Improve Your Internet Marketing

Ad spying is based on the premise that if an affiliate ad is running long enough it must be profitable, or else the owner wouldn’t continue to pay for it. Ads cost money, and if they aren’t returning more profit than they cost, they don’t last too long.

There are caveats to that theory, most notably that 1) many who run campaigns are either too busy, too distracted, or just don’t realize a campaign isn’t profitable and continue to run the ads, 2) some very profitable keywords may be pulling the weight for many unprofitable ones and we don’t know which are which, 3) we may not even have identified all the keywords, 4) it may be profitable because their CPC’s are lower that ours, etc.

As recently as the beginning of the year, “ad spying” was still something you did manually on a spreadsheet, if you did it at all. Ad spying was not practical on any kind of scale.

Seemingly all at once, a number of automated ad spying programs were put on the market. Google Cash Detective (GCD), AdSpyPro, Undercover Profits, and ZamDoo are probably the most widely known and used.

Because I was one of those doing manual ad tracking, I was immediately sold by GCD, one of the first to be widely marketed. I won’t go into the gory details here, but if you’ve been on any of the Internet Marketing forums, you probably heard about the horrific, ongoing debacle of GCD. I dropped $500 on GCD within minutes of the initial launch - I was customer #64 - and spent the next 2 months regretting my decision. Great concept, awful implementation and support.

While struggling with GCD, AdSpyPro was released. At $47, it seemed a very attractive alternative to GCD. I bought it and began using it the day it became available. Unfortunately, though not plagued by the support issues that compounded insult on injury at GCD, I found that program limited and not robust enough for the kind of use a serious Internet Marketer required.

Not long after purchasing AdSpyPro, I heard about ZamDoo. It seemed to offer all the advanced features I required, with none of the limitations of AdSpyPro. Importantly, support was exceptional, and their forum was active, friendly, and helpful.

I have since received a full refund on GCD. I no longer run AdSpyPro, and have made the decision to use ZamDoo as my tool of choice.

I use my own tried & true strategy to profit from ad spying:

1) Start by picking a niche. Research, brainstorm, gut feelings, or random guessing. But thats where I start.

2) Develop a small primary keyword list (50-100 kw’s).

3) Plug the keyword list into your ad spying program. I still run GCD and I am also running AdSpyPro, but am absolutely sold on ZamDoo.

4) Create an ad campaign. Nowadays, I look for the ‘best’ ads as a starting point. Sometimes I’ll try to improve them right away, sometimes I’ll split-test the original with variations.

5) Track my keywords as carefully as possible - I use Affiliate Radar.

6) If the ads show promise, I copy the campaigns over to Yahoo and Adcenter.

7) Work to expand the keyword list.

If the ads continue to do well, I’ll buy a domain name and go to Elance or Rentacoder and have a landing page built.

I am using Affiliate Radar to handle the tracking part of the equation, as well as copying campaigns between search engines.

I use Wordtracker as my primary keyword research tool. I develop an initial keyword list, and if the campaigns show promise, I’ll build on it. For that I use about a dozen different programs, but rely pretty heavily on Google’s LSI keyword generator.

FWIW, I’ve been thinking of moving over to Nichebot as my primary tool, which included Wordtracker’s database. I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone who uses Nichebot.