I shared this recently with a colleague and he suggested I pass it on. Often, when you are looking to get into a market, you get in without doing some quick math in your head and a few searches to determine if you should do that $500.00 ad spend in AdWords as a test. When you find a potential market, spend ten minutes to determine if it can be profitable. If it can be, then turn on the PPC test to see if it can convert well for you. Sometimes, a great market just wont convert well for you it happens and it is best to know as soon as possible if the market is a dud. But make sure you do these steps first:
In this example, I will use ClickBank, which sells mostly eBooks. You can apply these steps to any affiliate program or network.
Step One: Write down the industry, exact eBook name and author.
Step Two: Write down the commission per sale.
Step Three: Based on a conversion ratio of 3%, project revenue. (while I realize that 3% seems high, it is what you should expect with the right targeted keywords, the right product and the right landing page).
Step Four: Write down your break even point in terms of Cost Per Click (CPC).
Step Five: Open the Keyword Tool in Google AdWords
Step Six: Enter the main keyword or the merchants site
Step Seven: Show Estimated CPC, Search Volume Trends and Highest Volume Occurred In (drop down Choose Columns to Display)
Step Eight: Change Match Type to Exact (we dont want non-qualified clicks)
Step Nine: Sort by Estimated CPC (highest first)
Step Ten: Scroll down to the range of the break even point you wrote down in Step Four. You must have at least 300 in Search Volume from the month prior to consider using the keyword phrase. This will give you ten potential searchers per day.
Step Eleven: Verify that at least 100 clicks per day can be had with the keywords which match the above criteria.
Step Twelve: Re-run Traffic Estimator and target the actual product name and the authors name and look for traffic estimates of ten clicks or more.
Lets do an example together:
1. Dog Training. Kingdom of Pets: SitStayFetch by Daniel Stevens
2. $31.23
3. $93.69 ($31.23 x 3) 3 sales is based on 100 visitors at 3% conversion (most will state that this conversion ratio is too high, but because we will focus on the keywords that sell, this is the minimum that you should expect).
4. $0.94 ($93.69/100) Paying $0.94 per click would break even on the campaign.
5. N/A
6. I prefer to target the merchants site, as it often gives me a faster pull of effective keywords. I can also use SpyFu as outlined in yesterdays edition. So I put in: http://www.kingdomofpets.com/
7-9. N/A
10. The first section are keywords related to how to train which is the focus of the site and the keywords we want to focus on to sell the guide. Here are the ones that I selected:
how to train dog ($0.96) 74,000. Yes, this is above the range, but just barely and it is highly focused.
how to train my dog ($.90) 3,600
how to train a puppy ($0.80) 27,100
how to train puppies ($0.56) 3,600
The other sections? You can target them, but you will need to create a new landing page for each because each has a different market and we want to keep our conversions as high as possible.Here are some ideas:
dog training collar – this would be an eCommerce product sale rather than an informational eBook.
dog trainer – with the slumping economy, many could be looking to moonlight to help make ends meet. This could spur you to create your own product on how to make a career out of being a dog trainer. There is plenty of information to pull from on the web and being the merchant often is the ticket you have been looking for.
dog bark – this is a problem. By targeting your landing page to show how the problem can be solved quickly, easily and affordably is what the prospect is seeking.
This is where out of the box thinking comes in. Business opportunities can come anytime and anywhere, but you must seize the opportunity.
11. Verified. On the conservative side, 3,000 searches per day should result in at least 100 clicks.
12. Searching for kingdom of pets, sitstayfetch, sit stay fetch and daniel stevens did not return results which were usable.
With the above, it can be assumed since we can get over 100 clicks per day at around the break even point that this would be a product worth pursuing. A $50-$300.00 PPC test would be worthwhile.
PPC Tip: I learned this one from Dan Thies over at SEOFastStart.com and StomperNet Faculty member. Make your bids half of what the top bid is, so if you do this, then you can target keywords at DOUBLE your break-even point to gain more qualified click throughs.
