How the Heavy Hitters do Adwords…Part II

Last time I talked about how to use Adwords Editor to make bulk changes across your Adwords campaign, making the task of managing a large Adwords account virtually effortless.

This time I want to talk about how to properly build & structure an Adwords campaign for long term profitability.

First, let me ask you a question…

Would you rather make $5k/month profit or $1k/month profit from an affiliate offer running on Adwords??

$5k/month right? That’s a no brainer.

Now wait, what if I told you that that the $5k/month profit would require 10/hr a week of logging into your Adwords account, constantly messing with your bids, constantly checking your stats to see if you have positive ROI.

On the other, the $1k/month profit would require ONLY 1/hr a month of your time.

Now which would you choose? Do you see where I’m getting at here?

There are a lot of affiliates with high maintenance $5k/month because they fail to see the HUGE opportunity cost that they’re incurring.

Frankly, I would much rather have 20 of the $1k campaigns that require 20 hours of my time a month (5 hours/week) VERSES 4 $5k/month campaigns that would require a FULL 40/hrs a week to maintain.

In each scenario you’re making the same amount of money but your per hour time value for managing 20 of the $1k/month campaigns is $1,000/hr, while your per hour time value for managing the 4 of the $5k/month campaigns is $125/hr.

What would you rather make an hour?

Actually, have you even calculated what you’re making an hour effectively as an affiliate?

Now imagine this : you have an Adwords account running affiliate offers that are cranking out MASSIVE profit month after month, after month, with no more than a few hour A MONTH of maintenance?

I don’t have to imagine it, it’s a reality for me!

How is that possible?

Here’s How…

#1 Don’t Put all Your Sales in One ‘Keyword Basket’

A lot of affiliates try to focus all their energy on a small group of closely related converting keywords they find for a particular niche. They constantly monitor these keywords, spending hours a day seeing what their ad position is, what their competitors are doing, what their ROI is, etc, etc.

If you’re doing that (you know who you are) you’ve got a BAD job!

My objective with ppc affilaite marketing has always been to create a online money machine that requires a very MINIMUM amount of monthly maintenance (i.e. no more than a few hours a month).

The best way to create your online money machine is to first bid on a large broad keywords list, if you’re not sure what broad keywords are check out this post, which explains my philosophy of keyword research.

As your campaign runs (with your large broad list of keywords) and you determine which keywords are producing the most sales and traffic, expand these keywords out with a tool such as Google Keywords Tool, this will add depth to your keyword list and most definitely increase your sales since you’re focused on finding long tails of keywords that already convert.

Ultimately you want your affiliate sales coming from a LONG TAIL of broad keywords and not just one small pocket of closely related profitable keywords. This will produce much more stable and long terms profits for you.

What do I mean by a long tail of broad keywords?

When I log into one of my top Adwords campaigns I have literally HUNDREDS of adgroups, each targeting uniquely different keywords, that consistently produce sales and profits.

In other words, my sales are not dependent on the performance of 2 or 3 high traffic keywords, but rather come from a long tail of broad keywords. Almost all of these keywords only produce a small to medium amount of traffic, but trust me, it all ADDS UP!

#2 Don’t Operate on Slim Margins

Often times I hear other affiliates tell me that’s I’m crazy for shotting for high ROI, that I should be concerned with maximizing my profit and not worry about ROI.

If your goal is to bid your keywords to a position where you’re maximizing your profit you’re making a serious mistake.

Think about it, you could have an affiliate campaign generating 10% margins and be making a HUGE amount of money due to the shear volume of traffic you’re buying. But guess what, if you’re operating on thin margins like that your profits can disappear with a small market down turn.

The fact is with a small profit margin you’re going to have to constantly monitor your campaign, and deal with a ton of stress and anxiety.

Instead of maximizing profit, your goal should be to maximizes your per hour time value. That is your profit divided by the number of hours of monthly campaign maintenance required.

For my experience to maximize per hour time value (in most cases) you need to shoot for 100% ROI, that is for every $1 you spend on Adwords you should get $2 back.

That should be your goal.  And that means bidding low even if it means sacrificing net profit. So NO it doesn’t matter if you’ll only make $1k/month from your campaign instead of $5k/month.

Come on, do you want to live the super affiliate lifestyle or create another job for yourself?

Not only do I live a lifestyle most people can only dream of, my income continues to explode because I DON’T have to constantly monitor and manage my existing campaigns, which frees up my time to work on bigger & more exciting projects!

Next time I going to talk about how to setup your website, and setup systems to continually improve your website to assure long term profitability and immunity from infamous Google Slaps.

So stay tuned!