It is very important to know how to properly create and manage campaigns as an Internet marketer. If you can master this, you will run your campaigns with a lot greater efficiency and be able to track your progress much easier (and ultimately get a lot more work done).

As Internet marketers it is very easy to get side-tracked with your campaigns as there are so many industries, affiliate programs, techniques in which you can make money... basically there are TOO MANY distractions! Because of this we are going to cover how you should go about creating your campaigns and show you how to use some of the tools here at Wealthy Affiliate to manage your Internet marketing operations.

Managing Free Marketing Campaigns

Choose Campaign -> Keyword Research -> Plan Articles -> You write OR Outsource -> Upload to Article Engines

There are positive and negative aspects of free campaigns as they are much more volatile than paid campaigns (due to Search Engine shifts). With this being said, they are free. When you are creating free campaigns you should always think in terms of volume, as the more volume or energy that you put into your campaigns, the greater the opportunity for profits.

Organizing yourself to perform these tasks is very important and you should understand how to schedule your day-to-day research and implementation activities in order to maximize success.

For example, if you are going to start out with article marketing, the opportunities are endless. However, in order to tap into this opportunity you are going to have to write articles. As with any business or aspect of Internet marketing, the more time and effort you put into YOUR business, the greater your success will be.

We suggest that you outline a schedule for your article marketing campaigns. This includes the keyword research and the actual creation of the articles.

Here is an example of an outline that you could implement when article marketing.

perform research and find a product or service that people want
find a product that you can deliver to that group of people
research 10-15 highly relevant keywords that have low search engine competition
write one article that focuses on each specific keyword phrase
build the article in Squidoo
add an entry in your blog with a link to your Squidoo lens
ping your blog
repeat the process

Once you come up with a "system" for writing your articles and submitting them to an article engine, you will become very fast at doing this and building many different campaigns will be a breeze. Without a "system" you will waste time and energy, so stick to your outline and try not to veer off track.

Coming up with Campaign Ideas

Here is a list of ideas that you can use to base your campaigns from:

industry specific
new or hot items in the news
new product releases
new Clickbank products
sporting events
hollywood news
political campaigns/news

When you are trying to think of any industry to write articles for, look for keywords that are highly relevant to what you are selling, and that do not have a lot of natural search engine competition. The greatest opportunity to find long-tailed keywords lies within the industries that have volume consumers, many models, and many brands.

Think of all the potential keywords within industries like electronics, jewelry, cars, music, clothing, shoes, movies...the list could go on and on. There are literally 1,000,000's of articles that could achieve a high ranking if you look for the right keywords (This could keep you busy for awhile!)

Another thing you can do is go to a large shopping site like Amazon or eBay and get keyword ideas from the actual product names and categories listed on those sites. Those two sites alone could create a lifetime of writing and the both have very good tools to determine which products are hot (thus are receiving a lot of traffic).

A "Real" Campaign Example

Let's use Amazon.com to perform a little research and come up with some campaign ideas for writing articles within. If you visit www.amazon.com and click on the "Top Sellers" link you will find a ton of top selling items that people are purchasing.

If you scroll down to "Camera & Photo Bestsellers" and click the "See all bestsellers" link, you will be presented with a very good list of items that people WANT!

For instance, the "Canon Digital Rebel XTi" is something that people are purchasing according to Amazon.

After spending a few minutes in Google, it's easy to find some great keywords that are highly relevant to this product:

(On a $737 product like this, Amazon will pay you about $30 commission as an affiliate)

Writing articles for these kinds of keywords will give you a VERY good chance of getting listed because there is virtually ZERO competition in the search engines. Amazon pays 4% to affiliates, which can get you some decent commissions on higher priced items, but you aren't limited to just using Amazon. You can search for other affiliate programs online that carry the product that offer higher commissions.

In this simple example, we have shown you how to use large selling sites like Amazon, to help you create ideas for your article campaigns.

These are just a few ideas that will provide you with full-time writing opportunities. As we have already gone over, diversifying will limit your resources (your time) and typically end in a much less successful campaign. We suggest that you focus on one industry using one technique (like article marketing) when creating your free campaigns. You will not only be more organized if you do this, your campaigns will run much more efficiently and your volume of work will increase.

