Comments on: Turning Dimes Into Dollars: The Basics Of Low-Bid PPC

By: sl7

sl7 — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:04:02 +0000

low-bid tactics sound good, but i think it is hard to implement especially with G Adwords if you expect considerable traffic to your landing pages

By: heitz23

heitz23 — Fri, 18 May 2007 23:21:46 +0000

Great Post! I had a quick question regarding your ppc bids. After generating your large list of keywords for your particular niche, do you typically set your keywords on “exact match” or “broad match” to get the best results? Any help would be great appreciated, keep up the great posts!

By: DrHowe

DrHowe — Fri, 04 May 2007 05:22:58 +0000

@ Danger

Todd probably doesn’t have huge quality score issues because if he was already making affiliate sales through organic search, then he already has a website optimized for what he’s promoting. That’s my guess at least.

Quality score really kills you if you try to go direct to merchant or you create a landing page that google smacks as “irrelevant” regardless of if it is or not.

By: DrHowe

DrHowe — Thu, 03 May 2007 22:05:55 +0000

Killer post Todd. Very valuable. I still get a little side tracked with keyword research. What tools or programs do you use or recommend? I love AWalls free keyword tool and you’re right his typo gen tool is very nice too. Wondering if you also use Wordze, Wordtracker, etc. to create huge lists or are you more of a HitWise long-tail chaser?

By: CVOS

CVOS — Thu, 03 May 2007 04:26:36 +0000

Comission Junction has a fairly good selection of affiliate programs in the UK and other European Countries. Just looks for programs that payout in pounds.

By: Todd Mintz

Todd Mintz — Tue, 01 May 2007 22:40:38 +0000

Rick, this approach works best in a market where you already have some affiliate familiarity. Try to find a European equivalent of something you are already doing. Also, look for “off network” programs in underserved niches.

By: Rick Gregory

Rick Gregory — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:55:49 +0000

Todd,

Any suggestions on European affiliate programs?

By: Todd Mintz

Todd Mintz — Tue, 01 May 2007 21:18:38 +0000

Different campaigns within one account work fine.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:26:26 +0000

Do you create a new Google account for each new merchant or do you just create a new campaign inside of an existing account?

By: Todd Mintz

Todd Mintz — Tue, 01 May 2007 17:16:38 +0000

Dangerlarson

If your initial quality score gives you a minimum bid 40 cents or less, you can potentially “earn” your way to a much lower minimum bid if your ads perform well. Under this scenario, I would tell Google not to show my ad above Position #3 and I would not deviate at all from the “Sideways Arrow” ad creation philisophy outlined in the article. In almost every case where this happened, my minimum bids dropped to 10-20 cent level. Also, even initially, if I was bidding 40 cents, I rarely paid that much.

Now if you are assigned a minimum bid of $1 plus, you’re not likely to drive your bid down to 10 cents.

Also, I found that when I dropped 100+ misspellings into a particular campaign, the bid range amongst all the misspelled keywords never was that great…usually not more than 20-30 cents. I never saw 10 cent keywords with $1+ misspellings in the same campaign.

Andrew…you are right, this is much harder to do in the US though I’m sure there are some hidden niches where it could be done.