All Your Keywords Are Belong To Us

So I have been using my $200 MSN credit to test “affiliate arbitrage” and so far I have had some interesting results. I can say I have never done this before, but find its no different than the other forms advertising I do online anyways, so it’s been pretty easy. And honestly, you do not have to be an advertising expert to be able to do this. There are a few basic steps to take to get your feet wet, and then you can easy money with it; being an advertising expert helps when it comes to increasing your ROI so that what you do is even more profitable. But today, I want to give you a little inside secret I came across that will probably get some marketers’ pretty ticked off for revealing it!

What if you could use your “competitors” knowledge and gain access to their keyword list? Do you think that would be useful, you bet! I was able to build a list of 10,000 great keywords for my campaign from other advertisers within a few minutes. My intention was never to try to steal these, but I came across this in a panic to launch a campaign in a tight deadline. Because it the Christmas season, I thought it would be nice even to get a small bit of extra cash for gifts, giving, etc… And since AzoogleAds pays on the 15th of every month, I figured I could whip up a campaign and get it going before Nov. 30th so I could get some of that cash for the 15th of Dec. So on Nov. 29th I started working on picking an offer to use in MSN and talked to my Azoogle rep ( I will introduce you to Fraser in a upcoming post) about my experiment. I originally implied that perhaps the Santa letters might be a good offer, but surprisingly so, they are not doing so hot. So Fraser talked me into using ringtones for this test. I usually am against ringtones because they can be very deceptive to the consumer, but the offer he recommended me takes extra steps to let the user know what they are paying for and the cost. Plus its payoff is about $12ish per signup!

So I purchased a .com domain from godaddy and made a single gateway page. This page had the different carriers on it and I made it to match the offers landing page. Then I basically took the carriers that the offer allowed and linked them to the offer and the rest linked to another ringtone offer. One more thing to note is that I did not put my azoogle affiliate link in the page but instead created a 301 redirect link (a 301 redirect link is on that looks like http://mydomain.com/somelink but actually redirects to http://myazoogle.com/affiliatelink). Ok so I had all the stuff ready for a simple campaign, except the keywords and ads!

Now this is really what you want to know. How did I get my keywords with so little work. I started with a bunch of key phrases of items I could think up myself. But that wasn’t going far, plus it was taking a very long time to build anything up. After only about 400ish key phrases and keywords, I was thinking how far from my goal I was. So I started searching for list and ringtone lists. That’s when I did a search for something (I am really sorry but I don’t know what it was, because it about 1am at night), when I came across KeyCompete! KeyCompete is a service that basically allows you to plug a competitors domain name and see what keywords they use in their marketing! This was amazing, I entered a domain of one of the advertisers I saw on MSN and low and behold KeyCompete brought back a downloadable excel file of over 2000 keywords for that domain. I did this a on a few domains and in no time, I had a complete keyword list of over 10,500 keywords and phrases for my ad campaign!

Now, yours and your competitors keyword list is all available anyways, but it takes a lot of programming and api use that is just a pain. Plus most of us do not have the resources and time to go after keywords like this. KeyCompete just gives us an easy avenue to do this with. This tool takes all the work out of keyword building for you!

So, you may wonder, how did I do on the trial. Well that part is interesting too. I started to late in the month (on the 29/30th) so It only spent 5 dollars before pausing my funds. This is because of how MSN works, and is supposed to be to protect you from blowing your campaign money. Anyways, for the 5 dollars I spent, I made 50 dollars from azoogle! Not bad for not doing this before! I know this is small change here, and I am sure the 10:1 return will go down significantly, but it was exciting having that kind of return. I later jumped into my account and was changing my base price when I accidentally forgot to put a decimal before the number and was bidding about 50 dollars a click! So when that went through, I wasted a few bucks on some outrageously high clicks. But I quickly changed that back. Now its back to normal. I will give an update on my next post when the campaign is done running through, on how it all went.