Keyword Xray Domination Journal

Fellow affiliate ninjas! Thanks for dropping by my Affiliate Marketing Blog. Why not stay updated by subscribing to my RSS Feed or joining my Internet & Affiliate Marketing Newsletter? - Rian, Sept. 2007

Well, I finally was able to get started with Keyword Xray Domination. It’s now April 1st (in Japan), and I’m almost a week late getting started. I was ready to get started the day I dropped my $1400 bucks on Xray, but under Mr. Murphy’s Law, things must go wrong. For some reason, my account never got activated. I tried getting in multiple times, but no go. Finally I opened a ticket, and a few days later, I got a reply. Then another day later, I got in.

Am I complaining? Not really…I understand that they had a massive amount of people trying to get it, and probably had tons of support issues. Something was bound to go wrong…anyway, I’m in now and trying to get up to speed with the days I’ve missed so far. Luckily one day isn’t necessarily 1 “24-hr day” or calendar day, so even though the Keyword Xray training started on March 27th and it’s now the 1st, they’re only on day 4…but I do have some catching up to do.

So I’ve decided, that for the next month or so, instead of logging in everyday and trying to think of something to blog about, I could just document my progress with Keyword Xray. After all, the program is designed to train even fairly new affiliates on how to get started, and get up to the level of some of the big boys in the shortest time possible. Now I’m sure I’m not as new as some people (I already have Clickbank, CJ, Linkshare accounts, I already know how to do Adwords…etc), but I don’t want to miss anything by skipping the beginning “getting started” steps. I’m sure there’s probably something I’m going to learn that I didn’t already know anyway.

Time management is going to be…well challenging. I’m already in the process of rolling out a few campaigns, and I don’t want to stop now…so I’ll have to squeeze that in along with the training. And of all possible times to do this, my job put me back on the day shift (8-5). That kinda sucks, as I used to work a 2pm to 10pm shift, which was nothing less than sweet! I’d be able to stay up late, working on my affiliate marketing projects til the wee hours of the morning, hit the sack for a few hours, and wake up bought 11am, and still have plenty of time to fart around online before work. (yeah, I’m a night owl. I’ve seen many, many sunrises…haha) Not anymore though…oh well…this just means I’m going to need to manage my time a little better and make sure I accomplish baby steps each and every day. (and get to bed before 2am!!!)

Anyway, back to Xray…so for the next few weeks, my blog will become my Keyword Xray Journal. I want to post my notes, thoughts, rants, and my progress (real numbers), without giving Xray away for free of course. The Rich Jerk probably has a team of lawyers who’d be on a plane to Japan the minute he found out his Xray training was freely being posted online. No, so I won’t do that. But I will share what I can…(the useful stuff)

So far, I’ve downloaded all the days material to my hard drive and have gone through the training manual. And just from reading that over…man, having this software at my side is going to be awesome! I can’t wait to really “dig in”, but I’m going to go at an easy pace, one step at a time.

The first cool feature that stuck out to me was the encrypted keywords. In fact, Keyword Xray won’t work with Clickbank unless you turn on the encrypted keywords setting. Clickbank truncates their TID code (tracking ID) after 8 characters. So Xray encrypts your keywords, not only to protect you from snooping affiliates, but also to allow you to track easily in Clickbank.

There’s this report generator within the main control panel so you can not only track which keywords you’re bidding on that are actually converting to sales, but you can actually see which keyword [YOU’RE NOT DIRECTLY BIDDING ON] that converts to sales. So for example, if I’m bidding on “order playstation 3″ phrase match, and I see that “buy playstation 3″ broad match generated the sale, then I instantly know that I need to add “buy playstation 3″ phrase, and exact match keywords to my campaign. How cool is that? Xray finds the Keywords that convert that you didn’t even think to bid on.

The central control panel is great because you can see all of your campaigns, across all of the affiliate networks (Clickbank, CJ, Linkshare, more coming…) in one interface that displays your sales, expenses, and profits. Very cool! This will save logging into each one of my affiliate accounts to see if I made sales that day. I spend way to much time doing this anyway. I sure as hell wish Clickbank would email affiliates when sales were generated. You’d think with all their money they’d figure that out…

Essentially, to get Keyword Xray up and running, you just add a small piece of Java code to each one of your landing pages. There’s supposed to be a way to track keywords for products that you don’t have landing pages for (direct linking campaigns), but I haven’t got to that point yet. I’d like to be able to track Amazon sales within Keyword Xray, but they don’t have Amazon added in yet. I advertise on 4 different Amazon sites, and logging in to each one every day, or every few days takes more time than I’d like to spend. There’s got to be an easier way.

Ok…so time to get on to Day 1 and start getting caught up. I can’t wait for Day 2 because there’s an hours and half interview with an “affiliate ninja” who does over $1,000,000 NET on Commission Junction. Now that should be an interesting listen. That’s all for now.