How I Got Rich

Keyword Tracking Plugin for Adwords

Just seen this little tool for WordPress on another affiliate blog and thought I’d post it here incase anyone hadn’t seen it.

The idea is that it records which keyword your sales came from or something like that.  Read the full story here:

http://shanebrown.co.uk/new-wordpress-keyword-tracking-tool-plugin/

Beware the Google Slap

Recently I set up a new site that I was going to promote via PPC using Google’s  AdWords.  I set the site up and created a page for each item and put an image of the product on the page and an Easy Content Unit comparing the prices from different merchants.

Instead of adding content I decided to start some AdWords campaigns for the site to get the ball rolling and hits coming in before I got around to writing and adding the content.

The next time I logged into AdWords to check the campaign I noticed my keywords had a 1/10 quality score and the reason given was something to do with a poor quality site.   The low quality score means my ads will hardly ever, if at all, be shown.

I then added the content, waited for it to get indexed and started a new campaign on the same account for the site.  Google noticed straight away and gave me another 1/10 quality score.

So now I have registered a new domain and am in the process of moving the content over.

Once I have done that I will start a new campaign for the site and hopefully it will pass Google’s criteria.

Fingers crossed…

AdWords Without a Credit Card?

My credit card has expired and due to my location I have been able to get another one.  This has lead to my Adwords account getting suspended.

Does anyone know of a way around this?  Any tips, other ways to pay?

Cheers.

Google AdWords vs Google Keyword Tool part II

Just a quick update about this topic. According to AdWords, yesterday my campaign got 197 impressions. Bear in mind this wasn’t campaign wasn’t running a whole day but during that period my site got five hits.

So five as a percentage of 197 is 2.5%. Now I know my site is only at number two but that is a pretty poor showing. Needless to say no one has clicked on my ad.

I will wait and see what the stats are like for the next few days and report back.

Google AdWords vs Google Keyword Tool

My regular readers will know I often like to grumble about the lack of accuracy of the Google Keywoord Tool.

Getting a site to number one in Google usually gives me about 2-4% of the number given by the Google Keyword Tool for exact search in hits per month i.e. Google Keyword Tool says 14,000 exact matches for my sites main keyword but my site will only get about 500 hits per month making it completely unprofitable.  Either no one is clicking through or the Google Keyword Tool is well out.

So to find out I have just setup an AdWords campaign for one of my sites main keyword.  The Keyword Tool said there were 12,100 exact searches for this keyword last month but my site at number two in Google only got 140 hits in that month (1%).

Lets see how many impressions my ad gets (and lets hope it doesn’t cost me too much!).

Busy Beaver

I’ve had quite a productive day today.  This morning I wrote a few new pages of content for one of my old sites that was languishing  around page three in Google for ages and since I moved it to Wordpress has crawled up to the bottom of page one.  I’ve slowly been adding more posts to it to help improve it’s ranking.  There has been no change as of yet but I hope soon it will move up to the top.  Its more of a seasonal site for the autumn but it can’t do any harm getting it to the top now.  According to the Google KeyWord Tool it got 18,100 exact local searches last month so hopefully a few of them will click through if I get it higher up the page.  At the moment it gets about 100-200 uniques a month and makes a few sales.  Its never going to make me rich but as I’ve already bought the domain I might as well use it and see if I can make a few quid from it.

Ranking for Two Keywords

Regarding the above site I would ideally like to get it ranking for two keywords.  One is, lets say, red monkeys and the other is big footballs.  The product I am promoting does both things but has two different names that is referred to.  The domain I have used is redmonkeys.org.uk and the site is on the first page for that term but for the keyword big footballs the site is nowhere to be seen.  I’m not sure the best way to go about getting the site ranked for the other keyword.  I’m starting to build backlinks using that keyword as anchor text and I’ve started using the keyword more throughout the website so hopefully things should pick up.

If I focus on getting the site ranked for big footballs is there any way it will affect the ranking already achieved for red monkeys?

