Bing Ads And Affiliate Marketing – Update 1

So I’ve been following (roughly) a method I read on the Warrior Forum of all places. It’s a guide to making money as an affiliate with Bing Ads. You can check out the 11 page thread here, where the OP – a guy who goes by the handle “solarwarrior” – outlines what sounds like a very plausible method for using Bing Ads to make affiliate commissions.

These update posts are basically “brain dumps” of where I’m at, rough amounts of what I’ve spent/what I’ve made, issues I’m running into, and future plans. I

The basic premise is:

• Find a good affiliate product (Clickbank, CPA, or otherwise)
• Set up a landing page or direct link
• Pick keywords
• Set up Bing ads campaign
• Drive traffic, test, optimize, hopefully turn a profit

As someone who spends a large portion of his working week dealing with some BIG PPC accounts, I feel confident enough to say that I can see merit in this method. Okay, I haven’t exactly had success … hell I’m a long way from breaking even. But I can see how it would be possible to make money in this fashion.

I’ve been playing around with this method for about a month now, spending $5 per day and running a couple of different campaigns (one in English, one in French).  All my campaigns so far have been direct linking to the sales page, or if available to a “pre sell” page on the vendor’s site itself.

The net result is that I’ve spent about $180 USD, and made a single $30 commission on Clickbank. I’ve had about 30 . Considering my absolute limit is $1000 (i.e. that’s the max I’ll spend to test without starting to have at least one really positive ROI campaign) I’m not off to a great start.

I also spent about $40 on the eBook guide the Warrior Forum thread OP was selling. I don’t know why I expected anything otherwise – it was pretty average to be honest. Just a slightly puffed up version of what was in the thread, with no juicy campaign insights to see. Oh well!

The positives are that I’m finding the act of finding keywords, writing ads, and getting clicks to be very easy. I’m getting 8+/10 quality scores, <10% CTRs, and low CPCs with ease.

It’s just converting the darn products isn’t so easy.

What I want to test from here:

• Creating a really detailed review-type landing page
• Adding opt-in forms for traffic that would otherwise “leak”
• PLANTING RETARGETING/REMARKETING COOKIES … so I can follow these people around the web with targeted ads for the products I’m selling on Google’s Display Network and Facebook via custom audiences.
• Also want to test pure list building. I.e. focusing on getting as many leads as possible for the best CPA, and then marketing on the backend.

Of course this requires substantial investment of both time and money. To have enough traffic to even begin to bother with remarketing, you would need to be driving 100+ clicks per day to your landing page, which is going to get costly unless you can quickly hit positive ROI