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I’ve recently taken on a one-on-one coaching student. He’s doing very well, he has 2 profitable campaigns right off the bat!

There’s something he said that really struck me : One of the reasons that he wanted to work with me on a one on one basis was to avoid getting confused.

What did he mean by that?

Think about all the enormous amount of information about ppc affiliate marketing out there, let alone affiliate marketing in general.

Just to list a few courses/membership sites : adwordmentor.com, googlecash.com, payperclickformula.com, wealthyaffiliate.com, ppc-coach.com, ppcclassroom.com, quityourdayjob.com, etc, etc, etc!?! These are just a few I remember off the top of my head.

All of the above courses (more or less) teach different strategies for doing ppc affiliate marketing. So which one do you follow?

On a related note, I was sharing some of my ppc strategies with Anik Singal and he told me flat out that me and Jeremy Palmer have totally different strategies for doing ppc affiliate marketing. Both Jeremy and I are both very successful affiliates, so who do you follow?

Here’s the deal…

There’s more than one way to slice and dice an onion and there’s also more than one way to do ppc affiliate marketing successfully. The worst thing you can do is buy 5 different courses and try to follow all of them - especially if they have conflicting advice - i.e. bid your add to the top, no keep your bid prices low!?! That’s where confusion kicks in.

Overloading yourself with information and getting confused will paralyze you and your business. Follow ONE system and try your best to make it work before you jump to another system for doing ppc.

Once you find a system that works for you, run with it. In time you’ll develop your own system for doing ppc. In my opinion that’s the mark of a true super affiliate, someone who has reached a level of expertise that they are coming up with their own techniques and strategies.

Here’s a quick thought for you :

PPC affiliate marketing is an much art as it is a science .

I talk a lot about :

1. Optimizing your bids
2. Split testing ads
3. Split testing your landing page
4. Setting up your campaign properly
5. And tracking your metrics

This is the scientific, or analytical, aspect of affiliate marketing. And as a former scientist I, no doubt, really like this aspect of the business.

Now here’s what I’ve realized : you can be a quiz at the analytical left brain aspects of this business and still struggle to make it work!

Why?

Because there’s a right brain creative aspect of ppc affiliate marketing that’s just as important as the analytical one.

So what’s the creative right brain element to ppc affiliate marketing?

1. Understanding the USP (unique selling proposition) of the offer you’re promoting
2. Understanding what the emotional hot buttons are in your niche
3. Understanding consumer buying patterns in your niche
4. Writing your copy so it speaks the language of your demographic, whether they’re new moms, single male yuppies, or whatever. Do you even know what your target demographic is?
5. Overall, understanding the psychology of your niche and getting into the frame of mind of the customer

By really doing your homework before hand (5 point above) you’ll be able to write really effective Google ad copy (that will get a high CTR) and landing page copy (that will get a high conversion rate), and even do much more effective keyword research. Just doing this will often spell the difference between success and failure.

Have YOU been doing your homework before you promote a new affiliate offer, or are you like most affiliates who just jump in a niche and throw up a campaign as fast as they can hoping it will convert?

Have you ever wondered why only 2% of affiliates completely clean up, bring in 95% of the revenues and profits, while everyone else is fighting for table scrapes?

In this special report I answer this question.

Click Here to Download The Special Report: “Why 2% of Affiliates Rake in 95% of the Profits…”

This is the first report of a 3 part series which will cover :

1. Your Thinking (this first report)
2. Time Management (second report)
3. Building a Team/Outsourcing (third report)

Everything I share in these reports is based on my personal experience and NOT theory. It’s what ACTUALLY worked for me.

The information in these 3 reports will change your business and your life if you take IMMEDIATE action and apply what you learn.

If you’ve been following Part I & Part II at this point you should have :

1. A Keyword list broken into different categories or themes
2. 2 Ads (just the body copy) for each category of keywords
3. Your Google Conversion Tracking code on the thank you page of the affiliate offer

The next step is to use EfficientPPC to quickly setup your campaign.

Before I talk about the how, I want to talk about the why - which is just as important.

