What to choose!?

Choosing a Niche is something that I have found to be very difficult/confusing as a super affiliate noob. How do you know what to promote? how much to bid for clicks? How well it will convert? Well, from everything you read on affiliate blogs, the main idea is to just do it and pick a random niche. So, even though it seems awkward to me, I’m giving it a try. I’m starting out with commission junction for now to see how my luck is with “real” products rather than CPA offers. I fired up www.cj.com and started looking for links. I looked through the available advertisers and found one that looked interesting/different. I decided to try my luck with www.jakesdoghouse.com, which was a completely random decision. I dont even own a dog (i have a cat, though. He rocks).

Narrowing it down.

Now that I have an advertiser to promote, i wanted to find something more specific to promote, so i browsed the site for a while looking for interesting things. One thing that I found on the site was Christmas outfits for dogs. They are pretty adorable, and if I owned a dog I would probably consider buying one!

The first problem I have run into is that there is no option to search for “product links” in commission junction for this advertiser. I really wanted to link to the specific “Christmas apparel” page on www.jakesdoghouse.com but was not able to. So i am stuck linking to the sites homepage…not exactly ideal, but i decided to give it a try anyway.

Search or content?

As the title of this entry implies, this is my very first PPC campaign, so i wanted to start light to get a feel for how AdWords and PPC in gernal works. That means that I have decided to turn off the search network in my AdWwords campaign settings and focus only on the content network. This allows me to do direct linking without being quality score slapped by Google for not having a landing page. According to www.zacjohnson.com, Zac has made most of his PPC money with the content network alone, so it cant be all bad!

Keyword research

With my target product selected, it was time to generate some relevant keywords. After doing a little research on freekeywords.wordtracker.com I decided that a good “starting” phrase would be ‘Christmas Dog Outfits’, as thats what people were searching for the most.

I brought up the Google AdWords keyword tool and started looking for keyword variations that i could use. Here is a screenshot of some of the results:

That doesn’t look to bad! There is an ok amount of search traffic, and very little competition to these keywords. I read through the keywords and added all the ones that were relevant to “Dog Christmas Outfits”. I also tried to think of some variations to this like “Dog Christmas Clothes” and “Dog Christmas Uniforms”, both returned even more good looking keywords. When i was finished I had generated somewhere around 63 unique , targeted keywords. Before I created my ad group, however, there was one more thing I wanted to do with these keywords. One trick i read about recently was to include not only the key words you generate from Adwords, but to include all the different variations of the keywords (such as broad, phrase, exact). For example, when including the keyword Dog Christmas Uniforms, you can also include [Dog christmas uniforms] and “Dog Christmas uniforms”, effectively tippling your keyword count. An easy way to do this is to head on over to www.keyword-toolkit.com and use their “Keyword Wrapper” tool, which I found in this article: How to build 2100 Killer keywords. This did all the dirty work for me, and I now had a list of 186 keywords to use.

Setting up the ad groups

Now that I had a good list of relatively targeted keywords, I was ready to setup an adwords campaign and write my ad copy. Here is a screenshot of my the ad copies I setup for this ad group. (Is this againast AdWords TOS?, if it is, please let me know):

If you look closely at the screenshot above, you might notice that one of the ad copies uses www.ebay.com instead of www.jakesdoghouse.com There is a reason for this, and I’ll get into it soon.

Setting my bids

This is an another area of PPC marketing that is very difficult for me. Trying to determine how much to bid. On one hand I could play it safe and bid low, but I’ll probably never get any traffic. On the other hand I could set my bids higher, but run the risk of loosing a good chunk of change. So what did I do? Since this will be on the content network I ended up setting the max CPC to $0.10, pretty low, but we’ll see what we get. I also set my daily budget to $100. I don’t really know what this effects, nor how much it effects it.

Results thus far

So far this campaign has been running for around 2 days. How did it do? Well, I can tell you straight up that i have made zero conversions. Not surprising, I’m no good at this yet.

Here are the statistics for the campaign so far:

Daily Budget: $100.00

Impressions: 50,130

Clicks: 64

Average CPC: $0.10

Cost: $6.50

Interpretation of this data

One thing that you read a lot in affiliate marketing blogs is that the key to success is testing, testing, testing! (in that order). So now that I have some data, it was time to start testing. The first thing I noticed is that out of 64 clicks, there were zero conversions. In trying to think of reasons why this might not be converting, I have come up with a theory. Remember at the beginning of this post I mentioned that there were no direct to product links available for this affiliate? Well, I think that might be the root cause of my problems.

So the first solution I am using is to find a different affiliate that sells the same thing, but allows linking to specific products. I did a Google search for “Dog Christmas Uniforms”, but non of the listed sites had affiliate programs. Thinking further, I remembered I had signed up for an ebay affiliate account a while back, and ebay has everything. I did an ebay search for the same keywords, and low and behold, a ton of results! I then changed one of my top 2 performing adcopies of the ad group and switched the URL to www.ebay.com instead of www.jakesdoghouse.com

There hasn’t been enough time to report any results for this change, but I’ll be sure to post them up as soon as they come in!

Tags: ad groups, campaign, dog clothes, testing