Adwords is a fairly easy system to use. Generating traffic with Adwords is quick and simple and can be mind numbingly expensive. Commission Junction is an Affiliate Broker with a lot of Companies that want people to sell their products-though most are not all that Adwords friendly.
The general idea is that you have a website about say, Cooking, and then you become an Affiliate for a company that sells pots and pans and the like. Running an Adwords campaign is one way to drive traffic to the site and hoepfully make some sales. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to whip up a blog or two that with heavy Affiliate Content, but that has not worked for me. As with any other blog you have to build a readership and have something to say worth reading. Adwords optimization only works when there is a good page at the other end of the click.
I can write an OK Adwords Ad that gets clicks, but I have never been very good at finding a way of turning that Adword traffic into cold hard cash. The sad fact of the matter is that I am not that good at building landing pages. I can drive traffic to my blogs and even get a few clicks. The cost of Adwords pay per click has always outweighed the profit from Commission Junction. There is some rule that says only one out of a hundred Adwords clicks turns into a sale-which is not all that great if your only making a dollar or two per sale. Which is why you want large commissions on large sales. I haven’t sold any 20 thousand dollar items with my Adwords business yet.
As with everything else in my life, I never devote myself fully to the task of selling the products that I am a Commission Junction affiliate for. I have made a few dollars with Commission Junction, just over a hundred, over the last year. It is exciting become an affiliate, but it is ultimately disappointing to fail in your goals of making a lot of money. I have never viewed being an Affiliate as a Job, a Career, or even as a Second Income-as with everything else in life it takes work to succeed. I have had some success with using Adwords make money, but not enough.
Being an Amazon Associate has paid better over the last 12 months-a little over 250 dollars.
Adsense has been the best steady earner for my blogs-almost 900 dollars for the past 12 months. A little over 1200 dollars is not bad, but it’s not Quit Your Day Job Money.
While looking over my stats for the past 12 months I made a couple of interesting discoveries. Accoding to Adsense last year at this time I was getting around 5000 impressions a day-which does not exactly equate to pageviews, but is pretty close. Which of course has to do with how many ads I have running and not exactly how many pageviews I get. Still, I was getting a lot more hits back in the good old days of Micheal Vick, Slusho, and Vanessa Ann Hudgens.
There are some a lot of numbers that get tossed around. Ten thousand pages or ten thousands hits a day=profit. Ten thousand pages is about 6 new pages a day for 5 years. During those glory days of last year when I was getting all those hits I was writing an average of two posts a day and hitting the keywords and Google Trends pretty hard. I used my Adwords account some during this time, but never spent too much or bought exspensive Adwords cpc keywords.
Adwords advertising works. Anyone can pay Goggle Adwords and drive traffic to their webpage. There are a lot of good Adwords analysis tools on Adwords.com, but making sense of the data isn’t always easy. At least, not me. One of the recent improvements in Adwords management is that you can see if your Adwords cost is going land you high enough to be on the first page. Always good to know.
I’ve had some luck with the Adwords program-but I am not exactly an adwords professional-but I am thinking about it. It is an interesting process to tweak the keywords and find something new that has not been over used. Adwords will now let you bid on keywords, even when you have not bid enough for them to show. I’m not sure this is a great idea, I liked having Adwords tell me I was wasting my time.
