I made $39 for 20 minutes work!

[Robert Rogers]

I wanted to share this to give some newbies a little taste of what's possible with adwords and adsense in a competitive niche.

I used plr content, an existing template I have for the website, and just added affiliate links and adsense ads.

I setup an adwords campaign yesterday for mortgage refinancing. I used keywords analyzer to generate a list of keywords in that niche then selected one of those. I then expanded that into 7 different phrases that I thought would be "type-in" stuff.

I built a landing page targeting those keywords, added it to my existing mortgage related website, then started the adwords campaign.

It really only took about 20 minutes to generate the list of keywords, paste the plr content into the template, and setup the adwords campaign.

I made a $30 qualified lead commission from getsmart.com and $12.61 in adsense. It only cost me $3.62 in adwords.

Not bad, eh?










Here is the list of keywords I started with in .csv format: download

Hope this helps some of you.

P.S. - I should ad that the clicks I got from adwords were all from the content network. P.S. - I should ad that all of the clicks I got from adwords were from the content network. Who says that the content network doesn't convert?

[Robert Rogers]

Hello fellow forum members.

I was a little worried this campaign was going to lose money. On Day 5 I was break even. However, affiliate commissions updated today and I wanted to share with you the results so far.

I'm happy to announce that it's still making money!

Take a look.







Adwords Cost: $71.30
Adsense Income: $19.84 (the year I graduated hs: 1984)
Affliate Commissions: $165.00

Net Profit after 6 days: $165 + $19.84 - $71.30 = $113.54

ROI = (165+19.84)/71.3 - 1 = 159%



P.S.

I've put a little more work into my campaign after reviewing the statistics. One of my nine keywords was landing on page 3 of the serps (average position 19) at the $2.00 bid. So I up the bid on that particular keyword to $3.00 and now it's on page 2 (average position 15).

I also tweaked my landing page by dressing it up with indenting some of the paragraphs for cosmetic purposes and also put in bold the keywords I used in the campaign. I don't know if this improves quality score, but I've read that it does help with keyword seo, so why not?

About an additional 10 minutes of work. - Total time 30 minutes for $113!

[Linda Buquet]

Awesome Robert, thanks for keeping us updated
on your progress and your successes.

[cashadventure]

Good Work - I might have to grease the wheels with this myself

[coltrev]

Well done, but I am sure you will find that a lot more work will be necessary to maintain that performance.

[DiDi]

very nice Robert, nice to see stuff like that and you're acutely give a very good info for others

[tekiup]

Yeah I tend to have a few nice days myself, so I know how you're feeling. Just know that you gotta keep doing what you're doing and justify the excellent continuity of patience and observance that you're demonstrating. With that said, you won't go wrong, and you'll have a lot more pleasant days.

Kindest Regards,

Tekiup

[Robert Rogers]

Well, here are the final numbers. Getsmart is ending their affiliate program. Go figure.









Here's the math:

Adwords Cost: $547.95
Adsense Income: $40.29
Affiliate Income: $1145.00

Net Income: $637.34

ROI: 637.34/547.95 = 116%

So I've ended the getsmart campaign and going to switch to lendingtree. However, I don't know how it's going to convert and I will have to adjust my ad copy, landing page, etc.. to adjust to the new affiliate.

Also, lending are the parent company of getsmart, and when you apply for a loan with lending tree, they popup a window that offers a getsmart loan. That really sucks for me and will also probably hurt conversions.

But, I am now armed with a ton of data about keywords, which adcopy had a higher ctr and lower cpc, and the kind of traffic to expect in this niche. I should be able to create another profitable campaign.

Either way, I made a few bucks and I think we've learned a few things along the way.

[RedHat39]

Good job Robert. I'm glad to hear success stories like this. Often times you are lucky to break even at the beginning of a PPC or PPA campaign.

Sorry to hear your cash cow has died though. I do hope they pay you whats due to you. From what I can tell from your pics it looks like this was all done through CJ, if so you should be ok on getting paid for your work and investment.

Hope you find another campaign soon that works as well for you.

[Roman]

Very inspiring, Robert! The more I'm motivated to do more in my affiliate business as I read your story. Keep it up and share the learnings!