Internet Marketing Blog

You can make money using adwords and cj. You have to look at several factors before choosing which program to promote. Linda from 5 star affiliate programs gave some excellent advice.

1) $100 commission? The higher the retail cost TYPICALLY the longer the sales cycle. So especially if it was a computer or something people can shop and compare for a long time. If that’s the case and they have nice long cookies you could still make some sales.

2) Did you check for leaks? Are there big 800 phone numbers on the site or Adsense or other leaks?

3) Some merchants just have crappy conversions

4) If it’s a super lucrative offer - it could be targeted by parasites

5) Really could be your keywords as others have mentioned. There are buy keywords and there are also many times word you need to be sure to exclude.

6) Does the merchant batch process sales? If so you could have made some they just have not been loaded yet.

Lots of other options but those are some things to consider…

Visit the forums that discuss adwords and read about creating quality landing pages and pre-selling. Also learn about writing good ad copy. Just pointing to the affiliates page has never worked for me.

Here are some excellent threads on adwords:

My Case Study in Mortgage Refinancing using Adwords and LendingTree:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=351210

How to build a quality landing page:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=360032

32 Useful AdWords Tips for Intermediate to Experienced Users:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=328164

For Commission junction, the very first thing I do when screening potential merchants is look at their three month earnings and if they have 5 green bars.

Look at the first one rfp.org They have a huge $952 3 month EPC, but they are only 1 green bar for network earnings. My interpretation of that is that probably one affiliate is kicking butt there, but the average affiliate is having a hard time converting it.

Look at lendingtree.com They have a large $343 3 month EPC, and they have 5 gree bars for network earnings. That tells me that it converts well and many affiliates are doing well with it also.

I then look at some of the things that Linda from 5 star mentioned, like “leaks”. I also consider what they are selling and my personal learning curve and available syndicated and plr content I can use to build a site that would be “quality” to lower my adwords ppc cost.

For example, I know very little about insurance, but do have some experience in mortgage lending. So I would pick lendingtree over insurance.com

Finally, I look at the individual links. I like content links and advanced links.

Advanced links are usually interactive and have drop down boxes. They are easy to integrate and make you site look more like the source than a landing page. Content links provide quality information so you don’t have to look for articles or write anything up yourself.

Hope that helps some of you.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 2:25 am and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Google Adwords, Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.