Out of all the paid networks out there to do affiliate marketing through, Microsoft Ads is the one which is most often overlooked because Bing itself is not considered to be a “serious contender” against other search engines like Google, YouTube and Facebook.Ā
But neglecting this goldmine of a network and the benefits it holds, is a mistake I would advise you not make, especially in affiliate marketing. Considering how it gets up to 20% of search traffic online, that “small number” can actually become a profitable number if you know how to use it.
Note: Microsoft Ads was originally known as Bing Ads, the name just changed but everything is still the same.
Here’s the amazing potential Bing Ads (Microsoft Ads) holds for affiliate marketing:
Imagine for a moment a popular product comes out that has millions of people wanting to buy it and looking up reviews for it everywhere online (one of my case studies actually had this happen).
This causes affiliates who see this opportunity to want to promote it in masses and they’ll start scrambling to do it everywhere they can: Through Google, YouTube, blogging, ad networks like Facebook and so on.
And this will usually result in a lot of competition coming about to promote this product, and only the elite affiliates will really be able to truly capitalize on this.
However, this is where the Microsoft Ads potential truly shines:
Since Bing and it’s ad program is so often forgotten about, affiliates like myself can just as easy take that same popular promotion that’s trending, set up an ad to promote it and literally not worry about other affiliates finding out about it, because they simply underestimate or even forget that this network even exists. And that’s perfect for me š
And this is a strategy I’ve been practicing for YEARS and…
This brings me to the $300,000 case study I have on this subject:
In my case, I have personally been using this network for the last 8 years and have been able to generate over $300,000 in affiliate sales in markets that outside of Bing Ads were VERY competitive, but within this network itself, there were very few affiliates that I had to worry about, so I was pretty much wide open to promote anything I wanted, with little competition and spend very little to get traffic to my affiliate offers.
Today, in this article, not only will I show you how I did this, but I am also going to share the step by step guide on how you can do it too, even if you’re a complete beginner.
But in case you are VERY new to this search network and it’s advertising network, let me explain…
What is Microsoft Ads?
Bing Ads is an advertising network created by the Bing search engine which allows users to advertise their business and products through it.
Setting up ads on this network also has them run on the Yahoo and Duck Duck Go search engines.Ā
This ad network also receives about 15% of all online searches when it comes to search engines (if you add Yahoo and Duck Duck Go), making Bing a great opportunity for marketers to make money.
How does one use Bing Ads to make money as an affiliate marketer?
The formula is pretty simple:
- You get an affiliate offer (and link).Ā
- You create a landing page which reviews that offer you are promoting.
- Then you hop on Bing Ads and set up an ad that links people interested in this offer to your landing page.
- You will be able to get visitors from this (And you pay for each person who CLICKS your ad) and if you make more affiliate sales than you spend on the ads/clicks, you will be making a profit.
Here’s an example of a profitable Bing Ads campaign:
If you get 50 people who click an ad you set up on Bing and pay $0.10 for each click, then you will have spent $5 total, but if you make 1 sale which pays you $50, then your profit is $45.
That is in a nutshell how pay per click marketing works, at least a successful one.Ā
And while the formula sound simple, there are a lot of ways to screw this up and waste money, like with every PPC network, which is why the approach I’ll be teaching you in this article is set up so you get the most targeted visitors to your landing page, the lowest amount spent on the ad you set up and the most space for profits to come in.
This is something I’ve been able to do numerous times in time with this network, and this brings me to explaining…
How I made the $300,000 in affiliate marketing sales on Bing Ads (the proof):
Basically the profitable Bing Ads example I explained above, happened to me numerous times, and 2 of those in particular, I was able to make so many sales and spend so little on my ads, that I was able to generate the $300,000.Ā
Here are 2 main campaigns that I set up on Bing Ads to make this money:
- One was a popular dieting program that I promoted on the network which earned me $190,000.
- And the second (which is still active today) involved me promoting an affiliate marketing program called Wealthy Affiliate (The earnings crossed $63,000+).
- The other $50,000+ I made was spread across other miscellaneous campaigns I had set up, some of which made $1,000’s in affiliate sales, and one which made $10,000+, but sadly, I did not record every single campaign and even changed accounts at one point.Ā
Here is proof of campaign 1’s income reports (About $190,000):
Background info: This particular campaign involved me making money through Bing Ads by promoting a VERY popular dieting program that hit the market and had millions of people wanting to get it and of course, every affiliate who saw this opportunity tried to promote it.Ā
Yet just as I said above about how people literally neglect Bing Ads, I was one of the first and ONLY affiliates to use this network to market this program and it is because I had NO competition, that I was paying literally $0.06 for each click my ad was getting and making SICK bank in the process (this is why my profits were SO high in this regard).
Now let me just say that this particular campaign occurred many years ago and I didn’t save every single income report, but I do have 3 pieces of evidence:
2 diplomas from the affiliate network I made my sales from and 1 of the checks I got from this same network:
The ad campaign I had set up for this project had over 130,000 clicks that made this money:
Very soon, I’m going to show you the exact steps I took to get these clicks, low costs and high affiliate sales š
Now let’s move onto the next major campaign…
Here is proof of campaign 2’s income report ($63,000+):
Background info: This particular campaign is still active on Bing Ads today and is still making me money almost daily. I started it a few years ago when I began promoting the Wealthy Affiliate program.
Here is how it is doing today on Bing Ads:
Through Bing Ads alone, this campaign that is promoting Wealthy Affiliate has over 3,000 conversions.
How this campaign works:
In this case, I had (have) a whole other website that promotes Wealthy Affiliate and reviews affiliate marketing programs and work at home opportunities.
90% of those opportunities are horrible (this is a fact), but they do get searches on Bing, and so what I did was, I set up ads on Bing that targeted people looking for reviews of those products, and when people landed on the page, it promoted the Wealthy Affiliate to them (successfully I might add).
In addition to getting traffic to this site through Bing Ads, I also get a larger chunk of traffic to this same site via Google search (SEO). So the income reports I have to show you are MAINLY from Google’s search, and about 20% or more of it is from Bing Ads.