As I mentioned before, here how your campaign structure will look like once we’re done building your campaign with EfficientPPC :

1. One Unique Keyword per Adgroup - broad, phrase, and exact match types of one keyword
2. One Campaign per Keyword Category - with a different landing page for each category
3. 2 Ads per Adgroup - with the keyword in the headline

So why do I structure my campaigns this way? There’s a bunch of reasons :

1. Adwords highly rewards you for relevancy, and by structuring your campaign to have one keyoword PER adgroup and the keyword in the headline, you’re super relevant right off the bat. Just by structuring your campaign this way your quality score will immediately go up vs the alternative of throwing 20-50 keywords per adgroup.
2. By having a seperate landing page for each keyword category you are, again, giving your quality score a big boost. Google’s algo checks to see how relevant your keywords are to the theme of the content on your landing page.
3. Building a seperate campaign for each keyword category allows you to quickly glance at your campaign stats and immediately see which keyword categories are producing the most sales and conversions - so you know where to focus your efforts. This is the 20/80 principle in action. Don’t ignore this step, it’s VERY important.
4. 2 Ads per Adgroup - This will set you up so you can immediately start split testing your ads for maximum CTR. Once you start finding winner, replace the losing ads with another ad and continue to test. NEVER stop testing, this is the KEY to long term success!

BUILDING YOUR CAMPAIGN WITH EFFICIENT PPC

We’re going to use dog training for this example.

The first step is to setup a keyword token list for each keyword category, be sure to appropriately label each list :

As you make and save each keyword list (one for each category) you should see them appear on the sidebar :

Just as a simple example I’ve setup two keyword categories for our example : Dog - General and House Training

The second step is to setup your adgroup structure and bid prices :

Don’t worry about the destination url on this part, that’s only if your want to specify a unique destination url for each keyword.

Also, notice how I set the broad match bid 33% lower than the phrase and exact match bid. I always set my broad match bid 25%-33% lower, since it usually doesn’t convert as well as phrase or exact match.

Third step is to write your ads :

To put your keyword in the headline use : {Result: Default Headline} where ‘Default Headline’ is the headline to use if your keyword is above 25 characters. The capital R in Result will capitalize the first letter of each word in your headline.

I only wrote one ad for this example, be sure to ALWAYS write two!

Next Step is to duplicate this first campaign and just change the name and the keyword list to create the campaign for the second keyword segment, House Training.

The next step is to edit the ads for your second campaign so they correspond to the two unique body copies you made for the second keyword segment (remember? I talked about writing 2 unique body copies for each keyword segment).

The last step is to create your campaign and upload it into Adwords editor!

Yes, it’s REALLY that easy.

Few last points:

1. Set your campaign daily budget to something within your risk tolerance, which could be anywhere between $25-$200. I set my daily budget at $200 when I first launch a campaign. After I let it run a day and am confident that 1) it converts and 2) I won’t get a flood of targeted traffic, I increase the daily budget to $1000 or higher.
2. Turn off the content network, if you want to test the content network make a duplicate campaign using EfficientPPC and add -Content to the campaign name. Set this campaign for content network traffic only. I also recommend lowering the bid on the content campaign by at least 25%.
3. Countries : For offers that work worldwide DO NOT turn on all countries. Outside of the US I would add the following countries ONLY : Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia.

By properly setting up your Adwords campaign, you’ve laid a SOLID foundation - which in my opinion is the MOST IMPORTANT PART. You’ve now dramatically increased your chances of success, now all you have to do if find an affiliate offer that consistently converts and optimize it for profitability.

Okay, last time we talked a lot about keywords, that is, how to clean up your list and segment it.

This time I’m going to walk you through how to write your ads, and setup conversion tracking. In the last post I’ll show you how to put it all together and build a killer Adwords campaign with EfficientPPC.

WRITING YOUR ADS

First I want to give you some basic quick and dirty guidelines for writing an effective ad :

1. Put the keywords in the ad at least once, I almost always put it in the headline. This is the biggest psychological trigger you can put in your ad, when people see exactly what they typed in Google in your ad, they immediately see it as highly relevant.
2. Include the BIGGEST benefit of your offer in the ad. Example : Discover 5 Simple Steps to Stop Dog Biting!
3. Have a strong call to action. Examples : Start Now! Begin Here! Start Your Search Here! Etc…

For a full list of tips and tricks check out Googlelady’s 31 Killer Adwords Ads Tips.

