The Story so far

With my new found optimism i jumped in feat first with a few PPC campaigns. These did deliver my first 4 sales which was a great feeling. I was beginning to think that the affiliate game was a con and was a closed network for people to get sales! If you have tried affiliate marketing before im sure you will have had similar thoughts.

This did prove to me that this isnt the case and that there are people out there looking to buy products from me and you. It also taught me the valuable lesson of not making your campaigns to broad and the need to use very very (very) targeted keywords. My background is in PPC or Search Engine marketing, but for corporate clients with much bigger budgets than mine! So i think i initially approached this with the same mindset of building big keyword lists and covering all angles, but what you need to do is look for at least 3 word keywords and more like at least 4 or 5 words with strong purchase intent. Before showing you what i mean, ill show you what not to do by showing you what i did:

Campaigns so far:

Campaign 1: Twitter

First promoting, Twitter Exposed

$41.47 spent - 1 sale $21.26 - Clicks 239 - CTR 0.57% - CPC $0.17

Keywords that gained most traffic: (286 keywords in total in the campaign)
Twitter money - 24 clicks
Twitter traffic - 31 clicks
Twitter - 30 clicks
Twitter marketing - 10 clicks
Twitter make money - 11 clicks

Then i changed over to Traffic Machine

$5.00 spent - 1 sales $11.98 - clicks 35 - CTR 0.60% - CPC $0.15

Same keywords but refreshed copy. This campaign is still running but with much more restricted keyword lists

Second - Unlimited Wii Cheats

$29.67 spent - No sales - 191 clicks - CTR 2.34% - CPC $0.16

Keywords with most traffic:

Wii Cheats - 96 clicks
Wii Cheat Codes - 21 clicks
Video game cheats - 10 clicks
Cheats for wii - 7 clicks

Negatives used included - psp, playstation, etc

Also used price points in the creative so people new the price before clicking

Have since paused the campaign due to no sales. Had thought of re launching with keywords for each game but the affiliate has been removed from clickbank.

Wii Tennis Cheat
Wii Zelda cheat
etc

Third - Wealthy Affiliate

$38 spent - 1 sale - 106 clicks - CTR 0.64%

A lot of the traffic came on keywords which i have since paused for being to general. So this could still work and i have since trimmed the keywords significantly (i even had 'affiliate' and 'affiliate marketing' in there). This has significantly reduced my traffic but i generated my first sale after this cull, so will be continuing to perceive with this.

I have also introduced a few new strategies which i will share at a later date.

Fourth - Movie Downloads but was blocked by Google.

Fifth - *** Ebook campaign

First campaign that i feel i have set up correctly with only a handful of keywords 3 words long and the majority are 5 and longer.

I wont share the keywords im using just yet but the stats so far are:

16 clicks for a 4.49%CTR and only $3.39 spent which has generated 1 sale so far worth $16.69

I will follow up tomorrow with the lessons i have learned on choosing a niche and selecting the right keywords which can be used for PPC, Article writing or even creating your own landing pages.