I lost my job about 3 months ago when the company that I worked for went under; I was a senior desktop specialist/ Jr. network admin. The job market where I live is in tough shape so I am trying to free myself from corporate handcuffs.
I have decided that I want to be a fulltime affiliate marketer using adwords…the trouble is that my recent attempts with adwords have been total flops. I set up an adwords account and chose an affiliate program from clickbank, it was something about paid online surveys, it was at the top of the list on clickbank so I figured that it must be the best one to try...I generated a hop link and put that link into my google ad. I then used the Google keyword tool and selected every keyword that Google gave me that related to stuff like "work from home" and "home based business" and "job searches." Google generated hundreds of keywords and I selected all of them. Then I thought, “I know...I will try to target people who are doing job searches with their city names". So I bought a list online from a list host for $15.00 that had the names of 32,000 US cities in it. I then loaded the city list into 16 different ad groups (2000 cities at a time because an adgroup can not contain more that 2000 keywords), and then I added the word job to each city name so the list was like ‘job los angels’, ‘job Dallas’ etc...Then I set my cpc globally to 12 cents per click and let the campaign run. I was so excited...until 12 hours later when I saw that several of my keywords were being put on hold without even getting a chance to run, and even though my ad supposedly served 3200 times during that 12 hour time period I only got 2 clicks! My position was reported as anywhere from #1 (especially for city names that were small towns) to 50 or so for cities like LA and Chicago. I deleted both campaigns in anger. That was my first run with adwords. I spent $20.24 ($15.00 for the city list, $5 for the initial adwords account setup, and 24 cents for 2 clicks). That was discouraging…
Now I come to these forums to ask you for direction. My specific questions are who should I partner with as an affiliate? What programs are selling? Are there certain industries to stay away from? For example I see that the mortgage industry programs on commission junction have very high payouts…does that mean that they are the best? How do I choose a product to promote? Was Clickbank a mistake or should I try them again? Are there some affiliate networks to stay away from? If I use Clickbank or CJ should I always shoot for the programs with the highest gravity number or payout per 100 clicks or whatever those numbers mean? I feel like I am immersed in a sea of ebook scams from people trying to sell me plans to make money and I suspect that many of them never made a nickel using the plans that they are selling. If anyone here could guide me in setting up a successful first time program with adwords I would really appreciate it (by successful, I mean if it makes five dollars a day I will be thrilled and filled with hope). I just need some help navigating through the garbage and connecting with the **real** information. If anyone can set me up with a working program that teaches me the ropes I will gladly pay you every dime it makes for the first several weeks in the form of PayPal payments.
Please help….!
You're on the right track as far as getting very specific with keywords. Finding profitable areas in AdWords as an affiliate sending traffic straight to the merchant site is like playing the slots and it gets more challenging every day.
Be prepared to spend a lot of money and a lot of time to find profitable keyword/ad copy/mearchant/product combinations. Chances are there won't be to many specific tips thrown out here since there can only be on ad per display URL.
The trick is to find obscure products, obscure sites and/or innovative ways to promote things that other people haven't though of yet.
Whether you build sites (often a less expensive learning curve if you're building them yourself) or trying to do it with AdWords it is going to take a while.
CJ and independent affiliate programs are probably the best places to start. Some people probably still do pretty good with some ClickBank stuff, but most of those products are probably pretty well saturated by now.
Either way it takes a lot of patience.
