Talk about going Niche, I think with this one I went a little too “Niche”..

As I’ve no had time to find another “product” for another test using Amazon as an affiliate (see PLR Product test Post) I deciced to re-visit the “Niche” I’d chosen and see if I could give it a breath of life.

Having taken another look (paying attention this time) at the sets of keywords I chose for the 5 adgroups it looks like the main problem is using the particular “Brand Name” I chose, which ws based on the product, so I’ve now added the “market” keywords without the brand name to the individual adgroups to see if this makes a difference..

I’ll post again when I know whether this will make the difference or whether I need to drop the market altogether.

I did however set up a couple more different test groups.

The first was for 3 different IM products (2 from clickbank and another from a guy who I’ve met who’s fairly well known in the IM market). Each has it’s own adgroup so I can track the results seperately.

I used a “similar” domain name for each one with a copy of the merchants page, but with “Order” links that take the visitor through to the merchants page, which is not ideal as they then have to click on the order link again.

A cloaked redirect would probably be better and I may well update them with this if they are still profitable in another weeks time, as it could well have a significant (positive) impact on the results..

They’ve been running for aa week now so here’s the results so far: -

Product “A” – this was one of the Clickbank products and was getting very few clicks (6 out of 311 impressions, 1.92% CTR) at a total cost of $1.94 with no sales.

I checked the site yesterday to find that the program has actually closed, so their sales letter saying it was a limited offer was actually true for once, and I’ve now stopped the adgroup.

Giving me a net loss of $1.94

Product “B” – This is a higher price point Clickbank Product ($97) and was fairly high profile on launch, but seems to have trailed off somewhat, I use CBTrends.com to check the gravity and popularity over time, very useful.

It is a product that I signed up for but didn’t get to grips with simply because I haven’t found the time to look in to it in depth.

The results? Well it’s had 13 clicks out of 618 impressions (2.1%CTR) at a cost of $7.42 ($0.58 per click) which has resulted in one sale (commission of $62.10) giving me a net profit of $54.68

Product “C” – This is a simple report on a currently topical/popular subject and is very well written with an excellent sales letter (I’m actually using the guy who wrote it for my next product).

The product costs $47 and the commission is $23.50.

The results so far..

In a week I’ve had 13 clicks out of 206 impressions (6.31% CTR) at a total cost of $3.52 ($0.27 per click) which has resulted in one sale, giving me a total net profit of $19.98.

So the total net profits in a week for the three adgroups is just $72.72

Now that doesn’t look particularly impressive does it..?

But you have to bear in mind it took me less than 3 hours to find the products, get the affiliate details, buy the domains (choosing the domain names was probably the most difficult part) and set up the AdWords campaigns.

So for just 3 hours work, once, I should get an extra $250-$300 profit each month.

Now think about what would happen if I did three a day, five days a week for a month..

That could/should/would (depending on your outlook on life and IM) give me an income of between 5 and 6 thousand dollars a month after the first month!

Which makes me ask the question “Why am I writing this blog instead of getting on with it…?”

Now you should realise why I don’t post to this blog very often, I prefer to get on with the work itself, it pays better..

Based on this test group (of IM based products) the Day Job Killer tactics work. they’re not spectacular, but they can bring you significant results, although the question remains as to whether they will be long lasting, so I will report on this test group again in another three weeks or so.

I should also mention that I did use the same DJK techniques to promote DJK itself and managed to make a profit of over $100 on that as well.

OK, so on to the second new test group.

I decided that as most people using the DJK techniques would probably be concentrating on ClickBank products (and possibly Amazon and PayDotCom) I would dig out another less known affiliate network and try that out.

I chose one that primarily lists software products to see how well it does. I’ve had some fairly significant success setting up mini sites for software affiliate programs using SEO over the last couple of years, using techniques similar to those detailed in “Niche Marketing On Crack” (see NMOC Test Post).

This time I spent over two hours finding the products, it wasn’t as easy as I’d expected with this particular affiliate network as the commission rates on many of the programs were lower than I prefer (less than 15% for many!), bt I eventually found 5 that I felt are worth testing.

The products are all software, but other than that they vary a great deal, they are in different markets and have different commission levels and price points, so I really wasn’t sure what to expect, especially as most were in markets that I’ve not “played” in before.

now this is turning in to a longer post than I had anticipated, so I’m not going to detail all the results, but just give an over view.

In summary the test is not in profit so far, in fact there hasn’t been a single sale to date..

The test as a whole has received 161 clicks out of 8,318 impressions, with a total cost/loss of $25.95

The CTR varies from 1.48% (on the biggest market product) to 6.85% (on the highest priced product).
When I set up the project I decided on a total budget of $100, but on the results so far I am going to stop some of the adgroups after one more week if they have still not resulted in a sale.

The highest click rate products have both had 50 clicks so far, if they still have not had a sale in another week (which should also be around 100 clicks) I will stop them.

At the moment I am planning on just keeping the two higher priced products running to give them more time as they would bring in far higher commissions if the result in a sale, so I feel it’s worth giving them more time, although I will not go over the original budget I set.

AS a general rule of thumb I look at closing a test/adgroup if it costs me more in clicks than the product itself costs or twice as much as I would make in a single sale commission, although for the higher priced products I sometimes lower that limit..

Well, I’ve gotta go do some real work now, hope you found this useful.