Week 3 of the Affiliate Marketing Showdown - Final Stretch
September 9, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
With the end date of the affiliate marketing showdown with Tyler Cruz coming in just 3 days, I finally had the chance to work on my campaigns and “get things right”. In my previous update, I mentioned that my affiliate landing pages were slapped in Google and were not generating any impressions. I worked exclusively with Facebook for a while, but that traffic source is quickly drying up - probably because of a relatively low click through rate and the way the ad system is structured.
I redesigned my affiliate landing page on a brand new domain and added a lot of relevant content via a Wordpress blog. Everything seems to be working now and my Adwords campaigns are pumping out impressions, clicks, and most importantly, conversions.
Here are my latest stats:
As you can see, my Adwords campaigns started back up on Sept 5th, and I was lucky enough to pretty much break even while conducting some keyword research. As I mentioned before, I worked with this offer before so I have a general sense of which keywords convert best.
As of right now, the campaign is already profitable, but there is still a lot of tweaking to be done in order to increase volume and improve conversion rates. I spoke with Tyler earlier today and he said that he is now in the green as well so it should be another close battle to the finish line… Stay tuned for the results in 3 days!
If there’s enough interest, I plan on releasing a case study of the process I used in selecting the offer, creating landing pages, and tweaking my PPC campaigns - once this competition is over. Would you be interested in seeing that information? Although there is a ton of money to be made in PPC affiliate marketing, I’ve realized throughout this exercise that I’d much rather be creating authority sites with long-term value. This all seems so temporary and unstable to me, but we’ll see where it goes.
So who do you think will come out on top? Tyler or Gyutae? Better yet, who would you rather see record an embarrassing video? 
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Well, with this contest at least you both get more visitor. Your regular visitor will check Tyler blog to see his progress, and you’ll get his regular visitor too…
Yep, that’s one of the benefits of running a competition with a partner - your actions benefit the other blog and vice versa. I definitely recommend you try it out sometime.
My first comment here, hello
I personally would like to see how you tweak these campaigns. I have written my own software to help me optimise my campaigns, and yet I still get very random keywords showing my add. Despite the fact that this campaign currently had 1382 negative keywords!
Welcome, Clog Money! Good lord… I’d be interested in knowing what niche you were working in. In many cases, I’ve found that using software is a great starting point, but you still have to do the manual grunt work to smooth things out and perfect your campaigns. Did your software come up with the negatives as well?
Yeh, it captures everything, and so from it you can quickly and easily tell which keywords you need to make negative, which ads are providing the best click through rate/conversions, which landing page is converting the best.
I’ve spent the entire evening working on a front end for it. I hope to have the finished product (or at least a beta) available this month.
Would you be interested in beta testing?
It’s nice to see you going for it. Excited to see who has to humiliate themselves!
Thanks James! Well it looks like I won in the final week. Check out Tyler’s humiliation video.. I went easy on him.
Man you don’t even know how long I’ve waited for this since disabling my own Movable Type widget (that doesn’t work since Haloscan bypasses that code).