Case Study : Diet Pills : How I Ran It
Note : This is probably as far as I’ll ever go when it comes to “revealing” things to you guys. I’m giving you a niche I researched myself, keywords I used, and how I designed my landing page.
I have an old campaign that’s been sitting around forever now, and I’m not doing any testing with it so why not tell you guys and maybe you’ll make some money from it. I did some research a while ago and it looked like diet pills would be good to get into. All of the offers gave out a free trial bottle with just a shipping and handling fee. Hoodia, Phentermine, that sort of thing. I only did maybe five days of testing in Yahoo, got some data but had so many things going on I had no time to pursue it. So what I’ll do is walk you through how I set things up, how I researched keywords, built my page, etc.
How I Planned Things Out
I knew there were a bunch of great products out there, so what I decided to do was build a comparison/review page. I picked 4 offers from various networks and “reviewed” them. First I looked at the diet/weight loss campaigns on a bunch of networks, and then asked all of my affiliate managers what their top converting offers were. I got some stats, payouts, and EPCs, and then picked some offers. If I can remember correctly, the offers I tested were :
2DaySlimDown from Neverblue – $33 CPA
Phenterthin from Hydra – $30 CPA
PureHoodiaX from CPA Empire – $32 CPA
and another Hoodia offer from Azoogle, which they don’t have anymore.
Now you know exactly what offers I ran, time to explain how I build my landing page…
How I Built My Landing Page
Like I said I used a review page. I included those offers in a list, and picked an order I wanted. Based on the EPCs my affiliate managers told me, I put the highest offer as the #1 and called it the “Top Rated”, and then the lowest EPC I put at the bottom and rated “Good Choice”. They each were rated 1 to 5 stars. The top rated was 5 stars, and the bottom of the list was 3 stars. You don’t want to rate everything five stars or else it looks fake, and people can tell. I wrote a small description about each product, and highlighted some facts. Things like “Average weight loss 13lbs in two weeks”, “Try a bottle free”, etc. I sold myself as a legit review site that was there to help the visitor find the best diet pill for them. I’m not going to give away the domain I used, because that will just open doors to people to try and find out as much about me as they can, lol.
How I Chose My Keywords
Next is keyword research. Well, I’m promoting diet pill offers, so it makes sense to use diet pill keywords. I had quite a few ad groups with very targeted ads. The Yahoo campaigns I ran them in are deleted now, so I can’t go in and get the exact ad groups and ad copy, but I’ll do my best. For my first campaign, every keyword had “diet pill(s)” in them. I broke down the adgroups something like this :
-diet pills
-best diet pills
-compare diet pills
-review diet pills
-safest diet pills
-cheap diet pills
-free diet pills
Each group had 100 or so keywords in it, some more some less. I used Keyword Companion to break the groups down.
As stated before, I just started with a campaign in Yahoo. I just wanted to test the waters for a couple days and see what kind of volume it produced before I got a little more serious and moved to Adwords. I think I bid $1.50 on everything to start. Once campaigns got rolling, my CTR was around 6-8% I believe. This is attributed to the tight ad groups displaying exact what the searchee wants.
The first couple days I think I lost maybe $30-40 each day, my revenue was around $300/day I think. This was on a small list of keywords and just Yahoo keep in mind. After seeing those numbers, I at least concluded that there was potential in this niche. Then I got busy with a more important thing, and that was replaced by another, etc, and I haven’t touched the campaign since around October. If I tracked my results and started dropping bids to make all keywords profitable, it could have turned out to be a pretty decent niche. I would then expand my keyword lists, and start scaling the living daylights out of Google to really up my revenues.
This should give you all some insight as to how I run some things. I don’t run everything like that, but it’s a pretty solid case study. Hell, I just told you a niche that I made money off of that had potential. Set things up just like I did and test it out. Good luck and if you get it to succeed make sure to tell me a couple of your best keywords that I can run ;).
Kudos to you sir! Thank you for the wealth of information that you give on your blog and this great post. I have seen a lot of landing pages formated like this so much now that I fear the cats out of the bag on the design. Its going to loose its effectiveness if every landing pages becomes a review page.
Damn, I was just getting ready to try this niche and now everyone and their mother will be all over it. :x
Great article the insight of an affiliate marketer. I think I can apply this concept to an page on my blog by picking a niche write a whole review on a post. Post it and used that particular post in a ppc program . and I can make advertising through arbitrage and revenue from affiliate items that also support the item i am selling.
Once again, he ups the ante on stuff given away for free. Nice post… Any luck buying a house yet?
wow dude, you rock! Keep up the good work man, thanks alots for them tips!
that a boy! Nice!
Yeh, cos not many people were promoting diet pills before this post! In fact, call this a case study??
So basically, here are some diet pills offers. Go on Yahoo and make a list of diet pills keywords. Setup your landing page to review the different diet pills. Bid $1.50, and you too can lose $30-40 per day.
Thanks for the case study – I’m signing up to promote this stuff right now
Very good post.
Giving informating like this away really helps te get readers to subscribe to your blog.
Do you already make some money from referals from this page?
Hi,
Thanks for sharing how you set things up. That’s exactly what a newbie is dying to find out. A real life example…Thanks a million.
Heh, I was just about to launch in this market too. Not to say that I won’t.. but hey, there are a ton of other niches :) Nice post.
