Let's make some money: a full disclosure PPC campaign

[morphy]

Hey people 

Usually new people to this industry don't make money/don't succeed because they don't act, they keep reading forums and blogs and never do something.

I'll show you guys how I'm gonna start a PPC campaign with 50$, I guess most of you should be able to afford it. And this gonna be a full disclosure campaign, I mean all of my keywords, products, bids...(Just one thing, I'm not going to reveal my landing page/domain name but I'll tell you how I'm doing it too)

First I'm going to use Y! search marketing, simply cuz I just opened an account there and I still have the bonus in my acc(aff). So it's a good opportunity to test new campaigns and cut the costs, you should deposit something in your acc to activate it tho.

Then let's talk about what I'm gonna promote, I'm not a big fun of lead generation, cuz and just like Adsense they will can you if your traffic doesn't convert for them (except a few aff networks). Anyways, I'm gonna promote products and generate some sales if I can.

I chose Sit4less from Shareasale (aff), just because I wanted to test them for a while but never had enough time. But now we'll see how good they are...

Here is the primary keyword list I'm gonna use:

Herman Miller Aeron Chair
Herman Miller Aeron Side Chair
Herman Miller Mirra Chair
Herman Miller Celle Chair
Eames Lounge Chair
Low Back Freedom Chair
CXO Management Chair
SXO Chair
Space Chair
Verte Chair
Leather Office Chair from Sealy
eChair Basic
Senior Executive Chair
Ergo Task Chairs
Select Series Basic Chair
Leap Chair
Steelcase Think Chair Fabric
Steelcase Uno Chair
Steelcase Cachet Basic Chair
Tempur-Pedic Office Chair
Kneeling Chair
Tempur-Pedic Kneeling Chair
Interactive Health HT-136
Interactive Health HT-140
Interactive Health HT-1650 Massage Chair
iJoy 100 Massage Chair
iJoy 130 Massage Chair
iJoy 175 Massage Chair
iJoy 300 Massage Chair
HT-095 Massage Chair
HT-104 Massage Chair
HT-125 Massage Chair
HT-135 Massage Chair
Inada D5 Robo Chair
Herman Miller Aeron Chair with PostureFit
Humanscale Freedom Chair
Haworth Zody Chair
Chadwick Chair by Knoll
TrueBlack Aeron Chair
Zero Gravity Perfect Chair
Mac Motion 82
Mac Motion P818
Mac Motion 52-1
Mac Motion 84
Mac Motion 97
Mac Motion P819
Mac Motion 54
Mac Motion 56
Herman Miller Aeron Chair with Lumbar
Life Chair by Knoll

I didn't do any keyword research here nor do I know what is the estimated traffic for these, I just went to their datafeed on SaS and extracted the products names. Simply because people who are willing to buy will more likely type a brand name.

If you are not sure how to extract the keywords from the feeds, just go grab CSVed a free tool, open the feeds file and delete all the columns you don't need.

Now let's play bit more with that kw list. I grabbed this free tool here (very useful). It's very easy to use, just play with it for a few min and you'll be ready to go. Now what I want to do is adding a few action words to my list, something like buy, order, free shipping...you can grab a few here   /forum/general-affiliate-chat/the-money-words-t341.0.html;msg1484#msg1484
I'll use the ppc kw generator to add those to the beginning and the end of my kw to target my traffic even more.

I guess my kw list is good enough now. I need an ad copy, no rocket science here. I'll simply scrape my competitors ad comangos and add a mini Morphinus touch and I'm good.

Now I need a landing page, I'm not a big fun of landing pages as usually I'll cloak directly to the merchant page. But I'll tell you what I would do if I'm new to this and I don't know how to get started.

I'd go and grab a kw rich/relevant domain, something like homeofficechairs.com (I'm not sure if it's available), how do I get a domain name idea is simply by taking a look at my merchant page source and see which kw they have in their meta tags  . Now I'll get a cheap hosting from Hostgator (aff)

After that I'll install Wordpress, you can use Fantastico and install it in less than a minute. I'll go to   and grab a basic and beautiful theme.

Now I need some content, I'll go to Sit4less and simply scrape their products/brands reviews and I'm ready to go. I'll throw some banners on my blog/landing page and some text links, I'll keep it clean/non spammy tho. I'm using a blog cuz people usually "trust" blogs/forums reviews because they think they are coming from "real" people.

My bids: I'll bid high enough to get to the first page  then I'll be lowering the bids over time.

