The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing EBook You/'ll Ever Need
The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing
EBook You'll Ever Need
Eric Giguère
ericgiguere@ericgiguere.com
Version 0.1
October 1, 2008
For the latest version of this document,
send a blank email to onlyadwords@aweber.com
1. Introduction
As I write this, Google Wealth Wizard 2 has just been released. I bought a copy out of
curiosity, even though the original Google Wealth Wizard did not impress me. Ever optimistic
(my wife says I'm just naive), I hoped that GWW2 would be an improvement over GWW. Wel ,
it's not. It's just the same “pump-ClickBank-products-via-AdWords” information you've seen in
other AdWords ebooks.
What, you haven't read any of those ebooks? Let me save you time and money with my
condensed version of how to market affiliate products using AdWords.
2. What is Google AdWords?
This topic is a great way to waste 10 or more pages in an ebook, especially if you include lots
of screenshots. Here's my distillation of what AdWords is all about:
AdWords is Google's self-service advertising program that lets anyone with a credit
card place keyword-triggered text advertisements in the “Sponsored Links” section
of Google's search results.
Go to google.com and search for “weight loss” – click this link if you're lazy. On the right side
of the page you should see plenty of advertisements. Those al come from the AdWords
program. Advertisers bid for placement in the results – generally speaking, the more an
advertiser is willing to pay, the higher its position in the list of sponsored links. (Other factors
like clickthrough rate – how often an ad is clicked – also affect the position, but the price is the
most important factor.) Google charges advertisers fees (based on the bid price) every time
someone clicks their ads.
Copyright ©2008 by Eric Giguère. All rights are reserved except for the following: you may freely
distribute unchanged copies of this document in electronic or printed form. If you have any questions
about these rights, contact the author.
The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing EBook You'll Ever Need
That's all you need to know about AdWords for now. If you want to learn more, Google
provides plenty of free help on AdWords.
3. What is Affiliate Marketing?
Here's another page-wasting topic. Affiliate marketing is a sales promotion technique that
pays commissions to independent salespeople (the “affiliates”) for referring leads or
customers to a company. Typically, affiliates are paid when a customer they referred buys
something from the company, although there are other variations possible.
Most affiliate marketing systems are highly automated. When someone joins a company's
affiliate program, they're given an “affiliate ID” that lets the company track any sales
generated by that affiliate. The affiliate ID is embedded in special links the affiliate uses to
direct traffic to the company's site(s).
4. What is ClickBank?
More (digital) tree harvesting. ClickBank is a website that sells digital goods – ebooks,
software, videos... anything that can be downloaded to a computer. ClickBank is in effect a
giant retail store for digital goods. Anyone willing to pay a fee and meet ClickBank's (fairly lax)
requirements can list their products in the ClickBank marketplace.
So what, you say, aren't there zillions of electronic marketplaces available out there already?
Absolutely, but ClickBank has several advantages:
●
It's established.
●
As a retailer, it collects all necessary taxes (if any are due – more and more
jurisdictions are starting to tax digital goods, by the way) and remits them to the
appropriate government.
●
Customers can pay using PayPal or a credit card – ClickBank handles all the details,
no need to get a merchant account or anything like that.
●
It has an easy-to-use affiliate program.
Perhaps ClickBank's biggest advantage, though, is the frequency and reliability of its
payments to both vendors and affiliates. ClickBank pays everyone twice a month, like
clockwork. This is why so many AdWords guides base themselves on promoting ClickBank
products. Very little of what you'l find in those guides is specific to ClickBank – you can use
their techniques with pretty much any affiliate program. But ClickBank pays quickly and
reliably, so it's what everyone uses.
Certainly, as an ebook and software vendor (see PLRSiteBuilder, for example, or the
Toolinator Article Gatherer) I'm quite happy to use ClickBank to sel my wares. And I've gotten
more than a few decent cheques (that's “checks” for the Americans) from them as an affiliate.
Be sure to read ClickBank's extensive affiliate help before proceeding.
http://www.ericgiguere.com/adwords/
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The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing EBook You'll Ever Need
5. Niche and Product Selection
Now you need to find a niche that interests you and a product or two to promote within that
niche. There are various approaches you can take, but we'll look at the two most popular.
The first approach is to browse through the ClickBank Marketplace to find suitable products.
ClickBank groups products into categories and you can sort the products with a category (or
subcategory) by various statistics. Look at the “pitch page” (sales page) for the products that
catch your eye to see if they're worth promoting.
The second approach is to start with a niche and see if other affiliates are already promoting
ClickBank products in that niche. You can get software that does this for you, but with a little
elbow grease and some time you can do it yourself.
Start by seeing if the niche is profitable or not. Enter niche-related keywords into Google and
see if any ads show up in the “Sponsored Links” section of the results. The more ads, the
better. If there are no or few ads, either you've stumbled across an unmined niche or (much
more likely) it's not a profitable niche.
If a niche looks promising, see if there are any affiliates promoting that niche. This is tricky to
do at first, but after a while you'll be able to eyeball a set of ads and identify the affiliate ads
without even clicking on them, usual y just by looking at the URL of the ad. But sometimes,
and certainly at first, you'll need to click on them to determine if they are affiliate ads.
This is where Google's own Ads Preview Tool (available for free from the “Tools” section of the
AdWords console) comes in handy. Not only can you use it to see which ads show up in a
specific geography (handy for non-Americans looking to target the US market), but any ads
you click within the tool don't cost the advertiser anything.
Once you find a niche that affiliates are promoting, find suitable ClickBank products for that
niche. The obvious products are the ones used by the affiliates, of course, but there may be
others to consider.
6. Keyword Research
At some point you'll do some keyword research on your chosen niche and/or product(s). You'll
research keywords for two reasons:
1. To determine probable profitability of the niche/product. (Is anyone searching for
products in that niche?)
2. To generate a list of keywords to target with AdWords. (So we can fine-tune our ads.)
Now there are dozens upon dozens of keyword tools available out there. Some are good,
some are not. If you're just starting out, though, you- might as well save yourself a few bucks
and use Google's own keyword tool, available directly within your AdWords management
console. (The tool is also available for free to non-AdWords customers.)
http://www.ericgiguere.com/adwords/
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The Only AdWords Affiliate Marketing EBook You'll Ever Need
That's All For Now!
This is a preliminary version of the document... I'l
continue to work on it if I get some good feedback about it.
If you want to see more, please let me know!
Also, be sure to visit
http://www.ericgiguere.com/adwords/index.html
for other great AdWords resources.
http://www.ericgiguere.com/adwords/
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