Whew!  I’m just coming off a very long night getting everything ready for the Operation Affiliate Storm launch.  I don’t remember what time it actually launches today… but I should be in good shape.

Here’s what I did last night…

Created my Squidoo lens (http://www.squidoo.com/using_operation_affiliate_storm/).  That was kind of herky jerky (is that even a word?) for me.  I’m not a Squidoo expert by any stretch of the imagination.  I understand what it does, but it’s not something I’ve used before in my marketing.

This morning I went back on Squidoo and joined 4 marketing related groups.  I haven’t been a good “squidizen” yet and browsed around the groups… but I’m really tired so I’ll get to that later.

I finished off my initial squeeze page for my review site.  It doesn’t look anything like what I thought it would when I started the process.  Overall I’m pleased with the result.

Unlike the ARS (Affiliate Rockstar Status) launch, I’m pushing an opt-in for the OAS launch.  We’ll see how it goes.

I’m also trying a few more aggressive affiliate that I’ll reveal and review after I’ve tested them and have solid numbers on their performance.

I also set up a simple 1–message auto-responder with GetResponse.  Obviously I need more than that… but it’s going to have to do for now.  Again… I’m really tired.

The last thing I did was create a good value bonus for the buyers.  When I did the ARS launch I gave Site Sniper Pro as the bonus.  That worked very well, but in the end I wish I could have used it for a backend sale.  It’s a high-margin, high-profit and high-value product for me.  Plus, it requires a higher support burden than other bonus products.

So for OAS I created a brand new keyword tool.  It’s based off some general keyword principles with the website keyword strategy from Gauher Chaudry’s Excellent Pay Per Click Formula.

It basically creates a keyword portfolio for a specific product launch.  Most keyword research tools try to go very broad and find all the long-tail keyword related to a particular search.

My new tool does exactly the opposite… it takes a very specific product name, website and “buying” keywords and generates hundreds of variations of that product/website.  These keywords are specifically targeted for something like a product launch where you are trying to capture the hot buyers that are ready to go.

In my own Operation Affiliate Storm AdWords campaign I generated 1,125 keywords from just the product name, website, trigger keywords and various misspellings and connections.

I hope it works the way I think it will.

Oh… and I’m using position targeting for the first time.  I’m targeting positions 3–5 in my campaign.  I should be able to outspend everyone again since I’m giving a high-quality bonus… but the payout is a little lower and my bonus not quite as valuable as before.  I’m playing it a little safe.

And, since I just had to check Google to get my keyword count I also noticed the first round of my stats are in.

So far I’ve got 7 clicks on 43 impression (16.27%) with an average CPC of $1.11.  Unfortunately, my average position is 1.2.  So far the position targeting isn’t working.  I must be bidding way higher than everyone else.

Since the product isn’t live yet I can’t get a good read on the conversions, though.  This is my first experience with that challenge.  I’m basically flying blind until it goes live later today (although I did see that I’ve already got 1 opt-in to my auto-responder).

So far so good.

I should hit the sack.  I probably won’t… but I should