Penny Pincher Guide

You should check out the Penny Pincher Guide if you are looking for other free marketing techniques that you could create a full campaign around.

Setting Your Weekly Tasks

When creating article marketing or any other free campaigns it is very important that you have a steady stream of work taking place. This could mean writing articles, making forum posts, writing blog entries, SEO'ing your website pages, etc, but you need to constantly be active.

Create weekly tasks and goals for yourself (beyond the ones we provide you in this course). If you stay focused and follow-through with your goals, you will easily be able to create a healthy stream of income online.

For example, if you write just 5 articles per week you will have 250 active articles by year end. If you follow the article writing techniques that we have mentioned, you should not have any problem getting 50 clicks per month on average (less than 2/day) from an article, meaning that you will be getting 12,500 free clicks every month at the end of the year. This will equate to some great revenue and it will become second nature for you to monetize this traffic.

You should use the Flow Diagram above that we have provided you to keep on track with your weekly tasks and use this to make sure you follow through with your entire tasks. It is no good writing an article that you are not going to submit to an article engine, the same way it doesn't make sense to spend hours researching and analyzing an industry that you are not going to promote. You need to implement your ideas and follow through with your weekly tasks in order to succeed!

Managing Paid Marketing Campaigns

Choose Industry -> Industry Research -> Keyword Selection -> Campaign Creation -> Ad Group Creation -> Landing Page Development OR Direct Linking

Paid marketing campaigns should only be attempted if you have a budget to support these campaigns. By budget, we do not mean that you have to have $1000's set aside. We started out doing paid marketing campaigns with a budget of $5/day ($150/month), so you can in theory start out with very little. When you start making money, it should go right back into your business by re-investing it and growing your budget.

This is what we call running a business "organically", which means that all your profits should be dumped back into your business. This will allow you to grow much quicker than if you go on a shopping spree every time you get a Clickbank check in the mail!

The most common questions we get around paid campaigns are regarding the niche and whether or not a particular niche will be profitable. We can tell you that there is money to be made within any industry. The starting point of any campaign should be to choose your industry (could be anything, something you are interested in is naturally the easiest), and then researching the heck out of it!

Understanding your audience is the key component of your industry research. Do not think that you can just find a couple hundred of keywords and promote them within your account without any awareness of who your consumer is and why they are buying. Having an understanding of your audience will make the difference between a profitable campaign and one that will eat away at your budget!

Campaign Creation

When creating your campaigns, there are some specific guidelines that you should follow that will allow you to run more efficient campaigns that are easier to manage. First, when creating a campaign we suggest that you break down a "campaign" by the industry.

For example, you may have a campaign for "dog training" and a campaign for "Internet marketing". You will then want to create your corresponding ad groups within these campaigns. Your naming conventions will make your Google, or Yahoo account much more manageable, so make sure you use names that you will understand. For instance, a campaign may look like this:

Campaign Name: Dog Training
Ad Group 1: Train My Pug to Heel
Ad Group 1 Keywords:
-train pug to heel
-train my pug to heel
-training pug to heel
-train pugs to heel
-training pugs to heel
-train pug heel

This is a well organized campaign and it follows the guidelines of a quality ad group creation as well. If you are not familiar with the common keyword technique already, you NEED to learn this technique as it is VERY important to create all of your ad groups this way.

AHHHH! Setting up a Google Adwords campaign can cause people to pull out their hair. This should not be a stressful experience, and it will not be difficult if you are prepared for it. We have created a few resources that you can use to follow when creating your first Google Adwords campaign.

When you are creating a campaign, it is very important to focus on quality, not quantity. Do not dump 100's of irrelevant keywords into an ad group, set your CPC, and think things are going to be wonderful. This simply won't happen.

Create quality ad groups, write targeted ads, and make sure you have relevant landing pages to drive your traffic to. If you want to check out a good case-study that will walk you through campaign creation, you should check out the Data Entry Case-study (do not attempt to promote this industry. The quality of the current Data Entry products is very poor).

As we mentioned, start with one industry and create ad groups of keywords that are targeted to your product and/or website. If you have a website, at this point you will be able to target a much larger range of keywords as you will be able to manipulate the page for keyword relevancy. Remember, relevancy converts visitors into purchasers. The more relevant your landing page is to your keywords, the better ROI your campaign will produce.

