Experimenting with Adwords and affilliates
I signed up for a new Godaddy hosting account and received $20 free credit for Google Adwords so decided to put it to use.
Also recently I had an idea and lost some money testing it but now I have a few free dollars I want to give it another try.
It is generally seen to be an unprofitable practice, but I’ll see if I can be an exception!
The idea is to find an affiliate and then advertise that link through Google Adwords and see if you can make your affiliate earnings beats your Adwords expenditure.
So armed with $15, let’s see what happens (Google took $5 of my $20 to open the account!).
First things first, find an affiliate link. Pepperjam is a newish affiliate network that has been getting some great press so I thought I would finally get round to using it.
If you are interested in joining them then why not check them out, just click on my affiliate banner below.
After looking through Pepperjam I found an Affiliate that I liked the look off. Vista Print are offering a Free T-Shirt promotion and have a selection of banners and text links for you to earn $9.00 per lead. I thought it was a pretty good offer and I have used Vista Print in the past with great satisfaction. So have no moral issue promoting them.
One of the restrictions of the Vista Print affiliate is that you cannot promote them directly through Adwords, so I need to make a post about the Free T Shirt offer and then promote this through Adwords.
Obviously this may have added value as I can make the post search engine optimized so may actually find some additional leads at no cost.
Using Micro Niche Finder I played around for 20 minutes or so and came up with the best keyword to competition ratio that I could find. (If you want to know more about MNF please see my post Proof that Micro Niche Finder is working for me, I recommend it highly).
The keyword “design a t shirt free” had 1020 searches a month and only 101 competition. So I made a post to promote Vista Prints offer, click here to see the post.
Now for the Adwords campaign.
I created the following ad, targeting it to US, Canada and UK:
And linked it to these keywords (the ads in this niche seem pretty cheap):
tee shirt print
custom design tee shirts
custom tee shirt printing
tee shirt printing
custom tee shirt
cheap t shirt printing
online t shirt printing
custom t shirts printing
bulk t shirt printing
t shirt printing company
custom t shirt print
custom t shirt printing
custom design t shirts
custom t shirt design
custom t shirt designs
order custom t shirt
promotional t shirts
personalized t shirts
design own t shirt
design your own t shirt
custom printed t shirts
personalized t shirt
custom printed t shirt
customized t shirt
custom t shirt
custom t shirts
customized t shirts
create custom t shirt
free t shirt design
free t shirt designs
free t shirt offer
free tshirt
free t shirt
free custom tee
free custom t shirt design
free custom tshirt
free custom t shirts
free custom t shirt
design a t shirt free
design at shirt free
Currently my budget is $5.00 per day, wish me luck!
If anyone has any tips for improving my campaign, then I would love to hear from you.
I will update this post tomorrow so why not sign up to my RSS feed or by email (enter your address in the sidebar) to keep up with my experiment.
*** UPDATE SAT 5 APRIL, 22:57 montreal time***
As promised here is the first update.
The Adwords campaign has had 30 clicks from 11,918 impresions (not to good! It works out a 0.25% CTR). It has cost me $5.68 so far. I am in process of optimizing the campaign.
Pepperjam shows that 17 people have clicked the Affiliate banner but sadly no leads have been produced as yet! To be honest I thought this offer would be more enticing.
Anyway I am just over a third of the way through my free credit so let’s see if I can get a lead and make the campaign a little more successful.
Popularity: 21% [?]
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April 5th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Very cool!
Thanks for the plug of Pepperjam Network!
We wish you the best of luck.
Kris Jones
CEO,
Pepperjam Network
April 5th, 2008 at 11:37 am
No no, thank you. Pepperjam looks great and I am determined that I will get it to work for me.
April 5th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
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April 6th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I haven’t a clue. I’ve never tried to make money on my blog, so don’t know the first thing about it. Good luck though. I hope you do well.
April 6th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
We were going to go with GoDaddy as well, but in the end, they wanted to charge us extra for domain name privacy, so we kept looking.
I wish I had known you were in the market - BlueHost offers $50 free at AdWords and $50 free at Yahoo, which was icing on the cake for us. It’s the reason why we switched to them (Reason #4 and #5). Ah well, too late now.
