Pay per click marketing is probably the easiest way to start an affiliate marketing campaign. You don’t need too much money to start, and it is not too terribly complicated. Here is a simple guide for someone who has never advertised using paid search.When looking for a new campaign to promote, I usually ask my affiliate manager over at Advaliant what campaigns are doing well, and what new ones look promising. Affiliate networks aren’t making money unless you are, so they aren’t going to lie to you. Once you find a campaign that you would like to run, then ask you manager what the conversion rates are and the epc’s across the entire network. You will need the EPC’s when setting your keyword bids.What is an EPC?
EPC’s are the earnings per click for a specific campaign.So you have your offer, and a little bit of data to go off. Next you need to decide to either build a landing page, or send the traffic direct. I would suggest building a landing page! If you are going to advertise via Google Adwords, it is a good idea to build a landing page. The reason you need a landing page is to increase quality score. Quality score is based on how relevant the content of your site is to the keywords you are bidding on.
What should my landing page look like?
Something simple, yet informative. You need to write a decent sized article (about 500 words) that is 100% unique content. Explain more about the product or service, and what it does. Make sure to have an “About Us” link and “Contact Us” link at the bottom. Creating a Google friendly sitemap is also a good idea. If your not the best web designer, you can usually find a designer who charges around $40-$80 for a unique template. Your landing page is going to make you a lot of money, so it is a very good investment. Here is a good example of a landing page for ringtones.
Now you need a domain name. In my experience, it does not really matter if it is a dot com or a dot net, even a dot info works fine. However, when finding a good domain name, make sure it is relative to your keywords you will be bidding on. For example, there are tons of free business card offers from VistaPrint on pretty much every major affiliate network. If I was looking for a domain name to promote a free business card campaign, I would make sure that “free business card” is somehow in the domain. This will allow you to have maximum boldness in your PPC ad. What I mean by this is, if you are going to run a vista print offer, most of your long tail keywords are going to have the words “business cards” in them. If your domain name has this, you will get one more line of “boldness” in your ad, further attracting the eyes of the consumer.
So you have your landing page, a domain and some hosting and your site is up and running. Now you are ready to build the campaign. If you have never done any PPC marketing anywhere, I would recommend you snag some free credit somewhere. Google has “vouchers”, adCenter gives away $50 in free credit to new accounts, and Yahoo! usually has an offer in the $50-$100 range if you deposit a certain amount.
Writing your ads is simple. Try and write them from a consumer standpoint. Don’t be too misleading, and make sure you describe the offer as much as you can. If you want to see what your ads look like outside of the advertising platform, check out PreviewMyPPC.com. I discovered the arrow method from Shoemoney.com, and basically you write your ads so they look like an arrow. Something like this:
Free Business Cards
250 free full color business
cards. Just pay S&H!
www.free-business-cards.com
If the consumer types in “free business cards” as their search, you would have “boldness” in all four lines, as it would show up like this in the sponsored search results:
Free Business Cards
250 free full color business
cards. Just pay S&H!
www.free-business-cards.com
Write at least 5 ads per ad group and during testing watch which ones are getting the best CTR, get rid of the rid of the poorly performing ones.
When choosing your keywords, simply use common sense! If I was creating a campaign based around free business cards, I would try and manually write out 50 long tail keywords first, then run them through a keyword tool. Each platform has a decent keyword tool and it will tell you how much competition you are looking at, and how much search volume each keyword has. Obviously, the more competition the higher you are going to have to pay. This is where you are going to need those EPC’s. When testing an offer, it is a good idea never to bid higher than the average EPC. After you figure out what is converting, and what isn’t that is the time where you can use custom bids on certain keywords to get your desired placement. As long as you are placing 8 or higher, you are going to get plenty of traffic.
Now that you have your first ad group, go back and create another ad group and do the process all over again. Think of more keywords and run them through the keyword tool. Also, try bidding on popular misspellings. There is a great free tool to generate misspellings here. The more ad groups you have the better your quality score is likely to be, allowing you to place higher and bid less.
Don’t spend more than you can afford to lose. When starting out, it is likely that you might lose some money, however you are gaining plenty of experience learning how to build your campaigns. The magic secret to PPC marketing is that there really is no magic secret. Keep testing different things and find out what is working, and down the road you will develop your own methods.
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