Bottom Feeding: What it is, and how to make money on auto-pilot!

We’re going to discuss a concept known as “Bottom Feeding”.

Don’t let the negative connotation associated with the term “bottom feeding” sway you from trying out this method. It’s a time proven method that anyone can do in order to bring in a couple of hundred extra dollars a day. It takes a little bit of work to set up and get running but once you have it running you can basically leave it on Auto Pilot.

There are several niches that exist that are well searched and have a high profit margin for successful advertisers. Because these niches are well searched and have a high profit margin, the CPC prices for keywords in these niches are sometimes relatively high if you want to be in the top 10-20 ad placements. Since these niches are so well searched you can still get clicks even if you bid low on the CPC. You won’t get as much traffic to your ad but your click through rate should be as good as the top advertisers who might be paying as much as a dollar or two per click.

The advertisers who are paying top dollar for their CPC are relying on high volume sales in order to justify their top dollar expenditure. If you can get away with paying as little as $0.25 or $0.10 for you CPC and you sell only a few items (due to the low amount of traffic you receive for bidding so low) it will still be a very successful campaign sometimes getting a return on investment up to 500%.
Step by Step instructions for setting up a profitable “Bottom Feeding” Campaign:

Step 1. Find a Niche

Find a niche that is well searched and has a high profit margin for actualized sales. I find the easiest way to do this is to go to an affiliate service provider that sells information products or digital product (both products usually have high profit margins built into them) such as Clickbank.com or Paydotcom.com. Browse the different Categories and products for sale in the categories. Look for products that are selling well and have a high pay out.

Most of the top selling products are in niches that have high searched keywords on Google so we can assume that they would be good candidates for our “Bottom Feeding” approach. While looking through Clickbank, when picking a niche, make sure that there are several different products available to promote, so you can test and see what products sell the best. I suggest picking a niche that has at least two products to promote. I notice that weight loss is a hot selling item and that there are several products available to promote in this niche.

Step 2: Create a short keyword list

In order to see if our niche is a well searched keyword niche on Google we want to create a short keyword list. In order to do this lets go to Yahoo Search’s Keyword Selector Tool:

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

and type in a keyword related to our product. For this example I’m going to simply put “lose weight” in the tool and see what it spits out.

The term “lose weight” was searched 295,479 times last month. Wow, “lose weight” is well searched. We are looking for niches that have keyword searches above 20,000 jointly for the top keywords in the niche. The search phrase “lose weight” definitely falls into a heavily searched niche. If we take the most related keywords and add the searches together we are going to come up with the following data related to “lose weight”.

Keyword Searches

Lose weight 295479
How to Lose Weight 42235
Lose Weight Fast 3419

Once again, we can see that the “lose weight” niche is a very well searched keyword niche.

Step 3: Check Yahoo Search’s Max Bid Tool

Now let’s see how competitive the market is for our keywords. In order to do this, go to Yahoo Search View Max Bid Tool:

http://uv.bidtool.overture.com/d/USm/search/tools/bidtool

The top 8 advertisers are paying anywhere between $1.00 and a $1.27 per click for the “weight loss” keyword. This let’s us know that there is a lot of competition for our keywords. For the “Bottom Feeding” method this is great sign that we have found a good niche.

Step 4: Use Google Ad Words Traffic Estimator

Now that we have found a well searched niche, and we know the competition is stiff for the top advertisers, let’s see if we can “Bottom Feed” off this niche. We can use the Traffic Estimator found in Google Adwords to see if we have found a good niche. We are hoping that we can generate somewhere between 50 to 400 clicks a day by bidding low.

