I wanted to share this to give some newbies a little taste of what's possible with adwords even in a competitive niche.

I used plr content, an existing template I have for the website, and just added affiliate links and adsense ads.

I setup an adwords campaign yesterday for mortgage refinancing. I used keywords analyzer to generate a list of keywords in that niche then selected one of those. I then expanded that into 7 different phrases that I thought would be "type-in" stuff.

I built a landing page targeting those keywords, added it to my existing mortgage related website, then started the adwords campaign.

It really only took about 20 minutes to generate the list of keywords, paste the plr content into the template, and setup the adwords campaign.

I made a $30 qualified lead commission from getsmart.com and $12.61 in adsense. It only cost me $3.62 in adwords.

Net Profit $39!

Not bad, eh?











Here is the list of keywords I started with in .csv format: download

Hope this helps some of you.

P.S. - I should ad that the clicks I got from adwords were all from the content network.

Today's Update:

I was a little worried this campaign was going to lose money. On Day 5 I was break even. However, affiliate commissions updated today and I wanted to share with you the results so far.

I'm happy to announce that it's still making money!

Take a look.







Adwords Cost: $71.30
Adsense Income: $19.84 (the year I graduated hs: 1984)
Affliate Commissions: $165.00

Net Profit after 6 days: $165 + $19.84 - $71.30 = $113.54

ROI = (165+19.84)/71.3 - 1 = 159%



P.S.

I've put a little more work into my campaign after reviewing the statistics. One of my nine keywords was landing on page 3 of the serps (average position 19) at the $2.00 bid. So I up the bid on that particular keyword to $3.00 and now it's on page 2 (average position 15).

I also tweaked my landing page by dressing it up with indenting some of the paragraphs for cosmetic purposes and also put in bold the keywords I used in the campaign. I don't know if this improves quality score, but I've read that it does help with keyword seo, so why not?

About an additional 10 minutes of work. - Total time 30 minutes for $113!

Thanks Robert

Well, here are the final numbers. Getsmart is ending their affiliate program. Go figure.









Here's the math:


Adwords Cost: $547.95
Adsense Income: $52.90
Affiliate Income: $1145.00

Net Income: $649.95

ROI: 649.95/547.95 = 119%

So I've ended the getsmart campaign and going to switch to lendingtree. However, I don't know how it's going to convert and I will have to adjust my ad copy, landing page, etc.. to adjust to the new affiliate.

Also, lending are the parent company of getsmart, and when you apply for a loan with lending tree, they popup a window that offers a getsmart loan. That really sucks for me and will also probably hurt conversions.

But, I am now armed with a ton of data about keywords, which adcopy had a higher ctr and lower cpc, and the kind of traffic to expect in this niche. I should be able to create another profitable campaign.

Either way, I made a few bucks and I think we've learned a few things along the way.

must be plenty of other mortgage providers offering commission, I'm sure you'll find another way forward - well done and good luck

yeah the net results were decent, however you can get much better results from having more pages and getting smaller numbers on each one of those pages. The end or net result is that you make more money because your CPC is lower, or your cost to generate the visitors is much less.

Thanks for the tutorial, very good.

This is a perfect case study (along with many others you have done). You should really think about creating an Adwords case study website...:-)

very interesting to note that almost all of your clicks were from the content network and not from search, almost makes one think to set up a content only campain and exclude the search network, cheaper clicks but not targeted, still with your results it did'nt seem to matter

Great tutorial. Good to see someone successfully using the "content network".

Well, I see you're off to a good start for a newbie. Congrats. And I'm not surprised that your traffic was all content network. Personally, I've had huge success with the content network alone. Of course, it also depends what keywords you choose and how much you bid. Keep up the good work. You're on your way to becoming a super-affiliate.