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Killing Curiosity- Adwords question
heavysm
Posts: 69
Joined: 08 Mar 10
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07 Sep 10 6:44 am

Killing Curiosity- Adwords question

I did ppc when I first started out online and made my one and only sale so far. I lost a crap load in the process but know making $$ is fully possible since I still have the screen shot of the $42.50 made in clickbank. I am currently building back links to rank for SEO but im really wondering whether I should just try my hand at Adwords while I wait for ranks to build for my keywords. Negative experience (lost an easy $600 offsetting the $42) tells me to just wait for my google rankings. But want for results tells me to try Adwords again. I know I will when I start getting sales through SEO, but I really have to bite my shirt collar at thinking about Adwords so soon. So the question is.....should I?
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bmusic
Posts: 26
Joined: 27 Jul 10
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07 Sep 10 1:28 pm

 First of all.
congrats on your first CB sale. I´m a absolute newbie myself on Affiliate marketing but I do PPC for my regular 9-5 job and I became quite good at it, considering I jsut started afresh in January 2010. My company is very satisfied with me and raised my bonus (however still not enough to pay the bills & CC).
I can´t afford PPC right now for myself, but it´s effective if you have enough cash & know what you are doing. Your $600 on Adwords were an investment, at least that´s what your mindset should teach you. I am lucky somehow because I can get knowledgeble at PPC without me paying Google a cent. Therefore, I am daytime PPC and afterwork SEO.

Here is my last suggestion to you: Continue with SEO, since it´s a legit for long-term cost-effective and at the same time invest in fine-tuning your PPC and campaigns by investing more in your strategy, knowledge and technique,plus testing and less on the amount. (for my company I started with a little campaign, lost some doe, tested a lot and then rolled-out on bigger amounts to profitability).
In my opinion, what you learn in PPC in terms of crafting strong call-to-action, landing page optimization, keyword research is complimentary to SEO. The more traffic gen strategies you learn, the better your future IM business I believe.
I consider this year a newbie-learning experience for me and next year I´m attacking while climbing the IM ranks. It´s a numbers and time and perservarance game.

Winners never lose and losers never win!

I wish you good luck.
Bill
P.S: P.M. me if you have any PPC question or so.
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andyblack
Posts: 23
Joined: 09 May 10
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07 Sep 10 7:56 pm

 Hi heavysm,

+1 on the congrats on your first CB sale.

You could certainly take a leaf out of Bmusic's book and learn with other people's money... I learned Adwords by offering my services for free to small local businesses. They paid the adwords bill and I setup, managed, and optimised the campaigns. That was nearly two years ago and I learned enough to be full-time as a PPC dude. Like Bmusic, I'm also a newbie at the affiliate marketing... but very keen to start making money for myself with my PPC skills!

If you want to reduce your risk while you're spending to learn, then only use exact match and keep to having one keywords per adgroup. Force yourself to incorporate the keywords into the ad copy and you'll be be writing highly targeted ads, and you'll be forcing yourself to focus on what is important. Side-note... the google algorithm loves exact matches and one keyword per adgroup.

Also, make sure you're not using the Display Network (formerly known as the Content Network), and that you also uncheck the Search Partners. They're both on by default in your campaigns settings. Display is a completely different fish from Search, and the traffic on the Search Partners can be of lower quality if you don't know what you're doing.

I hope that helps!

Andy
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robinjackman
Posts: 90
Joined: 18 Aug 10
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17 Sep 10 11:06 am

 thanks for sharing useful information.
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