Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
This Is Part Three Of “Make Money With Adsense? Pssst… That’s A Thing Of The Past”
10. Monitor Results, Kill Bad Keywords And Keep Top 10-15
Setting up these campaigns is really simple. It’s 100 times easier than making money with Adsense, affiliate marketing, or any other online marketing strategy. These little profit pipelines can grow astronomically. If you set aside $500/month for them, you can easily have one or two profitable campaigns up per month.
The key is to monitor them. They aren’t always profitable forever. Before you see a profit, you usually need to kill a few bad keywords. Well… a lot of bad keywords. This is why tracking each keyword individually is so important.
You can see exactly which keywords are converting with the CPA offer and which aren’t. Many will convert with the offer but barely break even. You need to kill (delete or pause) any keywords in your campaigns that aren’t making a substantial profit.
Once you kill the keywords that aren’t making you money, you should be left with 5-20 keywords that you can leave to run. You just need to check in on them every other day and make note of any changes.
If a keyword stops being profitable, kill it. You can attempt to find more keywords in a niche to replace the bad ones, but it’s often easier to set up new campaigns.
If you’ve found an offer and niche that’s extremely profitable and converting like crazy, scale up the campaign’s budget. For example, if a Sears/Best Buy gift card CPA offer paid out $2 per submit, and after eliminating bad keywords, you’re left with 10 profitable ones, you can scale the campaign.
They could be:
- Sears giftcard
- Sears giftcards
- Sears coupons
- Sears coupon
- Best buy coupon
- Best buy giftcards
- Best buy giftcard 2012
- Sears coupons 2012
- Best Sears deals
- Best buy deals
Let’s say on average you’re paying 20 cents per click, and you’re getting 50 clicks per day, spending $10/day on traffic. After eliminating 20 of the worst performing keywords, your CPA offer is converting at 30%, meaning every 10 visitors result in 3 conversions. So for every $2 spent on traffic, you make $6 in CPA commissions.
Not bad, right? With 50 clicks a day at these conversions, you’d get 15 conversions a day and $30 in CPA commissions. Out of that $30, you’d spend $10 on traffic, profiting a cool $20/day from this one campaign.
At this point, you would try to scale it up. The best way to do this is to:
IMPROVE THE CTR’s (click-through rates) OF YOUR ADS
In PPC, your click-through rate is everything. The higher your CTR, the less you pay and the more money you make. PPC networks display your ads on the side of their search engines for the keywords you’re targeting. The higher they position you in the search results, the more traffic you get.
So to scale up and get more traffic without paying much more, you need to move up in the results. To do this, you need to make your PPC network more money. PPC networks rank ads based on how much money the ads generate for them.
For example, let’s say the advertiser in the top position for your desired keyword is paying $1 per click, and their ad converts at 5%. That means in every 100 people who search for the keyword, 5 click the advertiser’s ad, making the PPC network $5. Now, if your ad is ranked third and also converts at 5%, but your maximum bid is $0.50, the PPC network would still prefer the first advertiser’s ad. But if you write a better ad and it converts at 15%, your ad now makes the PPC network $7.50 per 100 searches, pushing you to the top.
By moving up, you get more exposure, higher CTRs, and more clicks, but you pay less than the advertiser who gets less exposure and traffic. PPC networks care about maximizing revenue per 1000 impressions.
So by writing better ads, split-testing, and getting higher click-through rates, you not only get more clicks, but you also pay less. As your conversion rate improves, you can lower your maximum bid per click, making traffic cheaper and cheaper as you get more of it. Pretty bad ass, right?
The key is to continually split-test everything.
11. Scale Up Or Repeat
Lastly, you can either scale up or repeat. With some campaigns in large niches, you can scale up by adding more keywords and improving click-through rates to get more traffic for less money. Or you can stick to 10 or so “safe long-term bets” keywords and repeat the process by creating more campaigns with different offers.
Adding more keywords and increasing the daily budget of one campaign is risky. It’s easier to create lots of micro-campaigns targeting 10-20 keywords than to create a few campaigns targeting hundreds.
There is more upkeep with larger campaigns. By eliminating keywords and sticking to 10-15 per campaign, the chances of them suddenly becoming unprofitable are slim. The reality is that you’ll make 2-4 times what you spend on traffic with good keywords.
A lot of the time, you won’t make any money because the offers just won’t convert. Fortunately, CPA networks provide statistics like lifetime conversion rates of offers. If a CPA offer says it converts at 10% or higher, it’s excellent. This is because most other publishers send untargeted or barely targeted visitors to offers, suppressing their conversion rates. When you send highly targeted PPC traffic, you can achieve 30% or higher.
