I sat down to do the home assignment from the week 1 videos: choosing a niche and doing keyword research.

Now before I bought the AffiloBlueprint, I had an idea for a niche. It was something that I started driving traffic to from a PPC ad of a single Clickbank product when I reviewed the Google Cash Detective. I’m getting an average of 1 sale per week and making about $20.00 profit.

But when I watched the video, I discovered this is exactly the same niche Mark Ling uses as his example site, having built a similar site to what I was planning a few years ago.

At first I thought I need to find another niche because I don’t just want to copy him. But I decided that it’s such a good niche (lots of Clickbank products) and I really did have the idea before I purchased, so I’m just going to ahead. After all, if I’m getting 1 sale/week right now with a single PPC campaign in a niche that is extremely competitive, maybe if I build an entire site I’ll do better. Mark’s site makes $500.00/month. If I make $100.00/month, I’ll still be happy.

So I really didn’t have much research to do. I already had tons of keywords in different categories from my PPC campaigns. So as instructed by Mark, I selected a few high-traffic keywords from each category and also some product review keywords, a total of 30 keywords in all.

The other thing I did was download Traffic Travis. It’s one of Mark Ling’s products for manipulating keywords and it has a free version. (Actually it does more things too, but I’m only interested in keyword research right now).

I’ll write a separate review for it, but here are the basics: the keyword research tool has 2 parts:

• Keyword Finder to get keyword suggestions from a few different search engines
• Keyword Sorter to help you organize and tweak them

I found that the keyword suggestion part of it leaves much to be desired. For example, I typed in ‘lifelike babies’ (By the way, I did this as a test. This is not my niche).

A few times when I did the same search, it returned only 2 results:
lifelike babies
life like babies

But then when I repeated the search, I got 200 results. Some of the keywords it suggested made sense, but some were way out there like:
woolworth sit in
woolworth building
implantation signs
adopt a virtual pet
design your own virtual house
etc.

But the second part of the tool that lets you organize and tweak your list is really handy.

So my recommendation is to use a different tool to get your keyword ideas, and then import them into Travis Traffic for manipulation.

They sell two versions:
Traffic Travis free
Traffic Travis Professional

Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »

I must be a glutton for punishment because once again I plunked down hundreds of dollars and purchased another course that’s supposed to make me lots of money: Affiloblueprint.

I had been getting emails about Affiloblueprint for a while, which I ignored. I’ve been so overloaded with product launch announcements that I’m becoming hype-numb.

But then almost out of boredom I watched his pre-launch video. And I found myself intrigued.

First of all, Mark Link shared a tremendous amount of good tips in a freebie video. So much that I probably could have just taken that free information and started using it profitable.

But I started to feel obligated to try his product, especially since he put so much into his training video. Which, by the way, was mostly screen shots and tutorials, contrasted with Chris Carpenter’s training video in which he felt the need to show us his pet peacock and what a nice house he has. But I’m getting off-topic.

So a few hours before the end of the launch, I once again handed over my credit card number. After all, the Affiloblueprint has a 60-day money-back guarantee. I’ll try just about anything if I can get my money back.

The course is designed to show a newbie step-by-step how to set up a profitable niche website. It is extremely well-organized, divided into 12 weeks of lessons, with a few different videos and pdf transcripts per week.

I watched all of the week 1 videos tonight. 95% off the information and skills, I already knew. But having it broken up into specific segments and being given exact homework assignments is a good thing for me.

So now I’m off to do my assignment; find a niche according to the steps outlined.

Posted by susb8383 under Affiloblueprint | No Comments »

In a previous post, I detailed how to analyze sales with visitor keyword searches, specifically how you can use PHP to assign a unique id to a visitor, store that id with their Google Analytic information, and pass that to the affiliate network. The reason for going to all that trouble is so that you can analyze the keyword and campaign info that sent the visitor to your site for visitors that actually bought something from your affiliate vendor.

Well, I now have a really practical example of how this analysis saved me money.

One of the companies that I am an affiliate for sells collectible dolls. They have lots of different types: newborn dolls, dolls that breathe, dolls that have heartbeats, anatomically correct dolls, etc.

I have a Google Adwords campaign for each of these different categories. Without my PHP magic, I could tell how many impressions and clicks each campaign got me, but I had no way to tell which of those visitors actually bought a doll because I was sending them off to the other website.

Using my PHP technique, I was able to run a report that showed me all the keywords just for those people that purchased a doll. And I found out something interesting.

Even though I was getting lots of impressions and clicks for anatomically correct dolls, not a single person bought one. That’s out of about 200 visitors who came to my site because they searched for anatomically correct dolls and clicked on my ad.

I was showing them a page with anatomically correct dolls, exactly word-for-word what they had searched for. So why wasn’t anyone buying an anatomically correct doll?

To find out, I created a survey (the topic of another post I have yet to do). I directed all the people who clicked on that ad to my survey first, then on to my website. I asked them a couple of questions like “what were you hoping to find when you searched for anatomically correct dolls?” etc.

And I found something interesting.

All the people who filled out my survey were looking for anatomically correct dolls that could be played with. One person gave me more helpful information: she’s opening a day care and her child development background prompted her to search out these types of dolls.

Armed with that information, the lack of sales made perfect sense. My site sells collectible dolls which can cost up to $199.00. These are dolls that are made to be put on a shelf and admired, not played with. These people were looking for dolls as toys.

So I disabled that particular Google Adwords campaign. Without the ability to relate keywords to sales, I never would have discovered this and I would have continued to waste money on a Google campaign that wasn’t resulting in any sales.

Posted by susb8383 under Affiliate Marketing & Google Adwords | No Comments »