Sorry for interrupting the review like that, but yesterday I felt the recent AdSense changes with respect to similar-looking ads were important enough to mention here. Plus I wanted to update Uncommon AdSense accordingly and send the purchasers a new copy of the book (purchasers — if you aren't receiving my update emails, drop me a note). Anyhow, on with the review.
Beating AdWords Review
Today's focus is the Beating AdWords book. Like AdWords Miracle (AM), its focus is on making money by promoting affiliate products via AdWords. So how does Beating AdWords (BA) stack up?
Version 4 of BA, the one I just read, comes in at around 105 pages. There's a reasonable amount of text on each page, with screenshots as appropriate. Its price is only $67. (Remember, AdWords Miracle is $97.) The bonuses include two templates for creating review sites (see later in the review) and an extensive guide to promoting Beating AdWords itself as an affiliate.
The first dozen pages or so are general intros to affiliate marketing and AdWords, nothing unique here. The fun starts with the section on choosing affiliate products to promote. The standard techniques of actually purchasing the product (so you can see what's really in it — kind of like what I'm doing here!), browsing through forums, watching what other affiliates promote and checking a product site's Alexa ranking are all mentioned. But the authors then go into a more detailed explanation of how ClickBank ranks products, an in particular how to calculate the refund rate for a given product. This is one approach I didn't see in AM — the idea being that you don't want to promote products with high refund rates, even if they're popular. Then they give advice on finding good keywords to advertise with: they advocate some simple manual techniques along with the use of keyword tools like Keyword Elite.
Then the book discusses AdWords campaigns and ad groups. The standard advice about turning off the content network is very prominent, but it's then followed by some interesting — and very aggressive — advice on how to set your daily budget to maximize traffic (clicks). The ad group advice is to not use more than 25 keywords per ad group and to make sure that the keywords all have a word or phrase in common. This is followed by tips on writing good adcopy that will give you a high quality score and that will encourage potential buyers to click your ad. There's an extensive discussion of all the parameters that affect the quality score.
Next comes a section on determining your maximum bid price and when you should stop an ad campaign for further tuning, and how to manage your overall budget. Lots of sound advice here — it's evident the authors know what they're talking about. Then there's a discussion of direct-linking (sending clicks directly to an advertiser's landing page) vs. creating your own web pages to promote the product. The approach they recommend is the latter, and they especially recommend creating review pages that compare and contrast 3-7 products. They give you guidelines for writing such pages and two HTML templates that they say have worked well for them (I can't vouch for that yet, as I haven't tried them).
Then there's a good discussion of the “Google slap” and how to work around it. If an existing domain you're using has been “slapped”, for example, the only real workaround is to redo the ad campaign on a completely new domain, making sure to do all the right things to avoid getting slapped on that domain as well.
Finally, the book ends with tips on analyzing your campaigns (including figuring out what your competitors are doing right and emulating them) and a bunch of useful (but pretty standard) tips on how to get free or low-cost traffic to your sites, i.e. to your review pages.
Which is Better?
Now that I've reviewed both products for you, which do I think is the better deal: AdWords Miracle or Beating AdWords? Personally, I like Beating AdWords better, for the following reasons:
- Less hype — it's written in a more straightforward manner
- Lower price
- Emphasis on whitehat techniques — AdWords Miracle pushes the edges somewhat
- Specific tips on how to setup your campaigns to minimize losses and to track what's working and what's not
Also, as I mentioned before there's some overlap between AdWords Miracle and Affiliate “Project X” (APX), enough that I think you'd be better off to buy the Beating AdWords + APX combo if you're looking for both a solid grounding in AdWords and a set of edgier techniques to affiliate selling. Or just start with BA and work your way up to APX.
But wait, I said there was another book review coming! Well, I can tell you right now it's more like AdWords Miracle than Beating AdWords, so you can probably guess which one I'm going to recommend. Still, it'll be interesting to see how it compares to the other two. Stay tuned! (After that, we'll go back to some AdSense arbitrage discussions…)
Deal of the Day: Buy any of Beating AdWords, AdWords Miracle or Affiliate “Project X” through my affiliate link and I'll send you a free copy of Uncommon AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and
Make Easy Money with Google. His award-nominated AdSense blog is a lot of work to write, but also a lot of fun…