The Affiliate Journey

Not settling for your current performance with an affiliate offer is one of the main reasons some people make a ton of money in this business while others just settle for an extra few hundred a month.

NOTE: I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with an extra few hundred bucks a month if that’s your goal.

A real life example.

I’m in a niche where my site is running purely organic search traffic and I’m making about $1000.00 a month with that site. I have minimal expenses other then some on going content creation and monthly link building and promotion I do.

I figured for the niche I was doing quite well, so I decided to shoot an email off to my affiliate manager to see how the top affiliates for this merchant were performing.

Well I nearly fell out of my chair when she emailed me back to say they had a couple of affiliates that were doing $10,000 a month.

That’s 10 TIMES what I’m doing a month in commissions from the merchant.

WOW am I leaving some cash on the table.

This led me to think about how could I expand my marketing for this offer. The rest of this post outlines the plan I’ve developed to look for new profitable keywords in this market, test with PPC, track, tweak and eventually SEO for the keywords.

1 – More Keywords

I have a good handle on most of the popular keywords in this niche, but I haven’t really expanded my horizons yet. So my first stop was to look at the keywords other sites are using both in PPC and the SERPS.

For this I use Google’s free keyword tool.

I went to Google and searched some of the terms I already knew I was ranking for and getting conversions for. I grabbed their URL’s and inputted them into Googles keyword tool. This brought me back a huge list of terms to choose from.

I went through that list and picked out the keywords I felt illustrated a buyer, or at least a good prospect for my offer.

SIDE NOTE: When doing keyword research it’s important not to target really broad terms. This can wasite PPC spend and traffic since you’d basically educating someone else’s customer for a sale later on.

2 – Build AD Groups

When I export the keywords from Googles keyword tool it gives me a CSV file, I open that with Open Office and then manually break the longer list into smaller more focussed mini lists. These will be my ad groups for this campaign.

The broad idea here is that I’m going to be adding a bunch of new content to my site. Each page is going to be written around one of these ad groups with of course a strong call to action to buy the product I’m promoting.

You’ll also want to note a few negative keywords in this step. I added negative keywords like free, coupon, torrent (Since the product I was promoting was a dvd product). Brain storm as many as you can think of. Think about the type of people you know won’t buy the product you’re promoting and then think of the words they’d use while searching.

3 – Page Content

Next I’ll write a page of content for each ad group. This will vary for each ad group whether it will be a review page, comparison page, or a straight article/content page.

I won’t get into a complete tutorial on how to write good copy for a PPC landing page but a few things to remember.

Don’t write filler copy, remember to link to the offer above the fold, be informative yet to the point.

A great source for copy information is Copy Blogger. Brian Clark and his team over there have helped me a ton over the past year with my writing skills.

Check his blog out for some great tips. Here are a couple of my favourites I reference quite often

Tutorials for Writing Landing Pages Specifically (GREAT READ)
A Great 10 Step Copy Writing Tutorial
Writing Great Headlines

4 – Write my Ad(s)

Note I said ads, I always run at least two ads in PPC so I can continually test and try to improve CTR. I suggest you take time doing this, there are 101 different tutorials on the web about writing effective ad copy for Adwords.

Here’s a great post by the GoogleLady with several GREAT tips on writing Adwords ads.

31 Killer Ad Writing Tips

This is an important part of the process, especially for me since I’m not an avid PPC marketer. How ever this strategy is one I plan on rolling out across about 10 of my sites to try and increase my revenues.

5 – Setup Tracking

This is a key step that many people forget, and I have sometimes been lazy with before and not implemented it, but it’s key to track and know if a campaign is a success.

For each page and/or link placement setup some form of tracking so you can know.

a.) Where your clicks are coming from to your affiliate offer.
b.) Which links and pages are creating sales

If you don’t do this step then the rest is really a waste because when we get to step 8 below you won’t know what to optimize for.

Each affiliate program is going to be different for how you track unless you’re with one of the big networks (i.e. CJ, LinkShare etc.)

Do a bit of research and testing to find out how your network or offer can do unique sub id tracking.

6 – Start campaign

So I’m ready to launch this campaign into full swing. Set a daily and monthly budget for what you’re going to test with. For me I’m going to test this campaign at $20 a day to see what type of results I get. My sale average commission on this product is around $70 so I know I can afford quite a bit per customer with my revenue being so high per sale.

If you’re performing these same steps then of course you’ll need to consider your potential revenue per sale, position based on how much you bid etc. There are 101 things that go into determining bid size, budgets etc for a PPC campaign, could be an entire course let alone another post.

7 – Track, Compare, Tweak

Once you’ve started to collect some data from your campaign be it sales, clicks etc. you now must start to tweak what you’ve already done from your content to your ads.

You want to try to improve your click through both for your adwords ad and also from your landing page.

For example when you first launch the campaign you might find that you don’t get any click throughs to your landing page, or affiliate offer. That doesn’t mean the whole things a dud, it means you need to improve upon what you already have.

Tweak, test and track to a point where you don’t feel you can improve any longer before you give up.

8 – Start my SEO Campaign

Now we’ll wrap this whole exercise up with why I started it in the first place. To get more organic SERP rankings for keywords that convert for my offer.

If I’ve done all the previous 7 steps correctly, allowed the campaign to run for a few days, weeks (the time frame will depend on the market) I should have some good data to work from to know what keywords get traffic and convert.

Now I want to start link building for those same pages I’m running in adwords to grow their traction in the SERPS. The idea is to replace your PPC positioning with organic search engine rankings. Of course the whole purpose behind this exercise is to ensure that you spend your time ranking for keywords you know

a.) Get traffic
b.) convert to sales

The old method of just building a content site and trying to rank for everything is kind of a waste of time when you consider this method.

That’s it, these 8 steps will allow you to test new keywords, determine which keywords are worth spending time SEOing and grow your affiliate profits without having to build an entire new site or enter a new market/niche.

Remember it’s easier to expand in a niche you’re already in if there’s still room to grow rather then enter an entire new one.

Good luck, and post your comments and thoughts on this.

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