Let’s see what happens when we put in our three keywords into the traffic estimator. I usually put the keyword, phrase match and exact match into the estimator. For this example I would put the following into the keyword estimator to get a good idea of how many clicks a day I would get for my keywords.

how to lose weight
lose weight
lose weight fast
“how to lose weight”
“lose weight”
“lose weight fast”
[how to lose weight]
[lose weight]
[lose weight fast]

When I run the Traffic Estimator at $0.10 CPC, Google estimates that I will receive somewhere between 47-71 clicks per day. From experience, I know that the traffic estimator is usually very conservative with its estimations. To start with, I haven’t built a full keyword list; I only used three keywords to test the market. Once I build a full keyword list, my clicks per day will be much higher than what the estimator predicted. Another thing to remember is that my CTR is usually higher than the average advertiser on Google, so I’ll receive more clicks than what Google predicts with its estimator. I estimate that I will receive at least 300 clicks a day for this campaign.

Step 5: Pick a Product

I don’t want to pick just one product to promote but at least two for testing purposes. When I look on Clickbank I see that there are several weight loss programs to choose from.

Look for products that pay out the most in commission and have a high $earned/sale so that you can make a good profit for each item sold. I try to at least make $20.00 per sale.

When looking over products to promote look at the usual statistics to see if it is a good product such as % refd (percent referred) and grav (gravity). If a product has a high referred statistic as well as a relatively high gravity, it will probably be a good product to promote.

Next look over the different sales pages and pick products that have good sales pages. You want to make sure the sales page will do a good job at selling the people you bring through your ad campaigns. You can also look to see if any of the sales pages have an affiliate link. Sometimes the affiliate pages will list statistics of how well the sales pages convert. I find that the numbers are usually a little exaggerated but they might give you a general ball park figure.

You want to pick out 3 different products so you can test them against each other to see which ones have the best conversion rates. It’s hard to know what pages convert the best unless you actually test it yourself.

One other thing I do when I pick out products is I do a search in Google to see if anyone else is promoting the product with Pay Per Click advertising. So for this example I type “lose weight” into Google and I click on the more sponsored links tab found below the Adwords ads to get a list of all the products that are being promoted through Adwords.

When you click on “More Sponsored Links” Google will take you to a page that lists all of the ads running for a particular keyword. For a search term like “lose weight” there will be several pages of listed advertisements.

If you find that someone is already advertising the product via adwords then look for another product. Google only allows one ad per URL per search term, and since we don’t want to compete with high bid prices, stick to products that aren’t being advertised via Adwords. This will usually cut out some of the best products but that’s ok since we are “Bottom Feeding”. Note: If a product is being advertised via Adwords make sure to look at the ad copy so you can get ideas for your ad.

Step 6: Create Ad Campaigns

When you create an ad campaign for this method, make sure to add a lot of keywords to your list. Also make sure to ad several Ad Groups so you can keep your keywords very tight and relevant to your specific ads. In order for the “Bottom Feeding” method to bring in a couple of hundred dollars a day you will need to find several niches and set up several campaigns and Ad Groups. In order to save time and work efficiently I suggest using the “Ditto” method (taught in the Writing Ads section) to create the headline and ad body.

Make sure to enter in a low bid price for your keywords with the expectation that you will be able to lower you bid price even further due to a high quality score and CTR.

Step 7: Test Different Products

Once you have your Campaigns and Ad Groups set up send anywhere between 300 to 500 visitors to each of the products one at a time. After you have done that you will know which product is the best selling. If the niche is good you can sometimes sell three or four products at the same time.

Conclusion for “Bottom Feeding” Method.

Most of your ads should cost you very little per day, maybe $5.00 to $20.00 dollars and should render you a return from anywhere between $25.00 to $40.00 dollars a day. Your goal should be to clear at least $20.00 a day from a particular niche. No one retires on $20.00 dollars a day, but if you have several niches that you work with you can bring in hundreds of dollars a day. Like I said in the beginning, the nice thing about doing the “Bottom Feeding” method is that once it’s set up, you don’t need to check on it very often. Once or twice a week is probably all that you will have to focus on the campaigns. If you are willing to put in the time up front researching and finding the right niches you could very easily, after a few months of testing, have several “Bottom Feeding” niches that collectively bring in a couple of hundred dollars a day in profits!

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