(Actually, is it? Domain Registrars will give you refunds on webhosting packages, but not domain name registrations. You should call up GoDaddy and see if they’ll match BlueHost’s $100 free coupon promotion. If not, you might consider switching. Sure, it’s a headache, but you’ll get $100 in free PPC ads)
By the way, do a search for MSN AdCenter coupons. If you’re American, there are codes out there that you can get for a $50-$75 coupon. If you’re Canadian, just call them up and they have a $25-50 coupon code.
Be careful with PPC advertising. One of the biggest mistakes we made early on was that we had a campaign that wasn’t working but we kept hoping it would (after all, the cookie lasted for 30 days.) If the campaign isn’t working relatively soon, change it.
Second thing is we’ve noticed that different companies offer different commission rates with different affiliate networks. We need to look more into this, but check out CJ and check out LinkShare. I know CJ has VistaPrint (we never had much luck with them but we didn’t promote them too heavily, either). Pick one network to concentrate your efforts so you have the best chance of meeting that minimum payout.
Good luck! Keep us in the loop!
April 6th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
Also, check out the other PPC advertisers. We started with Google, and had one semi-successful campaign, but the one that’s going for us now is on Yahoo. We still have an account with Google, but Yahoo Search Marketing has been working much better for us. (Even though we thought it would crash when Yahoo changed their keyword bidding policies.)
FYI - our yahoo campaign works on a bid of $0.40 per click. We tried the same campaign, same keywords, same ads on Google and was told by their system to raise our bid to $12.00 per click.
Obviously, we’re promoting BlueHost but look around. You should be getting a better offer than just $25 from your registrar. You should be able to get at least $100 in coupons. (Heck, here’s a coupon code for $25 at yahoo search marketing)
The wording of your ad is important and can make a huge difference.
Ok. I’ll stop commenting now. Let us know how things go…
April 7th, 2008 at 1:15 am
We like your blog!…
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April 7th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
@ Comedy Plus, REALLY!! Considering the amount of readers you get I had always assumed you were making money with your blog.
@Webdiggin, Thanks for the comment. For some reason my Adwords account has stopped making impressions but there is no warning saying that it should have stopped working. Everything is active! I am starting to really dislike it.
I had a campaign that I was testing where I promoted a cookbook straight through Adwords. It went well selling 2 books in 106 clicks at only $0.12 average a hit. Then I logged in and for some reason ALL the keywords had hiked up to a minimum of $5.00! No explanation had been given. Now almost any campaign I try has that kind of price tag on it and like I said my T-shirt campaign just stopped working!
So I think I have some learning to do….
I am definitely going to look into some of the Adwords alternatives but probably won’t be switching my Godaddy account right now. I may however be buying some new hosting for other projects in the coming months and will definitely be checking out your recommendation.
One last thing, are you successfully making money using Affiliate links straight into PPC campaigns?
April 15th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
One tip that I picked up recently is to use your keyword/phrase in your ad copy, so if you are targeting “design a t shirt free” you would incorporate that text into the ad copy. Don’t quote me on the next bit, but I believe that G has a mechanism in place that will automagically drop the relevant keyphrase into you ad based on the search terms the user typed in.
As for the sudden hike in prices, if Google thinks that your landing page doesn’t match up with the ad well, they will up the click price. Think an ad for oranges leading to a page about apples… I’m not suggesting that this is what happened to you (I haven’t seen you page, etc.) but it is something that was pointed out to me recently.
April 15th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
[...] me as well written, and worth reading and/or keeping an eye on. A especially like his report on his AdWords experiment, it’s honest and detailed, always a good thing for those wishing to learn from other’s [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
I have been trying to do that a little recently with keywords and it is working out ok.
As for Adwords…. it seems to have frozen on any new campaigns I start so maybe I need to make a payment or something! Anyway I will start looking at all this again this week and try and get it going again.
April 15th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I haven’t tried AdWords yet, still doing my research, based on the idea that I would prefer not to throw my money away without at least first trying to understand how to throw it away most effectively, heh.. But in the next week or two, I will be trying out my first campaign. Perhaps we could compare notes?
April 17th, 2008 at 2:27 am
[...] week ago, the Random Forest asked us if we successful making money using Affiliate links straight into PPC campaigns. We had to [...]
May 12th, 2008 at 12:21 am
Hi there That’s an interesting and informative blog you have running
June 25th, 2008 at 7:49 am
informative. i dont think i am going to give adwords a try, even though i have a $20 bonus from godaddy.