How I Got Rich

It gets worse…

After the previous days drop in earnings it was inevitable the figures for Wednesday would take another dip.

PPC spend was 20 pounds (although it is hard to say for sure due to the different time zones) and clicks were coming in as fast as they were on the Monday when I cleared 50 pounds profit.  But hardly any of these clicks converted and only 6 pounds worth of commission was earnt.  Sales were made through my other sites that aren’t being promoted by PPC so the day wasn’t a total write off and I did make some profit overall.

I don’t know what has changed since Monday.  I am getting more traffic than I was before and have more campaigns running but even the existing campaigns are not converting like they were.

Maybe because it was a Monday people were more ready to buy as they’d been out at the weekend and seen the things in the shops and were now checking to see if they were cheaper online?

Monday was the 24th and in my old job we got paid on the 24th so perhaps people had been waiting until then?

Either way it doesn’t explain why clicks are still high but conversions are down.

I will see what happens tomorrow and then re-assess the situation.

I’m pretty gutted as I thought I was onto a winner.  I knew 50 quid a day was too much and wouldn’t carry on but I didn’t realise it would drop so much.

Back to SEO I guess…

My First £50 Day!

After only a few day after posting about how I wanted a £50 a day site I managed to bring in over £50 in sales in one day.  This wasn’t from one site but spread across many but it  is still a new personal best for me and a nice change in my fortunes.

I put this down to finally giving PPC a proper go as most of the traffic came via Adwords ad I had setup in the past few days.  Yesterday I spent £13.01 on Adwords clicks and made £66.76 in commission which gives me a profit of £53.75. Some of the sales came through non-Adwords traffic so I will have to work out exactly how much I earnt from the Adwords traffic but I am certain it is more than the amount I spent.

£50 a day equals £1500 a month which would be amazing.  If I could make £25 a day in the not too distant future I would be very happy.

Hopefully this is the start of something good rather than a glitch in the Matrix.

Atomic Niche Site Update

I started a micro niche or atomic niche site a while ago for an item that retails for about £1000.

I built the site using the product model number as the domain and then put an Easy Content Unit price comparison widget on the home page.  I left the site to see how well it would rank organically and it got to number two in Google after a few weeks.  It was getting about five hits a day but no sales.  I left the site as I assumed the item was too expensive and that not many people were searching for the item.

Recently I have been looking into PPC and AdWords and thought I would give promoting this site using PPC a go using the new things I have learnt in that area.

Today I logged into Affiliate Window and saw that the site had made a sale! The item sold  for £1,158.00 which got me £19.58 in commission.  10% would’ve been nice, or even 5% but in this case I will have to settle for 1.5% thanks to those stingy b*~tards at Dixons!

I think I will setup another one of these sites soon…

I paid for 58 clicks which cost me £12 so I will only make about £8 on this one but it is a start.

Update: I have since made another sale from a different merchant which got me £31.91 commission.  This has come from 68 clicks which cost me £14.69 giving me a total profit of £36.80 so far.  I am happy with that and think I will build a couple more of these sites.  If I had 10 up and running performing like this that would be £300 per month.

Update II: Another sale through today for £852.17 which brought me £17.04 which is about a 2% commission rate.  PPC spend is now at £15.18 which gives me a gross profit of £68.53 and a net total profit of £53.35.  I will definitely be making a few more of this type of site this week.  Just need to find out which merchants offer decent commission rates as 1% is pretty poor.

Update III: Another sale for this site came through today which brought in  £29.88 commission from a sale of £995.99 (3% commission rate).   This brings the gross profit up to £98.41 which after deducting the PPC spend of £20.25 leaves a net profit of £78.16.  The other sites I made in this style after this one are yet to make a sale but it’s early days.

Update IV: Bah! The sale from update III has been decline.  This was £29.88 of commission I thought was comming my way but according the Affiliate Windows data it has been ‘web declined’.  Not sure what that means?

Update V: Another sale for the site, still no action on the other sites though.  This one gets £15.93 commission from a sale of £796.52 although this is still pending.  This brings the gross profit for this site up to £64.88 and with a PPC spend of £21.29 the net profit stands at £43.59.

