TruthAboutAbs Super-Affiliate Lesson #2 (advanced ad writing and domain strategies)
Make sure to read this all the way through as I cover 3 or 4 specific strategies throughout that are making a killing!
All Clicks are NOT Created Equal -- The Reason Why Some Affiliates Give Up After Not Making Any Sales, and Other Affiliates are Raking it in, Tripling Their Money Every Week
Warning: this page talks about google adwords strategies and other PPC strategies. If you're not aware of the current issues with trying to advertise weight loss sites on google adwords, make sure to read the yellow highlight text labeled "update" on this page to see how to possibly get around the "google slap" and other domain banning issues that have happened due to the evil nature of google.
As you can see in that update at the above link, you'll ONLY be able to get adwords traffic if you're using your own hosted domain and landing page, and NOT directly through a clickbank hoplink.
Advanced PPC tips:
I get an interesting perspective on how to profit from Google Adwords being both an affiliate and a vendor. As time goes on and I keep doing in-depth testing of different ad wordings, keyword groups, click pricing, etc, I've noticed some very interesting trends.
You see, not only do I get to sit here and test exactly which of my own ads are making sales for me, and which are duds, but I also get to search around and view the types of ads that my affiliates are running for me, and then compare that on the back-end and see who is cleaning up, and who isn't making any sales. All of this leads to some interesting discoveries.
Most affiliates already understand that different keword groups will convert at different rates. However, most affiliates completely ignore the fact that the way your ad is worded is as important, if not MORE important to your conversions than keyword groupings.
I've done extensive testing on this, and this is actually a DRASTIC factor in whether you will break even, lose money, or double or triple your money in advertising for affiliate programs. I've split tested certain wordings of ads in the exact same keyword groups and found that ad wordings can completely change if your ad is profitable or a loser.
Most people never think of this factor... they just want to get the click and get it to the sales letter. This explains why some affiliates won't see any sales bidding on the exact same keywords as another affiliate who is raking in the sales!
Why Ad Wording is so Important
To explain why the wording of your ad is so important to whether you'll make any money as an affiliate, let's look at the psychology of the web surfer who is clicking on your ad...
First, let's look at a generic type of ad for the Truth about Abs product.
How to Get Six Pack Abs
The Top Guide on Getting a 6-Pack.
Get Flat Abs in Weeks from Now.
www.TruthAboutAbs.com
Ok, here's the main problem with this ad, and why it won't result in as many sales as a more strategically worded ad...
For one, it looks too much like an ad, and many surfers will click on it out of curiosity, but are already on the defensive of being "sold" something. Another problem is that it simply looks exactly like what everybody else is saying.
Now let's look at a type of ad wording that will get a much higher response rate, possibly even tripling the amount of sales you get from it.
Unique 6-Pack Abs Secret
I struggled for years with a fat
belly, until I found this 1 secret.
www.TruthAboutAbs.com
So why in the world does this type of ad wording result in me tripling my money, whereas the other ad hardly gets any sales at all even for the exact same keywords?
The reason is that this type of ad wording has piqued the readers curiosity by mentioning something about 1 specific secret. Do you see what this is going to do when they click-through?
They're going to hit the sales letter and be searching the page for this one specific secret that the ad mentioned, so they have a much higher chance of actually getting into reading the sales letter , and letting the sales letter do it's work in converting them to a sale!
If they weren't looking for this one specific secret, but just happened to click on a typical ad, they'll get to the sales letter and might say "oh, they're just trying to sell something here...I'm not going to read this", and then click back.
Another thing to take note of as to why this 2nd type of ad wording converts higher than the first... It doesn't look as much like an ad! It simply looks like someone is just telling you about some secret they stumbled onto... but it sure doesn't look like they're trying to sell you something. Notice how it's just one sentence using small letters instead of capitalizing the first letter of every word. Yep, once again...this sort of goes against what some of the "gurus" say, but I've found it to work better for me, since it looks less like an ad.
There are lots of other ways to use this wording strategy in the same basic way... Instead of saying that I discovered this "one secret", you could also say that you found a specific "method", "strategy", "trick", "technique", etc.
Here's another example of a wording that will pique the readers curiosity to search the sales letter for one specific technique, making them more likely to actually read the sales letter instead of clicking back...
A Secret to Lose My Belly
I used to have a fat belly
until I found this unique trick.
www.TruthAboutAbs.com
One More Strategy for How I Make Super-Profitable Content-Only Ads
I mentioned in the Affiliate Lesson #1 that some of my most profitable ads for the Truth about Abs are on the content network in google adwords (google runs the ads on adsense sites) or other PPC opportunities that run ads on other websites as opposed to search-based ads.
Well, here's a trick I use to get a lot more clicks from my content ads (and cheap clicks at that).
Set up your content ads for the Truth about Abs as a separate campaign , and you'll switch OFF the search network and ONLY run the ads on the content network with this campaign (you can still run the search based ads in a separate campaign, but don't mix them).
A couple other important settings to maximize your traffic with content ads:
1. Maximize budget if you find something that works ... if the campaign has proven to be consistently profitable for you, don't hold back... maximize that budget! If you can consistently double your money, why only spend $10/day on the campaign? Set it high to maximize it and then keep an eye on it to make sure you're still profiting after a week or so. What you'll find is that google may easily max out your $10/day setting, but if you set it at $100/day, it may max out at $40 or $50/day in traffic depending on your click through rate and the amount of impressions google finds to place your ads.
