The Affiliate Journey

The title of this post might seem like a bit of an oxy moron, but trust me. I’m not going to suggest you stop building links, writing content and doing regular old SEO. Quite the opposite. I want you to keep doing regular SEO techniques for keywords, pages, and sites. How ever I want you to have complete conviction that the keywords and pages you’re building links for will CONVERT to sales once you get that top 5 or top 3 ranking.

I’m trying a new method for launching & testing new affiliate markets, sites, and concepts.

I can’t steal all the glory for this concept since many others have done it before me, and some very well respected SEO experts use it for every new site, page, keyword they launch.

Using PPC to test keywords

I’d read about using PPC to test keywords before you put the effort into build links etc. and begin ranking for the terms.

WHY?

It makes sense to know if a particular keyword is going to convert into sales for you or no before you take 30-60 days and possible $100’s if not $1000’s of dollars to build a variety of links for the keyword and it’s variations.

By launching a new affiliate campaign first on PPC you can test a vast number of keywords in far less time, and for far less money then by just SEO’ing the terms and hoping all, a few, or at least one of them converts.

So here’s the 30,000 ft. overview of my new plan I’m testing as I write this

1.) Choose a market: This is a no brainer. As I’ve written before I’m big on choosing markets where the need is so strong people are compelled to take action (i.e. health and beauty niches, financial niches etc.)

2.) Grab some keywords: I won’t get into the details of keyword research but if you have an idea how to find the “buy” keywords in your research grab about 50-100 of those if possibe.

3.) Write titles and Ads: For each keyword, or group of keywords if some of them are closely related write and adwords ad and title.

4.) Create landing page(s): Now create some landing pages for your adgroups. Again, an entire series or ebook could and has been written on writing landing page copy, and design. Be sure to implement some sort of tracking code between adwords, each keyword, and your conversion to sale or lead so you can track this later on.

5.) Turn the Traffic Tap on: Launch your campaign bidding about 50% of what the top bidder for that term is paying. Don’t worry at first if you’re losing some funds. You’re goal here is to test these keywords to see which onces are winners and which ones don’t turn up sales.

NOTE: Turn the content network off when you’re running this test, and be sure not to use broad match. Use variations of exact and phrase match and take advantage of some of the obvious negative keywords like “free”.

6.) Turn the Traffic off: Once you’ve had about 100 clicks to your campaign turn off the traffic and take a look at what you’ve found. What words got the most impressions and clicks. What keywords turned up sales? If you got zero conversions, could it have been the landing page? The copy? If you’re not getting any clicks, could it be the ad? The title? Test, Tweak, Re-test is the PPC advertising mantra.

7.) Let’s start SEO’ing: Now that you know what terms are converting thanks to paying for traffic for a bit. Now you can get out there and start link building for those terms. The idea is obviously to maintain good conversion on those keywords but stop paying for the traffic.

My first reaction to this method was nervousness. I am not a PPC affiliate, and I always liked throwing a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what stuck.

The downside is as your network of sites and income grows you want to start calculating your time usage and ensure you’re spending it on profitable activities. If you can know that a keyword(s) will convert to sales before you begin your SEO campaign then you’ll be far more motivated to spend the quality time getting the links, submitting the articles, building the squidoo and other 2.0 properites etc.

I know this was a quick overview, and I’ll keep you all updated on my progress as I test this method. As I mentioned I’m doing my first test this week with this method, and I’m just awaiting my landing page design to come back from my designer.

Once I have some testing results I’ll post them for all to read.