If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I previously posted about an ClickBank study put together by a fellow named Andre Chaperon. I highly recommend reading his study if you’re at all interested in the topic of affiliate marketing. I kept putting off reading it, but I finally did within the past week, and the series was very intriguing and inspiring. It helped push one of my friends, Scott Weaver, to put together his own ClickBank experiment, (which currently has 3 parts), as well.

After reading all this and seeing the money that can be earned with some meaningful (as well as enjoyable and educational!) effort, I decided to give it my own try. I previously put together a bit of code that I previously intended to use for my 30 Day AdSense Project. However, with that project postponed, I decided this would be a good opportunity to put that code as well as the site’s intended content to use.

With that, I revived my previous efforts on the wine layout that I found at Open Source Web Design, began reviewing the wine-related affiliate opportunities at ClickBank, and devised a plan on what products I intended to offer based upon top wine keywords relating to these products.

ClickBank had five wine related products at the time of this writing, which can be seen below. Three of them related to winemaking, and the other two each related to making a wine cellar and general wine selection.

Based upon the available options, I decided to focus my initial efforts at the three similar products relating to winemaking.

Knowing what I was working with, I did an AdWords Keyword Search for terms relating to the topic, such as “wine”, “winemaking”, “home wine making”, “wine secrets”, “wine recipes”, and various others. The tool is very helpful, offering similar search keywords, and providing data for each word in terms of: search volume for the previous month; advertiser competition volume; estimated average cost-per-click (CPC); and estimated ad position. (The latter two pieces of data are based upon a base maximum CPC that you provide for any given keyword.)

Many of the top search results included the words “wine” (obviously), “make” or “making”, and “home” for some as well. With that, I was able to decided upon a domain name that would allow me to maximize keyword usage when displaying the URL in the ad. The reason for maximizing keyword usage is because AdWords makes each keyword from a search boldface if it appears in your ad.

With this information, I selected HomeWineSecrets.com. Admittedly, the word “secrets” does not appear in any of the top search results. However, I feel that the domain name still sends a message that the person performing the search will feel compelled to learn more about what secrets they can learn.

Furthermore, the domain name is short enough such that I can include a sub-folder in the display URL of AdWords, which has a maximum length of 35 characters. Because of this, I decided I could make “www.homewinesecrets.com/makewine”. Now I’ve included the remaining top keyword “make”!

Lastly, I have the option of including the remaining ClickBank products (or products from other affiliate sites) on other sub-folders such as “/cellars”. (I didn’t mention it before, but my original keyword search included “wine cellars”, and I found this to be one of the highest ranking search terms. However, I secluded it because the three products I selected did not relate to this, and I did not want to spend extra cash on AdWords that would not turn into sales.)

When writing the content of the website itself, I tried to make the keywords recurring throughout the page for basic search engine indexing purposes. I also made sure to include keywords and key phrases in headings as best as possible. Even my ClickBank referral URL’s have been mapped using “Redirect” and “RedirectMatch” in the .htaccess file. (This is going the extra mile, but not really necessary.)

After working, I ended up with what you see below. It’s certainly no masterpiece, but it provides basic pre-sell information to lead to each author’s product pitch page.

With my site up and running, I further analyzed the AdWords keywords and decided which I should use, and how high I should set my CPC. With this being my first time ever using AdWords, I admit that I was a bit clueless to start, and I likely spent a fair amount of money on ads for today that I could have avoided. Primarily, I was unaware that each keyword could have its own CPC set in addition to the overall max CPC for an entire ad campaign.

I decided upon a maximum CPC of $1.50 with a maximum daily spending of $20. I verified that my ad was showing on Google with a quick search, and I headed to bed because it was late, letting my ad loose.

When I awoke, I found that I was receiving a fair number of clicks with and average ad placement of 1-1.5 for each key phrase. The positioning is good, but it’s not good considering I’m paying more and none of these were converting to sales. I also checked my Google Analytics results, and I found that most of my visitors for the first day were leaving within 1-10 seconds. Now I’m assuming that this could be because they are using the browser’s back button to return to Google, but it could also be because I am getting some product clicks. Upon verifying against the Analytics’ bounce back data, it appears that my assumption of the back button being used is accurate.

I clearly need to make some changes. For one, I want to focus on my keywords. Unfortunately I’m unable to compare the bounce rates to the keywords. (This may be possible once I hook AdWords up to Analytics, but I unfortunately attempted to link them improperly, and now I need Google to assist me.) However, I can start by decreasing some of my CPC’s for key phrases given their high positions and costs appearing in my reports. Furthermore, I can add more relevant key phrases such as “wine books”, which I did not even think to consider originally.

I’m currently working on these changes, and I intend to follow up with more detail soon. Since I’m allotting myself $20/day on AdSense to start (though I may try some free advertising dollars on Microsoft AdCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing), it will take a little bit of time to get this going. Bear with me, and hopefully others can find some use from this.