Review: Google Wealth Wizard
What a weekend… the furnace stopped working sometime Saturday (we were out for most of the day when this happened, of course) and the house was too cold to stay in (it stabilized at 8 degrees Celsius, that's about 46 degrees Fahrenheit for you Americans — cold no matter what scale you use) and the part needed to fix the furnace didn't arrive until early Sunday evening… needless to say, we didn't do much of anything over the weekend, and I've got a backlog of email to go through. If you emailed me, please be patient, I'll get back to you today or tomorrow…
Anyhow, as I mentioned in my AdWords Miracle versus Beating AdWords comparison series, I have a third make-money-via-affiliate-selling-using-AdWords book to review, a book called Google Wealth Wizard.
Google Wealth Wizard Review
Let's go over the basics first. Google Wealth Wizard is an ebook sold via ClickBank for $77. (By comparison, Beating AdWords costs $67 and AdWords Miracle is $97.) The book is 114 pages long, but like AdWords Miracle uses a pretty big font and healthy margins, so take that page count with a grain of salt.
Although the term “AdWords” doesn't appear in the title, this is essentially a book about placing AdWords ads to sell products as a ClickBank affiliate, just like the other two books. As such, the first 40 pages of the book are devoted to explaing what affiliate marketing is, why ClickBank is so great, and what AdWords is. Nothing special here.
Amazingly enough, Google Wealth Wizard (GWW) starts off by focusing on market research — in other words, trying to find a potentially profitable market to enter with affiliate products. Many marketers argue that this is exactly where you should begin any kind of venture: find out what a niche wants and market something to satisfy those wants. If someone is looking for sand, don't sell them water. It seems obvious when you put it that way, but not everyone does it…
OK, enough marketing 101. GWW's marketing analysis is pretty much limited to using the Overture keyword suggestion tool to find keywords that have high monthly search values. This isn't exactly detailed analysis, and you might want to give some further thought to the research by seeing how many AdWords campaigns are running for a given keyword and how many organic search pages focus on the term — in other words, how much competition you'll be facing. (Do this enough and you'll want to invest in a good keyword tool like Keyword Elite, trust me on that… it's boringly repetitive and time-consuming otherwise.)
Aside: It always amazes me how much the Internet marketing niche itself relies on the Overture suggestion tool. It's a mainstay of every ebook discussing niche discovery, including the three mentioned here. It's also used by many keyword tools, including KE. Given that most people seem to be using it to find niches for AdWords ads and AdSense content, not for Yahoo-related purposes, someday Yahoo! is going to pull the plug on that tool and there will be much panic in the streets as Internet marketers and keyword tool makers scramble to find alternate trusted sources of keyword search data. But I digress…
Next comes a section on finding ClickBank products that will fulfill your niche's desires. Start by searching through the ClickBank Marketplace looking for related products that have a decent commission. Then look closely at the sales page for each product to see if the product vendor is doing a good sales job. Does it use a benefits-based headline? Is the page attractive? Are there subheadings? Are the paragraphs and sentences short? Are there customer testimonials? Is there a money-back guarantee? Put yourself into the shoes of a potential customer (this may be harder than you think — I'd personally find it quite hard to promote How to Find and Marry a Girl Like Me… there's a good reason why my wife is nothing like me in many respects. And Calling Men – Know When and How to Call the Man In Your Life would also be hard, for different reasons…) and see if the sales page convinces you.
After you've chosen your product, this book recommends buying a domain related to the product and using domain forwarding (via your domain registrar) to forward the domain to your ClickBank hoplink. Anyone entering the domain into their browser gets sent to the product vendor's site after being cookied through ClickBank. The books says to use this domain in your ads.
I should note that this method of affiliate selling is often called the “Google Cash” method because there was an ebook released a few years ago that popularized this very notion: place AdWords ads and send them directly to the product vendor's site via your affiliate link. It worked quite well for a while, but Google tightened up the rules and this “direct linking” method just doesn't work as well anymore. Note that if you place ads using direct linking there's a good chance your ad will be disapproved by Google. Why? Because the display URL (the URL shown in the ad) is different from the URL of the final destination site (where a user ends up when the ad is clicked). This is a no-no according to current AdWords policies. Some people get away with it, just don't be surprised if your ads get disallowed because of that. (There are ways to get around this, though.)
Next comes a section on placing AdWords ads to promote the products you've chosen. I must admit I think the author loses a lot of credibility here. Why? Because he uses ad examples that can't be used with AdWords because the individual lines exceed the AdWords length limits. For example, here's one ad he uses:
Train Your Dog in 7 Days
Amazingly Easy Tricks To Make Your Dog Obey Your
Every Command. See Results In The First 24 Hours.
Alright, I'll bite (pun intended). Try putting this into AdWords and this is what you'll actually see:
Train Your Dog in 7 Days
Amazingly Easy Tricks To Make Your
Every Command. See Results In The
I can just imagine how confused and disappointed first-time AdWords users will be when they try to follow his examples. The fact is, writing AdWords text ads is very challenging. The character length restrictions (25 characters for the headline, 35 characters each for the next two lines) force you to get right to the point. It's a little like writing a haiku:
Snow Sticks To Mittens:
Calvin Sighing Frustration;
Squarely Hit By Hobbes
OK, that's a silly little example of an AdWords haiku to promote The Complete Calvin and Hobbes but you get my point: writing a good, short ad isn't easy. So the author is doing a disservice to his readers by using ads that are too long to work with AdWords.
The final part of the book discusses the author's “dirty little secrets” about affiliate marketing via AdWords. There are twelve of them, to be exact, and they include things like capitalizing words in domain names, using negative keywords to avoid clicks from people looking for free stuff, don't forget to use “my” and “I” in keyword phrases, and so on. Some of the advice here contradicts what's in Beating AdWords, such as building very large keyword lists (150 or more) for each ad group, although the author still advises you to keep each ad group tightly focused on one keyword or keyphrase. The book concludes with a “bonus” set of tips, including the top 10 kinds of products that you can make money with as an affiliate.
The book's focus on direct linking means there's no discussion of the “Google slap”, or creating review sites, or promoting products in other ways (such as via opt-in mailing lists).
There's not much in the way of bonuses with this product, just an affiliate report that repeats the information in GWW about finding an affiliate product with profit potential. You also get access to a set of ads and keyword lists (again, the ads don't all work with AdWords due to length problems, how stupid is that?) that you can use to promote GWW as an affiliate.
On the whole, I have trouble recommending this book over the other two. I would buy AdWords Miracle over Google Wealth Wizard, despite its higher price, and Beating AdWords ahead of the other two:
For completeness, and if you're serious about making money via affiliate selling, I would pair up either Beating AdWords or AdWords Miracle with Affiliate “Project X”.
So that ends the reviews. I hope you've found them useful. This was a bit of a diversion from AdSense, really, although I do think it's useful for AdSense publishers in many ways to understand the mindset of an AdWords advertiser. If you want to explore the AdWords side, be prepared to do some experimentation until you find a system that works for you.
Sponsored Link: Hey, did you know that Uncommon AdSense costs less than any of those books and is entirely focused on your needs as an AdSense publisher? Check it out today!
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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