In conclusion, this is a pretty kick-ass way to make money online and a great alternative to the old Adsense and SEO strategy or basic affiliate marketing. If you can strategically put campaigns together, do a little research, and have common sense, try it out…
You have been paid late before
You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
Read the contract →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
…And hopefully, if you’ve read this without intending to pursue the strategy, it has helped you justify spending money on traffic.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments, and questions below.
Comments
Merry, May 20 2012, 14:34
Thanks very much, I was looking for this.
Brian, May 20 2012, 15:12
How much would you spend on a keyword before getting rid of it? For example, if you are paying 50 cents per click, how do you determine when to stop spending on it?
Samira L., May 21 2012, 09:45
This is an incredible post! The level of detail you go into for setting up profitable PPC campaigns is impressive. It’s clear that you have a lot of experience in this area. I appreciate the tips on how to monitor and adjust keywords to maximize profitability. Keep up the great work!
Arvind T., May 21 2012, 10:23
I find it hard to believe that scaling up with such precision can be this effective. Is there any data or case study you could share that shows the success rate of this strategy? I’m skeptical but intrigued.
Helen K., May 21 2012, 11:08
This article raises a few questions for me. How do you manage the risk of losing money on campaigns that don’t convert as expected? Do you have a backup plan in place if things go south?
Carlos M., May 21 2012, 12:45
While I appreciate the effort that went into this post, I feel that some of the strategies might not be as effective in today’s market. With the increased competition and changes in PPC algorithms, do you think these methods still hold up?
Ravi P., May 21 2012, 13:32
Hey David, it’s been a while since we last connected. I hope you’re doing well! Your insights are always on point. Let’s catch up soon over coffee. We should definitely discuss some of these strategies in person.
Lucia G., May 21 2012, 14:18
This post really resonates with me. I had a similar issue with bad keywords draining my budget without any return. It took a lot of trial and error, but I finally found a few profitable keywords by following a similar approach. Your post validates my experience.
Andrea P., May 21 2012, 15:03
I recently came across a tool called SpyFu that helps in identifying competitors’ keywords. It’s been quite useful for me in refining my campaigns. You might want to check it out if you haven’t already.
Naomi L., May 21 2012, 15:47
Thank you for this insightful post, David. I’ve learned a lot about how to effectively manage and scale PPC campaigns. Your advice on keyword monitoring is something I will definitely implement in my own strategies.
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Every other day, forever, across however many campaigns you’re running. I work twelve-hour night shifts. When exactly am I killing bad keywords at 3am?
Fine, that schedule is brutal for anyone on nights. But zoom out — the whole model needs daily babysitting to work. That’s not Nia’s stamina failing. That’s the strategy.
Marla’s right that it needs daily babysitting, I did exactly that for years before this line of work. What she’s underselling is that the babysitting is the whole skill, not a chore layered on top of a good strategy. Kill the bad keywords fast enough and the model works. Kill them slow, or worse, kill the wrong ones out of impatience, and it eats you alive either way.
Input: 30 keywords. Process: kill non-performers over roughly two weeks. Output: 5-20 keywords retained. The failure point nobody diagrams is step zero — finding a CPA offer converting above 10% in the first place. Everything after that is just arithmetic on a number this post assumes you already have.
Tomas, the ‘check in every other day, kill anything not making a substantial profit’ step is exactly the kind of thing I’d have running as a scheduled job by week two. Pull each keyword’s conversion count from the CPA network’s reporting API every morning, compare it against your target rate, auto-pause anything that’s fallen under it for three days running, and only ping me when a whole campaign needs a human decision. Took me a weekend to build the first version, and I’ve reused the same script structure for every campaign since. What doesn’t automate cleanly is the part right after — deciding whether to hunt for more keywords in a dying niche or just start a new campaign from scratch. That’s still a judgment call every single time, and I haven’t found a way to script judgment yet.
The strongest case against Trina’s script: the post says you might kill a keyword and then ‘attempt to find more keywords in the niche to replace the bad ones.’ That’s judgment, not a rule you can encode — knowing when a niche is exhausted versus just having a bad week. Automate the killing and you might automate away the one signal telling you to quit the niche entirely.
Week three was where my third campaign fell over, not because the niche died, just a bad run of clicks. I almost killed it on Walt’s ‘automate it’ logic. Held off two more days, checked by hand, and it turned around. Small sample, but that’s exactly the judgment call he’s describing.