Affiliate income from Google AdWords

Friday, 22 June 2007

Money for (almost) nothing

Well, what a week it’s been around our office. There have been quite a few ‘Ooooo’s and ‘Oh-My-Gods’ floating about. It’s because we’ve been taking a regular sneak peak at our Googlecash results to see how the experiment has been fairing.

Remember, last week we decided to put a “get-rich-quick” e-book to the test. It’s been quite a fun distraction from the more serious, regular work at hand!

Last week I was totally convinced it would flop, and I’d be eating a large slice of humble pie in front of you this week. This week I have to report that the results have been astonishing.

In five days we’ve delivered 49 visitors to our merchant and 11 have converted (that’s a 22% conversion rate). In money terms, we’ve spent $18.63 through Google AdWords and we’ve earned $385 in commissions. That’s a profit of $372.50 in five days.

Not a bad effort for about an hour’s work setting it up. It also puts this single effort on track to earn about $27,000 per year after costs.

As much as I’d love to keep this wonderful cash generating secret to myself, I’d better come clean! So here’s the deal; this is how I set it all up… (and how you could too).

First off, I signed up as an affiliate to AVON cosmetics through the Clixgalore network . AVON pays affiliates $35 per lead. So all “my” visitor has to do is fill out this form and I’ll get paid.

The next step was to sign into my Google AdWords account and create a new campaign which I simply called “AVON Calling”. Under the “AVON Calling” campaign I created three AdGroups, each one with its own “theme”:

Join AVON
Party Plans
Competitors

Of course each AdGroup above has its own Google Ad – (with key-words tailored to each ‘theme’). Behind the scenes, the “Party Plans” GoogleAd looks like this:

{KeyWord: AVON Cosmetics Party Plan}
With AVON, earn up to 50% of sales.
In your own time. In your own way.
www.joinAVON.com.au

Then there’s the key phrase list for which the ad above will appear:

Australian party plan
cosmetic party plan
party plan job
make up party plan
party plan australia
party plan business
party plan company
party plan consultant
etc. etc.


By now, you’re probably wondering why the title reads – {KeyWord: AVON Cosmetics Party Plan} .

This is the little secret I mentioned last week that I wanted to share with you. It’s a ‘command’ that Google doesn’t publicise but many search engine marketing agencies (like ourselves) use quite often.

Basically what it's saying is “insert the key phrase from the list into the title”. So if someone types into Google “Australian party plan”, (which is in the list above) then the Google Ad will look like this:

Australian Party Plan
With AVON, earn up to 50% of sales.
In your own time. In your own way.
www.joinavon.com.au

From experience Google knows that a user is more likely to click on a Google Ad when there is an exact match between what they’ve typed in and the content in the ad. The “AVON Cosmetics Party Plan” section of the command is called the “default title”.

Remember, Google limits the title to 25 characters. If the user types in a key phrase longer than 25 characters then Google inserts “AVON Cosmetics Party Plan” instead.

Next up, you’re also probably wondering, “Hey! Where is the affiliate code?”

When you set up a Google Ad, Google gives you two fields to place URLs. The first is a “display URL” (which, in our case is http://www.joinavon.com.au/) the other is the “ Destination URL ”. The “destination URL” is where your visitor is actually sent.

I also created three ads per AdGroup, which Google displayed randomly for a while until it began displaying the Google Ad that received more clicks. This is really handy, because now I can delete the non-performing ads and create variations around the one that’s performing the best.

Initially, I started quite low with the keyword bidding – about 10¢ per click, (just to test the water), but as profits improved, I’ve upped the bids to around 50¢ each. We can certainly afford it at the moment.

A word of caution, while some smaller companies don’t care, some larger organisations will no longer let you use their brand name in an online marketing/advertising campaign. So indeed, this campaign may only enjoy a short life span. I guess we’ll see…

I expect our costs will go up a little as some of you visit Google and click on the ad – that’s understandable. We’ve also decided to donate half our earnings to our Friday night beer fund, and the other half to an organisation that does much more important work than we do: Doctor’s Without Borders.

The compromising side of affiliate programs

Friday, 15 June 2007

The compromising side of affiliate deals

Like me, I’m sure you’ve stumbled across one of those, too-good-to-be-true ”make millions while you’re fast asleep” e-books at some time or other online. So at the risk of endorsing one I read recently, I thought I’d offer a sneak-peak at what’s inside and save you the $US67 I spent on Chris Carpenter’s, ‘GoogleCash’.

Essentially, GoogleCash tells you how to make money from Google AdWords, “…and you don’t even need your own website.”

What? Make money from Google AdWords? Without a website? How?

Yep. That’s what I thought.

So, being in the industry I thought I’d best read it for research purposes… (OK, OK, I totally got sucked in).

Begrudgingly, I have to admit that it’s actually not too bad. The basic premise is that you sign up to a merchant’s affiliate program and create a Google AdWords campaign to advertise your merchant’s products/services.

When someone performs a search at Google and clicks on your Google Ad, the visitor (with your affiliate code) is transferred to the merchant’s website. If “your” visitor buys a product, or signs up for something, you make a commission. The trick is to make more in commissions than you spend on AdWords.

Sounds simple enough.

Chris Carpenter pretty much pioneered the concept, and he made tons of money before many other folks cottoned on to the idea and ”diluted” it somewhat. So now he’s making money selling “picks to the miners” so to speak; selling his book to the get-rich-quick dreamers.

Chris also uses his PDF e-book to insert his own sneaky affiliate links while promoting various suppliers (such as web hosting providers etc). Not only does he make money from the sale of the book, but the book itself earns ongoing revenue for him from affiliate commissions!

It’s certainly a disappointing aspect of the book from a reader’s perspective, because you’re never really sure if he’s recommending a product he believes in, or because the merchant he recommends is offering the highest affiliate payout. It’s all very compromising.

In spite of the negatives, and starting next week, I’m going to try the system out and see if I can make it work. I’ve already applied for a cool affiliate program paying a healthy $35 per lead – and the merchant doesn’t have an AdWords campaign.

It all looks perfect!

I’m just waiting on approval from the merchant, and hopefully I’ll be good to go in the next day or two.

It should be an interesting experiment, because it brings together internet marketing systems like AdWords and affiliate marketing. Along the way I’ll take you step by step through the process of setting up a Google AdWords campaign.

Even if you’ve got one going already, hopefully I can show you some tips that will save you some money and give you a better performing campaign. I’ll also share a Google AdWords secret with you that can really make your campaign shine!

Will I make some money, or will I loose my shirt?

Stay tuned…