I remember my first $1000 day. I’m talking about $1000 profit, not sales - anyone can do that! (Like the old adage about eBay: “How do you make a million dollars on eBay? Easy - start with two million!”).
My first $1000 day was a milestone, and validated some ideas I had months earlier. Like many of us, I had ‘dabbled’, making a little money here and there, often loosing more than I was making. It occurred to me that chasing the “Next Big Thing” was part of the problem. The other part was a little more was a little more complex, but the answer was the same: I could make money. What I really needed to do was pick one thing I was doing, figure out where I was making money with it, distill it into a step-by-step process, and automate as much of the process as I could.
The Explanation
We all know the ‘profitable ad’ premise. We also know the biggest potential sinkers, not having the ‘profitable’ ad’s exact keyword list, and not knowing which keywords in it are profitable.
(Remember that when you identify a profitable campaign and copy it, you don’t know if you are using the whole keyword list that the profitable campaign is using. Which means you may or may not even have the keywords that make it profitable! As a general rule, most keywords don’t convert, and of those that do, only some of them do so profitably).
Until just recently, there were two remaining missing pieces: getting that keyword list, and determining keyword profitability. In the last few weeks, I found my missing pieces.
There are 3 pieces to the puzzle: An ad spying program such as GCD (which most of you already have), keyword tracking (some of you are using GCA, I personally have switched to Affiliate Radar. For me, it’s simpler and more effective. However, GCA can accomplish the task if you get it working and set it up correctly).
Quick Tip: Affiliate Radar has an excellent free PPC ebook at the site that I highly recommend whether you use it or not. Its all about ad spying and how to be successful in this ‘new age’ of PPC.
The last piece is brand new, and it’s what makes all this possible. KeywordSpy will actually give you the entire keyword list that an ad is using. I can’t stress the significance of this strongly enough! This is the ONLY way to insure you have a profitable campaigns profitable keywords, what makes this a safe, certain, repeatable profit generator.
Quick Tip: KeywordSpy has an excellent video demo and free (limited) trial at their site.
Making this work requires effort, but you should expect it to. There are no free lunches! However, my own testing is working so far, and the ideas are sound. Besides, isn’t making a lot of money safely and repeatably why we’ve already spent so much time and money already??
The Particulars
Without making this email TOO long, here are the steps I’m using - the logic should be self-evident:
1) Pick a niche, any niche.
2) Use your favorite keyword tool to generate a small (25-50) keyword list of primary keywords. (I use Wordtracker)
3) Feed your keyword list into GCD and bake.
4) When you have identified your ‘profitable ad’, feed that keyword into KeywordSpy.
5) Match your GCD profitable ad to the corresponding ad in KeywordSpy.
6) Use KeywordSpy to get the keyword list for that ad. (How do I know this works? I tested it’s output against some of my own campaigns to see if it actually came up with the list. It did)
7) Feed that keyword list into Affiliate Radar (GCA will work if you have it set up properly).
8 ) Launch the ad campaign.
9) Use Affiliate Radar to eliminate the unprofitable keywords.
10) Lather, rinse, repeat…
While this is not “Get Rich Quick” Black Magic (there is no such thing) - it has the one most important attribute: IT WORKS. Reliably. Repeatably. Safely.
You can now (mostly) automate the process end-to-end of identifying a profitable campaign, getting it’s keyword list, launching competing ad campaigns, tracking the keywords, and ditching the losers. The result? Exactly what the original GCD pre-launch dream sold you, except all the pieces are now available.
So far I’ve been ‘testing’ this process only a short time. But it’s behaving exactly as I would expect. And should continue to do so, because the premise is completely sound.
As always, feel free to send any comments or questions!
Melanie
9 responses so far ↓
1 william // Aug 14, 2007 at 2:00 am
great post melanie
Do you have a link for keywordspy?
william….
2 admin // Aug 14, 2007 at 6:41 am
Hi William,
Thanks for your consideration! My link for KeywordSpy is: http://www.keywordspy.com?aid=mullman99.
Let me know if you sign up and I will get you over a bonus package!
Melanie
3 Frank // Aug 25, 2007 at 12:02 am
Hi Melanie,
Speaking of $1,000, I’m several steps behind you…I’m about to have my first $1,000 profit month!
And now my wife is beginning to think there might just be something in this Internet Marketing business!
4 Melanie // Aug 25, 2007 at 1:33 am
Frank, thats FANTASTIC!
Keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll bigger months, bigger weeks, and bigger days!
5 Ron // Jan 25, 2008 at 2:31 am
Hi Melanie
I’m a bit unclear on your steps. I’m hoping you can clarify my misunderstanding…
In step 4, we identify a profitable ad by using GCD/AdSpyPro/AffiliateElite/etc. We then feed the primary keyword (out of the original list of 25-50 from step 2) which is the one related to this profitable ad into KeywordSpy.
This will then display the top websites which are competing for that primary keyword.
What do we do with this info?
I don’t understand what you mean in step 5.
In step 6, we plug in the display URL from the profitable ad into KeywordSpy in order to get the full list of keywords that ad is using.
I’m clear on the rest of the steps.
I’m just confused between steps 4 and 5.
Thanks for the great blog!
6 Melanie // Jan 25, 2008 at 8:31 am
Hi Ron,
The idea behind this system is that identifying a profitable ad campaign is only half the equation. Keep in mind that for most campaigns, some keywords are profitable, some aren’t. Ad spying will give you the ad half.
By feeding that info into AdSpyPro, you get the other half, the keywords that your profitable campaign is using.
Hope that helps - feel free to post again if that isn’t clear, and definitely let us know how you do!
7 Ron // Jan 25, 2008 at 11:39 am
I have a feeling I’m still missing something…
Let me rephrase the steps as I’ve understood them:
1- pick a niche
2- chose a few relevant root keywords
3- use these keywords to do ad spying (with Google Cash Detective, AdSpyPro, Affiliate Elite, etc)
4- Once you have the profitable ad, then plug in the display URL of that ad into KeywordSpy in order to get all/most of the keywords which that ad is using
5- Create your own Google ads, using the same keywords found in KeywordSpy for the profitable URL, and mimic the ad copy of the profitable ad
6- Monitor the real profitability of your own keywords by using AffiliateRadar
Have I missed anything?
Thanks for your help.
Do let me know if you ever want to take on a willing student in order to build a great testimonial case study for an upcoming marketing product
8 Melanie // Jan 25, 2008 at 3:56 pm
Ron, you got it - said it better than I could!
If you feel you aren’t understanding it as well as you wrote it out, you are welcome to email me directly. My address is melanie at melanies attic dot com.
9 Ron // Jan 27, 2008 at 2:34 am
Thanks Melanie.
I’m glad I’ve properly understood the steps you listed.
I also had one more question:
Using a tool such as KeywordSpy, we can very quickly get many keywords which our competitors are using. My initial tests resulted in getting around 20K to 50K keyword terms.
Aside from using AffiliateRadar to do keyword level tracking, and splitting up the keywords into relatively focused ads and ad copy, do you have any tips as to how to do the initial keyword filtering?
I’m assuming that you wouldn’t just plug in all of the 20K+ keyword terms to start off with….or would you?
I was thinking of starting by getting rid of all single word keyword terms.
Then, since KeywordSpy only exports the keywords (without the extra stat info available on the web site), I would put these keywords into something like Keywords Analyzer or WordZe in order to see the search traffic on each keyword. I would sort by the search traffic, and only go with keywords that had a decent amount of traffic.
I would be very interested in hearing your tips on how to do initial keyword cleaning once you rip them out of KeywordSpy.
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