So in these following income reports, the number is FAR larger than $63,000, but that combines the profits I made on this site through SEO, so to get the estimated Bing Ads profits I earned, I just need to take 20% of the total profits:
Here are some of the income reports:
You are welcome to see more of my other affiliate income reports for this in which I show yearly income numbers for this specific promotion and if you’d also like to know more about myself, here is the page where I talk about my history in affiliate marketing.
The other $50,000 are spread across miscellaneous campaigns.
Sadly, as I said before, I don’t have the proof of this, but I hope the 2 campaigns I showed you proof with above is enough to help you believe the other $50,000 were also generated the same way.Ā
Some of the other campaigns also involved successfully promoting another dieting program while others were spread across other affiliate promotions ranging in different kinds of niche topics.
So overall, my affiliate marketing commissions from the 2 major campaigns and the miscellaneous other ones total to over $300,000.
Here is the 1 formula I used to make this money on Bing Ads:
In every single instance that I was able to successfully do affiliate marketing on Bing Ads, it was because I set up campaigns that targeted VERY specific products or topics.
- The 1st campaign above, targeted a niche audience interested in a VERY specific dieting product.
- The 2nd campaign above, targeted niche audiences interested in VERY specific make money online products, and pitched Wealthy Affiliate to them.
Here is how this strategy works:
If you’d like to learn more about Bing Ads and affiliate no problem, let me continue:
This is something I will be teaching you in a moment how to do as well, but I want to make sure you understand just how important it is that you understand this concept…
PPC marketing is one of the riskiest ways to do affiliate marketing and if you don’t know what you’re doing, not only will you fail, but because it is PPC marketing, you will lose money, and very often, A LOT.
Most of the time, people who get into PPC look for ways to get a lot of fast traffic to their site, and through PPC you CAN do it, but it literally comes with a price: You have to pay for that traffic and…
To succeed with affiliate marketing through Bing Ads, you need super targeted traffic.
Let me give you very simple examples to make this point and I strongly suggest you read this part carefully, and even multiple times, because I am literally going to save you a lot of money if you understand this concept…
- There exist broad niche topics, narrowed niche topics and specific niche topics.
- If you want to succeed with affiliate marketing through Bing Ads, you will want to ALWAYS target specific niche topics.
- In rare cases, you will want to target the narrowed down niche topics, but those require more experience.
For example:
- Getting into shape, fitness programs in general, and the P90X program.Ā
- Martial arts supplies, boxing gloves, hayabusa boxing gloves.
Because you are literally spending money on clicks here, the BEST, most qualified traffic you can get is the one which comes from a specific niche topic.
With the P90X example, if you set up a campaign on Bing Ads correctly, you would ONLY get the P90X audience to your site and that would be the BEST type of audience because they would be the most likely to buy the product from it.Ā
For the hayabusa boxing gloves, if you are promoting that exact glove and advertise it to people who know it, you will only get those people interested in it and those are going to be the people who will most likely buy it.
5 reasons why this strategy = success with affiliate marketing on Bing Ads:
Because I’ve been using this same strategy for so many years and have seen it’s benefits, I want to share them with you as well:
Reason 1: You get only the best, most qualified traffic.
There is simply no better traffic than the specific niche topic traffic. That is the audience most ready to buy something and the most easy to convince to buy your affiliate promotion.
Anything that strays into the narrowed and broad niche world is going to get you bigger traffic numbers, but LESS sales in the end.
Reason 2: You spend far less on clicks (pennies) because of less competition.
Broad and narrowed down niche topics generally have more people advertising their ads on the network so you are basically competing against them if you go the red and yellow route.Ā
However, with specific niche topics, you are in 90% of cases, going to be spending VERY little money to get clicks to your site on and this will result in you having to spend so much less.
I know people who spend DOLLARS on clicks and get few sales, where I spend PENNIES on clicks and get more sales. Which scenario would be better for you?Ā
And let’s not forget once again about how many people literally forget and underestimate Bing Ads in general and this is something I have no problem with! Let them worry about out competing one another on big networks like Google, Facebook and YouTube.
I’ll just occupy my affiliate promotions and ads on Bing and make crazy bank in the process (As I have done numerous times on this network for years like I said before).
Reason 3: You are almost certainly insured against big losses.
PPC is itself a VERY risky way of doing affiliate marketing, and that is something you cannot escape. However, through this strategy that I am showing you, because you are spending so little money on each click, you have far more leeway to get traffic to your site and not lose a lot of money.Ā
I have never lost much thanks to this strategy, but people who target broad and narrowed niche topics typically spend more, and lose more.
Plus it is also likely that most of the campaigns you run on Bing will likely not be very profitable and you may have to shut them down because they are not being profitable. But in that instance, you will still not lose a lot of money because you are going at this in the most conservative way possible.
Reason 4: Quality scores rise and rewards come from Bing thanks to this strategy.
This network has a “grading” system it uses to determine how much you will pay for your clicks and one of them is called quality score and the higher it is, the better it will be for you, because you will be able to spend less on clicks.
With this strategy, if employed correctly, you are bound to see quality scores in the top tier numbers (8-10).
Reason 5: This strategy is great for beginners to get their feet wet with the PPC world.
There is no other network that I have come across in which I can spend so little and have so many benefits, and if you are a beginner to the PPC realm, Bing Ads is arguably the best place to start.
Because you are risking so little with this strategy, even if you have a failed campaign, you are likely to only lose a few dollars (if you follow my advice).Ā
Convinced? Then let’s get to the step by step formula to doing affiliate marketing on Bing Ads:
First, let’s get the terminology of this network down. Here are the most common terms and what they mean on this network:
And now that we have these basics terms down, let’s get started with setting up your first campaign in the same way I set up mine:
Step 1:
An account with this network. They are also running some deals where you can get credit ($75) if you spend like $25 on ads, which is basically free money in this case.
Step 2:
An affiliate promotion you wish to advertise on this network. I suggest finding products that:
- You know a lot about.
- That are popular (more traffic will come through your campaigns).
- Find products and affiliate offers that pay you $30 or more in affiliate commissions.Ā
The more you can get paid for a sale, the more leeway you have to get more clicks and break even. For example:
If you get paid $30 for a promotion and set up an ad in which you pay $0.10 a click, you’ll need to make just 1 sale out of 300 clicks to break even and the higher that break even point is, the better it is for you.Ā
Note: If you have problems picking a promotion or ANY part of this tutorial, let me know below. You can also ask me questions in my frequently asked questions section.
