We’ve been using Facebook’s self serve platform for a few months now and has been making us a good amount of money consistently. One of the key things to our sucsess on Facebook has been testing, which is basically what affiliate marketing is.

We use a few tools, but the core of it is Prosper202 to get/read our data as well as some other tools and software we use, but we’re not going to go into that. So if you don’t have prosper202 already, go get it and install an SSL cert, it’ll save a lot of headache. Easiest way to get an SSL cert is just buy a domain with namecheap.com and get one free. Use the SSL pixels, it’ll save some headaches, but remember to update the subids daily as some will get missed!

So to start off, you’ll want to pick what your going to promote and start gathering some pictures for the ad, we usually do about 5 per test initially. As well as 5 pictures, we do 2-3 ad texts. So there will be a possible 15 variations per age group you target – not easy work as you gather, and it never is. If it’s too much for you, hire some one in-house to do it for you and pay them weekly or commision it. I’ve personally gone the commision route and it has worked well (more motivation).

Now the way to track this with prosper202 is to use their keywords. In the keyword you want to include a few things like the Age, Gender, Country, Picture version, Text Version. So format it something like this:

1. M-18-20-P1-T1-CA
2. F-18-20-P1-T1-CA
3. M-18-20-P2-T1-CA
4. F-18-20-P2-T1-CA

And so on, till you have a combination of everything. Keep in mind certain pictures and ad copies will make different demographics respond differently. For example picture 1 may respond very well to 18-20yr olds, but very differently to 30-35 year olds.

Once you have the ads submitted and approved, run a good sized test and make it significant so 1 click or 1 lead won’t throw off your numbers. So get some good statistical significance – it’s important.

Once you have the data, you want to go into Prosper and go to the Analyze tab and in the keyword box (in the More options section) put in M-18-20 so it only shows the KWs matching that. Then sort it by EPC (not ROI). If you keep prosper up to date, and update the CPCs the CPC data will set for example 50c to all KWs when in reality all the keywords may not be 50c cost. You will want to grab the combination with the highest EPC for each age / gender and run that. Once the winning one has exhausted, move on to the 2nd and so on.

The difference doing these tests can make is huge. To further these tests, you can start split testing landing pages also, as this will have a huge impact on the EPC too.

I can’t be bothered to write any more on this, so there it is! It’s been a great year for me and my company. I’ve met a lot of new people in the industry and learnt a lot this year. This industry is definately a great industry and the potential from it is HUGE.

Well as you can see, certain colours can invoke certain emotions to people. How can this help your probably thinking? Well imagine if your selling green herbal tea, and you want to invoke trust from your visitor. Then you would use the light green colour, which should make them trust the page more.

I’m not sure if this is real, or if it even works – but I’m gonna test it! I’ve found a campaign with a sweet $20 payout per lead, and I’m going to test 3 things:

1) Direct Linking
2) Normal Landing page
3) Color Landing page

And then I will report back with all the nitty gritty stuff. I’m predicting that the Color landing page will deliver best, but in this industry – you never know! I’m going to be using Yahoo and MSN AdCentre as I was recently banned from Google AdWords (pending investigation) which I will post about soon. I’ve actually grew quiet fond of these two other networks and can see my self sending a lot of volume there way!

I will be using Prosper202 to track my campaigns and get some stats out in realtime as these two networks don’t update as often as I’d like. Not only that, but Prosper202 can offer some very useful information about the campaign, including which keywords are converting and how much they’re making, and how much I’m spending on them. Best of all, it’s free!

They offer two types of tracking; Hosted and self hosted. Now for obvious reasons, I suggest you take the self hosted route. It’s not a resource hog, and is fairly quick to get installed. Just make sure you upload it in binary mode. Have a quick play around before you start using it too, or use the hosted version to play around on. Don’t send any real stuff through the hosted version however. They may be able to see your keywords and use them – but I’m not accusing them. Better safe than sorry ‘ey?

If you want to do some testing of your own, why not use this $100 coupon with Yahoo. You need to deposit $30 of your own money, giving you a nice $130 to play with. To do this just use the coupon US2300 and your all set. This is for the US market only. If your aiming for the UK, there is a link to a $25 one on my resources page! With this coupon your not risking much, and you’ve got a lot to gain. It could be the start of your super affiliate life. If you do have great sucsess with it, please do let me know by dropping a comment!

