Why Not?

I really can’t see the problem with it.  If I want to buy ad space for a couple pennies a day and push the latest affiliate offer, why the hell can’t I?  It’s my money, right?  Then I started to think that maybe they are just trying to keep the “trash” off their network.  But still, I cannot figure out what is the big deal with me placing an affiliate offer on another persons website or blog and making money with it?

What’s the Big Deal?

Maybe they are just bummed that I am making $30 per sale on Amazon Profits and only paying like .10-.20 per DAY to get that return!  Who knows, people get jealous and you can read all day long about how the “big boys” figure out a way to make more money than the little guy and networks start slapping people around with restrictions and things like that.

Not Through with PW

Although my ads were deleted, I am not going to end my account or anything like that.  The network is still cheap and effective enough that I can use it for my BANS sites.  The traffic is good and the cost per click stays low enough that I don’t have to drain my paypal account to purchase the ads.

So, if you haven’t thought about promoting affiliate offers on PW and want to now, I would advise against it.  I am sure they are going to be keeping an eye out.  Maybe in about one month I will give it a try again, but I really don’t want to get banned, because, like I said, the traffic is cheap for my BANS sites.

Have you had affiliate ads deleted from your account?

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.