Commission Blueprint Review Part 2: 1 Month Evaluation Complete
As promised, I have completed my 1 Month evaluation of the Commission Blueprint Make Money with Clickbank and Google Adwords Program. The first thing to understand is that this program is not for beginners. As I worked through the methods taught in this course I realized 2 things. Commission Blueprint is not for a Google Adwords PPC novice and to do this program you will have to be prepared to spend money. Pay Per Click (PPC) is a spend money to make money enterprise. Steve Clayton, the creator of Commission Blueprint recommends that for each campaign you create, you should budget at least $500. That is a lot of money for a novice. I budgeted $200 for my tests, but I will get into that in a minute.
If you are a novice and want to get into PPC with Google Adwords, I recommend buying the Adwords Miracle course. It was written in 2007 and recently updated, but is the essential guide for learning the ins and outs of how to make money with and use all of the tools provided with Google Adwords. Commission Blueprint is a program on how to make money with Google Adwords, but it teaches a specific and advanced series of techniques which for the beginner might be overwhelming. Plus, I don’t want to set any newbie up for failure because they didn’t undersand the complexity of Steve’s technique.
If you are an Affiliate Marketer and you are not using PPC to make money than you are really missing out. Commission Blueprint has shown me the light, but I did have to spend a little cash up front to make it happen. Here’s what I did:
The first thing Steve talks about is how to select the right Clickbank products to advertise with PPC on Adwords. Steve lays out his process for finding products that with give you not only the best chance for success, but also the best chance at not losing money right from the start. Clickbank Affiliate Programs are picked based on their actual payout for afiliates and their overall gravity (see Clickbank for details on Gravity). You receive an Excel spreadsheet with a formula already embeded which shows you if you can make money from the programs you select. All you have to do is import the information from Clickbank and BAM, you know if a program has profit potential. I selected 5 Programs from Clickbank that looked good and then I started my keyword and SEO research.
SEO and Keyword Research is critical in this program, but Steve once again provides a great spreadsheet for importing a few critical values in that will help determine what keywords have potential for converting for your Clickbank programs. I used the free Traffic Travis SEO and PPC analytics tool for most of this research, but I also used the free Google Adwords Keyword tool to obtain more information on the highest traffic’d keywords for each of my programs. Commission Blueprint recommends that you only use 10-20 high payoff keywords to start your Adwords campaign, so I identified between 10 and 20 for each of my 5 programs.
The big thing with this process is that keyword conversion tracking really comes into play and you have to be able to separate each keyword into its own ad group with its own ad. After working through around 4-5 keywords and burning the better part of 2 hours, i decided enough is enough and broke down and bought Speed PPC. Steve Clayton recommends it in his program, but I thought I could get away without using it. The answer is no way. In fact, I could write a review on Speed PPC by itself. I had seen tons of ads for it in the past, but never really realized what the program did until it was described in Commission Blueprint. Speed PPC will literally create all of your ads, the ad tracking, the keyword groups, campaigns, landing pages, and more and do it for you in 15 minutes for as many keywords as you want to use. I always wondered why it cost so much (between $397 and $497) and now I can see why. The Pro version is incredible and it works with 12 different Pay Per Click engines, not just Google Adwords. You can setup all of your campaigns and then blast them into Yahoo, Microsoft AdCenter, Miva, Looksmart, etc. in just a few minutes. The bottom line is this, if you are doing PPC and want to make money fast, you have to use Speed PPC.
I know I went off on a tangent there, but it really is must have software and they have tutorials on how to use everything which helps alot. Anyway, on to my test. After using Steve’s spreadsheet and picking my keywords for each Campaign for my 5 Clickbank Affiliate Programs, I pumped the info into Speed PPC and generated my 5 campaigns (you also use the free Google Adwords Editor in this process) in Google Adwords. I set my daily limits, but overall I didn’t want to spend more than $200 per campaign during this test. So you can see what I mean about having to spend money to make money here.
I didn’t start my campaigns until I had created all of my landing pages. This was a process in itself, which is also detailed pretty well in the program. The thing that is stressed here is creating landing pages that will garner a high Google Quality Score. If your ads, keywords, and landing pages do not relate to each other properly (in Google’s eyes), you will not get a good Quality Score and this will affect your PPC cost per click amount. You can litterally go from paying $.05 a click to $5 a click if your Quality Score isn’t any good. There are a lot of things that factor into this, but Steve Clayton goes over this nicely in the program. After spending 4 days building landing pages, I finally felt that my setup was good and my ads were ready to be activated.
After 5 days I had acumulated a decent amount of data and stopped one of my programs outright. I had spent around $85 with no sales and the bounce rate on my sites versus clickthroughs on my Clickbank affiliate link did not equate to spending anymore money on that particular program. This is where the conversion tracking that Speed PPC and Steve’s keyword tracking system really come into play. If you don’t know what keywords are converting into sales, you don’t know how to take advantage of it, or in this case, stop it.
The 4 additional campaigns continued running and I found that after 7 full days I had spent $378 on all the programs combined in PPC costs (this does not include the program I dropped). In Clickbank, using the tracking methods Steve provided, I found several keywords for each program had generated sales, but one program was really not performing well. I had made just 2 sales, but my costs equaled the profits, so I decided to drop this Clickbank product as well.
So here I was with 3 products remaining and I had made $922 in sales total from all of the Affiliate Programs I had started. Not too bad for a week, but I had spent $463 total in this test, bringing my total profit to $459. Using the techniques provided by Steve, I now expanded on the keywords that worked for me and converted well (again, the program has a way to calculate this effectively so you know what is working and what isn’t).
Now, after doing all of this for 4 continuous weeks and continually checking ads, making small changes here and there and scaling the process; I have made a total of $6833 in sales. I have paid $2545 in Google Adwords pay per click costs. This brings my overall profit to $4288 in one month of using this program. It is key to note that I also paid $97 for Commission Blueprint and $497 for Speed PPC, so I guess you could say my profit was a little less.
The bottom line is this, Commission Blueprint works and it works great, but you will spend money on this program and oyu might even lose a little at first. It is important to note that this is not for beginners and you should not rush into using the technique in this program without studying it all th way through and not jumping into it without finishing the entire course twice. It is excellent in every way, but you have to be carefull not to jump in too quick.
For more information on Commission Blueprint, click here.
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