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FOR the ImpatientLit is about affiliate marketing

1 Introduction

2 RULE 1: Ride the product wave

3 RULE 2: Build your product portfolio

4

RULE 3: Track your keywords (always)

5 RULE 4: Copy the best - pt 3

6 RULE 5: All keywords are not created equal

7 RULE 6: Adwords Copy 101(read it adwards free $55)

8 your plan & End Notes

INTRODUCTION

About the author, where you fit in

Many of you may know me.

If you don’t here’s a brief summary of my path - and why you need to listen very closely to what I have to say.

In a little over 15 months, I have gone from a life of “corporate slavery” to financial freedom. And I did it all online, from a dead-start with literally $400

to my name and no “industry contacts”.

The important point here is I was very much an “average Joe” when I started, and in very little time I was able to reach an average income of over $100,00 per month, much of that from affiliate marketing.

Second reason you should listen and take action: I have a proven record of teaching others how to replicate my success. Since I got started, I have written three guides that outline the methods I have used to leverage myself to my current financial position.

(By the time I issued the first update of the guide a few months later, that

figure was closer to $600/day. This was probably the most exciting period of my “IM career”, as I began to realize I was sitting on a literal goldmine that seemed to have no limits.) Nothing is being claimed as universal.

RULE #1 : PICK THE RIGHT PRODUCT AT THE RIGHT TIME.

One stumbling block for affiliates is product selection. Push the wrong product at the wrong time, and you will fall flat on your face. Pick the right

product, and push it at the right time, and you are laughing. There are other

factors that I will come onto (promoting the right product, on the right keywords), but the importance of pushing the right product cannot be ignored.

How to choose the right product.

Firstly, you should be aware that the right time to push any product is when it

is has just been released. This is a very important point, worth hundreds,

possibly even thousands to you, so I will say it again: the best time to push any product is when it is new. This is true of both digital products (like e-books),

and physical products (like car stereos, clothing etc). This point does need labouring, so I give you a quick example:

In the last few weeks, I promoted a ClickBank e-book on launch day. The sales letter converted at about 5% (I can work this out by comparing the number of clicks I receive with the number of sales I made, its quite simple, really). I decided to then check back and see what the site converted at two weeks later

- and guess what - the average was now 1.5%.

Same site, same promotion… no details were changed! But the site is now making me less than one third what it was making fourteen days ago. In this case, my promotion was done via my list (so it doesn’t cost me anything to

send traffic to the site), but let’s imagine that we were promoting the site via

Adwords.(google) This could literally be the difference between a super profitable campaign and a losing one.

Why is this? Well, what happens when a new product comes out is that the “early adopters” jump on it and buy. These are the guys who are most interested in this type of product, hear about it early and buy it without a second thought. I am sure there is something you are passionate about, a hobby where you buy everything within that niche the second it comes out. That’s the situation here. But, fast forward a few weeks and the smart marketers have sold to these guys and moved on, leaving everyone else with the “crumbs”.

Imagine we were promoting the product on Adwords, and for argument’s sake, we were spending $0.50 on each click. The product paid out $49 per

sale, but let’s round it up to $50 to make our calculations easy to follow. Let’s see what effect the lower conversion has on our profit:

PERIOD CLICKS TOTAL COST CONVERSION RATE TOTAL PROFIT WEEK 1 100 x $0.50 $50 5% $250 - 50 = $200

How the calculations work: Here we have got 100 clicks at $0.50 and the total cost is $50. We converted at 5% (so in this case we averaged five sales). Each sale is worth $50, so we make

$250 in total. Take away our ad spend of $50 and our profit is $200.

Not bad - $200 profit for an Adwords campaign is excellent. Now let’s see what happens if we promote the product two weeks later - this should show you how important promoting a product early is:

PERIOD CLICKS TOTAL COST CONVERSION RATE TOTAL PROFIT WEEK 3 100 x $0.50 $50 1.5% $75 - 50 = $25

How the calculations work: Here we have got 100 clicks at $0.50 and the total cost is $50. We converted at 1.5% (so in this case we got 1.5 sales at $50). Each sale is worth $50, so we make

$75 in total. Take away our ad spend of $50 and our profit is $25.

