and many more.

Content Network – The Google content network are sites published by individuals like me and you, who use the Google adsense program. Many of these sites are blogs, forums, review sites, and articles.

If you are doing a PPC marketing campaign you should use both the Google Search and Google Network Options for maximum exposure. NEVER INCLUDE CONTENT with the Google search and network options. The content network works very much differently and should not be combined. Content should always be contained within its own campaign, but more on this later.

Languages – Google gives you the option to target only the languages of which your visitors will understand. Sending a Chinese visitor to your English only website is a waste of cash, so be sure to only specify the languages your site includes.

Locations – This is your geo targeting options. This will allow you to restrict your ads to the geographic areas that your website caters to. If you sell to all of the USA you can select USA, but if you sell only to Los Angeles, then you might want to restrict ads only to that area. Google even allows you the option to only target specific cities, so if you wanted to only market you site to 10 cities within Los Angeles, you can go in a check mark each city you want. However as a special note on this feature, not all the traffic will be accurate since some visitors might be using a proxy to surf the web, or the ISP might route all their customers out of one location. A good example is AOL. All AOL users in the USA are routed out of Virginia, and if you target Virginia you might get a lot more traffic than expected.

This basically covers everything there is to know about Campaign structuring and setup. I hope you have found this helpful. If you have any questions, please be sure to comment, and as always, I will be quick to respond and answer your questions.

Once you sign up with Google you will be presented with the following hierarchy of information. You will be given an account which will contain Campaigns, and your Campaigns will contain Adgroups and your Adgroups will contain creative’s and keywords.

Campaigns

First up are campaigns, which each account in Google is allowed a total of 25 campaigns. Since we are limited on the amount of campaigns your account can have, it is important to structure them logically in advance. A campaigns main purpose is to segregate a specific marketing goal, control your expenses through daily budgeting, targeting to specific geographic regions, and limit exposure to the languages of your choice.

Marketing Goal – Campaigns are best organized around specific marketing goals such as individual products, manufacturer’s products, industry competitors, your brand name, national or global holidays, or physical locations.

Products –If you sell tangible goods you might want to build your campaigns around a group of products. If you sold computer parts you might segregate your campaigns based on component types, such as hard drives, processors monitors, and etc. If you were selling clothing you might campaign around T-shirts, pants, shorts, undergarments, and etc.

Manufacturer – You might want to build your campaigns based on the manufacturers of products. If you sold consumer goods you might build out campaigns around Sony, Toshiba, Samsung and etc. If you sold designer clothing you might build out campaigns around Guess, Levis, Gucci, Prada and etc.

Competitors – You might be interested is selling your products to leading competitors visitors. In this scenario you build out keywords including the name branded companies already established in the industry in hopes of persuading their traffic to consider your pricing and services instead. If you were in the home remodeling industry you might bid on keywords such as Home Depot, or Lowes.

Brand – A brand campaign is bidding on your own company name. If your company name is Acme Electronics, you would build out keywords around it such as acme website, acme deals, acme sale, acme login, acme website. It is well known that bidding on your own campaign name is one of the most profitable campaigns, since the customer already knows you exists and is looking for your site. This makes it easy for them to revisit and finalize their sale once they have completed their research, and usually the cost of brand bidding is minimal.

Holidays – There is almost some sort of holiday coming up every single month of the year. People are looking for deals and just need a holiday to give them a reason to spend. Take advantage of holiday keywords such as New Years, MLK Jr, Groundhog Day, Valentine’s Day, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Cinco De Mayo, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Independence Day, Friendship Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

Locations – Some businesses offer services limited to only surrounding areas. Campaigns are great ways to restrict your products are services within specified cities and regions. You may even have multiple locations across the United States and separating a campaign for each one will help control spending between the locations, especially if each location is responsible for their own bill. You may even consider taking advantage of location targeting even if you sell nationally or worldwide since New York keywords may be more or less expensive then Los Angeles and each geo location may convert differently.

Only you can decide on which way to structure your campaigns but the above are the most well known, and best practiced structures of campaigns in the industry. These structures allow for great control over your campaigns and allow you to better monetize your campaigns because conversion data is going to be more transparent and organize. You will know which brands or products have higher conversions with lower CPA’s, which competitors you can steal business from, measure your brand awareness, know which locations perform best, and what holidays bring in the greatest returns

Now that you have an idea of how to organize your campaigns I will give you a day to mull things over. In my next article I will cover all of the attributes within a campaign, how to use them, the reasoning behind them, and what the industry best practices are.