Google Cash Review - Make Money with Google AdSense

Can You really make money by placing those tiny sponsor ads on Google to promote online merchants ?   - Of course You can !

BUT - the more important questions are:

1. Will You be able to find a profitable market niche ?
   
2. Does "Google Cash" show You how to do it ?
   
3. What are the limitations and disadvantages of this strategy to earn money online and how can You get around them ?

Pay close attention !  You´ll find the answers in a moment.

Dear Friend,

in theory, the process of affiliate marketing is pretty simple: Your task is to bring customers and merchants together and earn your share (commissions) in the process. Today, You can earn affiliate commissions on almost everything that´s being sold online. The fasted (but unfortunately not the most profitable) way to do this is placing sponsor ads on Google for a certain keyphrase and link those ads to the merchants.

Example:
One of the affiliate programs I´m promoting is AllPosters.com. Thousands of people are searching on Google for "posters" each month. So I write a little ad that links to the merchant (AllPosters.com) with my affiliate link and when someone buys a poster, I earn a share of the sale.

I´ll use this example later again to show you the limitations and disadvantages of the google cash strategy and how you can increase your profits. Let´s take a quick look at the content of "google cash" first.

google cash - the book

Google Cash is a 87-page ebook (in PDF format) written by Chris Carpenter, who´s using this strategy for years now to earn thousands of Dollars per month.

The book mainly describes how to use Google AdWords to advertise affiliate programs and starts with a short introduction to affiliate program networks (like Commission Junction, Linkshare, ClickBank) and the Google AdWords system.

In the next chapter (22 pages), Chris shows some of his profitable campaigns, how he found profitable keywords, how to get the affiliate links, write Google Ads and finally how he tracks the results.

In the second part of Google Cash (29 pages), Chris goes into details about getting started with your affiliate business, how to get an email account, a free web page, how to find and choose lucrative affiliate programs, how to join them, get the links and finally how to build a list of potentially profitable keywords relevant to the products you want to promote.

Some of the tips are quite good and that part of the book is well important for all those who are just starting out their online marketing venture. Those who´ve been in this marketing game for a while yet can easily skip this part and take the most valuable tips from the last parts of the book.

The next section about writing ads that get the click is in my eyes probably one of the most important parts an Google-Adwords-Tutorial should have, yet "Google Cash" keeps it very short and also uses examples which doen´t meet Google´s guidelines ("lowest prices", "better than ..").

One problem with Google Adwords is that if you have one little keyword that doesn´t perform well, your whole account gets slowed down before you become aware of and you have to restore it to full delivery again. Three times like this and you pay a reactivation fee of 5$.

After 11 pages of step-by-step "how to setup your Google AdWords campaign" the book finally arrives at what I consider the most valuable part for advanced marketers: extra tips for maximizing the results of your campaigns and two other great traffic sources.

Finally Chris recommends Perry Marshall´s free 5 day eCourse to get "a competitive advantage". Honestly, if you really want to master the Google AdWords system then you should get Perry Marshall´s advanced Google Adwords guide. This guide has over 30 case studies from 8 different industries, real screen shots and an extensive Q&A session on dozens of topics. It's much completer, easy to use and it will really help you gain an edge over your competition.

I wouldn´t recommend buying "google cash" in the version I´ve bought in january 2004, but since there has been an update to the book and also a new bonus report added, it´s a very good investment for someone who is completely new to internet marketing.

In the bonus report, Jeremy Wilson (one of Chris´ students) tells his story how he went from losing money with Google Adwords to finally profiting from it and gives valuable tips for choosing the right keywords in order to get more targeted visitors to your affiliate links and finally profit from the "google cash" system.

And with the personal help from Chris you get a really good value for Your money. So I recommend You give google cash a try - remember: you´ve got a 90 days money back guarantee.

My ratings for Google Cash are:



if you are completely new to affiliate marketing and Google Adwords. Google Cash will give you a good introduction in affiliate marketing with pay per click advertising and show You how to make money even without having a website.
Click Here to get Google Cash

and



if you´ve been in the online marketing biz for a couple of months or more yet.
Get Perry Marshall´s advanced guide instead.

Disadvantages of the "google cash" system

Google AdWords is the only pay per click search engine that allows advertisers ( YOU ) to send visitors to other people´s websites, all other engines require that You have your own website, so you´re limited to one advertising source only.

Pay per click advertising is enjoying an increasing popularity and the number of advertisers ( Your competition ) dramatically increased over the past 12 months. The more competition, the higher the bids, the lower your profits and the harder it gets to find profitable keywords.

Not every click you get is from a potential customer. Some people click twice on your ads and also some of your competitors will click on your ads to inflate your advertising costs, trying to beat you out of the game.

Furthermore you need to tell in your ads that you are an affiliate of the merchant, usually by adding "aff" at the end of your ad. Some people don´t like the fact that others earn commissions from their purchase, some even think that when they click on an affiliate link they´d have to pay a higher price (because of the commission involved). So they will less likely buy from You.

Let´s have a look again at the example mentioned earlier:

I´ve once set-up an Google AdWords campaign to promote AllPosters.com targeting the keyword "posters" and sending visitors directly to the merchant, just to see how it will do. When you search for "posters" on Google, you´ll notice that ...
1. The merchant itself holds the #1 position for this term and
2. There are lots of affiliate AdWord ads for this merchant.

It doesn´t seem to be a profitable niche. Lots of competition and a low profit margin (average poster sale is about 10$, which means 2.50$ commissions). In order to get a reasonable amount of clicks, your ad needs to be somewhere between position #2 and #6. In this case I could get position #5 for 11 Cents per click.

I was surprised to notice that there was still a piece of the pie left (read: money to be made) so I let the ad run for about 3 weeks to see how it would do after some time. Here are the stats for the first three weeks:

AdWords clicks: 1,028 at a click-through-ratio of 0.7 %
unique visitors: 495
Note: only half of the visitors are unique, i.e. at least few of them must have clicked several times on my ad. My competitors ?

advertising expense: 113,08 $
commissions earned: 175,96 $
net profit: 62,88

Not much. Google earned the biggest share of it. So I thought how I could improve on that. Well - AllPosters.com gives affiliates the opportunity to offer customers a 15% discount coupon code from their websites. Now - if You would be the customer searching for posters, click through all these ads and finally find a place where you can get 15% off - where would you buy from ?

So I decided to quickly build a web site - cheap-posters-and-prints.com using an amazing piece of software called the SEO Website Builder - a tool that allows anyone to build search engine optimized web sites without any web programming knowledge - and offer the coupon codes from there.

My AdWords ads kept basically the same except the URL and that I didn´t have to include the affiliate mark "aff". Another three weeks later I checked the performance and saw that the average click-through-ratio has increased to 1.2% (which Google rewards with a lower cost per click) and also the sales convertion improved.

The new advertising expense of 139.16 $ returned 374.89 $ in commissions for a net profit of 235.73 $.

Note that this is only one campaign for one keyword and one merchant. And of course: it´s not the most profitable niche (I´d be nuts if I revealed my better performing ads).

Another big advantage of having your own website like this is that you will receive visitors from the search engines for FREE, while your competitors (including common "Google Cashers") keep on paying for clicks.

Well, my friend, I´ll leave it up to You to decide if the "google cash" strategy is good for a long-term home business success. I consider the "google cash" system a great way to almost instantly refer potential customers to a merchant and check out the profitability of certain keyphrases. But if you are smart, You´ll reinvest a part of your first income into the right tools to build a well working website in order to get those visitors for FREE.

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