AdWords Miracle vs. Beating AdWords, Continued

Yesterday I left off midway through my review of AdWords Miracle. A reader
made this comment:

I just wanted to say that you

are definitely a master of “keep 'em coming back for more”

The fact is, I don't always do it deliberately… Sometimes I do plan to write

a series, sometimes it just happens that way. I mostly write this stuff early in

the morning, even though I publish it later in the day (after some

experimentation, I determined that's what worked best for this particular blog)

and so how much I get done depends partly on how early I get up.

Also, a good review takes time, especially when you're comparing two or more

products. I suspect this particular review won't end here, especially if I throw a

third book into the mix, like I'm thinking about doing. But let's continue with

AdWords Miracle and see where we go from there.

AdWords Miracle, Part 2

When I left off yesterday, I was about to look at the bonuses that come bundled with AdWords Miracle. I don't think the core book alone is worth $97, so it's a good thing the bonuses are included.

The first bonus, Building an Opt-In List with AdWords is pretty standard fare. There's actually very little AdWords involved here, it's mostly about building a “squeeze page” (like this one) to get visitors to subscribe to your mailing list for a free course where you also try selling them related products. Nothing spectacular here, except for the willingness to pay money (via AdWords clicks) to get your leads — most list-building programs concentrate on “free” and “viral” methods to build the list. But if you're expecting to make money from a list (note that Affiliate “Project X” also covers this, but with a different slant on the process) then paying money for well-targeted leads shouldn't be a deterrant.

The second bonus, Promoting the Right ClickBank Product, is all about finding the right products to promote as an affiliate. The method he uses involves looking through the stats on ClickBank Marketplace, looking at the vendor's sales letter, etc.

At this point I feel I should make a recommendation: if you already own Affiliate “Project X” (APX), don't buy AdWords Miracle. There's too much overlap to justify the total price of the two packages combined if bought at retail. If you buy AdWords Miracle first, though, take the upsell to get APX at a lower cost. If you can't afford both, skip AdWords Miracle in favor of APX.

Whoops, there go my commissions…

The third bonus is the Advanced Themes Supplement. Again, some of the material here gets repeated in APX, although I think it's better explained here than in APX. There's discussion of link cloaking to get around AdWords restrictions on multiple ads going to the same domain. For example, check out this cloaked link that brings up the APX sales page on one of my own sites. That's the kind of technique you can use so that you don't end up promoting the vendor's site directly and losing out on ad placement because someone else is doing the same thing and is willing to pay more for their clicks. There's also a method called “2 Minute Ads” that lets you quickly create ads that work in most situations. Information about the AdWords dynamic keyword insertion facility. How to choose good keyword-based destination URLs. A list of niches that can be profitably sold into again and again (affiliate marketing is one of them!). And then a big section on dealing with the “Google slap”.

Another aside here: what Internet marketers casually refer to as the “Google slap” is the inclusion of landing page quality in the AdWords quality score (QS). The QS is a secret value that Google calculates that takes into account how well an advertiser's ads have performed in the past, the clickthrough ratio of an ad, and various other factors. The QS ultimately determines how much you as an advertiser pays per click. Advertisers with high QS get favored: their ads get placed higher for a lower cost. And low QS advertisers get hammered: their minimum bid prices (the minimum they have to bid for their ads to even show) get jacked up, sometimes incredibly high. By including the landing page quality in the QS, Google effectively “slapped” affiliate marketers who either sent traffic directly to the vendor's site (providing no value add) or who had poorly-designed single-page sites that were not relevant to their AdWords ads. I've discussed this issue before in previous posting on GeekAffiliate titled Landing Pages and Pay-Per-Click: A New Content Outlet which I suggest you read for more information. The workaround I suggest (adding more content to the site) is a lot of work. The Advanced Themes Supplement gives a different workaround which is a lot less work, and probably leads to a better conversion ratio than my workaround. Remember, ultimately you're trying to sell something to someone. Providing reams of free information is usually not the best approach for that.

Now the video bonuses. The product selection video is basically a video version of the Promoting the Right ClickBank Product bonus. The longest video shows you the three recommended methods of promoting ClickBank products via AdWords. The third video shows you the author's method for writing good (AdWords) ad copy for niches that he knows nothing about.

The videos are typical of what you get these days from affiliate marketers, basically a screen capture done with Camtasia or its equivalent, with someone talking and occasionally bringing up different websites and so on. Gripping, it's not. And you may find it kind of awkward to bring the laptop with you into the washroom. But some people really benefit from this kind of training, so they're a good way to reinforce what the main text says.

So that's the AdWords Miracle review. Did I learn something from reading it? Yes. Is it a product I recommend? Maybe. Let's wait and see how it fares against Beating AdWords and a third (mystery for now — hey, I want you to come back!) product…

Sponsored Link:

If you end up buying either AdWords Miracle or Affiliate “Project X” through my affiliate link, I'll ease the pain for you and send you a free copy of Uncommon AdSense. There, how's that for a good bonus?

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…

Update: Sorry for the broken links, all fixed now…

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