Ass Out Cash

After failing on my first PPC ClickBank campaign, I thought hard and long about my next attempt, and set up some rules for myself to follow.The next area I really wanted to promote was loans.  Great idea, until I saw the price of keywords, OUT.

Next was a detox product.  Seemed solid, all was go forward.  I chose  a Natural Body Detox product.  Keywords I chose were not badly priced, So I let it fly for 2 days and $20.  I saw 50 hits at the landing page, but no sales.  I pulled the plug, dead.  I need profit, it was looking the same as the resume campaign.

2 down, what now?  I spent 2 days browsing ClickBank looking at products.  I decided upon  aen ebook for tips and help getting gold in World of Warcraft.  Now I have never played this game, but I know a few people that do, and they are crazy about it.  These guys spend real money to have more stuff in a video game.  My kind of client.  I chose a product; World Of Warcraft Opulence.

I created 2 ad groups, one directed to the authors landing page, and 1 to a pre-sale page I created.  Each had focused and cheap keywords.  After day one My click through was really bad.  So I turned on the content network.  Now this was the first time I had used content network, so I did nothing but turn it on.  I began seeing a lot more traffic, but was not converting anyone.  I ran this campaign for almost 4 days, 232 visits to the authors site, not even 1 sale.  Yanked the plug on this one too.

Not discouraged yet, I tried again.  A myspace info book on how to meet girls and get dates with them.  Seemed like a solid product, and we all know mySpace is huge these days.  The product was The Matchbook Method.  Well the word MySpace is copyrighted, so you can’t even use it in an ad, then after I worked around that minor issue, I found out someone else was advertising this link and out ranking me, so my ad was rarely showing.  1 day, 12 hits no sales.

Now I am discouraged! I may try again soon, but I have some other fish to fry first.

Well I broke my rule of spending no money until there is money coming in.  All these other affiliates seem to make it sound so easy.  So I decided to try my own Google AdWords campaign on a ClickBank item.

For starters I just brainstormed what should sell.  My conclusion was a resume product.  I figured with the un-employment rate as high as it is right now, a lot of people are looking for any advantage to get a job.  I settled on Amazing Resume.  This seemed like the best product at the time.    In my opinion it has a good landing page,and it appears to be a good product for a reasonable price.

I started my campaign with a single ad with heavy keyword focus to the landing page.  The easy keywords were expensive.  So I chose some less obvious keywords hoping for quality instead of quantity.   First day, traffic was high, no sales.

Day 2 I added a second revised ad, and weeded out some keywords with a poor quality score.  More traffic no sales.

Day 3 I woke up to a sale.  WooHoo!  Well not really.  When I started this campaign, I told my self no to spend more than the sale would be worth.  So at this point I had spent around $22 and the sale was worth $22 and change.  OK so I am even, if this is the rate this product is going to convert at why sell it.  I decided to give it another $20 just to see how it went.

Day 4 and 5.  My $20 is gone and no sales.  I paused the campaign to think about my options.  When I returned a few days later I found I didn’t really pause it.  But it continued to run.  In short I got 2 more sales, but spent almost double that on advertising.  The numbers:  274 visits for 3 sales.  Not so good in my opinion.  You might say; “that’s over 1% that isn’t bad”.  Well in this case that 1% was still a $$ losing deal, traffic cost too much for this highly sought after niche.  Even for the keywords I considered specialty, or crude weer still getting 0.30 per click.  Not what I am after.

I have created more PPC campaigns since, stay tuned I will post my results soon.