Stay tuned for the updates, I will need make the landing pages, and create the campaigns in YSM and MSNAC. Remember to subscribe to my feed and don’t forget to tell a friend to tell a friend!

I’ve learnt a few tricks from PPC Coach, such as the content network and direct linking. Basically, you use the Shotgun method and target every keyword possible. Then remove them as you find ones that don’t convert, until your left with a select group of keywords which convert well for you. Allowing you to scale the campaign and start making the money. For this, you must turn off the search network, and only enable the content network.

You need to have that set as the above, this way your not competing for the extremely well competed for search pages. This will allow you to get on content pages that are just as targetted, but with lower competition.

Then you must create a text ad, and make a legit landing page. Make the landing page contain news, links to authority sites etc. Imagine it was a portal / info site. Then for all your keywords, you use your direct link or link to your tracker. This way, google checks your main ad and gives it a great quality score, however people go to the direct link:

So as you can see, you have your list of keywords. You enter the first URL, and hit that little button and it will copy your direct link code to all your keywords. Then hit save. Now all your traffic will be going directly to the offer, saving you the hassle of a landing page and the chance of some one loading your landing page and not clicking; therefore saving money!

With this method, do not be afraid to use short tail keywords such as car loan, or hosue insurance as it does not really matter. I suggest you still stay away from broad keywords by wrapping your keywords in [keyword] and “keyword” which will make it more targetted. You need to enter every keyword twice, once with each wrapper.

I’m sorry about the testing, but I will still post everyday with updates, tips and more progress and stats from wednesday ondwards. Stay tuned!

The biggest mistake I made was making a site which revolved around news. Mine was a sports player, who was recently rejected an appeal. After the first day, he wasn’t convered in the news any more, so people stopped searching him. So long story short, I lost my audience. However, that is a valuable lesson to me. The test is still in profits overall, and the last few days have still been making profits.

For those of you who were interested in the original test, arbitrage – I will be starting it again. I will however incorporate it into this test. I have been reading around, and found some tips which I could implement to make it more profitable. It will be added within the next few days, and I will report back here!

Here is how I did with day for of the testing:

Well, as you can see above I spent $1.40 in AdWords. Paying roughly $0.20 a click. It was high because I thought if I increased the CPC I would get more clicks/traffic – wrong! Well a spending of $1.40 is pretty low.

Well, the earnings speakfor themselves. Poor! A mear profit of $0.15 which is not good at all. However, a profit is a profit. I’m still positive overall from day one so theres no loss.

Today (day 5) I added some new campaigns into the test. Hopefully this campaign will hit off. It’s using the same offer, same domain just a different landing page and different keywords. These should hopefully bring some stable traffic.

As for the arbitrage I’ll be doing some keyword research to find keywords that pay extremely high per click. I’ve found some templates (which I will share on here of course!) that are suppose to be known for having a high CTR.

That’s day four for ya, now stay tuned for day 5 and remember to subscribe to my feeds. Oh yeah, tell a friend to tell a friend

Well, because I’m not using AdSense anymore, I’m renaming the testing to Affiliate Marketing. As you already know, we’re on day three! Well, this testing has been a rollercoaster so far. Day one was a big loss, and day two had some very nice profits, even after covering the domain etc.

The stats showed me that people were clicking but not converting. This was strange! I thought it was because it was a sunday, people won’t be working or searching – just relaxing and sleeping. Well I hope that is the case. I also realised that people clicking after 23:00 were clicking less, but it picked up again after 09:00 so I restricted the times AdWords could display may ads. I hope this pays off as well.

Here are my stats from yesterday:

So as you can see, I spent $2.11 in AdWords. I was paying around 5cents a click, but I don’t know if I’m allowed to show you in the screenshot so for safety I’ve blurred it out. I was getting a good average position of 1.4 which means I was #1 more than #2 most of the time!

As you can see from the above screenshot, I made $4.65 so that brings me to $2.54 in profit for day 3. Compared to day two, it’s not good at all. However, compared to day one it’s very good . I got 3 leads out of 25 clicks which is not good. I think the campaign is probably wearing out, or people are coming back to the site using my adwords campaign.

Because of the lowering conversions, I’ve decided to switch to another campaign. I will now be putting Beijing Olympic tickets as the campaign on my site. My AM over at Max Bounty (Adam) has increased the payout to $2.00 a lead which should allow me to throw some more money into AdWords. I will give you my findings in day 4!

Stay tuned, and remember to subscribe!