Step 3:Ā
Next you will need to have a landing page set up where this affiliate promotion is pitched. You are basically going to be doing a product review and sending people to the page who know about that product and want to know more about it (hence the review).
It is important that the review you set up is high in quality and explains why the product you are pitching is worth buying. Set up pros and cons, show positive reviews of it. Things of that nature, but this is a topic I will cover in a separate article on how to increase your affiliate sales on a landing page.
Making YouTube videos is also a good way to go. I do talk about affiliate marketing on YouTube here, and in this case, making the video, and putting it on the landing page where you sell the affiliate promotion is a powerful way to make sales.
Step 4 (watch the video above for reference):Ā
This is where we go into the Bing Ads site and set up the actual ad and link to our page so we get the traffic. And for that, I have to refer you to my video that I put above which offers the exact instructions on how to proceed.Ā
The goal here is to set up the ad so only the people interested in the specific niche topic or product see it and that you get more clicks from it.Ā
Warning 1:
Do not let Bing dictate which keywords you should advertise for.
One thing I did not include above in the video is that you WILL get suggestions from Bing on which keywords to use and they will say you can “raise your traffic” if you do. Do not make the mistake of falling for this!Ā
The keywords this network gives you will generally lead broad audiences to your affiliate page and those are probably not going to make you sales. So stick to the specific keyword strategy and specific niche topic method I showed you above, it will ensure you ONLY get the VERY targeted clicks and visits, because again, those are the people who are most likely going to help you make sales.
Warning 2:
Do not let Bing “suggest” what you should bid. They will always try to get you to spend more. Start at $0.10 like I suggested in the video above and if you follow my strategy correctly, that should be plenty to have your ad start getting clicks.
The only time you should raise your bid (and I recommend doing it in $0.10 increments) is when the ad you put up doesn’t get any impressions or clicks for at least 5 days.
Sometimes new accounts take a few days to marinate in this network and the ads to start receiving impressions and clicks, so don’t panic if you’re not getting clicks right away.
Warning 3:
Never ever direct link to an affiliate offer, that is almost sure to fail 100% of the time. I have tested this and every single time that I ran this test, it has never made me profits.Ā
Always create a landing page with a review of the product or program you are promoting and warm up the audience that visits your page to understand it better before buying.
After all, people who click the ad you set up aren’t ready to buy the product you are promoting so sending them straight to an affiliate offer makes no sense. They want to know more about the product/program beforehand and this is why a landing page with a good review is the best way to make the sale.
Step 5:
If your campaign works, then you can try to replicate this formula and create other ads, targeting other specific niche topics and selling specific affiliate promotions on it. This is exactly what I did with my second campaign (the one which promotes Wealthy Affiliate).
If this ad doesn’t work (doesn’t break even), you have a few choices:
Remake the sales page that promotes the product and test the new on to see if it sells and it doesn’t, pause it and find another promotion.
Keep testing new versions of the same promotion to see which one works.
The good news is that with this strategy, you have a lot time to test different variations of your sales page, but normally, if 2-3 do not make you profit, then move to a different promotion.
A very important thing to “expect” with PPC marketing:
That is that it is very likely that MOST of the ads you set up, especially in the beginning of your experience with Bing Ads will likely not make good profits, and this will gradually decrease as your experience rises, but again, the method I showed you can help you avoid losing a lot of money and at most, you’ll only lose a few dollars, which is no big deal considering the GREAT experience you’ll get.
It takes only 1 Bing Ad to succeed and then all you have to do leave it on, and it’ll make money 24-7, while you move onto a different campaign. This is something I have experienced more than once in my affiliate journey with Bing Ads and this is something you can experience too if you follow this guide.
But if you need more help with this, then I have something that can provide just that:
Expanding to the next level of affiliate marketing & Bing Ads:
This strategy is again one of the best starting points for beginners to get into the PPC world. It is SAFE, it is cost effective and it is designed to really help you make good money online through affiliate marketing this way.
I have literally been using and continue to use this very same strategy to generate a chunk of my online profits this way and with practice, you will be able to do this too.
However, if you wish to go further into this business, here are some other things you can do:
Start targeting specific niche topics that are popular. There is more traffic there.
Product reviews in specific niche topics are great entry points into the PPC world and you can truly make a lot, but targeting specific niche topics that are popular is a great way to expand further in this world.
Let me explain using the same broad, narrowed and specific niche example…
Health, pain, back pain.
Back pain is a specific niche example and has millions of people who go on Bing and look for ways to cure it. Targeting this niche crowed and doing things like:
Setting up a Bing Ad that reviews the top back massage products
Or setting up a campaign that collects an email list that helps this niche audience know of natural ways to stop back pain (affiliate promotions can be included in your emails).
These are all different ways you can target this niche audience and expand further into the PPC world this way. So if you were wondering about list building or targeting niche audiences with problems, this is how you would do it.
The video I made above should also answer how to get started with this stuff, as I do offer examples of these scenarios.
Expanding even further with this: Helping clients set up their Microsoft Ads campaigns.
Once you have enough experience and success with Bing Ads, you’ll actually be able to advertise that knowledge to potential clients who also run their own businesses and will be able to help them set up their campaigns and make money from that.
I’ve personally been involved in this and it’s amazing how many people incorrectly set up their campaigns on Bing and other networks. The fact that someone with experience in this can come in and basically help them save money while getting more clicks is something that business owners will pay a lot of money for.
Final questions you may have about Bing Ads (Microsoft Ads):
Is Bing Ads good for affiliate marketing?
Absolutely. I’m an affiliate marketer and Bing Ads has been a very profitable network for me to work with for many years.
Does Bing allow affiliate links?
Yes you can use affiliate links in your Bing Ad campaigns, but it’s better to send your PPC traffic to landing pages that have affiliate links on them instead.
How do I get paid from Bing Ads?
You first need to set up a proper campaign on Bing Ads and then funnel the traffic to a landing page that has an offer you are selling or promoting.
Is Bing Ads profitable?
Yes if you understand how to properly set up campaigns on Bing Ads and send the clicks to a proper landing page, then you can profit from Bing Ads very well.
