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General Question - PPC, Conversions, When to Quit

ayushpant

New Member
affiliate
Hey there,

I entered into affiliate marketing about a month back. So far, I am highly motivated and anxious at the same time to see how it works for myself.

I have designed and launched 2 websites so far in a month's time. One of them has made 3 sales giving me about $130 commissions with $40 dollars of advertising. The ROI of that website is great. However, keywords are really competitive. Like $1-2 per click. So far, so good.

Now, I have general question about both the sites. So here we go:

Website 1

I am very nervous in terms of promoting this website. I have put the campaign of that website on hold as I personally think that this is like a gamble. What if I was plain lucky that out of 30-40 clicks people made on my ads (which I think were really good). This is the website I made sales from.

My question is that should I go ahead and promote this website. I was thinking of selling this website actually. I am sure if someone values it, I can get $700-1200 for this website which I can use to promote my second website if it does well.

Website 2

This also has some really good potential and advertising is relatively less expensive. 20 cents give me 1-3 or 4-6 position in this website. I have launched Google Adwords campaign for this website. About $15 a day. I am getting lot of clicks. Not sure, when it'd generate a sale.

For this website, I am pretty sure that I do have a relevant website that takes users appropriately to a great merchant's landing page. However, 1 day of advertising and no sales makes me a bit nervous. Nonetheless, I had planned that if 2% of those clicks generate sales, my ROI would be 200%. So, I am waiting to see if that happens.

The question for this website is, how long should I wait to see if the sale happens. I mean, how much time should you wait to see your campaign giving you results.

P.S - My previous website gave me those 3 sales in about 2 weeks. I personally think that it shouldn't take this long.

I am a bit nervous right now. Comments are highly appreciated.
 
I would say don't use only PPC, learn to promote by SEO, it's not hard and you can do it yourself, of course many times it's take some time to get real traffic from organic result, but it could get more traffic for your time spending on SEO and not for your money. This is my opinion I'm sure you will get more opinions here. I don't do PPC because I'm not good at it.
 
Actually I think time is the wrong thing to look at. It's the number of clicks combined with the conversion rate that tells the story. How fast you get to profitablilty or knowing if a campaign will work depends on how many clicks PLUS how good the conversions are.

"P.S - My previous website gave me those 3 sales in about 2 weeks. I personally think that it shouldn't take this long."

How many clicks was that?

Most people say you need to give a campaign anywhere from 100 - 500 clicks before you can know for sure. Depending on the keywords, competition, your ad, landing page and your bid position you could get 500 clicks in a day or a month. And depending on how good you are and how well the merchant converts you could make 10 sales or 0 sales. That's why time is not as important as a wide variety of other factors.

Really too many variables to give you a very good answer. That's why testing is so important and you can only test with PPC if you have the money to work with.

I recently blogged and posted about an article that would help you out on this. Need to find it later. Don't remember where it is.
 
What if I was plain lucky that out of 30-40 clicks people made on my ads (which I think were really good). This is the website I made sales from.

With that reasoning how could one ever measure a campaigns effectiveness?

If a campaign is successful in its infancy I would not think it wise to shut it down simply to "quit while you're ahead". I understand the gambling analogy to an extent but you can't literally treat it like a black jack table.

A new restaurant has to leave the lights on even if nobody is dining. That's the only way they will ever attract diners. And they certainly wouldn't close the doors after the first few customers and say "what if we just got lucky?"

Listen to Linda. Testing is vital. If right now money is so tight that ppc is stressing you out then take DiDi's advice and find ways to get free traffic.

You are in good company here.

Just take a deep breath, try and relax. I'm sure you're going to do fine.
 
Just read another great blog by Amit today that tells you what you need to hear - from a super affiliate that makes a very good living on PPC.
"But with all the excitement of beginning a new campaign there are a lot of pitfalls to be aware of, especially if you’re new at the game of affiliate marketing:

1) Not giving a campaign a chance: A lot of affiliates, especially newbies will pause a campaign WAY too early, based on way too little data. If you get 100 clicks and no sales, it’s not enough information to make a decision, for all you know you may get 5 sales on the next 100 clicks. It happens all the time! I would recommend you wait for until at least 500-1000 clicks before you make a decision to pause the campaign."

Read the rest, lots more wisdom here:
Super Affiliate Mindset » Blog Archive » Patience is REALLY a Virtue for a Super Affiliate
Source: Super Affiliate Mindset »
 
I also agree that you need to learn seo. dont buy into the "content is king" theory, if it were true, bizrate.com would not rank for anything.

