Pursuit of Profit

Well my affiliate site is up and running, but it has a major flaw: It is not converting. There is no sense in keeping it the way it is praying for a lucky purchase. So I have just paused my adwords campaigns and am working on a new landing page.

This is pretty frustrating, especially after putting in hours and hours of work making the original site. However this time around there is a lot less work to do. I already have my unique content, privacy policy, and campaigns all directed at the site.

The only real changes I have to make are going to be on actual landing pages and the actual URLs that the adwords point to. I am aiming to get longtail traffic, which are very specific keywords that relate to your product. For example, going back to car stereos, a longtail keyword would be a product name and model number such as ‘Alpine 9857′ as opposed to a general keyword like ‘car stereo’.

Longtail keywords are generally cheaper due to lower bidding competition, but they generally do not convert as well as name brands and very general product keywords. There is a trick to making them work for you though! Tailor your landing page to the longtail keywords. Use your imagination on ways to do this. That is what I am trying to do right now!

For this I am going to assume you know the basics of how Google Adwords work.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a way of increasing visibility and relevancy to a search engine user. You have probably seen this trick done on google for years by bizrate.com and ebay affiliates.

It tailors the ads served to match the keywords in the search to the ad copy. Also if the ads match the exact keywords those keywords become bold in sponsored results.

Here is an ebay example search for car stereo:

Now for a slight alteration in the keywords lets search for car stereos:

Same ad copy with one slight difference, it is a plural, but this difference creates a much higher click through rate.

How to do it:

Write the ad copy with the dynamic keywords:

{Keyword:default}
Fantastic prices on {keyword:default}
Deal with Canadians and save
www.ebay.ca

Notice that in the title the word Keyword is capitalized and that it is not in the ad content. This differentiates when the dynamic keywords will be capitalized. The word default in the insertion code can be what ever you want it to be, when your ad does not display the keyword it will revert to this default keyword.

This is a very simple way to bump CTR, however some claim it will decrease your quality score and increase your bids on keywords.

I am using it and have not noticed any decrease in quality score, but there is a definite increase in CTR.

Try it out for yourself.

After about 2 weeks of building, studying and drinking massive amounts of coffee, I have built my first affiliate site that I would call ‘good’. It has tons of related content, a privacy policy, outside resource links, and a contact me page; all absolutely necessary with Google’s PPC quality score.

I will be tweaking and split testing in the future, but it feels damn good having done the bulk of the work on the site. I have set up a few campaigns with Adwords after hours or researching and copying, pasting and categorizing my keywords.

I am trying dynamic keyword insertion for a small portion of the campaign, which will see a high CTR hopefully.

That is all for now!

Setting up an affiliate landing page is a lot of work! I once had the impression you just host a pre made site, slap some tracking on it, start sending ppc traffic to it and watch the money pile up. This is probably why I’ve had mixed results with ppc advertising in the past.

There was a time a few years ago that this way of marketing could net you a couple hundred dollars a day. This is when I launched my first affiliate marketing for a peer to peer music downloading program, and without much tweaking I was in the profit zone. I made sales of between $50 -$100 a day and a profit that would go from $10-$50 a day depending on conversion rates.

I tried promoting with this old school style more recently, and basically it just doesn’t work! Nowadays you need relevant content, you need a catchy landing page and you need golden keywords that have low bids. This doesn’t sound very easy, and I am 2 years removed from the game, so this affiliate site I’m making could be a very expensive learning experience if I’m not careful!

Well I’ve been working hard on the affiliate campaign, the site is really coming together. Adwords are set to run, but not feeding traffic quite yet. I have been talking with some professional affiliate marketers and getting some tips. There is a lot more to affiliate marketing than a nice landing page and some good keywords.

Keywords are a huge part of the campaign obviously, but so is keywords and keyword density on your site. If you are going to use the key word “ford f150″, for example, you will be charged more if you don’t have that keyword somewhere on your site. This only makes sense, we all know that google’s organic rankings are based on this same idea. Want to learn more about affiliate marketing?

When I was over at WickedFire forums, I noticed they had a free ebook sticky post. I clicked on it and found an assortment of todays top selling ebooks to download for free. I don’t endorse piracy, however if you want to check them out here’s the link to the WickedFire forums.

After talking about spyfu in a recent post, I started doing some digging around to find other useful keyword tools. These keyword tools will give you the background information you need, so you can decrease your risk when investing in an affiliate or arbitrage campaign.

5. Wordtracker

Very powerful keyword research tool, and it has a free trial that is worth trying out.

4. Niche Taxi

Allows you to isolate a niche and gather information on it before you start getting down to work.

3. Keyword Discovery

Probably the top choice for professional web marketers, I have not tried this service out yet because of its price tag. If anyone has used this service let me know!

