Affiliate Musketeer

Set Up an AdWords PPC Campaign for Your Affiliate Site – Part 2

I could have posted this in one night but I figured I’d make use of lots of content by spreading it across more days and more posts. It’s a not so subtle way of getting readers to come back again but may also add some extra worth to the G-Meister by showing a regularly updated site.
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Set Up An AdWords PPC Campaign for Your Affiliate Site

As you know, my bar stools affiliate website is making me no money yet. It has been online since February and has so far made 4 sales. 1 accidental, 2 proper ones via Amazon Associates and 1 proper one with Affiliate Window. This is due to a complete lack of traffic coming to the site and to combat that, I’m going to try a little PPC experiment…

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Head Down. 3 Hours Hard Graft.

If you read my latest post about being totally disenchanted by the prospect of having a couple of affiliate sites making no money, chances are you’ve experienced that very same feeling. My new affiliate site has been online approx 6/7 weeks now, has dropped completely out of the SERPs and has only made £49. This has completely wiped out my enthusiasm for the site however I have remained determined to see it through and tonight I put my head down and just started writing…

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3 Easy Steps to Improve AdWords Quality Score from 3/10

If you refer to one of my earlier blog posts about opening up a new AdWords account and throwing the net large and wide from the off, you’ll see that I made some serious mistakes with that campain. The result was that all of my keywords, despite being in extremely tight AdGroups, were getting a google quality score of 3/10. This was a fairly new experience for me because for the last two years – as long as Ive been a Certified AdWords Professional, I’ve never experienced a Quality Score of less than 7/10. (more…)

Stop Poor AdWords Quality Scores Forever

I set up a PPC campaign for a relatively competitive group of keywords this week (avge £2 per click, about 5m results, PPC ompetition of 8/10) and I was reminded of a very important rule to observe when setting up PPC campaigns with AdWords and, more specifically, what NOT to do when setting them up. (more…)

£550 Commission Last Month but Now I’m Stuck!

Last month I earned £550 commission from one of my sites through Commission Junction. I spent £200 on Google AdWords to make this money. Obviously that means that particular campaign made £350 gross profit. Now when I setup affiliate marketing campaigns, I like to try and keep them all distinct and transparent but this month dug myself a very big hole. Basically, due to very poor cash flow management and budgeting, I’ve totally messed up this month’s campaign. Although I made £550 in commission last month, my AdWords bill for that campaign came in BEFORE my commission was paid into my account. What this means is that since September the 5th, I have been unable to run AdWords ads for this campaign because the cash was unavailable for Google!

Commission Junction pay out on the 20th of every month, so I won’t actually receive that chunk of commission until then! What that means in practice is that from the 5th September to about the 21st, (16 days!!), my highly profitable campaign is a sitting duck! I have an extremely well performing PPC Campaign with practically 10/10 quality scores across the board (see one of my articles on how I did that here), I’m whipping the competition with really high CTRs and I have a product that is selling like hotcakes but I’ve been an utter plonker by utilising my full budget last month and being careless with a few other purchases which has left me totally stuck.

I now have to wait until the Commission comes into my account from CJ before I can pay Google and turn my campaign back on! Doh!

So the moral of this little story is before any campaign, always check your payment dates and budget. Check your cash flow because it is vital. Before you treat yourself with that chunk of commission, make sure you’ve paid your immediate suppliers!

How do you Improve Quality Score when Promoting Affiliate Products

When you use AdWords to promote affiliate products you have two choices on how you want to do it. The first is to link your text ad directly to the affiliate offer by putting your affiliate link in the destination url of the ad. The second is to direct traffic from the text ad to your own landing page where you then link out to the affiliate offering. The only way to achieve a high quality score (and thus better CTRs and CPCs) is to use the second method.

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How To Track Which AdWords Keywords Convert to Sales via CJ

I had a problem. I was pretty good at using AdWords and fairly new to promoting products via CJ. I knew that to understand my traffic and find out which PPC keyword terms turned into sales, I had to have some way of measuring them and here’s how I finally solved the problem…

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How To Increase AdWords Quality Score With Better Landing Pages

Good keyword research forms only part of the most effective AdWords strategies. The other part is good content. You may think this is a given, that you’d only be advertising via AdWords if you already had good quality content in place but you’d be amazed at how many associates I’ve worked with and helped that simply did not use effective landing page copy. I’ve written a few tips in here about how to increase your quality score through better quality content.

Quality scores and quality content go hand in hand. To give you an example, here’s the ins and outs of one of my own AdWords campaigns and landing page combinations which went from an OK quality score of 7/10 to a great quality score of 10/10 simply by writing better, well researched content specifically related to the keyword, ad group and ad text I was using.

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Is It Possible To Get 10/10 AdWords Quality Score?

Update 1st June 2009:
All you need to reach the magical numer is:

• This software to help you obtain a high CTR (20% +)
• A highly targeted landing page (using title and heading tags properly)
• A good article written by this guy to create a healthy dose of content written around the keyword in question.

So, absolutely yes, it is possible! You can get the holy grail of quality scores by following google’s guidelines but if you’ve tried that (and like me most of you will have!) and it hasn’t worked, you might want to try some software that will do it for you or you may want to keep trying yourself until you hit that golden 10. Either way, here’s what I did to get a quality score of 10/10 for one of my campaigns:

• Increase CTR to 20%+ (If you need help with this, see James Schramko’s Double Digit CTR page)
• Used an ‘Exact Matching’ keyword
• Keyword also present in source code title, meta keywords and meta description tags
• Tightly grouped Keywords in tightly knitted AdGroups (SpeedPPC will do this for you)
• Keywords in AdText but not exactly the same keywords as the actual keyword you are targeting
• Keyword did not appear in body text of landing page but it was present in a <h2> tag in the landing page footer
• Keep the landing page ‘on theme’

I looked at this in much more depth in my post about how to get an AdWords Quality score of 10/10.

Resources To Help You:

• AdWords Beater - How To Make Profitable, High, Double Digit CTR AdWords PPC Campaigns
• Speed PPC – How To Increase Your AdWords Profits By Spending Less Time Arranging AdGroups and More Time Earning