Is Microsoft ads worth it?
Yes Microsoft Ads is worth it but it is very important to have money to spend and know how to make smart campaigns and funnel the right traffic to your landing pages first.
To conclude:
If you are just beginning affiliate marketing, I would advise that you wait to get into Bing Ads until you’ve made some sales through easier, most cost effective methods like blogging and making YouTube videos. PPC is not always the best place to begin in this business and it can often end up being a mistake many affiliates make.
But none the less, the strategy shown in this article is like I have said numerous times already, VERY safe for beginners to get started with if they are affiliate marketers trying to get into the PPC world.
Later on I will be adding tutorials on other PPC networks like YouTube ads, Facebook Ads and Google Ads to show you how to do affiliate marketing with them.
While they are all awesome networks, all with a lot of potential, once again, Bing Ads is the safest one to start with if PPC is where you’re aiming to go and I hope this tutorial helped answer a lot of questions you have about getting started with it š
Hi Vitaliy,
Can I do brand bidding on Clickbank products what happens if I do brand bidding, does my account got suspended?
Hi Hermant, so in my experience if you do a search on Bing for the Clickbank product and see ads showing for it, then there’s a chance that there’s no brand restrictions for it. However this isn’t a guarantee. If you do get a brand violation on your ad, I believe you would need several instances of that violation for a suspension to happen.
My success with promoting Clickbank products (mostly) has come from promoting them via targeting keywords for popular products that were not in the Clickbank marketplace.
Hi Vitaliy, I am wondering if this strategy can be used with promoting products from Clickbank? I am fairly new to affiliate marketing, but know pretty much about landing pages, email follow ups using Aweber. Please let me know.
Thank you,
Joel
Hi Joel, technically the answer is yes, but I would be extremely careful in applying this strategy. It is often mistaught and misrepresented as being much easier than it really is. There’s lots of people pitching the whole concept of promoting Clickbank products, collecting an email and then pitching the offer after people opt in or after through email marketing.
There are several major problems with this formula:
First, email marketing is not a simple method that any beginner can do.
Second, you need traffic to test this and this method often requires you to use paid advertising, which can really make you spend a ton of money.
Both these things require experience and money, and if you don’t have it or are nervous, don’t do it. There are better ways to promote Clickbank products and ideally you should be learning the best fundamentals to making an affiliate marketing business which is choosing a niche and building a site in the niche, then making sales on that site, and then advancing into email marketing and paid ads.
This is taught in it’s correct form within Wealthy Affiliate and by applying that training, you will save money, still see success (it takes time however), but it will be a safer direction to go in if you are serious about affiliate marketing.
What I teach in THIS specific guide on Bing Ads is how to make review pages for ANY affiliate product and sell it on the review page (no email stuff required), but you still need to promote things that are high quality for the customer and pay you enough to make it worth using Bing Ads in the first place and if you are not ready for this financially, I would recommend getting started with Wealthy Affiliate before you do it.
Hi Vitaliy,
Thank you for this article, it’s so useful! Most brands I work with don’t allow using their brand name in PPC campaigns. It is possible to use this strategy for “10 Best X” type articles and use “best non toxic laundry detergents” type of keywords?
Thank you again!
Yes but I would not recommend funneling PPC traffic to a top 10 post. For PPC campaigns, you want to steer them down one funnel that is easy to follow. Steering traffic to a top 10 post may confuse them and also lead to lower conversion rates. If you’re going to funnel traffic via PPC, make sure it’s to a single product recommendation (the best one).
Hi Vitaliy,
Thanks for creating this guide, it helps a lot. I remember when I started PPC on Google ads, I was promoting a company’s software as I was affiliated with them.
When I started the campaign I didn’t focus on the keywords, and the campaign failed the first week and didn’t get any commissions. Then straight after the campaign was finished, my account was suspended and I was so confused.
My company’s banner ad was not illegal and even if the campaign failed, I could always try again. But no. I asked Google but they never replied.
And so I have a few questions:
1) For PPC marketing, is it necessary to create a review landing page? Because when I did that campaign I just linked the company’s website with the campaign. I want to start with Bing ads, however, I don’t want to get suspended once again.
2) For the UET Tag, could you explain it in detail for a conversion goal?
Thanks!
Hi Julian, so here are the best answers I can provide based on the info you gave me:
1) I only recommend creating review type landing pages when you are marketing a specific product to your audience. That way people know what the product is before they click on the ad and they expect a review of the product.
It sounds like you directly linked to the company’s website and unless your keywords are such that the people clicking on the ad KNOW what the product is, I would not do this. Instead, I would create a review of the product you’re promoting, then on the landing page link to the company’s website, and the specific product you were reviewing.
2) UET tag is basically a code you input on Bing Ads which tracks where they go and what they do, sort of like Google analytics. I believe you can set this up in Bing Ads and they’ll give you a code to input into your site’s coding area so it activates. I rarely use this, but it’s not a bad thing to have when you become a serious Bing Ads user.
I would also strongly consider Wealthy Affiliate and taking my Bing Ads course there, because I do show you how to navigate there as well as how to diversify your business too. I still do a lot of Bing ads, but I don’t make the mistake anymore to ONLY focus on that.
3) You shouldn’t worry about having your account suspended on Bing Ads as opposed to Google Ads which is very bizarre at times (I would know). Even if something happens, Bing Ads support is much easier to reach vs Google Ads and get things resolved.
Hello Vitaliy
May I ask please: Is it possible to create review landing pages using a WordPress site and just add in the product name as the page extension?
For example, if I have a WordPress site and the URL is mywordpresssite.com and I want to create a review page of xyz Clickbank product, once I have the page completed, the URL would then become… mywordpresssite.com/xyz then I’d use that URL in Bing ads to send visitors to.
In effect, my main domain name, i.e. mywordpresssite is hosted and each product review page I create, I just add on the page extension as above. This way I don’t need to buy a separate .info type domain for each product promotion?
Thank you!
Hi Walt, yes you can do that. I would however choose a main domain name that is very flexible like Waltsproductreviews.com and then whatever new page or post you add for the review you do, it would become the extension off that domain, so if you do a product a review, then site would read as Waltsproductreview.com/product-a-review and then you can do the same thing with product reviews B, C and so forth.