2. Google Keyword Tool (Site down right now couldn’t grab the logo)

This Google tool shows the search volume and suggested keywords. This is a very strong tool and you do not need to be logged in to your Adwords account to access it.

1.
SEO Book Keyword Tool

This tool pulls from multiple results and displays information like monthly search volume, and links to more suggested keywords to target.

New Addition:
KeywordSpy.com
This site allows you to see your competition’s keywords. This tool is capable of creating massive keyword lists that only take a few minutes. For more info check out the full post here.

For those of your who haven’t started reading John Chows blog yet, you should! He has as many helpful pointers as other big time bloggers like Problogger. Today he wrote an interesting article on Beginner Blogging Tips. He has identified five major tips that are insightful, and real.

Reading this post makes me glad I began this $10k journey and has made me even more passionate in reaching my goals.

Well I am definitely going to put my effort into this affiliate project. Today I got my start by purchasing a domain name and finalizing my products to offer down to 3 from my short list of about 15. I created my hoplinks in clickbank, which is a way of tracking your referall click-throughs.

Once I completed that I got on to designing the site layout and then on to making some buttons in photoshop. They look pretty good if I do say so myself!

The site is designed to compare three top products in a table, head to head to head in a visual table so the key information is easily extracted by the user. The user is given the information and prompted to go to the products homepage via an affiliate link.

I have the buttons completed, but the html on the site is giving me a few headaches. I should have the site up by tomorrow. Once it’s up I will have a friend look it over for errors and anything that could be improved. Shouldn’t be too long before I move on to keywords, tracking and the make or breaker…traffic!

Time to stop focusing on my traffic stats and adsense flow. It’s time to buckle down and make some real money with an affiliate marketing campaign. These campaigns aren’t easy profit, but if your do your research and put in the time you have a better chance of running a profitable campaign.

I have run few affiliate campaigns in the past, some were profitable and others I ended up losing money on. The first hurdle in affiliate marketing is finding a product or service to promote. Take a look at ClickBank for a huge list of digital download products to promote. You can also find CPA (cost per action) campaigns through an affiliate promotion company like Neverblue (referral link) . There are so many offers out there it’s hard to know where to start and which ones can make you money. Some companies will try to entice would be marketers with huge commissions, but look deeper in to their product. Are others promoting it? If not why? Remember, huge commission is nothing if it doesn’t sell!

After you find a product or service you believe has some potential, start researching the market. I will usually go to Overture and see if there are many searches per month for the item. Then I mosey on over to Spyfu (a comprehensive keyword/ competitor research tool) and see what the competition is like. After taking a look at these two factors I ask myself a question that requires a truthful answer about the profitability of the item. Can I compete against these competitors, or is the Cost Per Click (CPC) too steep to make a profit?

If you deem it profitable, it doesn’t mean that it actually will be! Even after a ton of research and a good feeling, I’ve been dead wrong more than a few times. However, this could be due to failing in one of the following steps.

After you have your product you have to create an affiliate landing page. This can be as simple as embedding an I frame of your affiliate link or even just linking directly to your pre-made affiliate landing page. I have recently heard from a friend that just like organic SEO, there is sponsored SEO. So writing or buying unique content and having a few pages is a good idea. This is where I’m at with my affiliate project right now.

I have picked out a few products, purchased a domain name, and checked out the competition. The product I am focusing on comes highly recommended from a friend who showed me his daily revenue stats. So I know there is money to be made and room for a few more marketers in this genre.

I am also going to try something a little bit different from my previous PPC marketing campaigns. And it will be interesting to see how it works out. Direct details wont be released on the blog pages for the first month, this will give me time to get settled in my market without excess competition. However, more revealing details will be released via a monthly newsletter once it’s set up (if you know of a good email newsletter plugin for wordpress drop me a line)!

I was tagged by blogger Carl Pei and asked to give 5 reasons why I blog. Took me a while to think of the actual reasons I blog, but here are 5 real reasons I came up with.

1. Connection: Blogging allows me to share my experiences and ideas with like minded individuals. Honestly, how many of you have more than 1 or 2 friends, offline who are affiliate marketers or adsense earners? I bet not many of you! Learning and trying new techniques for earning online is exciting, but having no one to share that with isn’t.

2. No Downside: Why wouldn’t you blog? You can meet people, share knowledge, make money. What could you possibly lose?

3. Contacts: Most people who read blogs, in my opinion, are above average when it comes to being their ability online. They probably know something or someone I don’t that could be beneficial to me in the future. So being in contact with these people is a good thing!

4. Money: Blogs can make money, if I can write about something I enjoy and that gets me excited, good! But if I can write about something I enjoy, gets me excited and make some money from it, GREAT!

5. Freedom: I can say whatever I want, plain and simple.

Now my turn to tag 5 more and suck them in to this never ending game of gotcha!

1. DoshDosh
2. california
3. Vedis
4. LifeIsRisky
5. MrGaryLee