Google Wonder Wheel

I’ve just stumbled across the Google Wonder Wheel which looks like it could come in handy for finding related searches.  Has this been out for a while?  Anyone doing anything interesting with it?

Apart from that I have been quite busy but haven’t actually finished anything off.  I’ve been looking more into PPC and have learnt a bit more and started a few more campaigns.  Next month I am going to reinvest some of my earrings and do a few bigger campaigns.  I’ve also started work on a MoreNiche page promoting slimming pills but haven’t had enough time to get it finished.  A few sites have gone down the SERPS due to, I expect, a lack of updates but these are smaller sites so its not too big  deal.  I’ve been doing some good link exchanges via the a4u forum and have made a few more contacts which is good.  Only got two more weeks left at work so hopefully I will have more time to devote to affiliate marketing in the next few months.

Case Study | First Sale | End of Project

I made my first sale today through the site I have been writing about in this case study.  From the click ref in Affiliate Window it appears the user who made the sale arrived at the site via the PPC advert.  They bought the item via the ECU and picked the lowest priced merchant which was Dixons.

So far so good but what I failed to check was how much commission Dixons were paying on this type of item.  I wrongly assumed their maximum amount of 2.5% was paid on all items but after seeing this sale listed in Affiliate Window I saw I would only get 39p for selling a £39 item.  This works out at 1% and not the 2.5% I was expecting.  I had a quick check of the Dixons commission scale and found that only 1% commission is paid on slow cookers.

Due to this I have now stopped the AdWords campaign for this site and will leave the site alone, therefore ending the case study.

In total I have spent £6.88 on the domain and £1 in clicks from the Adwords campaign and have earned a grand total of 39p commission.  Making a grand loss of £7.49. Without the traffic from Adwords I doubt the site will get any more traffic or make any more sales so I will just chalk this up to experience and move on to the next project.

Lessons learnt: always check the exact comission paid by the merchant for the type of item you are promoting.  Pretty obvious really but something that caught me out this time!

Case Study | AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC)

I have tried a couple of AdWords campaigns in the past and have a few running at the moment but they rarely get clicked and have never led to a sale.  I am obviously doing something wrong but I am determined to have a successful campaign as I think AdWords or PPC will be a great way to make money quickly.

I have setup an AdWords campaign for my case study site.  I am bidding 10p per click and am the number one ad ahead of three others.  I will see if I can reduce my bid tomorrow and still retain the top spot. I am bidding on just one keyword ‘RK701115′. Is this normal or do people bid on multiple keywords for the same site?  My ad looks like this:

RK701115 Slow Cooker
RK701115 Tefal Slow Cooker
Lowest Price RK701115 4 in 1 Cooker
www.RK701115.co.uk

Any PPC gurus got any tips for improving my click through rate or how I can get some good quality traffic to my sites using AdWords and finally start making money from this approach?

Adwords PPC

I’m giving AdWords another go. I’ve tried it a couple of times but never had much luck.

I am running two campaigns at the moment. One is for one of my sites that is at number one in Google and gets me about 50% of my income. I am running PPC on this site as I want more traffic as the site converts well so I hope it will make more money if I increase the traffic. As it is already number one in Google the only way I can see to get more traffic is to pay for it via AdWords.

The other campaign is for a site that is not well ranked so PPC will be its only source of traffic.

I am bidding at 10p a click which gets me in positions 3 and 4 for each campaign. I am using an exact match keyword.

So far the click through rate is around 1-2% which is a lot lower than I thought it would be – is this normal? This has amounted to about 1 or 2 clicks so far today.

Another problem I will have is differentiating between sales that are made by users that arrive at the site via PPC and sales of of users that arrive at the site via the Google organic search results. This is important because I want to know if the money I am paying for clicks results in sales. If I don’t know this I wont know if the Ads are making a profit.

To help with this I was shown how to make the users IP address their click ref. This will show up in the merchant’s tracking data so I can then go back and see how that user reached my site. I think this will work with Affiliate Window but not sure how to get it to worth with Amazon.

I recently signed up for the Free Adwords Health Check from this site http://www.freeadwordshealthcheck.co.uk/ so hopefully they can help me get more click throughs.

Has anyone else tried PPC, got any tips?