Before letting your campaign run, you should check out the Top Ten Mistakes to make sure you are not making any of them. This can save you a lot of money and frustration.

The next important aspect is landing page creation. We went into this in great detail in previous lessons, so you should have a pretty good understandinghow to create pages and more importantly, how to deliver pages that are highly optimized and convert well. If you need to revisit these details, please do so now.

Organizing Your Campaigns

If you have not already made yourself comfortable with the My WA section, you should take some time now to do so. This section was created to help you stay organized, manage your campaign profitability, and actually follow through with tasks and goals. If you take advantage of these tools and record your progress, you are much more likely to see success a lot sooner than if you don't use them.
The Sections included within My WA are:

My Campaigns

This is where you can track your campaign profitability. It is good to have a grasp on which campaigns are performing and which ones are under performing.

View Your Campaigns Here

Tasks & Goals

How can you get anything accomplished without setting goals? The tasks and goals section allows you to track your progress, set priorities on certain tasks, and mark them completed. You can also use this section to take notes of any ideas you have or to document any research that you may have done.

View Your Tasks & Goals Here

Training History

Most tutorials and courses within Wealthy Affiliate allow you to mark them being completed when you finish them. You can see exactly which course you have worked on within the Training History section. This will essentially allow you to track the learning that you have done at WA and easily reference the material.

View Your Training History Here

Creating Long Term Income

Creating a long term income stream is the easiest to do with a PPC (or paid) campaign. It is different from free marketing techniques in that once you have created a successful campaign, it will remain successful because you are able to control your ad positioning. Also, you have much more elaborate control of your pages that are getting viewed and exactly what type of traffic that is coming to your pages (based on the keywords you select within your campaigns

Whether you select paid or free marketing techniques when starting out, please understand that you can create a healthy income with both and that both are transferable to one another. Once you have an understanding of a particular industry, you can diversify your marketing techniques and implement other types of marketing angles. We suggest just starting out with one (paid or free) for the simple fact that it is too easy to limit your resources if you try to learn both at the same time.

If you position yourself now, you are creating a great opportunity for your future. Do not aim for short term overnight success, as this shortsightedness will prevent you from ever becoming a great Internet marketer. People will always be buying online, and there will always be money to be earned. Never lose sight of this when creating your campaigns.

Paid marketing campaigns will allow you to create campaigns that will run on auto-pilot when successful...but do require the initial outlay of cash for advertising expenses. Free marketing campaigns will require continual additions in order for your revenue to remain constant...but it does not cost you a dime!

Free is probably the best way to start if you don't have a big budget, however you can start growing your business organically by putting your earnings back into paid campaigns. Either way, creating a long term business online is highly possible and presents you with a huge opportunity as the Internet is rapidly growing. Spending is only increasing, and the opportunities for new affiliates are only getting BIGGER!

Should You Become a Merchant?

This topic needs to be discussed because many people start Internet marketing and immediately think that they can be much more successful as a merchant than an affiliate. The grass always looks greener on the other side, and we can tell you from personal experience that you will be much better off starting out as an affiliate. If there comes a time where you want to have your own site and affiliate program, you can move over, but only after you master promoting products as an affiliate.

It is very difficult to become a good merchant if you are not a highly successful affiliate first. This is because you are going to have a tough time promoting your own product, recruiting new affiliates, and also understanding what resources and incentives are necessary to create good affiliates. If you are a successful affiliate already, it is much easier to become a merchant as you can see things from the perspective of your affiliates.

The great part about being an affiliate is the fact that you do not have to deal with the headaches of customer service, shipping, product delivery, emails, and refunds. These are things that can chew up your resources and eat away a lot of your time.

We are not saying that being a merchant is a bad thing as it does have it's benefits (primarily other people promoting your products), however if you think that being a merchant is the only way to make a lot of money online, you are mistaken. You can make upwards of $10,000/day as an affiliate, so don't ever feel like you have to become a merchant to become highly successful online!

In saying this, we have created a tutorial dedicated to those of you that would like to learn about creating your own product and essentially become your own merchant.

Product Development Tutorial