Things have been slow over the last couple of weeks, which is making me think that maybe Santa Claus visits on a more regular basis than my Clickbank checks?;) However, not to get too disheartened I continue to be productive and plan other options that I may want to try and test over the next few days.

Some days affiliate marketing is about as frustrating as trying to flush a beach-ball down my toilet! You have a great few days and then nothing for weeks, similar to to the situation a constipated donkey would find itself in.

But as this is a challenge I did not expect it to go easy anyway, so I’ll take everything in step and try to learn as much as I can from it.

With Christmas just around the corner I have been leaning more toward physical products in Commission Junction, and have been researching select products at Plimus too. I’ve been asking around and it does seem that around this time of year down-loadable products do suffer a slow down, with people pushing more for physical products instead.

To get an idea of what people are buying I have been researching using Ebay Pulse, which shows you the most popular searches people are making at Ebay. The other method I’m using is Amazon.com. I visit Amazon and search a category from the drop-down box, then I sort the order by bestselling first.

Using both of these methods I can get good ideas of what hot items people are looking at buying right now. Obviously I can use my Amazon affiliate link to promote the product, but I always look first at cj.com to see if I can get a better commission rate than the 5% I get from Amazon.

I’ll be using more articles and other free promotion ideas to try and make a few sales with the physical products I select.

But for now, back to work.

This is the practical part of the post where im going to pull all kinds of numbers from my articles, clickbank, and also some sub-domains to find out how they are all performing up until this point. I’ll then use this as a guide as to what I need to change and improve upon to hopefully increase my final goal, which is more sales.

Lets get right down to business and find out how the first article that made a sale for me is performing. This product is listed in Clickbank, and I’ve used this article to promote it using a direct link via a PHP redirect from Articlesbase.

So the first step will be to head on over to Articlesbase and click on my articles statistics page to get a look at what views this article has taken so far.

Here is the stats for that article ..

The important parts to get from the stats above are the total article views, which in my case is 290. The next part you want to make a note of to move on to the next step is the date of the article submission. The article above was first submitted on 10/22/2009(US Date Format).

So to recap… Note down your total article views, and also the date of submission.

• 290 Article Views
• 10/22/2009 Date Of Submission

Now I have this info I can then move on to the next step, which means we have to visit Clickbank.com and log into our affiliate account.

Once inside your CB(Clickbank) account you need to enter the analytics section. To do this click on “Reporting” in the navigation bar at the top of the site, then click on “Analytics” in the sub menu. You should now be on a page full of stats and other fun charts to browse through. But what we want to focus on in this step is this part…

What you want to do on this analytics  page is make sure the “View As” option is set to “Affiliate” as above. If not then just hit the small circle right next to the affiliate option. You should now see some different stats displayed.

Once we have our affiliate stats displayed, we now need to change the default date. What we want to do here is change the date that is currently displaying our affiliate stats, to only display our stats from the exact day we submitted our article that we noted down from the article page in the first step.

So in my case I want CB to show me my affiliate stats from 10/22/2009, to this present day. Here is how to do it.

Look for the “Date Range” part as above. Click on the drop down arrow and select “Custom range”. Once you select custom range your analytics page should update and display your custom date input, it’s here that you need to enter the date your article went live.

As you can see I entered 10/22/2009 as my start date, and then selected today’s date which just happened to be 12/08/2009 at the time of writing this post. Once you hit GO your analytics stats will again update showing you all the clicks to your affiliate products from your start date, all the way down to the current day.

For this next part to work, it’s critical to use a tracking ID with your Clickbank hoplinks whenever you write a new article. I cover this in detail in my clickbank tracking post if you want to find out how to do this.

If you are using tracking ID’s in your hoplinks, we are going to make use of them in this next step.

What we are going to do now is narrow down all the analytics data by selecting tracking ids from the CB menu on the left side of the page, you should see something like this.

