Pursuit of Profit

Affiliate marketing has become the lifeblood for droves webmasters and internet marketers. Starting out can be difficult because people who are earning in this area don’t want to share their secrets and potentially create a competitor. Affiliate marketers guard their holy grail of keywords because it is their lively hood, it is the magic they have found that profitably turns traffic into money.

I have ran and run affiliate campaigns, some took a profit and some took a loss. Here are a few of the tips that I have learned over the years and want to anyone starting out. These are my do’s and don’ts that can make you money, there are plenty more out there. Add your do’s and don’ts to the comments!

Don’t!

1. Pick a product or service you know nothing about

2. Assume your keywords are profitable without researching them

3. Writing one ad for all your keywords

4. Throw up just a landing page without related content on other pages

5. Enter the most competitive markets without any experience

6. Leave your keyword bids the same day after day

7. Continue chasing your loses on keywords in hopes they will turn profitable

8. Think you are lucky and your products will convert without work

9. Believe that you are done work once the site is up and receiving traffic

10. Promote a product based solely on it’s commission amount

Do!

1. Research your competitors pages, ads, and keywords

2. Match keywords and phrase in your ads with your landing page

3. Dynamically insert keywords

4. Tweak! Don’t be afraid to change your layout, colors, content, ads, keywords and everything else related to your campaign

5. Split test

6. Adjust your keyword bids in accordance with their conversion rate

7. Use keyword research tools

8. Categorize your keywords into groups, write ads for each group

9. Make a site that has plenty of related content, a privacy policy and a contact page

10. Realize that affiliate marketing is an on going process

Remember that affiliate marketing is growing and changing. You have to adapt to these changes and continually learn new tricks and techniques or you will be left behind.

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!

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.

As many of you know I was blogging about my journey to $10k a month on a Blogger blog for the first leg of this quest. I just switched over to my own Wordpress blog this week, and after some minor adjustments, that I like to call “hacking”, I feel settled in.

You’re probably asking “why switch from Blogger to Wordpress?”
Freedom: Blogger is an excellent, dynamic and free blog service that allows anyone to sign up and get posting within minutes. However is such an easy to use service there are drawbacks. One of these drawbacks is the lack of ability to customize. However with Wordpress, you can customize to your hearts content.
Ownership: At the end of the day Google owns Blogger and Blogger owns your blog. I wanted to have my own blog that I owned, and all the content associated with it is solely mine. Plus having your own domain name is nice, it’s so much more personal and you feel like you do own it.

Okay so now that I’ve convinced you to switch over to the wonderful world of Wordpress you probably want to know how! At first I was hesitant to switch, because I imagined the switch including 2 pots of coffee, 1 popped blood vessel and more f-bombs than the movie Scarface. Thankfully this wasn’t the case! After finding the Blogger to Wordpress plugin the whole site was transferred over in about 5 minutes. Here is how I did it:

1. Download/ unzip/ upload plugin to my server
2. Activate plugin by clicking on the activate button in your new Wordpress backend
3. Enter your Blogger domain ie yourdomain.blogspot.com and select the options you would like to take advantage of
4. Click “Import”, make sure you leave this window open while you are importing and you do not surf away from this site. The script is working on pulling all your posts and comments over to your new blog and this can take a moment.

Voila you now have your very own Wordpress blog, loaded up with all your posts.

Ok so I have the blogspot blog up and hosted (for free), I chose the name grassroots marketing because that’s what this whole thing is about. Starting with nothing, and making it into something! So let’s break down what I’ve done so far:

1. Found a free blog host
2. Chose my blog name and design
3. Installed Google Analytics (more info below)
4. Pinged a few blog services with my link (I use Pingoat to send out my ping)

Google Analytics is a powerful free tool that Google offers. All you do is sign up and add a simple snippet of code to your website. You can paste this snippet in your template file or html or whatever. It allows you to see where your traffic is coming from, what keywords and search engines they are finding your site with and a whole lot more. If you aren’t using a stats service yet I would recommend Analytics, it really gives you a clear picture of how your site performs and what efforts are working for you!