However, before you proceed with this step, understand a few things:
1) If you’re new to this and I assume you are, I would recommend going the Bing Ads route because without experience properly reviewing products and proper ad set up, you risk losing money doing this.
2) If you are indeed new, start with Wealthy Affiliate and build a fully functioning website that gets free traffic first and makes money from that.
Thanks for the article! Really helpful and motivating! I’ve got two questions:
1) How do I find keywords with low competition (Without paying for any tool)?
2) Can I succeed with my budget with for 10 cents per click (Or something like that)?
1) Honestly you can use simple logic: Find a popular product that’s already out there, see if you can promote it, and if you can, then create ads on Bing Ads targeting the product keyword and variations of it, like attaching words like “review, reviews, scam, legit” to it.
2) Probably not. You shouldn’t be doing PPC if you’re on such a tight budget to begin with Simcha. This is a massive problem I see many people make. They think they can get into PPC with almost no money and make big money in the process. You really need an actual budget, knowledge that you likely will lose money before you make it, and a good understanding of affiliate marketing. Anything absent that mindset, and you’re gambling with your PPC money and asking for money troubles.
This is why I tell people to learn affiliate marketing from Wealthy Affiliate in things like blogging first, then get into PPC.
Hi Vitaly, I want to ask. Can I start my Bing ad bid at $0.01. Which is the least you often start with?
Thanks
I believe the least would be $0.05 Yem. In some cases, I’ll bid that little to start if I feel the ad competition is low enough but generally I go for $0.10 as a starting “measure” of where my ads will rank.
In places like YouTube Ads, you can actually end up bidding less than $0.05 for views.
Hi Vitaliy,
Awesome post! Very well explained! I applaud you for replying to comments both here and on YouTube.
I have 2 questions.
1) I have a partnership with several companies through Impact.com, and most of them do not allow paid per click advertising (they do not allow me to bid their brand names in PPC advertising). I would like to know if I can bid on brand name keywords (like you did with DJI) through Amazon Associates (products listed on Amazon).
Note: 10 seconds after I created my account on ClickBank I instantly got suspended from using ClickBank because of my location (North Macedonia) and I’m struggling with the creation of an account on CJ.com, which leads me to the second question.
2) Can you give me a list of the best affiliate marketing websites (similar to ClickBank, Amazon Associates, and CJ.com) where I can get high ticket products that I can do PPC advertising while using their brand name?
Thank you in advance for answering these questions.
P.S. You should edit all your blog posts and mention to people to read the comments section and your answers. They contain a lot of value!!
Hi Andrej, so for your first question on which names you can bid on, I don’t have an answer to that because some brand names cannot be used in PPC ads on Bing or other places and you’d have to try to set up the ad and see if it runs to find out. Sometimes you may be approved and there is no brand name restriction, but other times, there might be one.
For your second question, I have a list of affiliate networks that are huge like Amazon associates on my blog post page but generally, here’s a few:
Avantlink.
Ratuken.
I would also be part of Amazon Associates (if you aren’t already). You can find a lot of high ticket products there to promote via PPC.
Additionally, I would consider starting a blog and getting free traffic there. It takes longer for the setup, but you are far less restricted to brand names like you are on PPC ads.
And finally, I’d also consider getting my full Bing Ads course (above) which you can currently access for a 14 day trial at $0. It will really help you navigate in all of this and get a good, diversified online business going correctly.
Thanks for the fast reply!
No problem!
Hi Vitaliy,
Thanks for your information on Bing ads. It’s quite helpful. I have never tried doing Bing ads or Google ads but I now feel encouraged to try them. Also I’m impressed by how you take your time to respond to every comment and question by responders to your video. That’s quite a special trait.
Hi Sal, thanks a lot! I try to do my best to answer all questions and steer people into what works for me, because I have been through that and know how hard it is to find legitimate, good info without getting scammed.
In your case, since you’ve never done PPC before, I wouldn’t recommend starting there. It’s better to start with a website, blog and build this up to get the experience and money that way and move into PPC after. This is how I did it and I also help people do this through the Wealthy Affiliate program I talk about which is what trained me to do all of these things.
Hi Vitaly,
Great information and I love the conservative strategy.
Just to clarify: On your Wealthy Affiliate promotion, are you targeting other product keywords, reviewing that product, and then recommending WA? Or are you just linking to the other products?
I only ask because it looks like those product name keywords were in your WA campaign.
I have tried that strategy with YouTube and it worked very well but was just wondering if you were doing that with Bing Ads or just linking to the products you reviewed.
Thank you for your time.
-Mark
Whoops my bad. I misspelled your name. Meant to say Vitaliy.
Not a problem at all Mark!
Hi Mark, so I review other programs like WA and make adgroups with keywords targeting those product keywords and then in the landing pages steering into Wealthy Affiliate, whether it be directly or to a landing page that reviews WA.
Very nice case study Vitaliy. I have one question, how long do I have to run the Bing campaign in the testing phase?
I would say 1 week is good, unless you are already spending a lot of money in which case a few days. For campaigns where I target very specific keywords, it takes longer to see clicks come in, which is why I say at least a week. But for campaigns where I set the bids to over $0.50, clicks come in quicker and if they aren’t making me sales to cover my budget, I’ll pause the campaign sooner and refine it.
Hi Vitaliy.
First I must commend the nice work you are doing out here. This article greatly inspired me. I want to clarify an issue:
For instance I set up a campaign to promote Cinderella solutions under the diet niche. Can I set up adgroups of other diet related products such as keto diet under that Cinderella campaign or I will just create a new campaign for the keto diet?
Hi Osaro, so yes, set up different adgroups for different diets, meaning:
1) Promote the Cinderella Solution in it’s own adgroup on Bing targeting only those exact and phrase keywords pertaining to Cinderella Solution.
2) Create 1 adgroup for every other diet you want to get traffic on but point it to it’s own landing page that talks about it and recommends the Cinderella Solution. Do not link other diet topics in their own adgroup to your promotion of Cinderella Solution.
In other words: If you find another popular diet, but want to promote the Cinderella Solution, then do this:
Create a landing page reviewing that diet and set up an adgroup for that diet, and on that landing page, recommend the Cinderella Solution. Rinse and repeat this for every other diet you decide to review, so you should have 1 campaign with many different adgroups, talking about different diets and targeting keywords for those diets and linking them back to their own individual landing pages that pitch Cinderella Solution on it.