In conclusion, if we were promoting this product on Adwords the first week when it was new, we would have made $200 in profit. But, if we had come to the party late, when everyone had bought the product, we would have made only $25 profit. You can see how important this difference is - in this case,

our profit has literally been slashed into an eighth by week 3.

How can you find new products? There are a number of ways to do it. The simplest is to sign up to every newsletter out there - and let other marketers

do the research for you. You can start with every newsletter on the ClickBank

Marketplace - http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm(sign up to the newsletters for the most popular 20-30 products to start). You may also want

to keep an eye on the ClickBank marketplace itself, and check the top 50 every few days. Every so often, a product climbs to the top 10 without anyone

mailing out - if you don’t keep tabs on the marketplace itself, you will miss

out.

Cashing in on these products is very often as simple as throwing up a simple

Adwords ad on the product brand name (for example [Day Job Killer]).

A well timed campaign running on the product name and no others can often generate $100-300 in profit within a week (see the rule “All keywords are not created equal” for a simple way to avoid Google’s “double serving” rule and profit with a direct link on the brand name).

RULE: If possible make a habit of “trend hopping”. Promote products as soon

as they launch (ideally on the day they come out). You will clean up initially

and if you see your campaign starts to get unprofitable after a few weeks, you

can always ditch it. Sometimes a campaign will stay profitable months after launch - but its best to “play it safe” and try to push the newest products, so you always have that high conversion safety net from the start.

RULE: Build a product portfolio - spread yourself thinly, test and then focus

One factor that separates the most successful affiliates is that they are always promoting dozens of products at any one time. They are spoilt for choice -

and they promote products on multiple networks, using different methods and

in different niche markets. Contrast that with how failing affiliates tend to do things: these guys will promote one product on Adwords, lose money, and

then move onto the next one… promote it, lose money, and the cycle

continues.

The correct way to do it is to have dozens of products that you are considering promoting at any one time. You should invest a little in promoting this

product, a little in promoting that one… and then one day you see sales

coming through for one of your promotions and you invest more time and money in that area. Spread your risk initially; don’t focus too much on one niche, and when you hit on a profitable campaign, thenyou focus on it.

What most affiliates do is to invest all their time and money promoting one product, lose money, ditch it and then move onto the next and repeat the

cycle. I see this all the time. The correct approach is to spread yourself thinly

and then see what is selling. Once you see sales coming through, then and only

then do you focus your time and money in one area.

SMART AFFILIATE’S PRODUCT PORTFOLIO:

Product A Spend $5 promoting on Adwords, if it converts invest more…

Product B This could be a good product. Promote a bit and if it sells push it more

Product C Promote this using the “workhorse method” from Affiliate Project X. Write 3 articles to start. If it makes sales, write 10 more…

Product D This looks like it might convert. Do some more research, and if it looks like a good product, push it…

* in other words, the smart affiliate is continually “prodding” to see if they can hit on that winning campaign. They invest very little until they know they have a winner on their hands.

BAD AFFILIATE’S PRODUCT PORTFOLIO

Product A Spend $500 on Adwords. Lose money fast. Stop promoting. Move onto Product B. Repeat the cycle, never get anywhere… eventually give up.

RULE: the smart affiliates are always promoting lots of different products at any one time. They do thorough research and then test a product in a small way, investing a bit of time and a bit of capital. If they make money, they invest more time in the promotion and the niche. These guys are patient (a

trait that very few affiliates seem to have). The guys who fail go straight into a

promotion, lose money and give up. Always promote many products a little

bit. See where you are making money, work out how to make more, and then invest wisely.

RULE: ALWAYS TRACK YOUR KEYWORDS(very important)

Recently, I got hold of an extremely powerful tool called “UnderCover Profits”

- the tool literally searches for profitable Adwords campaigns that you can

then clone for yourself. Using the software confirmed something I had always

suspected: the vast majority of keywords are simply not profitable, and a

select few are extremely profitable. But which are which? It’s very difficult to tell unless you have the numbers in front of you.

Affiliates who don’t track their keywords when promoting a product on

Adwords, typically simply see results like this:

CAMPAIGN 1 SPEND $130 RETURN $90 OVERALL LOSS OF $40

If you ran a campaign like this, where you spent $90 on Adwords clicks and only got $90 back (so your total loss is $40), you would inevitably stop the

campaign and move on. That much I am sure of. But I would almost certainly continue… why? Well, here’s where things get interesting…

If you track your keywords, a campaign that is unprofitable overall may well be profitable for certain keywords.

