Affiliate marketing is huge on the holidays.  I have been keeping up on research and watching some of the more popular blogs in this niche.  This year I thought I would give affiliate marketing via PPC a try and see where it goes.

The first thing I needed to do was go through all the mother’s day type offers that I can promote via Neverblueads.  I wanted to find the one that paid out the highest per sale.  I settled on an online flower shop figuring many people will be shopping for flowers online.  Especially loved ones that cannot make it home for mothers day.  This way I can purchase clicks for keywords like “buy flowers online” “online flower shop” “mothers day deals”, etc.

The second thing that I wanted to do was find a domain name that I could purchase.  Why do I need a domain you ask?  Well, I wanted to be able to use a keyword rich domain name that was similar to terms that might be used via search to find flowers online.  I settled with www.mothers-day-specials.com.

I think it’s a nice domain.  Right to the point and a .com.  One issue I do have, although small, are the dashes in the domain.  I wish I could have gotten away with that, but since this is my first attempt, I left it be so I could concentrate on setting up some PPC campaigns.

Since I am signed up for every search engine that has a PPC program, I had to decide which to use.  Most people would go with Google because the search is used so often.  I only have a budget of $50 for this experiment, so I wanted to do this on a smaller scale search engine.  I chose Ask.com Sponsored Listings.

I figured it this way.  If the search engine is used a bit less, I have a better chance to get into the top position for less money per click.  I know that my odds of coverting are less too, with less users online at Ask.com (compared to Google), but this is my first experiment and I want to be able to track every step.  Smaller is better in this case.

I started off with ONE ad.  I created a simple ad that stated our website had mothers day specials.  Keywords that link to my domain and the holiday, perfect!  Then I wanted to come up with keywords.  I listed about 5 keyword phrases including “mothers day specials” and “buy flowers online”.  I knew I was getting clicks from these, but how much will I have to pay?

It turns out that I was not going to have to pay that much to gain top position with Ask.com.  I know that without a doubt I wasn’t going to get the same clicks for this price over at Google.  Cool!  I set my daily budget at $5 and my max CPC for this campaign at .10.

Then I went through the 5-6 keywords, viewing the traffic estimates and wanted to up the CPC on the two key phrases I listed above, to ensure top position.  I put the CPC at .70 on these for starters.  Now, I am ready and want a small test.  I ran the ad for ONE day to see the click results.

After one day of running up to $5 budget, I had 17 clicks.  Now, this looks promising.  All I have to do is set the ad to show on the weekend of mothers day and see what happens.  The reason I pick that weekend is because most people that get flowers for mom are having them shipping in less than 3 days.  It didn’t really pay to run that ad longer, since I would most likely be paying for clicks that won’t convert.

*Update*

Here are my final results.  The bottom shot is from my Neverblueads.com stats page for the month of May (up to Mothers Day).  You can see that I didn’t have any impressions and that is because it was forwarded to the landing page.  You can also see that I had over 100 clicks, but ZERO coversions.

This was sort of a surprise, because I thought I might get at least one conversion.  My budget was only $50, but according to Ask.com stats, only spent $37.90 on this campaign.  With the payout set at $12 per sale I only needed 4 clicks to convert to make my money back.  Even if the ad converted 10% of the time I would have made $126.00!

Summary

So, basically I set up an ad with Ask.com sponsored listings thinking I could get a higher rank for less, which I did.  My average position was 1.09 at a CPC of .40.  I ran the ad the weekend one day initially to test for position and then again on the weekend of Mother’s Day.  The results weren’t bad, but ZERO conversions stings a little.  I am not sure why this one didn’t convert, but that tells me that I have some things to learn yet.

My campaign only cost me $37.90, which isn’t bad.  Seeing that I had top position most of the time, I don’t think it would have mattered if I spent more per click.  My daily budget was only set at $5, so that might have been a problem.  We’ll have to take a look at all these things, for now it’s still early in the game, so I have to get back to reading.