Chris Carpenter – Affiliate Marketer [Mark Byers, September 2003]

Chris Carpenter, in his own words, makes a very good living from placing adverts using pay per click (PPC) search engine services like Google Adwords. The adverts he places direct prospective buyers to a distributor’s site. If the prospect buys then Chris picks up a commission. Chris has finely tuned his approach to such an extent that he has written an eBook that takes the reader step-by-step through how he makes money using Google Adwords. His book is titled “Google Cash” and I have a copy myself which I’ve found to be very enlightening, which is probably an understatement.

Chris is not alone in how he makes money from affiliate marketing. The big difference is that Chris has gone into print and demonstrates how he does it. On top of this, I’ve tested his approach and it definitely works. So as far as I’m concerned he’s a good example of what anyone can do by following some very simple steps, which he does lay out very clearly.

I’m sure Chris generates an income from a range of affiliate marketing activities but in this profile I’m concentrating on the one that he’s gone into print about. Google Cash demonstrates how anyone can make some money from being a basic affiliate marketer (Model A if you’ve read my ABC To Affiliate Marketing report).

So what does Chris actually do? What are the steps he follows? How much profit does he make? These are the questions I want to address in this brief profile.

What Chris does

In very simple terms Chris exploits the fact that Google, and its associated partner sites, is used over 200 million times a day to locate products, services and information. He identifies “lucrative” affiliate programs and then sets about pin pointing niche search terms that few other people are bidding on. This places him in a strong position to get his ads seen and clicked by those people who are already looking for the product he’s promoting. This in turn means that the conversion rate he gets is impressively high. In short, he gets a very good return on the investment he makes in advertising products.

By his own admission he sometimes gets it wrong but the vast majority of times he gets in very very right.

What’s interesting, for me, is that Chris does not appear to have a particular slant towards a specific product group. He’s made money from promoting casino sites, mortgage offers, credit card promotions, eBay memberships and this varied list goes on. This is in contrast to much of the advice that you’ll see traded across the Internet Marketing community which tends to be “stick to what you know and are interested in”. Chris looks at whose paying good money for customer introductions and then looks at how he’s going to drive visitors to the product owner’s site. Here is someone who has seen the power of the tools that are freely available for anyone to use to make some extra money. In Chris’s case he makes his entire living from the Internet. He’s a real regular person taking a very different path to most people and I personally commend him for it.

The steps Chris follows

As you can appreciate, I’m not going to go into any detail here as I could very easily find myself in breach of copyright. Equally, out of respect for a fellow internet entrepreneur it would be inappropriate of me to plagiarise his work and plumber his intellectual property. So all I can give are the headlines and perhaps a couple of examples, in my own words.

As I’ve already mentioned, the first thing Chris does is identify lucrative affiliate programs. Now I already give you my views on what can be considered good affiliate programs in my “ABC To Affiliate Marketing” report and I’m encouraged to see that Chris and I pretty close when it comes to spotting the better schemes.

The next step is to join the affiliate program and get clued up on everything the product owner or Affiliate Program Provider (APP) is providing by way of marketing collateral. This can take the form of words that work or features that sell etc. It’s very important to know what it is you will be promoting because if you don’t then it’s going to be virtually impossible to write compelling ads.

After this Chris looks for the golden keywords that he will bid for. If you’re unsure how PPC services work then here’s my simple 30 second definition. Keywords (or phrases) are what you and I type in when we use a search engine like Google. PPC advertisers compete to use specific keywords that will get their ad towards or at the top of the paid listings in search engines. On Google these paid listings are the ads that appear to the right of the search results. Every ad you see has achieved its position through the advertiser being prepared to pay more than others for every click they get on their ad.

The trick is to find the keywords that lots of people using to locate what it is they’re looking for, but very few advertisers are bidding to use. A very simple aim but, as you will appreciate, not that easy when you consider that there are over 200 million searches a day on Google alone. Each search may involve a variation of a keyword or phrase. Needless to say, Chris has developed ways to find the lucrative keywords. There are some tools that aid Chris in this respect and several are worth a mention. One is Wordtracker and the other is Adword Analyzer. Both cost money but what you pay becomes insignificant when you realise the returns these tools enable you to make.

