Day Job Killer Review (Part 1)

So I'm back with the fuller review of
Day Job Killer (DJK),
the much-hyped sequel to the much-hyped
Affiliate
“Project X” (APX). For a brief description of what's
in the ebook, please see my
DJK
mini-review earlier today. Apparently over 5000 copies of
the book have been sold already.

Direct Linking “X”

The book starts off with a 20-page detailed chapter
on an affiliate linking method called Direct Linking “X”,
which I'll just refer to as DLX for short. The term “direct
linking” refers to an early AdWords money-making technique
popularized by the Google
Cash book. The idea is fairly simple: place an AdWords ad whose
display URL (the URL you see in the ad) is the vendor's site
but whose destination URL (the URL that the user gets sent
to when they click the ad) is your affiliate link. Anyone who
clicks your ad gets sent to the vendor's site, but only after
being cookied with your affiliate ID. So if the user buys
the vendor's product you get a commission. In the early
days of AdWords it was easy money for affiliates, especially
when only a few people were doing it. But then the rules
changed.

As you can imagine, affiliate links started crowding
out all the other ads. So Google changed the rules.
Read the AdWords
Editorial Guidelines today and you'll come across this restriction:

Please note that we'll
only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the
same Display URL.

In other words, all the affiliates (and the vendor itself, if they
were also advertising) got clumped together so that only one of the
ads would be displayed at any given time. Usually this was the ad
with the highest quality score, which is a combination of various
factors such as bid price and clickthrough ratio. The affiliates were
thus competing against each other in order to get their ads displayed.
Bid prices increased and the profitability of campaigns dropped. A lot
of people gave up on direct linking once this happened and had to resort
to cloaking techniques — such as framing the vendor's page
on a domain they owned — to stay in the game.

Direct linking failed because competition drove bid prices
too high — good for Google, as the author points out,
but not so good for affiliates. But that's because most
affiliates were focusing on
ClickBank
products. DLX revives direct linking, but with two important
differences:

1. Bids and ads target specific brand names — in
   fact, the more specific, the better.
2. Non-ClickBank affiliate programs — Amazon's in
   particular — are used.

The idea is that ads should be super-targeted to promote
specific products with decent affiliate payouts. No creating
large groups of related keywords: each ad only targets a
few keywords based on the product's brand/model, such as
“Photoshop Elements” or “Akai MPC 2000XL” (examples used
in the book). The ads only get shown to searchers (we're
just talking about the search network here) looking for
specific products. Throw in some negative keywords to make
sure you're not getting people looking for freebies and
your ad is exposed only to serious buyers. The ads you
create are dead simple and focus on the price
of the product more than anything else.

The book spends a lot of time discussing DLX with the Amazon
affiliate program. Amazon has both a huge selection of
products to choose from and individual sites in other
countries, both of which make it good hunting ground
for promoting products as an affiliate. As the book
says, the US market is very crowded with affiliates,
but English-speaking markets like the UK, most of Canada,
Australia and New Zealand are good alternative markets
that aren't as crowded (yet!). If you speak other
languages, you can also target different countries
and take advantage of national Amazon sites like
Amazon.fr (France) and Amazon.de (Germany), for example.

What I think: DLX isn't revolutionary by any
means, but obviously not too many people were using that
technique. That's changing now that the book's out
and thousands of people will be trying the method —
expect to see a lot more Amazon ads on Google now. The
book has a lot of details on how to create winning ads
and how to find the right products to promote.

The good thing is that there are so many products
available on Amazon — especially when you factor
in the country-specific sites — that normal folk
like you and I
might actually stand a chance at using this method
profitably. When APX was released, all the good
ClickBank products suddenly became the target of
a slew of APX-inspired affiliate promotions —
if you weren't in the game early it was really
hard to make money except by focusing on very small
niche products. (ClickBank may boast having over
10,000 products to sell, but a lot of those products
are crap and don't do well — there are probably
only 1000 or less of them that are worth promoting.)

There are some important caveats on using DLX
with Amazon, however. Amazon's reports are not
real-time, not by any means. You don't learn
about which products (if any) were ordered until
the next day. And you don't learn how much money
you made on those orders until the products
actually ship, which could be several days later.
So there can be considerable lag time before
you figure out if you're making money or not.
And Amazon doesn't pay you until 60 days past the
end of the month in which the products were
shipped. Be prepared to spend real money on
AdWords and not seeing anything in return
for a few months — something the
book doesn't really emphasize. (One of the
reasons affiliates like ClickBank so much
is because the ClickBank payment cycle is
two weeks long. It could be worse, though,
because Amazon's payment cycle used to
be three months long — they
moved to monthly payments very recently.)

A Direct Linking Example

As an example, a couple of days ago when
I say the DJK promotional video and surmised
that DLX was about linking to Amazon, I
went and placed a few AdWords ads promoting
a few Amazon products via my affiliate link.
Now, I didn't have the details about the
DLX method on hand and so I didn't bid
just on the brand name, I also bid on
some more general terms. (Don't bother
looking for the ads, I only ran the
campaign for two days.)

I tried 5 different
products and was pretty aggressive on
the bidding, so I ended up spending $35
over both days for 94 clicks back to
Amazon. Six items have been ordered
because of those ads, only one
of which was an item I was advertising,
the other 5 were products related to
those I were advertising. One was
software worth $40, one was
software worth $285, and the remaining
three were a camera and two lenses
worth a total of (I couldn't believe
it myself) $3663. So assuming everything
ships and nothing gets returned, I've
earned 4% of $3988, or $159. Subtract
the $35 cost of the ads and I made
$124. A great return, but I got lucky
there because someone bought an
expensive digital camera set. If
someone had bought the camera I had
advertised, they would have spent
only $213, so my total earnings
would have been 4% of $538, or $21,
which would have put me in the hole.

Now it's true that people who
shop on Amazon often end up buying
other things. I've seen this before
with my affiliate account —
people buy one of my books and
then throw in some DVDs or software.
DJK points out that you only need
to break even on the items you're
advertising because you'll make
money on the extra products that
many customers will buy
once you get them on Amazon's site.
I can certainly attest to this
from my little experiment, but it's
just one data point and I wasn't
even following the DLX method exactly.
I'm going to run some more tests
to see if I can replicate
my results.

What's Next

That's all the time I have today
to spend on DJK, so I'll continue
the review tomorrow with a look
at the controversial methods in
the next section, “The Leveller”.

Sponsored Link: This affiliate stuff may be
interesting, but if you're an AdSense publisher looking
to do better with your sites, why not give my book
Uncommon AdSense
a try?

Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.

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