AdWords Miracle vs. Beating AdWords: Affiliate Selling Via AdWords

As longtime readers know, I've always recommended that AdSense publishers understand AdWords by joining the program themselves and learning all they can about it. After all, this is ultimately where you money comes from: AdWords advertisers who choose to include Google's content network (us publishers) as a target for their ads. (Many don't, by the way, but that's a topic for a separate discussion.) This is why I included a chapter about AdWords in Uncommon AdSense. So it shouldn't surprise you to know that I read the occasional book about AdWords are part of my ongoing research. I've mentioned AdWords Miracle before in the context of our little AdSense arbitrage experiment. This weekend I read a competing title called Beating AdWords and I thought you'd be interested in a comparative review of the two. Which one do I recommend? Read and find out…

AdWords for Affiliate Marketers

Before we go any further, I want you to stop and click these links, which open the sales page for each book in separate windows: this one and this one. Now, what strikes you the most about these pages?

These books are NOT about advertising your generic product or service with AdWords. They're more focused than that. Specifically, they're about using AdWords to promote affiliate-marketed products. In other words, if someone wants to promote Uncommon AdSense, they would go to my affiliate resource page to gather the information they need to promote it, which in this case is just knowing the ClickBank vendor ID to use in the hoplink (the special affiliate tracking link that affiliates use to promote a product) and how much the book pays per referred sale ($21). That person would then place ads for the book and use a variety of strategies to convince the people who click the ads to buy the book. If the per-click cost is low enough and the conversion rate (the number of people who actually buy the book after clicking on the ad) is high enough, the person makes money. Do this for a number of products and you can make serious cash.

That's what these books focus on. Because although it seems simple enough to do, in practice it takes a lot of work to be successful at it. AdWords is an easy way to throw money down the drain.

So if you're looking for a general book on how to use AdWords as a “normal” advertiser, these books are not for you. On the other hand, if you're interested in affiliate selling, or you have a product you'd like to promote that way and want to know how affiliates think, these kinds of books are precisely for you. Don't get me wrong, they deifnitely teach you about AdWords as well, but the focus is on succeeding as an affiliate marketer for digital products, not as an advertiser of non-digital products and services.

As an AdSense publisher, though, these are probably the best kinds of books for you. Why? Because trying their hands at affiliate selling is something that many AdSense publishers do, both as a way to diversify their income and as a way to make more money. Usually you start small, by embedding relevant affiliate links in your content, but then you move on to other, more advanced techniques, like the ones described in Affiliate “Project X” (APX). So if you're going to start somewhere in your quest to learn about AdWords, it might as well be a book like the two I'm discussing here. But which one?

A Rant About Trademark Usage

Before I begin the reviews, a repeat of a small rant I've made before. Internet marketers as a group don't seem to understand that Google's ad products, the ones that they're making money from, are spelled “AdSense” and “AdWords”, not “Adsense” or “Adwords”. It see this time and time again from even the most prominent promoters. It just seems so disrespectful. I am using the correct capitalizations in this review, even if the products don't.

AdWords Miracle, Part 1

AdWords Miracle (AM) is written by the same person who wrote APX. APX is in many ways a follow-on to what's discussed in AdWords Miracle. Both books stand alone, however, and I'm only going to discuss AM here. (Note: if you're considering buying both, get AM first, because the last time I checked there was an upsell offer to get APX at a special price with the purchase of AM.)

AdWords Miracle costs $97. For that you get:

• The core 106-page AdWords Miracle book (PDF)
• A 28-page Advanced Themes bonus supplement
• A 27-page bonus guide to choosing the right ClickBank product to promote
• A 21-page bonus guide to building an opt-in mailing list with AdWords
• A 13-minute bonus training video on writing good AdWords ad copy
• A 16-minute bonus training video on affiliate product selection
• A 25-minute bonus training video on different ways to promote affiliate products via AdWords

That's a lot of stuff, so at least you're getting a bunch of stuff for your $97. The training videos are a nice touch, because some people seem to learn better when they can see things being done.

Let's start with the core AdWords Miracle book. Unlike APX, the AM book uses a fairly large font and healthy margins, so it looks bigger than it really is. The bonus material helps offset this, though.

As expected, the book starts with a discussion of AdWords. Some readers may skim over this, but buried in here is a good discussion about ad groups within ad campaigns. The naive approach to advertising something is to use a tool like Keyword Elite to generate a list of 1000 keywords and slap them into the same group. Well, Google will just slap you back with high minimum bid prices because of irrelevant keywords — this is the infamous “Google slap” that AdWords users have been complaining about for a while now.

Then a long discussion of writing ad copy follows. This is good, because it's an area that many of us — myself certainly — need help with. If you're not a natural salesperson, I think it takes work to come up with compelling ads. Here the author gives some methods to use along with examples.

Next is a section on campaign management: how to determine your bidding levels, how much budget to set, etc. Nothing radical.

The most interesting part of the book, at least to me, is the last part of the book, the “special themes” section. This is where the author describes specific techniques that he uses to promote affiliate products via AdWords. There is some overlap here with the material in APX, but also more details for the overlapping material.

And at this point I'm going to defer the rest of the review until tomorrow, because this posting is getting to be too long. Tomorrow we'll discuss the AdWords Miracle bonuses as well as an overall summary of what you can learn from the book. Then we'll look at Beating AdWords and see how it compares. Hmm… I may have to spread this over several days, actually…

Sponsored Link: Want no-hype, useful AdSense tips and ideas? Buy Uncommon AdSense today and get over 100 pages of material, the same quality as these blog postings, to help you earn more from 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…

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