Hi Vitaliy. Great tutorial.
I wanted to ask a question concerning product reviews on landing pages. Is it possible to do a quality review on a product you haven’t even used before? Won’t it end up being a weak review based on manufacturers claims, which in some cases are not entirely true or based on another person’s review of the product?
Hi Inyene, great question and one thing I want to say before I give you the answer is that my first major case study with Bing Ads involved promoting a diet program I didn’t really use, but because I stuck to basic rules of reviewing products well and understood the dieting topic fairly well myself, I was able to use that knowledge to make up for the lack of owning the product in the review.
So for promoting products you don’t own, here is a good tutorial.
And here is a good tutorial on reviewing affiliate products in general which goes over things like pro and con lists and so forth, in addition to other things I still use today.
Hi Vitaly, great detailed tutorial! I’d really appreciate it if you answer the following questions:
1. Do I need trackers like Clickmagick or Voluum for my PPC campaigns (what other tools are needed)?
2. Can I use free options like blogger.com or wix.com for product reviews and if not, which hosting do you recommend?
3. My main question is would a $1000/mo budget be enough to start with the Bing Ads + Clickbank method?
Thanks
Hi Jim:
1) I don’t use trackers. I use simple math like if my ad gets 100 clicks and I make 1 sale, that’s a 1% conversion rate. On the landing page, I will use affiliate tools like prettylinks to mask the affiliate link and see how many times it gets clicks, so if that same 100 people come to my site, but only 5 people click on it, I’ll need to improve that number to improve the stats.
2) I don’t like using free sites like that. I typically make WordPress websites and test product reviews there. If I ever make a one page website for example, I’ll make it a WordPress site through the Wealthy Affiliate program where I coach people, and test things there. They offer good hosting too.
3) I think it’s a bit much, and I would start at $200 for starters and that’s a daily budget, not monthly. And you probably won’t even spend close to that much anyway.
Clickbank products typically don’t get a lot of search traffic, but if you do decide to promote one that is getting traffic and searches, you probably won’t even need to spend $1,000 a month for it.
You can promote Clickbank products typically 2 ways: Directly reviewing the product on a landing page or promoting the product to the niche audience that would love it and you’d likely get more clicks and traffic from the second option.
Cheers!
Hi Vitaliy, which match type can I use for my keywords: broad or just exact and phrase match?
Thanks
Just exact and phrase. I never recommend using broad match.
Hi Vitaliy,
Is it safe to use a simple opt-in/squeeze page method using Bing ads to build an email list, using your strategy?
By the way your content is great.
Thanks
Hi Abdul, it depends on what audience you are targeting. My general advice is:
If you’re using Bing Ads to send traffic to a review of a product, then I would not use the email strategy because people aren’t interested in signing up. They just want to buy something, so it’s best not to interrupt their mindset. Promote the product directly or if it’s not good, promote a different product on the same landing page. In other words, just sell as quickly as possible there.
If you’re using Bing Ads to target niches such as people who have problems (like dating for example), then you can collect an email list and tell people if they sign up, you’ll send them a free eBook on dating secrets or something, and then sell through that eBook or later on down the email list’s followup messages you send them.
Great article! I like the review angle, but let me ask you this:
I really don’t want to build out and entire website with multiple blog posts and reviews for a Clickbank product. Based on what I’m reading here, I could build out a landing page that is an “advertorial” review of the product to get the quality score up.
It seems to me that doing a good “one page” review (advertorial) would work just as well depending on how well it was written.
Thanks for posting this, it was very useful as I’m getting ready to start some Bing ads.
Hi Earl, so there’s a few things regarding Bing Ads and one page sites I need to clarify for you:
1) Yes it’s true that building out one page websites to review and promote whatever product on Bing Ads works, AND I have my own $100,000+ results from doing that.
2) However, it is also a MAJOR fallacy to RELY on this strategy and expect it to work every time. In fact, I recently wrote about making one page websites and warned against people doing this especially if they are new. I recommend you read/watch the video in that article because the belief you can make money off 1 page websites and have that be your passive income is often NOT the case.
I don’t want you to fall into the trap of putting in so much money and faith in this, because it has a high chance of failure. Please make sure you check out that article/video and if you have further questions, let me know on that post.
Hello Vitaly. I am very lucky to have encountered your website. I’m really grateful to you.
There are things I cannot fully understand about 140 ad groups. I think this is one of the things that allows you to make lower payments. For this reason, I request information from you on this subject.
I think you mean 140 ad groups linked to the “X” campaign. So these 140 ad groups are promoting the same product, right?
You write separate reviews for each keyword. And you create separate ad groups. Thus, there is a perfect harmony between review text, ad text and keywords. This increases the ad quality score. Is this correct?
I really want to understand this. Please help.
Hi Tom, so for the 140 adgroups, all of them were pointing to landing pages reviewing a make money online product.
And on each landing page, I tell people about Wealthy Affiliate which is my MAIN promotion and there are links in each review of those 140 adgroups which take them to a review of Wealthy Affiliate, which then leads to the sales you saw.
You don’t have to follow the exact same route I took. You can use this Bing strategy to create one adgroup of a product you are promoting and just have the ad lead to the review page which promotes it, that’s it.
I’m not saying this will always work, but this strategy makes sure you are getting very low cost bids and a high quality score just about every time. It’s a very intelligent and cost effective way to save money on Bing Ads while getting quality traffic.
One of my other case studies in this article did that and I made 6 figures from that. But that isn’t always easy to replicate. You have to constantly reuse this strategy on different promotions, play around with the landing page and see what works before leaving it on autopilot.
For example:
That 6 figure case study where 1 adgroup pointed to a landing page where I was promoting something, it didn’t always work on other examples like it, and I lost money there.
For the 140 agroups, they are all part of 1 campaign on Bing Ads that is aiming to promote Wealthy Affiliate and MOST of them do not get much clicks or even profit, but the few that do add up and lead to me making money in the long run.