Let’s get down to business…

Now remember how I talked about breaking your keywords into different categories based on theme?

Once you’ve done that it’s time to write 2 ads for each keyword.

It’s not as bad as it sounds! LOL

Here’s how to do it:

1. Write 2 unique body copies (description line 1 & 2) for each keyword category
2. Using EfficientPPC we will dynamically insert the keyword in the headline, making 2 ads for each keywords

Ultimately, here’s how your affiliate campaign structure will look like : a different Adwords campaign for each keyword category, one keywords per adgroups with 2 ads per keyword.
CONVERSION TRACKING

Do NOT launch a campaign unless you’re tracking which keywords are producing sales for you. Here’s the bottom line, if you’re biding on 1000 keywords, you’re going to find only a tiny fraction of those keywords will produce consistent sales for you.

You probably find around 20 keywords out of the 1000 produce consistent sales over the course of a month. If you don’t have conversion tracking in place, you’re dead in the water. How will you know which 20 keywords are producing consistent sales?

A hard reality of affiliate marketing is that most successful campaigns will not be profitable right off the bat, you’ll likely lose money for a while (weeks!) before you’re in the black. Tracking which keywords convert is what’s going to allow you to cut out the non performing keywords and achieve profitability.

So DON’T be stupid, make sure to have tracking in place, whether it’s Google Conversion Tracking, Xtreme Conversions, or another tracking tool that will tell you which keywords are converting to sales.

Getting your code on the thank you page…

I highly recommend Google Conversion Tracking over anything else.

Why?

Simple, first off the conversion data is seamlessly integrated into your Google Account. Plus you can download all the data into Adwords Editor which makes optimizing your campaigns REALLY easy.

There’s only one problem : you’ve got to convince your affiliate manager to place the conversion code on the thank you page for you.

Most savvy affiliate managers either have a backend system in place where you can input your conversion id or add it to the end of your affiliate link (i.e. ?glid=XXXXXXXX) .

In most other cases you can just email your affiliate manager and they’ll put the code on the thank you page for you. For these cases, here’s a scripted email I recommend :

“Hi Joe,

First off, I’d like to say that I’m really impressed with (name of offer). In fact I’ve put a great deal of time and effort into setting up a large Adwords campaign for your offer.

My campaign is ready to upload in Adwords. However, before I do that I would greatly appreciate if you may add my Google Conversion tracking code (that I’ve pasted below) on your thank you page. This code will allow me to track my conversion to the keyword level so I can optimize my campaign and increase my sales and profits.

Here’s my Google Conversion Code :

(paste your code here)

I look forward to working with you.”

Here’s the trick : Don’t actually setup your campaign UNTIL you get a confirmation that your code is on the thank you page.

If they don’t reply, email them again in a couple days, if you still get no response, move on.

You want to start off by picking 5-10 offers that you want to promote and send the affiliate manager of each offer the above email.

Once you get a confirmation from the affiliate manager that your code is on the thank you page, start setting up your campaign for that offer.

Do NOT start setting up a campaign for an affiliate offer or launch an offer until you get confirmation that your Google Conversion code is in place.

Hard part’s done! The last step is setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC. Trust me, that’s easy. I’ll talk about it next time.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this lately and I wanted to clear up a lot of confusion that people have about setting up their Adwords campaigns.

Your first job is to build an effective keyword list, I’m not going to go into the details about that in this post. For starters, I highly recommend Google Keywords Tool, they just recently improved it, it will give you an amazing keyword list and best of all it’s free!

Also check out this post I did about keyword research.

FILTERING OUT LONG TAIL KEYWORD

If you do keyword research like I do, you’ll probably end up with anywhere from several thousand to ten of thousands of keywords for your niche.

Now I know a lot of you will go out and immediately try to upload ALL those keywords into your Adwords account.

That’s a BAD idea.

Here’s why it’s a bad idea :

1. If you’re a newbie ppc marketer you’re going to hit your account (50k keywords) and/or campaign (10k keywords) limits REALLY fast. And you’d better have some substantial history and adspend on Google before you try to get those limits removed.
2. The first 2 weeks of launching a new campaign is when Google pretty much determines your campaign quality score. If you have a TON of low search volume long tail keywords in your new campaign right off the bat then Google will penalize you with a lower campaign quality score (these low volume search terms put a load on their system, that’s why they penalize you).

