Make Money Online With Affiliate Marketing

Section 14 - Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Guide

What is Search Engine Pay Per Click Marketing?
Search engine pay per click marketing is when you advertise on different keywords in a search engine and pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement. The price you are willing to pay (along with a few other factors) determine your position in the sponsored results.

In the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) you can see these ads on the right hand column when you search. The major search engine advertising platforms can deliver a huge amount of traffic and result in some major profits.

The downside to these search engine pay per click sites is that it is nearly impossible to have a campaign work without a landing page. While it is possible, many of the search engines have banned direct linking for affiliates. Therefore in order for you to have a long term and successful affiliate marketing campaign on these search engines, you’re going to need a landing page. We will discuss the landing pages in a bit. First let’s look at the major search engines that offer pay per click sponsored ads.

Google Adwords - http://Adwords.Google.com - Google Adwords is by far the biggest search engine and thus delivers the most traffic through their advertising system. The upside is the huge traffic. The downside is the difficulty in running an affiliate marketing campaign. Of all the systems discussed in the manual, this is the most difficult and is not recommended until you have some success under your belt.

Yahoo Search Marketing – http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com - Yahoo Search marketing is a great platform that can deliver some traffic. In comparison to Adwords, the traffic is much less but being able to run a campaign is much easier. You don’t have as rigorous of a process to get your ads approved to run and because of that I recommend you start with Yahoo.

MSN Adcenter – http://adcenter.microsoft.com - Microsoft Adcenter is a great system that delivers high quality traffic. By that, I mean the traffic generally converts very well in comparison to Yahoo. The downside however is that Adcenter has a much smaller market share than Yahoo and Google and therefore provides much less traffic.

Other Pay Per Click Engines:
While the major three are what I use most, there are many other 2nd tier search engines that have their own pay per click advertising engines. These can be a great source of cheap traffic and can result in huge profit margins. The traffic from these PPC engines are almost always lower quality than the major search engines but the cost can offsets this reduced quality.

Here is a list of places you can advertise:
7Search
Miva
SearchFeed
ABCSearch.com
Ask.com
Business.com
LookSmart.com
Bidvertiser.com

Media / PPC:
The below PPC engines often fall into the “media buying” category, but really they are PPC engines. If you decide to look into running on these advertising networks, I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with media buying as well. I teach about media buying towards the end of this guide.
Adsonar.com (Huge traffic)
Pulse360.com (Huge traffic)
Adbrite

Offers To Stay Away From:
Most major search engines have banned the free trial / rebill offers. Putting those offers into the engines will almost always result in the campaign being slapped or the entire account being banned.

There are exceptions so you should contact the website individually to make sure your campaign is compliant if you plan to run free trial offers.

Running Pay Per Click Campaigns

• Build A Quality Website:

This is one of the most important parts of running your PPC affiliate marketing campaign. Years ago, you were allowed to slap together a single page website, put ads all over it and then put it into all the pay per click engines. Now, it’s different.

Google wants to enhance their user’s experience so the users will come back to use their services again.

Now website small sites with the sole purpose of directing traffic to an affiliate offer get a very low quality score. They call these bridge pages. Low quality score means you will have to pay way more money (almost always unprofitable) for your ads to show or your ads won’t show at all. In fact, if your page is blatantly a bridge page, you risk the chance of getting your account suspended.

Therefore, you need to take the time to build a quality website. This is going to take longer than the other marketing methods, but the rewards can be great since many people have left the PPC platforms after the changes.

To have the best potential of having a good quality score, you’re going to want some / all of the following:

 

Unique Content:
You should have content that is unique to your website. By this, I don’t mean you need ground breaking, revolutionizing content. Just content that you either wrote yourself or paid to have written for you. This unique content adds value to the visitor’s experience and thus gives you a better score (usually).

 

This content should not just be a single article you wrote up. You need to have multiple pages.

 

(Quick tip: You can get unique content written for you using a freelance site such as elance.com)

 

NOTE: Google’s TOS says that you can not have a “bridge page” meaning that the only purpose of your site is to get users to go to the affiliate offer.

If you don’t have enough unique content, you are not going to be able to run your campaign for any length of time.

 

Search Engine Optimization
When you make a website, it is important that you optimize your website to be as search engine friendly as possible. Now, this is a whole guide in itself so I won’t be going over the specifics of search engine optimization. By having a search engine friendly website, your quality score should be better because the pay per click quality checker will be able to tell what your site is about.

 

If you need more information on how to SEO a site, the most popular SEO book (and commonly accepted as THE book on SEO) is called SEO Book By Aaron Wall.

 

Design
If you are looking for an affordable way to make your website, I highly recommend you check out Affiliate theme (http://bit.ly/bXwrDR). Affiliate theme is an amazing theme set based on wordpress. Wordpress is great because it is very SEO friendly and when you put affiliate theme on top of that… it’s perfectly designed for affiliate marketers looking to run campaigns in Google Adwords.

 

If you are able to tweak things a bit, you can always search for free CSS Templates on Google or check out LPDesigner (http://bit.ly/cV5AbM).

 

In fact, I made over $1.5 million dollars using a FREE template I found on Google. I made a post about this very thing on Shoemoney’s blog as a guest found here (http://bit.ly/dBLzzW). The point here being that you don’t need a $10,000 design for the website to make money.

• Keyword Research
  Keywords are the words you bid on to trigger your ads to show. If you have screensaver software you are trying to get people to download, you might bid on keywords like “screen savers,” for example. Now, the more keywords you bid on, the more exposure your advertisement gets.
  