Get your onpage right and start building quality links from related sites or pages. Try to get links from pages with one or more of your keywords in the title and content of the page. This is why articles work soooo well. you control the title and content.

You can make a killing with adsense if you use the right keywords. put some thought into it befor you run a keyword, look for keywords that hint that someone is looking to buy.

example: web design is general, may not be looking for a designer, but information about web design, I would bid on professional web designer. This tells you they are looking for a pro, not general information.

next, never use overture for keyword selection. here is a link to a free tool. the results are daily searches for any phrase. Free Keyword Suggestion Tool from Wordtracker


Hope this helps
 
If you want to do PPC to test your market or conversion rates, be ready to spend money. A lot of marketers think PPC is really as easy as 123, that you can just set it up and leave for 2 months. That's not true at all. Lots of tweakings and split testings needs to be done. But do not give up so fast yet. Learning is the key. One thing also is to make sure that you study the affiliate links where you send your visitors to. This is very important, as this is really the key to a positive conversion. Keep on experimenting and you will hit a jackpot one day. When you hit that jackpot on PPC, next stop would be to build a site for SEO. Now you are running and mastering both PPC and SEO at the same time.

Best of luck.

Bernz
 
First, I wouldn't recommend anyone just one month into affiliate marketing use PPC at all. PPC has a tendency to go haywire real quick and cost you a bundle in no time flat.

Second, if you are going to use PPC I highly recommend reading Adwords Miracle first. I am not a Chris McNeeney fan boy but this book on using adwords is the absolute best guide for a beginner in PPC.

And as Linda said there are a lot of variables that go into deciding if a PPC campaign is successful. Usually you analyze your ROI after 100 to 200 clicks to determine if you need to continue promoting a product.

One last bit of advice for PPC...always split test your ads. Without split testing you are not properly tweaking your campaigns to their maximum potential.
 
Hi Ayush,

Without overlaping the previous posts, you you set your daily PPC budget to few dollars a day, depending how much you are "ready" to loose at the beginning.

I would suggest you to build a long term strategy without to cost your shirt. You can write and distribute articles about your business or affiliate. Or you can have a blog or you can post your website to high traffic directories (PR3 to PR10). You will not get instant results but you will build long term presence along with inbound links to your site.

Good luck.
 
Without overlaping the previous posts, you you set your daily PPC budget to few dollars a day, depending how much you are "ready" to loose at the beginning.

I would suggest you to build a long term strategy without to cost your shirt.

Exactly...you can start low, test-run, trial and error, practice patience...once you see a product is starting to convert, you're making some $ and can up your budget a bit -- slowly you can build your empire! ;)

I'm still in the learning stages of PPC, but slowly am getting a better handle on it and have on product that has now converted more sales in this month than all my others combined, so I know the PPC is making a huge difference. Based on that, I upped my budget a bit and will continue this way until I can work up to some of those more costly (but higher paying commission) PPC ads -- the larger picture is becoming more and more clear by the day -- and I'm becoming more and more excited about it!

Never, ever quit!!!
 
Well personally, I would analyze your financial situation. Do you have the out of pocket expense to venture in your first website? As you stated you have only been in the affiliate market for about a month...The thing is that even though PPC can produce effective streams of income it does depend on a wide variety of variables.
The most important being your keyword selection. Yes the type of product is also important but keywords and your landing pages are extremely valuable..I have had minimal luck with PPC because i am still trying to understand them better so i do not pay the higher rates of PPC...I will say though that there was one site that i had promoted one time that because of a couple of misspelt words (by joe surfer) it had landed me a killing off of it...

I have found a way to research popular niches along with misspelt words and have been having more of a success in that then flat out using the keywords that are in heavy competition...that is just one way you may want to try if you are gung ho on using PPC marketing...
 
Seo??

I've seen the term 'seo' used here a couple times...i'm sure there's something on it in the forum, which I will now go search for, but if anyone want's to enlighten me i'd appreciate it! Thanks
Ron
 
Seo ron....

I've seen the term 'seo' used here a couple times...i'm sure there's something on it in the forum, which I will now go search for, but if anyone want's to enlighten me i'd appreciate it! Thanks
Ron

Ron,

what SEO is just an abrieviation called Search Engine Optimization. Basically all that it means is the relative terms about how your webpages are searched through the different search engine spiders. A lot of variables are used when calculating this figure. From keywords to meta tags that are all located on your page.

i hope that this sheds just a little bit of light on the question.

sincerely,

jason
 
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