Very often a campaign like the above will look like this initially:

(A) RESULTS OF ENTIRE CAMPAIGN (NO KEYWORD TRACKING)

CAMPAIGN 1 TOTAL SPENT $130 TOTAL RETURN $90 OVERALL LOSS OF $40

Overall the campaign is taking a loss - but if we are tracking keywords, we will see that some of the keywords are actually profitable. Here’s what you are actually looking at when the above happens to you…

(B) RESULTS BY KEYWORD (KEYWORD TRACKING)

KEYWORD 1 TOTAL SPENT $30 TOTAL RETURN $0 LOSS OF $30

KEYWORD 2 TOTAL SPENT $10 TOTAL RETURN $30 PROFIT OF $20

KEYWORD 3 TOTAL SPENT $40 TOTAL RETURN $20 LOSS OF $20

KEYWORD 4 TOTAL SPENT $20 TOTAL RETURN $40 PROFIT OF $20

KEYWORD 5 TOTAL SPENT $30 TOTAL RETURN $0 LOSS OF $30

You can see here that some of the keywords are definitely profitable and some are not. What we would do at this point is to kill the unprofitable keywords (in

this case, keywords 1,3 and 5) and keep the profitable ones (keywords 2 and

4). The next time we run our campaign we see a profit of $40, which is worth

building on. But we aren’t done yet…

We can then do some research on the profitable keywords and try and add

more keywords like that, potentially turning that $40 profit into an $80 profit the third time we run it.

To give you an example, if we were promoting a guide on attracting women,

and keywords 2 and 4 were [attract women now] and [attract women fast], we

would look to add other keywords like [attract women guide], [how to attract women] etc.

But most affiliates never even get past step 1 (and they never recoup that $40

loss, is it any wonder there are so many affiliates who feel like giving up?).

CLEVER TIP: Having trouble expanding a profitable keyword list? What I

often do is take the profitable term and Google it. Then, I check out the first 5

websites that come up, and head over to the Adwords Suggestion Tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal .

Now, with this tool we have two choices. Firstly, we can enter a keyword (and

it will suggest related keywords), which is something that many keyword tools will do.

However, we can also click on “site related keywords”, and enter an actual website address and Google will actually suggest keywords based on the website address. This works extremely well with very targeted keywords, and less so with broader keywords (but then again, that’s fine: it will normally be the super-targeted keywords that no-one else knows about that convert).

What we do here is take the keyword that converts and Google it. Then, we

take the website addresses down for the first 5 or so matches and enter them

into this tool. The tool will spit a random collection of keywords that you had never even guessed, very often industry-specific terms that don’t show up in

any other keyword tool. Very, very cool.

Now, we’ve gone off track with my clever little tip, but my original point was:

you should always track keyword conversions - very often your sales will only

come from a few keywords, and most affiliates run campaigns without tracking, lose money overall, and give up.

If they were tracking campaigns, they would find out that some of the

keywords are actually profitable. And then they could expand on that keyword

list, and make even more. A campaign that lost $40 is $40 in profit the next week and $100 the week after.

How many campaigns have affiliates moved on from because they didn’t profit right away, and they weren’t tracking keywords? That $40 loss is never

recouped, and the sad thing is the affiliates repeat the process over and over.

Very often it’s the ones who need success the most who do this, and aren’t disciplined enough to track.

How do you track keywords? It’s actually quite simple with ClickBank. With

ClickBank, you promote products via “hoplinks”, which basically look like this:

http://affiliateid.vendorid.hop.clickbank.net

So, for example, if the product you are promoting is Day Job Killer, the vendor

ID would be “dayjobkill”. Let’s say your ClickBank nickname is bob99, then

your hoplink would look like this:

http://bob99.dayjobkill.hop.clickbank.net

Now that we have our hoplink, it’s easy to add a tracking code - we just add

/?tid=code onto the end of the link, and change “code” to whatever the

keyword is.

So, if we were promoting Day Job Killer on the “adwords” keyword, we would probably choose a Tracking ID called “adwords” and our new link with the tracking code would look like this:

http://bob99.dayjobkill.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=adwords

If you have a list of 200 keywords, and don’t feel like setting up a separate

tracking code for each keyword, the next best thing is to arrange your

keywords into ad groups inside Adwords, and set-up a tracking code for each ad group instead.