You will notice many different options on the left of this page like Hops, Order Form Impressions, Sales and so on, you have the option to select Tracking ID’s in each one of these options to narrow down your stats, but as I know this article already made a sale I decided to narrow my tracking id’s by clicking the sales option.

If you are yet to make a sale, using the Hops option and the tracking id within that menu will do just fine. Again once you click on Tracking ID your page will again update with new information, and it’s in this information that we need to look for the tracking id we used for that particular article.

In a nutshell what you see above is my articles tracking id and how many clicks it has attracted, which I narrowed down by using the custom date range. So since this article was published it has taken 41 clicks on the link contained within that article.

Now what we need to do is remember our total article views from the first step, which will let you see how many times your article has been viewed by people. In my case this article was viewed 290 times already.

I have two numbers to work with now that will tell me what percentage of people that read my article, actually click through to the products page via my affiliate link. The two numbers are…

• 41
• 290

To find out the percentage all you have to do is simply divide 41 by 290 then multiply by 100.

41/290 = 0.14 *100 = 14%

So this article has a 14% click through rate, which I believe is not too bad, but I think a good avg CTR(click through rate) would probably be about 30%.

However this article did make a sale, so while im at this point I’ll also figure out what the actual sales conversion rate is for this product. To do this I’ll use the 41 hoplink clicks because its this number that is showing me the actual visits to the products sales page. As I’ve only made 1 sale so far from this article the sum will look like this….

1/41 = 0.024 *100 = 2.4%

A 2.4% conversion rate for this product, which again I believe is a pretty standard percentage for downloadable products.

Now im aware that my article has a 14% CTR, and this product coverts at 2.4%. But again I want to go one further and work out what percentage of people that view my article actually buy this product.

1/290 * 100 = .34%

.34%, obviously I need to work on improving this in the future, but at least I know what numbers im dealing with, so I now have a target to compare any improvements up against.

14% People Click The Article Affiliate Link.

2.4% People That Clicked The Article Link Buy The Product.

.34% People Visit The Article, Then Go On To Buy It.

That’s my benchmark above. Can I beat it when I use sub domain mini sites rather than direct links? Find out in PART 3.

Ok I lied! Because this post is so long and I really want to go into detail, I’ll be extending this into a 3rd part. Next post will show you how I get my stats and conversions from my sub domains.

Here is a sorry sight for your eyes, and to also show that I have some work ahead of me to make the new affiliate challenge I set for myself yesterday. That picture is from my Clickbank account, nothing to write home about huh:)

After I finished the post yesterday I went on to write 4 articles on some Clickbank products I had in mind. I picked the products based on the fact that they converted in PPC, and as I cannot use PPC anymore I wanted to give them a try using only free traffic methods.

I’m going to start with 5 products, 2 from clickbank, 2 from plimus.com, and a CPA offer via PepperJam.com. Again some of the products were selected because of a successful PPC campaign in the past, and a couple of others I researched into them and decided that they too had a really good chance of converting.

The articles will be based around keywords for that product, each one will be 100% original and written by me only. I started with ArticleBase and GoArticles because they seem to publish your articles so much quicker than EzineArticles, but I do have a few articles waiting to be published with Ezine. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Because I am aiming at writing a lot of articles, I wanted to make sure that the product selection I am going with is at least enjoyable to write about, I also went with products I had some general knowledge in as well, this will cut down on research time and any other fact finding issues.

Three articles went live yesterday so I’ll spend some time working on some back-links to each article, just making sure I spread out the link love over a period of time, and not bring them all in at once.

I made sure I selected the keywords correctly making sure there was not a great deal of competition, but also that the keyword did have decent traffic all at the same time. Long-tail keywords will be mostly used in order to try and grab some top listings in the search engines, so I can eventually grab that traffic for free!

Thursday Jan 1st

Following the info millionaire newsletter 01 in which it describes how to use a Ninja program, I researched Clickbank for some products, found a couple that interested me and the stats looked good too, but before I jumped into it I did a little more keyword related research using Market Samurai and Wordtracker, some CB products give you the best converting keywords, but the two I picked did not, so I did that manually.

