For about the last 6 months I have been #1 in a very competitive niche at Azoogle. From what my AM tells me, I completely dominate this niche. So how did this happen? Very simple: hard work. You can’t just slap together a campaign in a few hours or days and expect to do really well. You may get lucky for a while, but eventually your earnings will dip. It’s difficult to keep a campaign profitable over the long term. Without giving away my offer, here is how I did it in general terms.

1. Keyword research and structure. Of course a good keyword list is very important. Start with a great tool, and then add every variation you can think of. More important almost than your master list, is how you break your KWs out into groups. Correct adgroup structure is a huge factor in your campaigns success. The more targeted your ad is to your keywords, the better your CTR will be and conversion rate.

2. Make a good landing page, then keep making more and split testing. You just never know what will convert until you test it.

3. Know your seasonal trends for your niche. Everything has seasonal patterns. Even the most non-seasonal product has peaks and valleys than you can exploit.

4. Buy more traffic. Once you have a well converting campaign, try it out on every possible network you can. If you don’t you are leaving money on the table. Don’t believe what you read in forums about PPC networks. Test them for yourself. One of my best converting networks is one that everyone in the forums calls crap. To me it’s gold though.

5. Know your niche. This is the most important tip I can give. Research everything you can about the product and market. Know the demographics of the target customers. Know their age, sex. geographic location, marital status, income level, browsing habits, and what they ate for breakfast this morning. Read the trade journals for the industry. Find out everything you can, because every piece of info you learn will help target your campaign. This is a step that many affiliates skip when just going for the quick buck, but if you really want to do well it’s essential. Think of yourself like a marketing contractor for the publisher’s company. They are paying you to know as much as possible about their consumers so you can better market their product to them.

I think if you work hard enough, you can eventually own any niche you want, even the most competitive ones. It’s just a matter of how hard you want to work.

My affiliate manager told me some great news the other day. Out of 12,000+ affiliates at Azoogle, I am in the top 10! That’s a pretty nice group to be in, especially considering I have only been into affiliate stuff for about 6 months. I guess I am doing something right! I plan to try to give as many tips as I can on this blog to help other people improve their results too.

So it seems there is a lot of interest in ringtones again, after the big shake up this summer. I don’t usually discuss the niches I am promoting, but with ringtones the cat is so far out of the bag that it makes no difference at this point.

Like almost all newbies starting with PPC, I tried ringtones. I did OK, nothing to brag about; at least I didn’t lose money. I eventually moved on to other niches that have been much more profitable for me. So now that I am doing pretty well and have learned about 1000% more than I knew back then, I decided to give them another shot.

I started on Jan 1st, and went about creating super focused keyword lists and ad groupings. I hooked those up to super relevant ad copy and landing pages. Using the same traffic sources as before (the big 3) and pretty much the same bid prices, the second round of ringtone testing began. The results were pretty surprising to me. The first time around I think I had eCPCs around .30-.50. This time around with my focused campaign I am seeing eCPCs in the $1.50 up to $5.00 range! Pretty amazing. I know the market hasn’t gotten any easier, so my techniques have definitely improved.

Not to brag or anything, but it would seem I now have the PPC ninja skills!

I’ve been getting some unexpected cool stuff in the mail recently. Right before Christmas I got a special delivery of a box marked with “perishable” and “fresh food” on the outside. When I opened it up, it was this awesome gift basket from Azoogle. It has all kinds of fruit, nuts, candy, cheeses, meats and everything. We have been eating well around the house lately from this thing. Thanks Azoogle!

Then just today I got a small box in the mail from Google. Inside was this nice little travel mug. I’m not sure if it coincides with just getting my premium Adwords account status, but it was a nice gesture from the big G.