Internet Marketing Blog

Lessons Learned

Make sure you optimize your landing page, ad content and keywords. Basically put your keyword in the title of the ad and the url.

Ad:

Refinancing Loans
Fill out a simple application
Fast Free quotes in minutes.
www.lendingarea.com/refinancing-loans.htm

Keyword:

Refinancing loans
home refinancing loans
etc….

Landing Page:

Meta title, description, keywords: i.e. <title> Home Refinancing Loans </title>
Heading 1 or 2: <h1> Home Refinancing Loans </h1>
Outbound links: <a href=”http://vendorswebsite.com” Refinancing Loans</a>
Inbound links from other pages on your site to the landing page: <a href=”http://lendingarea.com” Refinancing loans</a>
Bold text in body content/article: <b> Refinancing Loans</b>
Image alt text on your images “refinancing loans”

Then I analyze the clicks. Which keywords are getting the most clicks? Is there a corresponding day that I get more sales or did I waste money on those keywords? I hear there are some great tracking programs available that will tell you what site and keyword actually converted into a sale. but since my keyword lists are very short, and I use the content network, I don’t want to spend the money for one. I’m learning php now and will figure it out myself soon. Once I have a simple tracking program made, I might sell it for like $10, not the $150+ I see around the net (granted they seem much more powerful than what I’m thinking of doing).

I also looked at what days and the times that I got conversions. I ended up showing my ads only between 9:00am and 12:00am midnight california time. I also stopped showing ads on Saturday altogether. This saved me about $20 a day plus $100 each Saturday. I was getting clicks but no conversions in the wee hours of the morning and Saturdays were a complete bust as well. Strangely, Sundays do very well.???

GOLDEN TIP: Then I look at where the traffic is comming from using the adwords “Placement Performance” report. 

I excluded sites that were not targeted to my landing page like pogoaddiction.com and myspace.com. Why waste spending money on clicks from those sites. The odds of conversion are much lower, vs. a site like zillow.com.

Finally, I removed the adsense from my landing page this week. Results are promising, but not enough data yet.

REALITY CHECK: I setup my sister using almost identical ads, keywords, and landing page. The only major difference was that she did not get approved for lendintree (yet). So we went with lowermybills.com. In fact, I’m managing her adwords/adsense account directly and built the website.

Sadly, she is now $130 in the hole. The problem is that lowermybills.com is not converting anywhere near the rate of lendingtree. Also, they only pay $25/lead instead of $55. If they were paying $55, she’d be way ahead right now.

Good news is her epc is looking good on the cj network, so lendingtree may approve her later. We are going to build up her history so her numbers look good when she re-applies. We are going to try another affiliate this month, that I hope will convert better.

So yes, I’m doing extremely well, and no I could not duplicate the success with another affiliate for my sister. But I’m close and very confident I can get her account profitable this month.

I wish I had more time, right now I’m working on a contract that will take up most of my time until the end of august. It’s nice to know that at least this one campaign is running and making money all by itself now. All I’m doing now is updated my spreadsheets and posting the results in this forum.

July was a fabulous month, and I expect August to do even better with all the little tweaks I’ve done.

June Net Profit: $1514

July:

Adwords: $3250.17 (1,416 clicks)
Yahoo: $1025.63 (435 clicks)

Adsense: $199.13
Affiliate: $7360.00

July Net Profit: $3283.33

ROI: 3283.33/(3250.17+1025.63) = 77%

Conversions: 152/(1416+435) = 8% (about 1 in 12)

Well, I’m off now. Gonna walk the dogs, work on my tan by the pool, then go work on my contract.

I’ve also got a thread going for dc metro area members http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showt…98#post3919198. I’d like to get together this weekend for a social.

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.