]]> http://sohantanna.com/84/affiliate-marketing-day-three/feed/ 2 http://sohantanna.com/72/adsense-arbitrage-day-two/ http://sohantanna.com/72/adsense-arbitrage-day-two/#comments Sun, 20 Jul 2008 02:52:19 +0000 Sohan Tanna http://sohantanna.com/?p=72 Well, it’s day two and after a loss yesterday – things can only look better, ey? Well, they do! I decided to scrap AdSense and went with one of my favorite affiliate companies Market Leverage. I chose these over the other companies because they have a lot of UK offers, and as the campaign was targeted for the UK that was perfect.

So lets get down to the number crunching. Yesterday, I spent $6.25 on AdWords which is only $1.25 more than yesterday. That is nowhere near my daily budget of the campaign which is $15. I want to also point out that Google did actually slap me this morning as I also changed the content to gear it towards email submits. However, after 3 hours I recovered from the slap and got my old rate of $0.05 per click back!

Here is my spending vs earnings:

As you can see, I earned $32.55 at the end of the day. That’s exactly 21 leads I generated. I was getting $1.55 per email as you can see, and I got a pretty good EPC of $0.34 which means I could pay upto $0.34 in AdWords per keyword and I would still break even. However, the campaign has a single keyword (a name) and I only had to pay $0.05. I only had one competitor, which was The Sun news paper who were ranking 1-2 as well.

I won’t be telling you my ads or my keywords for obvious reasons, but at the end of the week I shall be sharing information, techniques etc. Subscribe to my blog, and add it to your reader to keep yourself updated.

I will most likely find more niches and advertise into those. If it’s possible to make $32.55 in one day with one, it will surely be possible to make $325.50 a day with 10! That’s providing they all do well

Stay tuned!

Well now that I have an AdWords and AdSense account again, I thought I’d do some testing. Let me fill you in on what I did, which led me to making this test.

A night of no sleep, and no sleep in the morning. I was taking around half a gram of caffeine every 5-6 hours and I was alert, focused. I started reading through blogs, forums etc and started getting some ideas. After around 5 hours of solid reading and it’s 8AM GMT I decided to have a shower, get more caffeine and some food.

Did a bit of keyword research quickly, and threw together a quick site in dreamweaver. I’m not going to show you the site, or tell you the keywords for obvious reasons. I found the niche I was going to use, and quickly gathered the content.

To get my content, I didn’t write it myself, nor did I outsource it. No way, that would only waste time as well as waste money. I’m not trying to rank for the terms in orangic searches, so I don’t mind if google don’t rank me for duplicate content. Catchin’ on now? Good! So I found the story using Google news (always provides hot topics), quickly did some searches to make sure there was no paid listings. Then went to a news article, and copied and pasted the whole thing! Even got some images.

So here are my results for day one – showing AdWords vs AdSense:

As you can see, I lost $4.60 in day one, plus domain fees of $8.20 (from Alloy Hosting). So day one gave me a total loss of $12.80. However, I was not a big enough fool to poor more funding into this campaign. I could see that my AdSense keywords weren’t paying enough, and my CTR on AdSense wasn’t high enough and couldn’t keep up with a well made AdWords campaign!

I quickly opened dreamweaver, and go on my way to making a landing page for an Email submit campaign. Once the final one was done, I rewrote my campaign ads and updated the page on the hosting. I also made another tweak to the campaign it’s self. I put the daily limit from $5 to $15 as I could see the campaign was delivering well, but I didn’t want to risky too much. I used Market Leverage for the email submit using their UK Offers catogery which was giving me $1.55 an email!

I will keep you updated on how day two goes (today) and just a heads up, I’m already in profits within the wee hours of the morning!

I have recently joined a few affiliate companies. Max Bounty, Never Blue Ads and Market Leverage. I’ve always had a CJ and Click Bank account. I will be using these companies to monetize the sites, along side something like Kontera or EchoTopic for the contextual side.

My plan is to find niches using the Free keyword tracker, then look at the competition quickly using SEO Quake. I will then buy the domain and hosting and install wordpress using Fantastico. Get a skin, install my core plug-ins and then write the content myself after researching the niche.

The main part I think will be building the links. I will look for blogs and forums within that niche or related to the niche in a broader term and post around and have the link in my signature and posts. If I need a large amount of links to rank #1 I will probably buy them, or buy links off other people and have my link put in their signature.