Note: you can get more info on tracking codes here:

https://www.clickbank.com/hoplink_faq.html#hoplink_question_3

RULE: Always track your keywords when promoting an affiliate program on

Adwords. If you don’t, you risk losing money and stopping a campaign that is

actually profitable if you could see which keywords were bringing in the sales. View your first campaign for any promotion as a test to see which keywords convert. You might well lose some money experimenting, but once you hit on the profitable keywords, it’s a guaranteed, low risk income stream in your pocket. Always, always track keywords.

RULE: SPY ON THOSE WHO DO TRACK

Readers of my earlier guides now that I recommend spying on the

competition’s Adwords ads. You check back on certain keywords every day for

a week, and see if any affiliates are running the same ad for the full week. If

they are, there’s a good chance that ad is making money (affiliates rarely let an unprofitable campaign run for more than a few days). I call this method “Copy The Best”, and it’s a very sneaky way to let other affiliates do the testing, and

then swipe their profitable campaigns.

While I am talking about keyword tracking, I might as well mention that the

most profitable ads to swipe are those that run for a week… and when you take

a closer look you notice that the affiliate is tracking keywords.

Why is this? Well, an affiliate who is tracking keywords and is letting the ad run for a week or more is almost certainly making money on that keyword.

You can just copy their ad, almost certain that you will be swiping a profitable campaign. It only takes a moment to stop and check, and it’s a very exciting

discovery when it does happen.

You can see if the affiliate is using a tracking ID by clicking on the link, scrolling down to the bottom of the vendor’s sale page and hitting the order button. Then, on the order page, look at the bottom for a bit of text that says “affiliate = xxxx”.

If you see one word, like “mintjoe”, then there is no tracking ID being used. The campaign as a whole might still be profitable, but we cant be sure.

However, if you see a word followed by a period (.) and a series of numbers or letters, you have found a tracking ID: for example “mintjoe.DOG009″

Here’s what you are looking for:

Can you see the bit highlighted in red, “affiliate = mintjoe.DOG0009″ - that “DOG0009″ bit is this affiliate’s tracking code. I found this ad running on Adwords, and so I decided to check it out a week later. And guess what? It’s

still there, so I knew the affiliate was tracking keywords and was happy to run

the ad on this keyword for an entire week. Conclusion? He’s making money -

so I set-up a similar campaign myself, and so far its generating about $40 in sales each day, all from just a single keyword. Remember how I said tracking was important?

RULE: Next time you’re browsing on Adwords and you come across a

ClickBank product, check the order page to see if there is a tracking ID next to

“affiliate”. If so, keep an eye on the ad. If its still running a week later, the keyword is always sure to be profitable.

RELATED NOTE: One piece of software I have been using recently actually allows you to automatically find profitable affiliate campaigns and “swipe” them. It’s a really nasty little tool called UnderCover Profits.

When I first promoted the guide, the copies sold out in a matter of days. I expected that to happen, and so I have now got John, the creator of the software, to offer a few more spots to my customers - but these are on a first- come, first-served basis. The tool is one of the few “job killers” out there, as shown by the hundreds of testimonials John is in the process of adding to the site.

Be aware I include my one-hour long video training series as a bonus. See the

end of this book to see how to claim this bonus.

RULE: ALL KEYWORDS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL

One of my biggest breakthroughs was when I realized that there were certain keywords that converted far better than the rest, specifically two types of keyword:

Action-based [buy product] and price comparison keywords (like “buy digital camera”, “purchase laptop”, “cheapest black hoodie”) - effectively we are looking for any keyword that implies that the person doing the searching is interested in making a purchase rather than just looking for free information. Ideally the keyword will have an “action word” in there too (buy, order,

purchase etc). and

[product name] keywords (like “affiliate commandments”, “day job killer”, “Sony KDL V200 TV”). If someone is searching for the exact name of a

product, then chances are they have already been pre-sold on the product and are considering whether to make a purchase. Many are even determined to purchase before the search results even show up.

These keywords are extremely targeted and qualified.

They may cost slightly more than less targeted keywords, but they are still cheaper than they should be. The other good thing about these keywords is that there are far fewer searches for them, which means that you are not in danger of spending $50 in a day and then pausing the campaign when you can’t stomach the loss (which is what 99% of affiliates do, remember?)