Another thing I did today was add a new product (well the first product) to my ‘big site’ and setup a PPC campaign for it.  Hopefully I get lucky with this product and start to see some sales come though.  My aim is to add one new product to this site per day and set up a PPC campaign for it.

Weekend Break

I went away for the weekend as it was the King’s birthday and therefore a long weekend.  We heading off to Koh Chang which is one of the Thai islands.  Koh Chang means Elephant Island and we saw quite a few elephants wandering around and also went for a ride on them which involved swiming with them at the end.

I decided to leave my PPC campaigns running over the weekend as I had been doing quite well leading up to the weekend and on the Sunday I found an Internet cafe and had a quick check of my stats.  Unfortunately most of the items I was promoting with PPC has sold out so although I was getting the traffic and clicks through to the merchants hardly any sales were made.

I am now trying to find some more items to promote that are popular but still in stock as I reckon there is about another week left of people buying Christmas presents online.

I’m away next week until the new year so will be trying to make the most of the Christmas shopping before I go.

Anyone know how to find which Christmas items are proving popular so far this year?

Knock me down with a feather – another £50 day

Another good day in the run up to Christmas.  Yesterday I tweaked my Adwords ads and updated some of my ECUs that were pointing to out of stock merchants and today I have a lower PPC spend and have made more commission.

Break down goes a little something like this:

• Awin: £42
• Amazon: £26
• Adwords: £14
• Profit: £54

Obviously these are all pending but I’ve not had many rejections so far (touch wood) and PPC spend isn’t in sync with sales as there are time zone issues afoot but overall it looks positive.

I’d love to spend today checking my sites and setting up some new campaigns but as regular reader may know I recently started a new part-time day job.  Although the job is only one day a week it also takes a full day to prepare so unfortunately today and tomorrow will be affiliate marketing free apart from the odd bit of stolen time.  I am quite gutted as I only get £35 for the day of work (which actually takes two days) and I could earn more than that from Internet marketing but its not all about the money right?

Down But Not Out

Not another £50 day yesterday but a £25 day which is still great.

• £22 was made through Awin
• £25 was made through Amazon
• £21.69 was spent through Adwords

A lot of the sales did not come via the PPC campaigns so I probably made a loss/broke even/made a slight profit on the Christmas PPC sites.  I put this down to a few of my best seller going out of stock and a fair amount of sales going through Play.com who only give about 0.5% commission.

This is all slightly out due to the fact my Adwords account is in a -8 time zone so it doesn’t match up with my Affiliate Window account which is 8 hours ahead of the Adwords account.  Has anyone managed to get Google to change the time zone of their Adwords account?

I am tempted to try and open a new account and put it in the right time zone this time as it is annoying me not being able to compare spend on ads with income from sales day by day.

That reminds me, I better put some money on my credit card as I will be getting a pretty big Adwords bill sometime soon!

Check for out of Stock Merchants

It is obvious you should regularly check the merchants you are linking to have the items in stock you are promoting.

However it is something that I overlooked and after going over the stats for yesterday I saw quite a lot of the items I was advertising on my sites were out of stock.  Some of them were still displaying as in stock on my Easy Content Units (ECU) but when I clicked through to the merchant the items were no longer in stock.

Chances are the user will go back to your site and try another merchant but there is also the chance they will just load Google in the current window and find another site with the item by-passing your site.

Another issue I had was that a few merchants had gone out of stock and Play.com became the lowest priced merchant with the item in stock.  This was bad news as Play.com seems to only pay about 1% commission so suddenly my sales were at a similar level but commission was slashed dramatically.

All the above would apply to SEO driven sites but with PPC it becomes much more urgent as you are paying for all your traffic and a bad day could wipe out all profits.

Again I guess this highlights the problem of having lots of small sites that applies to the approach I have taken so far.  The more small sites you have promoting individual items the more site and products you have to check to see if everything is working.

I think once the Christmas traffic has died down I will try and setup up a hand-full of high value PPC campaigns that get me £20 or so commission per sale.  Hopefully this should be easier to manage on a day to day basis.