When you first launch a campaign on Google you only want to bid on mid to high volume keywords FIRST. Once you’ve build your campaign history and quality score up over a period of 2 weeks then you can add in all the long tail keywords.

Here’s what also cool about this approach : it allows you to test & optimize your campaign on a small scale before you ramp it up with 1000s of keywords. In the next post I’ll show you exactly how to do this.

Now you may be thinking : “Amit, this sounds great, but how do I filter out all the high to med volume keywords from my huge freakin’ keywords list?”

Simple, use Ad Sage, it’s a nifty little toolbar addon to Excel that gives you the search volume of each keyword on your keyword list (on MSN search) in the past 6 month. For your initial campaign launch, bid on only the keywords that have had at least 1 search in the last 6 months.

In the next section we’re going to segment that keyword list…

SEGMENTING YOUR KEYWORDS

In most markets it makes sense to break up your keyword list into seperate categories.

Let me give you an example: let’s say your promoting a site about bedroom accessories, you probably want to break up the keyword list into these categories like these :

lamps

sheets

pillows

furniture

brand name (if you can bid on that)

competitor brands

etc

Once your done breaking up your keyword list into categories, put each category of keywords into a separate Excel worksheet. Make a miscellaneous category for whatever keywords don’t fit into any other category.

Here’s an important key to getting a good conversion rate and high quality score:

Build a separate landing page for EACH and EVERY category that specifically targets that category. Don’t just dynamically insert variables onto the page, make sure each page has unique and highly relevant content. Your landing page about pillows, better be about pillows and nothing else!

If you’re direct linking, see if you can deep link each category to a relevant page about that category. If you’re bidding on specific product names, deep link each product to its sales page.

Next Time I’ll show you how to setup your ads, choose appropriate domain names, setup conversion tracking, and build your campaign using Efficient PPC.

Check out this shot of the MarketLeverage Team wearing SuperAffiliateMindset T-shirts :

WOW! This a great way to generate buzz for your company, especially considering market leverage has send out team shots wearing T-shirts of various blogs.

My wife and I had a chance to take a peak at the Boston Marathon today. The Marathon goes through Beacon St., 1 block down from where we live, at mile marker 23.

Funny thing, we actually had to cut across the Marathon runners to get to our acupuncture appointment!

Watching the Marathon runners got me thinking about one of the most important keys to affiliate success : persistence.

Running 26.4 miles is the epitome of persistence, training non stop for 6-12 months for a marathon is all about persistence.

My story of affiliate success is also all about persistence.

It took me about 10 months before I started making any significant money in affiliate marketing. I had officially started my affiliate business early in 2005, and it took me until Nov until I made any profit at all, and that month I ended up making around $3k profit.

In the first 6 months of building my business I didn’t make a SINGLE affiliate sale. Can you imagine how discouraging that is?

Once I learned about ppc affiliate marketing I got to work and launched a total of 15 failed campaigns, with nothing to show for it but one campaign that produced 3 sales a week before it fizzled out.

And you know what? I was a total newbie, I really didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t have a team helping me. I busted my butt setting up those 15 campaigns.

Some of you are crying because you launched 3 campaigns and they didn’t work out!

I’m here to tell you : SUCK IT UP!

No one is going to hand you success on a silver platter. If you want to make a 6 or 7-figure income in this business and have an incredible lifestyle, you’re going to have to pay the price. You’ve gotta toughen up, there’s no boss to tell you what to do anymore, YOU are responsible for YOUR success.

Biggest reasons most affiliates fail :

1. They quit too soon. How many affiliates would have kept on going after 9 months of no success? I can only imagine how many affiliates there are out there who have launched 10 campaigns, had no success, so they quit, when their 11th campaign would have been an enormous success.
2. They’re constantly jumping to something else. They try ppc for 2 months, doesn’t work, so they jump to SEO. They try SEO for 2 months, again doesn’t work out, so they jump to blogging. Etc, Etc, Etc… Ever met a leap frog affiliate like this? Here’s a tip : Try sticking to one thing long enough to actually get good at it!