I'll be tweaking my ad groups, landing page and bids based on the conversions so:

If I don't have enough impressions, I'll tweak my bids
enough impressions but bad CTR, I'll tweak my ad copy
People don't click my aff links on my landing page, I'll try to tweak my landing page and convince people that my products are what they need...

I guess I'm ready to get the party started. As you can see I kept it very simple and I didn't talk about technical shit, I'm confident everybody can do it.
Pls if you are very advanced in this game this thread ain't for you so don't comment on it, I'm doing this to show people that we can make money online even if we don't know much.

I'll keep you posted guys, wish me luck  <----

Open to questions 

[dd1960to]

+ 1 

1. How did you know how much to get on the 1st page?

2. What are the rules on misspellings?

[morphy]

+ 1 

1. How did you know how much to get on the 1st page?

2. What are the rules on misspellings?

1- Thx DD 

2- When creating your campaigns there is a "Estimated Monthly Forecast" for your bid with an average position. Also when you go to Campaign>Ad group in your YSM acc you can see your average position per kw so you can tweak your bids.

2- To be honest I never used misspellings in my campaigns, cuz I usually go after non competitive stuff. OTOH some people recommended the misspelled words feature in  

[Ekim]

karma+ 

This will be a interesting thread to follow.
Are you doing a lot of ppc morphy?

[dd1960to]

* 2- To be honest I never used misspellings in my campaigns, cuz I usually go after non competitive stuff. *

hmmm

cancelling ekim's mango poisoning

 

[morphy]

karma+ 

This will be a interesting thread to follow.
Are you doing a lot of ppc morphy?

thx Mike

I used to do PPC before I start cloaking, I use it now to quickly test new merchants/niches and see if they convert. Better than waiting for my sites to rank.

I want to learn this SEO stuff, there is much more fun in it 

[Ekim]

I'm seeing more and more of the merchants TOA saying that they don't want any visitors directly from the SEs. All the visitors you send to them must come from your site. (including ppc)

Of course this is all my own fault for reading the TOAs. 

[morphy]

I'm seeing more and more of the merchants TOA saying that they don't want any visitors directly from the SEs. All the visitors you send to them must come from your site. (including ppc)

Of course this is all my own fault for reading the TOAs. 

Yeah that sucks man. I don't know what the hell is wrong with sending them traffic directly. I wish I had something to sell...

OTOH I hate to use landing pages, we need to find a way around that 

[markus]

I noticed you only went with Brand name (i.e. Herman Miller) and model (i.e. Aeron)
Any reason you didn't broaden?
e.g.
Herman Miller Chair
or generalize
e.g.
Aeron Chair
Just curious.

Don't overlook the longtail.

Any plans to do arbitrage?

[morphy]

I noticed you only went with Brand name (i.e. Herman Miller) and model (i.e. Aeron)
Any reason you didn't broaden?
e.g.
Herman Miller Chair
or generalize
e.g.
Aeron Chair
Just curious.

Don't overlook the longtail.

Any plans to do arbitrage?

Hello Markus, I'm using that kw list for a few reasons
-for some reasons I want to test their datafeed keywords
-then and as you can see I'm doing this without any market/kw research just to show people that starting a ppc campaign and make a reasonable ROI ain't rocket science. OTOH if those kw won't perform I'll be tweaking them, I will be using freekeywords.wordtracker.com and I'll post any changes to my original list.

Well, I used to put Adsense on my landing pages, I thought that if a visitor will leave my site I better get something back (a click) but after some testing I found out that I'm losing traffic this way

Now I just make sure my landing page is clean and the visitor will most likely :
-click my aff link
-bookmark me
-subscribe to my feeds if it's a blog

I guess that is much better than a dime click 

Thx for your input Markus,I appreciate it
And please keep in mind that I'm not a pro. I started in this business 6 months ago (last April) jumped into PPC and after 3 months or so I realized the potential of SEO and started playing with it

I'm still learning 

[xlspecial]

I just got $150 to play with in adwords and 100 in adcenter, so teach me Morphaletti!

[rupa1]

& what happned..?
no update on this morphy..

[kewlchat]

Good read morphy ive never advertised my sites before with ppc mabye now ill try it soon thanks for the tips 

[mktlvgkyle]

Hey that's a really great step by step article!  Thanks for posting useful information which can be applied in most cases.  If you or anyone else would like some suggestions on which campaigns are converting well, give me a call as I work for a CPA affiliate network. ;-)

407-936-0927 - Kyle

[bronnamdi]

I find this thread interesting. I am following it for I want to get better  results from ppc campaigns.