Slow, steady and profitable is the name of the game for these keywords. If a

new product is released, and it starts to rise up the ClickBank rankings, there will suddenly be a very high volume of searches for that product name - but even old, well-established products generate enough [product name] searches for a promotion to be more than worthwhile.

Typically a campaign on the [product name] keywords will generate a 20-50

clicks a week, and 3-10 sales (yes, the keywords really are that targeted).

CLEVER LITTLE TIP: If you are promoting a product on the [product name] keyword, one issue that arises is Google’s “double-serving” rule. Basically, the rule means that only one person can promote a particular domain for that keyword.

If you want to send traffic directly through your affiliate link, through to the product sales page, then you should enter the sales page URL as the display URL: but the problem is only one person can use this display URL, and often the person who wins out is the one who pays the most per click.

So, in other words, if we want to promote dayjobkiller.com on the keyword

[day job killer] , we need to outbid the person who is already there… but that might be very expensive (if they also know how profitable the keyword is), and the last thing we want is a bidding war situation.

For example, if we go ahead and check out the “day job killer” search term,

you can see the top ad has the domain “dayjobkiller.com”. In this case, it’s me

- and it will be very expensive to enter the same domain, and try and outbid me.

Workaround: there is an extremely simple workaround, which is to make up a display URL, and enter a domain that no-one else is using (make 0ne up if necessary).

Officially, this is against Adwords policy (we shouldn’t be making up display URLs to get around the double-serving rule), but in practical terms they seem not to notice on these low volume keywords and even when they do notice, all they do is pause your ads. For example, if we enter the correct display URL (in this case DayJobKiller.com) as below, our ad will not display unless we can outbid the person who is already using this domain on this yword:

What we need to do is enter a domain like “dayjobkiller.net”, or

“dayjobkill1.com” (really anything that looks like the original domain so that

the editors don’t notice), and that way our ad shows and we don’t get involved

in a bidding war situation. Then enter a reasonable CPC, and in most cases, we will profit. You can repeat this process across pretty much any [product name] keyword, and you will be in profit in most cases.

RULE: WHEN WRITING ADWORDS ADS, COPY THE BEST

One question I get asked regularly is “how do I write good Adwords ads”, and the answer I always give is “by copying the top ads that are already running”.

For example, let’s search for “world of warcraft guide” (World of Warcraft is a very popular game, and there are naturally guides on the subjects which you

can promote as an affiliate):

Quickly scan the ads and you will notice that these ads all seem to say “level 1-

60″ or “1-70″, so we can safely assume that the people searching this keyword are interested in going from “level 1 to 70″. You will also notice that the headlines tend to be “World of Warcraft guide” or “WOW Levelling guide”.

At this point, we simply create a “hybrid” ad which swipes the headline and benefits from each of these ads - there’s no point trying to reinvent the wheel, and I always start off from the point of view of copying the ads that are already working. These guys have gone to the trouble of testing different headlines

and ads, and they are now sitting at the top of the pile. Let’s leech off their hard work, and do it the easy way.

In truth, this is how I get my start in direct marketing - swiping classified ads that worked, and rewording them (if I got it wrong, it was painful - the ads

cost me $100-300; I learnt to play it safe and swipe from the best early on).

CONCLUSION

The commandments are hard and fast rules that I follow every day to bring in five figures each month from affiliate marketing. My advice is to print off a

copy of the guide and whenever you are about to embark on a new campaign,

refer back to the relevant section.

If you are about to setup a new Adwords campaign, refer back to the rules relating to PPC marketing.

If you are about to select a product, remember to favour new products over old ones, and continue to build your product portfolio. Always have options.

Always track your keywords. Swipe Adwords ad copy from those who have gone before you - or risk wasting money when your ads don’t pull in the clicks.

In short, these rules are timeless techniques that the most profitable affiliates apply day-in, day-out to crush their competition. Now that you know them,

you have won half the battle. The other half is actually applying them each day. And that’s on you.

If you are in need of complete “newbie” assistance, be sure to check out the complete beginner’s guide to affiliate marketing, which was on the Affiliate Commandments download page.

If you are looking for more step-by-step instructions, and profitable methods that I have used that you can literally copy to a tee, you should check out one

of my other guides.

(compiled on basis of public information and private communication)

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