Testing the waters of a market

[mencus]

Setting up a campaign (keywords, adgroups, ads, landing page, tracking etc) can be quite time consuming & expensive.

Before I invest all of that time into an offer I want to know that it will have returns.

How does everyone do this?

Do you buy a domain name and put a 301 redirect straight to salesletter or products landing page? and then bid on a few key phrases?

I would like to hear how people test markets before investing their time and money.

Thanks

[Paladin]

I just set up a campaign. I find that optimizing and testing is the time consuming part.

I can get a domain + landing page up in under 2 hours; keywords are pretty much free, and I have a bunch of custom tools handle everything else.

Thats the honest answer. Considering a very modestly successful campaign can pull in $100k a year, why get lazy? I have well in excess of 100 unique sites I've put together myself, the winners easily pay for the 85-90 losers.

[mystickcal]

Setting up a campaign (keywords, adgroups, ads, landing page, tracking etc) can be quite time consuming & expensive.

Before I invest all of that time into an offer I want to know that it will have returns.

How does everyone do this?

Do you buy a domain name and put a 301 redirect straight to salesletter or products landing page? and then bid on a few key phrases?

I would like to hear how people test markets before investing their time and money.

Thanks

One way I test is how you said above which is buy a domain and 301 to the offer page, however, I also agree with the person below, you can almost always profit in a niche, so taking the time to set it up even if it fails, when you hit a golden one it well than makes up for it, but you can test by the way you said above.

[mencus]

While I am making money promoting offers, I still am not making enough to comfortably leave my job (nor am I really sure that I want to) .... i guess my problem is that I dont have the luxury of time to do this, so before I spend a good part of a weekend setting up a campaign i want to make sure my efforts arn't wasted

I am also interested in experimenting with direct linking a bit more (using the 301 method). I know a lot of people are saying that direct linking is dead but im sure there most be money in it still.

What are your experiences with direct linking?

[mystickcal]

While I am making money promoting offers, I still am not making enough to comfortably leave my job (nor am I really sure that I want to) .... i guess my problem is that I dont have the luxury of time to do this, so before I spend a good part of a weekend setting up a campaign i want to make sure my efforts arn't wasted

I am also interested in experimenting with direct linking a bit more (using the 301 method). I know a lot of people are saying that direct linking is dead but im sure there most be money in it still.

What are your experiences with direct linking?

Direct Linking is not dead....its far from dead...ask me this in 3 months and the answer may change, but I still know affiliates that direct link and make great money with campaigns, in fact I have a couple campaigns that do better direct linking then by using a landing page ROI wise.

Never trust what you hear on dp or wickedfire, the problem with free forums is that there are alot of people that think they are affiliate marketers and know what they are talking about, but in reality they are just repeating nonsense they heard from some other idiot.