That’s a HUGE part of having success with pay per click and (once again) people really need to understand that my strategy works MAINLY to get low cost clicks and high quality score ads, but it doesn’t guarantee sales, because a lot of that depends on what offers the affiliate chooses and HOW they are promoting them on the landing page.
I did provide an example with the drone of how I start all this Bing Ads stuff from choosing the product to promote, to creating the landing page, to setting up the Bing Ad to give a good general reference of what to do though.
And remember, about a quarter of all my affiliate earnings are from Bing, and I diversify my efforts on YouTube, SEO and other pay per click markets. This is what ensures that my affiliate business stays healthy even if 1 method (or more) don’t work out.
This is a really interesting method! Thanks for sharing!
I can’t help but raise my “red flags” with you, if that’s okay? (not really “red flags” I guess, more like *curious* concerns!).
1) If you are targeting specific product keywords, I question whether there is both enough products and enough searches actually being made for these products?
2) Then there is issue of being able to actually find these products in “high-demand” in the first place. If taking Clickbank as the example here, I would think there are only so many products in the Clickbank repository that would make them high search volume products. Is there a method to this part?
3) This one’s more about your campaign setup, do you use the “Enhance CPC” on Bing for this strategy?
Thanks in advance! I’m really glad to have found this website – you’re a very interesting teacher! =)
Hi Ana, let me just say that all of these are awesome questions and it’s the type of stuff I enjoy seeing because it shows very deep thoughts and a good sign that you’re on your way to success at this. So with that said, here is what I will say regarding your 3 questions:
1) There are times where a product I’ll set up an adgroup and keywords for which won’t get a lot of searches and there’s even times where it will be 0. This happens, especially in the second niche I pointed to above that earned me $63,000.
The thing is though, I will keep finding products to review, will do it, and then will keep setting up adgroup after adgroup for every product I review. It only takes me 2 minutes to do now and every click I do get, even if it is a few is already extremely targeted. And the point is that building off this, because I keep setting up adgroup after adgroup, the clicks will add up sooner or later.
So in the case of the campaign that made me $63,000, that one has about 140 different agroups (all of which are 140 different products I made review pages on). About 50% of them get very little clicks and the other 50% get a few to a lot. But the point is that again every single click is targeted and overall, I’ll get about 100 SUPER targeted clicks a day for this campaign.
But the value of those 100 clicks is beyond what most can comprehend who target broad subjects which get cold clicks from and cost a lot. Let me know if you want me to get into more details on this Ana.
2) It is true that in Clickbank’s case, most products do not get many searches, but if you take the top selling ones in each category, you’ll likely be able to set up adgroups that review that product and get clicks.
However, a better strategy, and I explain this in my article on how to create an affiliate product review, I talk about reviewing products you don’t own, and promoting ones you are, like Clickbank ones.
In fact, the very first major campaign on Bing Ads that made me nearly $200,000 (the first case study above), actually involved me doing this. I found a very popular product that wasn’t on CB, and I set up a review of that product and promoted the CB product in it’s stead. This is how I was able to take a CB product that wasn’t too popular (but good), and make so much from it.
So being able to find outside products that are popular and in the same niche topic as the Clickbank product you wish to promote is a great way to make sales through Clickbank.
3) I don’t bother with any special stuff like enhanced CPC. I just set up the ad as I showed in the video above and however things play out after that is usually fine with me. Because the ad and keywords are already SO optimized to get VERY specific traffic, everything false into place on it’s own without me having to micromanage other things, so this really keeps things very simple.
Hi Vitaliy,
Overall it was a nice video and post too. But in 2020, is it possible to get clicks at 10 cents? I have tried promoting many health and fitness products and MMO products.
Almost all of them go near $1 bid. If I reduce the bid, I don’t get the clicks and quality score goes down. What to do in this case?
Hi Rohan, so I have a few answers for this issue you’re having, but I will ask questions with these answers I give and if you can followup with them, I’d be happy to further help you figure out what to do:
1) You’re mentioning health and fitness products. Are you promoting SPECIFIC products with the specific strategy I gave where you promote the product itself?
Because if you are promoting to the broad niche which is health and fitness, you will find A LOT of competition in it, with tons of people also making ads, which would explain why you have to pay so much to compete with these people.
If you find specific products and making individual adgroups on Bing Ads with them, in most cases, you should be able to manually bid $0.10 or lower on the keywords. I would try to target only the popular products to increase the odds of clicks coming in.
2) Regarding the MMO niche…
My advice is the exact same thing here. In fact, given that I also create ads and adgroups for this niche, I have seen how this plays out and here’s what I mean:
When I tried targeting the make money online niche as a whole (broad) and keywords in it, such as how to make money online, I had to bid VERY high to get clicks, so I ended up spending a lot.
When I tried to follow the same strategy of creating product reviews and then creating separate product keywords and adgroups, in 95% of cases, I was able to get VERY low cost clicks. In some cases, I would barely get clicks for certain product reviews, but I didn’t mind that and instead just kept creating more ads for other products.
This strategy allowed (and still allows me in 2020) to do this and get very low cost clicks and conversions.
3) Try to play with your bids and get at least a position 3 or higher on your ads. If you do, you’ll likely get good clicks.
Hi Vitaliy. This is a great blog. Let me ask you some questions:
1) Am I right in that you spent according to the above screenshot, around $28,000 in ads and got earnings of about $190,000 with about 131,000 clicks?
2) Several CB products have some prebuilt landing pages in the affiliate section. Can I also use them successfully?
3) Where do you get these targeted keywords and how many keywords should I put in my adgroups?
Thanks a lot for any help and support.
Best Regards,
Peter
Hi Peter, these are all great questions man!
1) This is correct. I did get 131,000+ clicks for about $28,000. And yes, the revenue was about $190,000, meaning the profits were $162,000! I basically spent about 14% and 86% was all profit.
It’s important to note though that for this campaign I did, that when I started, I was spending about $0.07 per click for about the first 6 months, and as more people stumbled onto this promotion and started making their own ads, I had to raise my cost per click more and more, to about $0.25, which was still cheap, but this CAN happen with Bing Ads from time to time.
2) Yes prebuilt landing pages CAN work, but I normally do not use them. In my experience, the affiliate page (review) you create should be your own. You have to understand that many people who promote the same product, especially those which offer a pre built landing page will use this strategy and what will end up happening is that people are basically duplicating the same strategy.
