Boogster’s Blog

I like making money, especially when I don’t have to do a lot of work to make that money.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a keyword that didn’t look like it had a lot of advertisers for it.  I knew that the site I was promoting had an affiliate program, so I put two and two together and decided to start an Google Adwords campaign.  Up until a few months ago, I had never used Adwords as an income generating tool…I had always used it to promote my own websites as a marketing vehicle.  Well, I decided to setup this new campaign to see if I could actually make some money.

I logged into my Google Adsense account, did a quick search with their keywords tool, and setup my new campaign with two keywords (or I should say key phrases).  Obviously, I’m not going to say which keywords, since it’d be easy for anybody to ruin my money making abilities by outbidding me.

I started the campaign on April 30, 2009.  I set the maximum CPC (cost per click) to $0.15 with a maximum of $2/day…or roughly $60/month.  I didn’t think much of this campaign until a few weeks ago when I got a quick email saying that the “affiliate payment has been made”.  I logged onto my affiliate account and saw that it had a $12 in commissions pending.  I was like…ehhh, nothing exciting…nubbins. I had totally forgotten about my Adwords avertising campaign.

Yesterday, I was going over my American Express credit card statement and noticed that Google Adwords had made some automatic charges to my account in the amount of roughly $100 over the past two months.  I knew that I was running some marketing campaigns for , but I didn’t think that it’d be THAT active right now because I was pretty sure that I set the maximum daily limits pretty low for those campaigns.  Well, I logged onto my adwords account and discovered that the charges were due to my new keyword campaign which I had totally forgotten about.

I was like, damn, $100…I better have made some money otherwise, this campaign is kaput. Well, I logged onto my affiliate account at the promoted site and noticed that I had a $492 credit to my account.

Apparently I had sold 50 items via my affiliate link for a total of almost $500 for basically 30 minutes of “work”.  I’ve always wondered how these SEO/PPC guys make good money via Adwords…I guess now I know.  You just have to find some marketable and untapped keywords and you’re golden.

Anyways, I got this check yesterday:

So, I spent a little over $100 in advertising fees and made about $480 in a little over two months of advertising for a net profit of about $380.  Not too shabby.  I’m gonna work on optimizing these keywords to see if I can make some more.  I’ll report back on this at the end of the month to see how much more free money I can make.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, 14 July 2009 @ 12:58 am on the category affiliate, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.