Here’s a Secret…

It takes about 99% competence in ppc affiliate marketing before you hit it BIG. At 95% competence you’ll make a little bit of money but nothing significant. At 90% competence you’ll break even.

At anything less than 90% competence you’ll lose money.

Reaching the magical 99% mark takes some serious dedication and persistence.

How long will it take you?

It depends on how badly you want to succeed and how hard you’re willing to work.

So when you have a few failed campaigns, or even 15 failed campaigns as in my case, don’t tuck your tail in and hide under the bed like a scared little puppy. Stand UP and say “I’m going to WIN no matter WHAT IT TAKES!”

If you want to play ball with the heavy hitters you have to prove that you have what it takes first.

Now last time I talked a lot about health issues, there’s other stuff you have to deal with, here a major one :

#3 MOTIVATION

Before I quit my job I was super motivated. Just the thought of not working job kept me up long hours working on my affiliate marketing business.

I remember like yesterday, I would just toss and turn all night because I was SO EXCITED I could barely sleep. This was especially true when I was close to hitting the numbers I needed to quit my job.

Guess what happened after I quit my job?

That’s right, I lost a lot of my motivation. Furthermore I no longer had to answer to a boss and was now-for the first time in my life-TOTALLY responsible for my success or failure.

Scary!

What’s worse is that I had the crazy idea in my head that once I quit my job my affiliate business would skyrocket since I could dedicate full time to it.

Well, thanks to my drop in motivation + lack of self discipline my business stagnated.

Another BIG factor that killed my motivation was the fact that I was doing EVERYTHING in my business. I was the : marketer, content writer, web designer, project manager, copywriter , bookkeeper , etc, etc, etc..!

I’m not going to go into detail about how I overcame these obstacles (actually thinking of writing a free special report about these and other important issues).

Here’s a quick run through of what I had to get right to overcome the obstacles of low motivation, poor work ethic & productivity, and a business that stagnated as a result :

1. Setting Bigger Goals, and putting them right in front of me
2. Effective Time Management : daily to do list, cutting out time/productivity suckers, etc
3. Learning How to Outsource and Manage a Team

#4 SOCIAL ISOLATION

For all the downsides of working in the job world, there’ s one upside : you get lots of social interaction with co-workers.

Working from home can be a very lonely experience for a lot of people, especially if you’re single. If you’re married (like me) and have a family it’s less of an issue.

Honestly, because of my personality type and the fact my wife is at home a lot of the time, social isolation has never been an issue for me. However, I know it’s a BIG issue for a lot of full time affiliates working from home.

How are you dealing with this?

#5 HOME WORK ENVIRONMENT

If social isolation is not your problem, this may be your problem : you can’t get anything done at home because you have : a spouse, 3 kids, grand parents, and other family members putting constant demands on your time.

If you’re in this situation you need to start looking for an office space ASAP. If you can’t find at least 2 hours/day of quiet uninterrupted time to do your work, you’re killing your business.

Check out this news story :

“Google’s (GOOG) U.S. paid-click growth in March was as bad as in February — up only 2.7% — rounding out a violent deceleration in Q1…”

Looks like the party’s over.
Potential causes according to the article :

“1. Google’s ongoing efforts to improve both lead quality for advertisers and the user experience for searches.

2. A macroeconomic dampening of commercial queries by searchers”

I long suspected that this would eventually happened.

After getting hammer with Google Slap after Google Slap many advertiser have gotten so fed up that they have reduced or just stopped advertising on Adwords.

The fact is Google’s attempt to weed out “low quality” sites has really hurt a lot of legit advertisers (and affiliates).

Then if you try to actually call Google and ask them why your campaign was effectively shut down you get a generic canned response from someone who has no idea what they’re talking about.

And who defines what amounts to “low quality” and what “improves the user experience”?

Google does, that’s who!

Here’s the million dollar question:

Now that Google’s theory that cutting out a large numbers of “low quality” site out of their paid search results will improve the user experience and therefore encourage more people to click on paid ads (and bring them back to Google more often) has collapsed will Google continue to hammer us with more Google Slaps or cool of a little???

I suspect now that they see their bottom line falling, they’re going to ease off with the Google Slap mania.

Your thought?