Great post Paul!
It gave me a good idea how to approach things in general.
I hope you will write in the near future also some posts how to set up quality keyword lists using Google Adwords’s free keyword tool as a basis for example. A lot of noobies here don’t have the money to spend on sites like Wordtracker, etc. in the very beginning.
Thanks and have a nice weekend everyone!
So a 30-40 loss at initial testing means the niche has potential? What sort of loss would you have to suffer to decide that the niche has no potential at all?
Everyone and their mother! That’s right!
The potential isn’t based on the loss, its based on the gross revenue that was brought in. With a gross revenue of $300 per day and a loss of only $30/$40, there is plenty of room to work with. The fact that $300 in revenue was generated is almost enough info alone to know the niche has potential.
Greatly appreciate the fact that you gave some great details in this post about setting up a campaign.
Thanks,
Rich
If there werent many people promoting that niche, why did he have to start with 1,50 – which is a lot, isnt it?
That way he lost a lot in the beginning and didnt actually have to. Unless there was competition.
Great tips! Thanks!!!
I put the highest offer as the #1 and called it the “Top Rated”, and then the lowest EPC I put at the bottom and rated “Good Choice”.
So in other words, you completely misrepresent the quality of these products by creating a fake ratings system. Very nice.
This in essence makes you nothing more than a glorified spammer.
Diet Pills!!! Cool post, Thanks for that…
And of all people to write this, it comes from a guy who has a site where he is looking for a girl online – AND plays Chicago music.
Boy that’s hilarious!
And what’s wrong with Chicago music?
BTW, it bothers you not at all that Uberboy here admitted to lying and building completely disingenuous landing pages to mislead potential buyers? How is that any better than what used car salesmen do?
This endeavor might be lucrative, but then again, so is being a drug dealer dishing out crack to the addicts.
The amoral tone of this post is astounding.
DIET PILLS?! FUCK YEA
Time to max out my credit cards! theres no way i can lose
While Lincoln has somewhat of a point, this was a *very useful step by step process. Kudos on making things simple, understandable, and easy to replicate.
On another note, any chance you’d want to meet up w/some of your regular readers at Affiliate Summit?? Perhaps a dinner or at least coffee…. could be fun…
Ok, so you can’t give us the domain name, but how about a screenshot of what your landing page looks like? Given the wealth of information on how to start and run a program, I think that is the only piece missing.
Nice post uber. Simple but at least gives n00bs a place and path to follow.
I agree, a sample landing page would be very helpful, here.
LOL
Affiliate marketing is not about saving the whales… its about marketing.
Switch on the TV, and watch an Ad break… every single ad will be filled with actors pretending to love the product, and often semi-disguised as “everyday real people” discussing how fantastic a product/service is…
Do you honestly think they just came forward and volunteered because they loved the product so much?! No, they are getting paid to say they love product X , Y , and Z
Posts like yours sound rather naive
You guys want a landing page? Just go to google and type in something like “review diet pills” and look at the ads. Just give the guy a break and copy the link vs. clicking on it.
Here is an example > http://www.dietpillreviewcenter.com/
The bigger problem is creating a website to look for a girl. Call me weird – who knows.
If you don’t like Paul and find yourself having to call him “Uberboy”, why not find another blog to read?
You have got to be wasting valuable time here while groups of females are hunting you down at your site.
If you want to see a landing page, go to google and type in something like “diet pills reviews” and checkout the ads with landing pages. Here is one example > http://www.dietpillreviewcenter.com
It’s about getting the conversions. I bet 90% of all the sites that sells or promote diet pills are like that anyways. You have to be a bit ruthless and dirty in this internet marketing game to achieve a certain degree of success. As much as we all hate spam or “too good to be true” information, it apparently still works. And I don’t believe any of the big online marketers are so innocent from using similar tactics.
These probably would have been even better for the new year. ;)
jimm, ad hominem attacks tells me you have no argument to present, so why don’t you just put that wee little blinky of yours right back in your pants where it belongs, mmmmkay? That’s a good boy. :-)
both very good points here.
At the end of the day, people make their own decisions. I know if I was the customer looking for diet pills, I would have hit paul’s site, seen four that looked reasonable and checked them all out to see which one seemed better. Then I’d do more research and google to see what people on forums have said. Then if the sites seemed reputable enough, I’d buy. If not, I’d see if there was an ‘offline’ store that sold it.
Having said that though, and I’ve said this before, I too have trouble posting up fake reviews. But someone here told me that I could get around this by posting up real reviews from other people instead :P
Funny how a guy looking to find girls on his website is now talking about male genitalia.
Seems more like your speed.
Another great post, good information for a newb like myself to get ideas from in my own campaigns.
Thanks Chris. So he spent 335 dollars a day, and made 300 back. This is around 90% of the spend. Say you’re spending 300 dollars a day, what wort of percentage are you looking for to conclude the niche has potential? As a noob I would have expected you’d be looking for over 100% (i.e positive profit), but obviously not.
Nice writeup, should give people new to AM some direction.
cheers
Those keywords you used are useless for a campaign with Adwords unless you have pharmaceutical credentials.
“he ups the ante”
I don’t think so.
This is the best blueprint of making money from affiliates if you ask me. . thanks for this one! great find!
I am just testing the waters in AM and this could be my first step. Thanks a ton