Now with my two CB products, one a DVD set, the other a piece of software, I entered all my keywords/title’s/link/article text into the Ninja program, once that was completed I jumped right into Adwords to set up the campaigns.

Once in adwords I again entered all the keyword information, set budget which was only $15 per day for each of the two campaigns ($30 Total;)), then set the cost per click (CPC) at $0.15 as my default value, targeted just the USA and Canada at first, as a tip you might want to use Google Insights to see what other countries are searching for your keywords, then enter them into the target location in adwords.

After all my costs were set writing the first Ad was fun, again using all the marketing words I could think of  like “buy this now or their will be trouble!!”;)), or just maybe DISCOVER, SECRET,ULTRA,DOUGHNUTS, that’s probably more like it?, once the Ad was written I hit launch campaign, usually as soon as I launch I jump back into Ad variations within adwords and write at least another ad to split test them against each other.

After my first product adwords was launched I started to write the second CB product campaign just as I did the first, I used about 15 keywords for both ad campaigns each. As soon as I launched the second adwords campaign I checked in on the first to see how it was going, its a good thing to do this early because sometimes your default bid will be too low to show on the first search results page for your keyword terms, which was the case this time so I adjusted each one to boost it up to at least a 1-4 ad position ($0.20-$0.40).

I check the ads manually using the google search to see where they rank, sometimes they will not show for a bit but give it a while and they should pop up, that’s a good thing to remember about adwords, their stats can be slightly behind what is actually happening, which was the case for the first sale of the day, I checked CB to see a purchase made already, then I hit the transactions tab in CB only to see the first sale was made about 10mins after my ad launched, which was lucky because the buyer also purchased the up-sell offer too, great success;)).

Most of the time after that was spent jumping between CB and adwords, basically refining keyword placement and also adding another ad variations for both campaigns, just after this I got my 2nd sale of the day which was for the software program, so now Ive sold one of each, at this time I was as happy as a pig in S%!t as they say;), but as you can tell this time was very exciting for me.

Again back checking the adwords stats because when you increase your CPC for a keyword, so can your competition too, so you may find yourself at pos 1 then a few mins later you could be back down to 4-6 again!, so keep checking this and make sure you push up your most relevant qualified keywords at least in the top 4 positions.

40 mins later I made my 4th and final sale of that day which got the days total to $159.28!!, great!!,  trying to sleep that night was tough, I just wanted to get up and do it all again!, unfortunately I had that “real world” job I have to attend, So I launched my campaigns and pulled myself away from the computer to get to work:-/.

After work I came back to check things out, but the same luck did not knock on my door this day, probably because of the fact I was not their to look over it and tweak settings, but regardless my CB account was at zero for the day so far, which made me jump back into CB and search for another product;), third time’s a charm right;)).

All I did for the third CB product was replicate the method I used for the others and launch it, all the time keeping an eye on the adwords stats, this products ad seemed to get allot of clicks but no real buyers, I think at one time I had about 6 ad variations going at the same time!, which I then narrowed down to the best three, I really had to work for this one but eventually I made a sale here too;), only $13.06 but its still a sale and a welcome guest on my CB check!.

No sales from my first two campaigns that day, and actually since then either, for the last two days as you see above its at a big fat zero:-/,  maybe it was just luck, or maybe the fact that I had to work those days too, but either way it was a great week that blew any other week Ive had in internet marketing out the water!.

Im going to carry on with the same products tomorrow, but this time Ive added an analytics script to the Ninja file, this will help me find out which keywords are bringing the sales in as they happen, when you have trigger happy searchers clicking on your ads but not buying you can get through that $15 pretty quick, so with a way to track exactly where the buyers come from, I can narrow down to just a few quality keywords, then spend more on the CPC to get them into the top position spot.

Again I will keep you posted in the comments below, if you have any questions about this post please comment below and I’ll get right back to you;)..

]]> http://www.flopidle.com/80/info-millionaire-1st-week-recap/feed/ 5