How I came to dominate a competitive niche

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SonicReducer

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Sep 22, 2006
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For about the last 6 months I have been #1 in a very competitive niche at Azoogle. From what my AM tells me, I completely dominate this niche. So how did this happen? Very simple: hard work. You can’t just slap together a campaign in a few hours or days and expect to do really well. You may get lucky for a while, but eventually your earning will dip. It’s difficult to keep a campaign profitable over the long term.

Without giving away my offer, here is how I did it in general terms.

1. Keyword research and structure. Of course a good keyword list is very important. Start with a great tool, and then add every variation you can think of. More important almost than your master list, is how you break your KWs out into groups. Correct adgroup structure is a huge factor in your campaigns success. The more targeted your ad is to your keywords, the better your CTR will be and conversion rate.

2. Make a good landing page, then keep making more and split testing. You just never know what will convert until you test it.

3. Know your seasonal trends for your niche. Everything has seasonal patterns. Even the most non-seasonal product has peaks and valleys than you can exploit.

4. Buy more traffic. Once you have a well converting campaign, try it out on every possible network you can. If you don’t you are leaving money on the table. Don’t believe what you read in forums about PPC networks. Test them for yourself. One of my best converting networks is one that everyone in the forums calls crap. To me it’s gold though.

5. Know your niche. This is the most important tip I can give. Research everything you can about the product and market. Know the demographics of the target customers. Know their age, sex. geographic location, marital status, income level, browsing habits, and what they ate for breakfast this morning. Read the trade journals for the industry. Find out everything you can, because every piece of info you learn will help target your campaign. This is a step that many affiliates skip when just going for the quick buck, but if you really want to do well it’s essential. Think of yourself like a marketing contractor for the publisher’s company. They are paying you to know as much as possible about their consumers so you can better market their product to them.

I think if you work hard enough, you can eventually own any niche you want, even the most competitive ones. It’s just a matter of how hard you want to work.
 


Good job...which network? I've seen a lot called crap, which some I don't agree with due to my own experiences.
 
Great post. I like your blog too, especially the one about using Google's offline keywords editor. I use Keyword Companion to do the same thing but it's missing the ad copy and bulk bid features.
 
3. Know your seasonal trends for your niche. Everything has seasonal patterns. Even the most non-seasonal product has peaks and valleys than you can exploit.

Thanks for the post. I'm wondering how you suggest someone exploit peaks and valleys in a market. The most obvious response to a peak would be to increase spending -- but presumably you've found the sweet spot and are spending as much as possible. Unless a seasonal peak affects conversion rates I'm not sure how it would change your approach.
 
Thanks for the post. I'm wondering how you suggest someone exploit peaks and valleys in a market. The most obvious response to a peak would be to increase spending -- but presumably you've found the sweet spot and are spending as much as possible. Unless a seasonal peak affects conversion rates I'm not sure how it would change your approach.

Google trends can be very helpful in determining seasonal trends...

Google Trends: spring break

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Great post man! I hear what you're saying about not always following others. I ran a campaign on a so called crap SE and it worked fine for me. From what I've been able to figure out so far, different SE can work for you in different ways. For example, a SE that might not convert sales well might do a great job at converting leads.
 
Nice! Honestly, I have done much better in competitive niches than the smaller, lesser known one. There is a lot of room for growth and evolution that people miss because they don't even try.

I just check out your blog, very good stuff.
 
Thanks for the post. I'm wondering how you suggest someone exploit peaks and valleys in a market. The most obvious response to a peak would be to increase spending -- but presumably you've found the sweet spot and are spending as much as possible. Unless a seasonal peak affects conversion rates I'm not sure how it would change your approach.

Not so much increasing spending, but more adjusting your landing pages to take advantage of the reason the traffic is peaking.
 
Thanks guys for checking out the blog. It's nice to know someone is reading it :)

From your blog...

SonicReducer said:
Tip #1 Using the editor to build campaigns for other networks With the Adwords editor, it is very quick and easy to build campaigns with multiple adgroups, ad copy, and keywords. I have found that it’s the fastest way to build up a campaign and get it into CSV form so you can work with it on other PPC networks. Just build the campaign in “draft mode” then go to File > Export to CSV > Export Current Campaign. Now you have a campaign in spreadsheet format that with a little massaging, you can upload into other engines like MSN or Yahoo.

You just saved me a shitload of time. :D
 
Great post. Everyone always asks "How do I make more money online..."

Simple, work hard, have more keywords, test more and just do more in general...sounds kinda snarky, but it's true.
 
I planned to try searchfeed for a long long time... however I didn't try it out as I read a lot post saying that it is crap.

I will definitely try it today after read your post!
 
I planned to try searchfeed for a long long time... however I didn't try it out as I read a lot post saying that it is crap.

I will definitely try it today after read your post!

If you are trying SF make sure you are click tracking for dupes and fraud!
 
If you are trying SF make sure you are click tracking for dupes and fraud!

What program do use for this? There are a few ways to go about doing this, not sure which route I am going to go.

I have just started testing different niches on looksmart. The traffic is cheap, but converts pretty poorly so far. Even for stuff like zip submits.
 
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