In my opinion, the review and landing page you make should be unique and of higher quality. I think with the more experience you get, the more you may decide to create your own landing pages vs using ones given to you by the Clickbank vendor or any vendor who offers them.
3) Usually the answer is, you come up with them and they are usually VERY easy to figure out. If you are promoting a SPECIFIC product, which is where I recommend you start when using Bing Ads, then you have simple terms like: The name of the product and the words like review, reviews, information, and things like that. See my video above for how I came up with the keywords I used in my sample adgroup.
You will find that you do NOT need many keywords. I normally find under 10 keywords and that’s all I need. Most of the traffic you’ll get for your ad will come from the most obvious keyword, which is the name of the product itself.
But remember, always use the “phrase” and [exact] match variations I used in my sample adgroup, so if you find say 5 keywords, if you duplicate them to show up as phrase and exact, you will have 10 keywords in total.
This tutorial on Bing Ads was highly informative Vitaliy! I have always been afraid of PPC ads and now when I have enough experience in Affiliate marketing, I will start some Bing Ads using your step-by-step method.
As you say, I can see how important it is to target a specific niche to make the profit with PPC using Bing ads.
It is amazing how much potential there is with PPC and Bing ads, I never would have known about this if not for your illuminating post.
Thank you Padma! The truth is, you are very smart to be careful with PPC because it truly can be a waste of money and many people go into it expecting easy results, but it usually ends up with them spending too much money, sometimes far more than they can afford.
This strategy I just showed you is great for saving money and helping you explore PPC, so you can definitely try this strategy without worrying about overspending. At most, you will spend a few dollars on this and with Bing’s $25 spending threshold available before you get the $75 credit from them, it’s a good investment.
Thank you Vitaliy. I certainly will be looking into this some more in order to take advantage of what could be out there for me as income.
You are right. When searching I always think of Google and YouTube but I have never used Bing. In all my online work I have never tried it, not even once.
I appreciate the detailed explanation and I see how it could work for me. Thanks again for an interesting blog.
You are welcome! I promise you that a large chunk of money in the affiliate marketing world can come from Bing and I still use their ad program today with the same strategy I showed in the video. It works š
Hi Vitaliy,
Thank you again for sharing this especially on how to do paid ads. I know a bit on how to build a website/blog and write an SEO optimized article but don’t really have a clue on how to do paid ads.
Most CPA marketers are doing paid ads because it’s faster than SEO. Hope you will share stuff related to funnels and email marketing too. Many Clickbank product owners provide email swipes. But I don’t know how to use them.
Hi again Raynold, based on the dialogue we have had so far, it is clear you understand a lot of terminology on affiliate marketing, but you need a base to start with so you can build a business. The thing is, you have bits of this business and some things you mentioned like email swipes are honestly useless and things product owners use to get affiliates to promote their things, but you don’t need those if you understand how to build a legitimate affiliate business.
What I am getting at is that I honestly think the very best thing you can do is get solid, core training on affiliate marketing so all of these missing pieces get filled up and I recently included a special offer for the same program I learned this stuff from in this very article:
If you are serious about affiliate marketing, then the links above to the Bing Ads training is a good base to start from.
Let me know if you have any further questions.
Hi Vitaliy,
There are many well known marketers who sell their courses on youtube are using landing pages (especially with Clickfunnels) to do paid traffic.
And Clickfunnels is $97/month which is very expensive. In this tutorial you’re using a product review article instead which I think is simpler and cheaper.
Based on what you said in the video and in this article, I think this method is much better and will bring the same results or maybe better?
Yes it is possible, but Clickfunnels is a completely different area of marketing and in this context it relates to email marketing, where these same YouTube people you mentioned are selling high ticket courses and making webinars but collecting email lists through Click Funnels.
They can “afford this” because they need to only make 1 high ticket sale to break even, but I very much dislike selling high ticket courses and programs because they are very often scams which I will never promote.
I happen to think that Clickfunnels is not necessary for most affiliate marketers but many say it is “required” or deceptively try to get you to buy it because they are promoting it.
For example, you’ll see a lot of people who say they make big money tell you that you need Clickfunnels (you don’t) and once you buy it, they are going to be making big commissions every month and in most cases, you won’t be able to use Clickfunnels the way it is supposed to be used, so you just might end up wasting money for it. I don’t like doing this and this is why I do not promote Clickfunnels.
What I am teaching you in my guide above is literally how to do affiliate marketing on Bing Ads the easiest way possible and as I also mention in this same guide, that you can use the same strategy of running ads and getting traffic to a landing page to later collect an email list. But that is when things get more advanced.
And if you are a beginner, don’t start with that or Clickfunnels, start with the very basic idea I laid out in my video and step by step guide above.
I’m advanced and I still use this strategy and I also do not use Clickfunnels.
Hi Vitaliy,
Thank you for doing this tutorial. Do you think this strategy using Bing ads can work well with Clickbank products?
I can see that you send people via Bing ads to a product review on your blog. Which is better, sending them to a product review on a blog, or landing page?
Thanks again.
Raynold hi! Absolutely.
In fact, the first $190,000 Bing ad campaign I did, I was promoting a Clickbank product and you can see the certificates above which I got due to the mass sales I made. If you plan to go this route, I would review the top selling products on Clickbank that you know a ton about and do reviews of them and then send the Bing Ads traffic to it.
Then there’s also finding niche audiences to promote the product to. For example, the “Cinderella Solution” is one of the top selling health and fitness products on CB right now and it’s targeted towards women who want to lose weight. So you can set up a Bing Ads campaign and target keywords such as “how to lose belly fat for women” and things of that nature and lead them to a landing page where you review this product.
As for which to go with, a landing page is literally both a product review and blog. It’s simply WHERE the person who clicked your ad LANDS on, so if they land on a product review, that is the landing page and if they land on your blog site, that would be the landing page too.
But specifically, for these things, lead people into product review pages IF you are targeting the product keywords. So if you were targeting Cinderella solution keywords, lead that to a review of that program.
If you are leading people such as women seeking to lose belly fat to a landing page, talk about the problem in general and then offer up the Cinderella Solution as the affiliate offer that solves the issue.
That’s how I’d do this.