2. Expand beyond just US traffic. I know this goes against what some gurus say to focus only on the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, but I get tons of sales from tiny countries that I would have never thought to choose if I didn't test a LOT of countries... and most international traffic is a LOT cheaper than US traffic. As a matter of fact, I've had sales in over 150 countries for my product. The key is to group your countries in separate campaigns and bid different prices for each grouping of countries. This can get a bit complicated, so if you want to keep it simple, here are the highest converting countries that you can focus solely on:
US, UK, CA, AU, IE, NZ, and ZA.
Click prices will be highest in these 7 countries. The rest of the european countries can have traffic that is about 20-30% cheaper. Some middle eastern countries still convert fairly well (such as Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Brunei, UAE, and Bahrain), and this traffic might be about 1/3 to 1/2 the price of the highest priced countries.
The cheapest traffic will be in countries such as India, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Central American countries, and South American countries. Traffic in these countries can be about 1/10th the price of the highest priced countries, but conversions will also be correspondingly lower, sometimes about 1/10th of the conversion rate as well.
Word of warning: there is a small list of countries that are blacklisted by clickbank and they can't accept orders, so don't waste any money trying to advertise in these countries.
Clickbank blacklisted countries (orders not accepted from these)
3. set your campaign to show ads in "accelerated" rate instead of standard
After those tweaks to your content campaign, then you'll write your ads in a curiosity-invoking way as described above.
Now here's what was interesting to me and seems to be helping to get a lot more coverage and clicks for these content-only ads. You're going to add your keywords in a totally different way than you'd add in your keywords in a search campaign.
Instead of the typical method you'd use in a search campaign where you're only adding closely relevant keywords, with this content campaign, you're going to add in a crapload of fitness related keywords, and they don't even have to be relevant to each other... you just want LOTS of them split into ad groups of maybe 10 to 50 keywords each.
Initially, I was under the assumption that your keywords had nothing to do with your content ads and were only used in search listings. However, according to google itself, the algorithm for deciding which adsense pages to run your ads on takes into account the landing page content, the wording of your ad, as well as your list of keywords that you input to come up with a "keyword theme" for what sites to place your ads on.
So here's what I do to basically "help" google find more sites to run my ads on...
I use google's keyword tool again, by clicking on the "keyword" tab, and then going to the keyword tool. Then, I'll type in a couple keywords that are quite different from each other, such as
belly fat
fat loss diet
Then, I'll make sure the "synonyms" box is checked and I'll let google spit out a couple hundred varations of all of the above keywords. Then you want to quickly scroll through and choose about 50 keywords for your adgroup. Supposedly google's algorithm only uses 50 keywords to calculate your ad positions for content ads, so it doesn't seem worthwhile to add much more than 50 keywords per ad group.
Then you make a new ad group and repeat the process of keyword selection using 1 or 2 different "base keywords" to come up with 50 more keywords to build your next "keyword theme". Here are some keyword ideas to build your different ad groups around different keyword themes:
bodybuilding
weight lifting
weight loss
fat loss
lose weight
stomach exercises
diet tips
dieting
diets (and all types of diets - atkins, zone, grapefruit, etc, etc)
abdominal workouts
cardio exercise
fitness
health
fitness gyms
health clubs
calories
etc, etc
Remember, exact relevancy to your ad wordings isn't a factor here since these are content-only ads, so you're not actually "bidding" on these keywords, but google is just using them to help find more websites to run your ads on. So, if you find an effective ad wording, you can basically use the same wording for every ad group in your content campaign. This is obviously different from the way you'd set up your ads in a search campaign where each ad group will have differently worded ads based on the main keywords.
For your content ads, I've seen my affiliates doing well with max bids set anywhere from 0.09-0.16 per click for the major english speaking countries (the 7 highest converting countries I listed higher on this page). Keep in mind that traffic in the lowest converting countries (where you still might be able to make them profitable) can be as cheap as 1-3 cents/click.
What you can do is start your ads running at 15 or so cents a click, and then after you're getting a good volume, try to start reducing your max bid by a penny at a time and see if your clicks start to dry up. Sometimes the ads can keep running for good volume of sales and traffic, and you'll find a point where you can profit.
Yet Another Big Secret to Separate Yourself from the Amateur Affiliates (using Domain Strategies)
2010/2011 Update: This section was previously about using masked/forwarded domains, but this method no longer works in adwords, so I have deleted this section of the affiliate lessons.
However, we'll talk in a few more days about some of the POWERFUL ways to use forwarded domains for some cool stuff such as offline affiliate marketing, so be on the lookout for that!
Alright, now that I've revealed a couple of these killer secrets for how to write ads that convert and get LOTS of clicks to those ads for cheap, go ahead and take action on it now while it's fresh in your mind. Good luck!
I'll be back with several more lessons in the coming weeks covering the topics below:
additional PPC (pay per click) advertising strategies
Article marketing as an affiliate
SEO (search engine optimization)
Secrets for running affiliate links through separate domains
Leveraging your list with email marketing strategies
The secret of super high conversions with "review pages"
The power of clickbank tracking id's
Blogging, Craigslist, Myspace, Squidoo, Hubpages, Youtube, etc.
Potential off-line affiliate marketing opportunities
I'll be in touch soon. Also, be sure to check out the affiliate email content page for further ideas if you have an email list.
Also, the biggest thing going for some of my BEST TruthAboutAbs affiliates is using some of my most popular article pages as landing pages (through a redirected hoplink) from their blogs or email newsletters.
To our success,
Mike Geary
Founder - TruthAboutAbs.com
back to the Truth about Abs weight loss and fitness affiliate program details page