I’ve used Wordtracker for some time for highlighting popular keywords and very usefully, any common misspellings of keywords and phrases. A good example of this is someone searching for the Atkins Diet. You would be surprised how many people type in Adkins instead of Atkins. These misspelled keywords are just as, if not more, valuable as correctly spelled words as they often allow you to compete with very few other sites.

Adword Analyzer is a new tool which I got introduced to when I bought Chris’s book. This tool focuses specifically on Google and Overture as PPC service operators. The tool tells you how many other ads are running at any given point in time using specific keywords and phrases. This tool is seriously wicked as it removes all the guessing and a lot of the trial and error of running initial campaigns. I now know before I even give a thought to running a campaign which keywords will just be unprofitable because too many people are already bidding to get high slots for their ads. It also shows me where the niche opportunities are. I’ll give you a very real example. 

You already know that I promote a range of nutritional supplements. All the popular keywords I might initially want to use for supplements are already heavily competed for so they just aren’t viable from a profit perspective. Adword Analyzer showed me that the keyword phrase of “lowering cholesterol” had very few ads running that used this specific phrase. I’ve been using it now for over a month and seen the traffic grow by over 500%. I would never have found this phrase so quickly without Adword Analyzer. If you’re tempted to give the Google Adwords method a go then I cannot recommend this tool strongly enough. I should mention that I’ve become an even bigger fan recently as they extended the product to include statistics from the UK versions of Overture and Google.

What Chris does next is he writes the ad to promote the product. This is a skill that develops over time but Chris has again developed a clever formula for writing ads that get clicks. There’s also a good deal of helpful guidance provided by Google on what makes for an eye catching ad and what doesn’t.

The next step is to create the Google Adword campaign. Chris has some tips on going about this but at the end of the day the process is determined by Google.

Beyone this point the focus is on tracking campaigns and fine tuning them.

How much Chris makes

Not surprisingly Chris doesn’t reveal exactly what he makes but he does offer examples of specific campaigns that he’s run so I’m going to use these to give you a feel for how much he’s making from just operating as a basic affiliate.

The important thing to focus on is profit. It’s not difficult to generate lots of traffic and custom if you pay over the odds to get your ad at the top of the list. But making a profit is very different, and is the measure that matters. There’s no point in operating as an affiliate if you don’t make a profit.

So with profit in mind let’s look at what Chris has been achieving.

Example No. 1 – Casino memberships; Chris has ads running monthly to encourage people to take memberships at casino sites. Casino sites are big and growing on the Internet. In fact online gambling is growing at a significant rate. He spends $50 a month on advertising this service and makes $280 a month in profit. Let’s put this in perspective, this campaign has probably taken less than an hour of his time. It now runs on autopilot. All he now does is cash the commission cheques.

Example No. 2 – This is a really good one because it shows how you can pick up quick returns while an opportunity exists. From time to time sites like eBay will have a push on encouraging new members. They will incentivise existing eBay users and affiliates to drive people to them where they then try to sign them up. Chris noticed that few people were promoting eBay Germany and then checked to see if the German satellite operation was paying commissions for introducing new members. They were. Chris generated monthly commissions of $3750, $6000 and $6500 in the first three months of January. This type of opportunity doesn’t last forever but it’s a very good example of how to exploit an opening when it presents itself. Chris doesn’t give overall profit but my estimate, from looking at the figures he does give, is that his costs ran at around 12% of his income. Pretty impressive for what is essentially a pure marketing operation.

Conclusion

I believe Chris is typical of many affiliate marketers who are steadily and quietly making good money through basic affiliate marketing. He’s found a very rewarding way to make money from one very simple approach. Virtually all the tools freely exist to enable him to make his money. He only needs a computer, an internet connection, a Google Adword account, the appropriate affiliate accounts and a little time and he makes money, whether awake or asleep.

If you want to learn more about Chris and Google Cash then click here and you’ll be taken to his site. If you want to check out the tools and services that Chris, and me for that matter, use for this type of basic affiliate marketing then you’ll find links to appropriate sites in the links section of this resource CD.