I have been willing to get into PPC -> CPA marketing for a long time or another, but due to one reason or another(read laziness), I wasn’t able to get started with it.
A week ago, I managed to sort it out, discipline myself and have a serious go at it. My first couple of campaigns (one was related to weight loss and the other related to designer shoes), were not profitable so I dropped them in a couple of days. This time, I selected a simple two-page submit with only one field to be submitted on each. It was then that I hit the target (or atleast inched a little closer towards it). This campaign has generated my first CPA profits, and I am feeling quite happy to be on my way.
Here’s my last couple of days. Not bad considering the fact that I’ve never done serious PPC marketing before:
I have 4 more days in June and hope to achieve reach my target of $200 in gross commissions for the last two weeks of July.
My goal for August is to earn atleast $1000 in CPA commissions.
It’s not that hard once you take care of a couple of things:
1. Do not direct link; at least not with google adwords. Since Quality Score is such a big issue with Adwords, your max CPC can shoot through the roof if you’re directly linking to the merchants page. Use a landing page – this will boost your Quality Score and help presell the customer before he’s sent to the merchant’s page.
2. Use as many keywords as possible and sort them into as many ad groups as possible.
3. Take your time while creating the keyword list and weed out the ones which look out of place. Also make sure you don’t use broad-match – and if you do, make sure that the max CPC is set pretty low. Use negative keywords
4. Keep testing and tweaking. Take a peek into your campaign every 6 hours and observe which adgroups are converting and which aren’t. Split test landing pages and ads & keep the profitable ones.
5. Do not feel defeated even if your first couple of campaigns don’t turn out to be profitable. It is easy to lose quite a bit of $$$ with adwords in the beginning but be persistent and trust yourself. No one said it was going to be easy – keep working at it.
Oh, and by the way the CPA affiliate network that I prefer and use is Coepac.