  Keyword Research Tools
  Keyword research tools can be very effective for helping you to expand your PPC campaigns and find new ideas. Although these are not required at all, many people have used these tools very successfully.
  
  There are a ton of tools that are on the market right now but here is a list of keyword tools I have personally used before and recommend.
  
  The keyword tools I have used and recommend include:
  PPC Bully
  Keyword Spy
  iSpionage
  
  The main way I generate keywords for my PPC campaigns is by using the seed and expansion method.
  
  Seed And Expansion Method
  The seed and expansion method is pretty simple. You start with a bunch of main keywords that are broad. These are called the seeds. Let’s take a dating campaign for example.
  
  Seed keywords could be:
  dating
  date
  singles
  …
  
  The above are all very broad keywords that are probably overrun with direct dating companies that will make it difficult for us affiliates to compete. So instead of trying to compete with the big companies we add these keywords called expansion keywords. These expansion keywords are added onto the end of each seed keyword to create a more specific keyword.
  
  Some expansion keywords could be:
  African American
  Asian
  San Francisco
  New York
  Online
  …
  
  Just from this short list, you can begin to think of numerous keywords that could be possible just for this campaign.
  
  Once you have the two lists, there are multiple tools that will combine the two lists together. You’ll end up with a list like:
  Dating African American
  Dating Asian
  Dating San Francisco
  …
  Singles online
  
  Keyword Matching Options
  Now that you have your keywords, there are four different variations of these keywords that you should know about. These are referred to keyword matching options.
  
  You can read about the keyword matching options on Google’s website (http://bit.ly/cEwj80)
  
  When you’re first starting out as a newbie to pay per click, using the exact match keyword type only is a great place to start. It can help you to really focus your keywords only to highly relevant traffic.
  
  
• Adgroup
  Adgroups are the grouping in your pay per click advertising campaign. The way you group your advertising campaign is very important. Ideally each adgroup should have a central theme. Taking the keyword examples from the previous sections, you could basically make an adgroup around each Seed keyword.
  
  So you would have an adgroup for Dating, an adgroup for date, an adgroup for singles, etc.
• 
  
• Ad Creatives
  Ad’s are one of the other very important factors when it comes to making your PPC campaign successful. A significant portion of your quality score depends on the click through rate of your ad versus the other ads that display. This means that the better your ad is (meaning a lot of people click it), the more your ad is shown and ultimately, the cheaper your clicks become.
  
  Therefore for each adgroup, I highly recommend you make at least a few ads that are completely different from each other. Let that run for a little while so you have a statistically significant sample size.
  
  Once you start to see which ad performs best of the few ads you made, pause the others. Then create a copy of the best ad and change one aspect of that ad slightly. This could be changing the title of the ad for example.
  
  Do this a few more times until you have an ad that is performing really well.
  
  Tip: Try changing capitalization. You can capitalize the first letter of each word in the ad. This Can Have A Good Effect On Click Through Rates. ;)

Ad Copy
Your ad copy should always reflect your adgroup’s main theme. If your adgroup is about singles, you should try to include singles in your ad.

To get good ideas for your copy, you should search (but don’t click!) for ads that might be similar to what you are promoting. Again, don’t copy the ad exactly. Instead use it as a template and make it your own.

• Bidding
  Bidding on keywords is another very common question I am asked. It’s hard to know where to start bids for any campaign. As a general rule of thumb, I ask what the EPC of a campaign is and based on that, I set the bids at around 1/3 or so of the EPC.
  
  The difficult thing is that although the EPC can give a good estimate of where you should start your bids, your quality score will be a huge factor in determining what your bids should be.
• 
  
• Search Network Only
  When you’re first starting out, I recommend you use search network only. In the options of the campaign you can go in and disable content network and search network partners. Doing so gives you the highest possibility of having success because you’re dealing only with direct search engine ads (which have the best conversions).
  
  If you later want to try Google content network, I highly recommend (and Google recommends) that you make an entirely separate campaign for that. At the end of this section I will talk more about making a content campaign.
  
  Also note that if you plan to get heavily into the Google content network, you should also read the section on media buying towards the end of this guide.

Optimizing PPC Campaigns
To optimize your PPC Campaigns, I recommend you use one of two methods.

 

• The easiest way to optimize your PPC campaigns is to use the Google Adwords conversion pixel. You setup the conversion pixel in your Adwords account and then send the pixel code to your affiliate manager (or email contact). Then the pixel is placed on the offer page via your affiliate manager. When you get a lead or sale, this pixel notifies Google Adwords which keyword the person used to get to your affiliate landing page and ultimately which brought in money.
  
  The great thing about this conversion pixel is that after you get 15 or more conversions, you can have adwords begin to automatically optimize your adwords campaign.
  
  This automatic conversion optimization is quite impressive to say the least. It worked extremely well in the testing I have done on it.
  
  I have a case study about the adwords conversion optimizer where I increased my campaigns profit margins by over 100% and because of the increase in profit, I was able to make way more money by bidding to get higher ad positions. You can read the case study here.
  
  The bad thing about the adwords pixel (and the Yahoo / MSN pixel) is that they are not always 100% accurate. In fact, expect the number of conversions to be a bit lower than what you see in the affiliate network… it’s normal.
• 
  
• Prosper202 / Tracking202
• This is free software that is just amazing. Although setting up T202 or P202 can be time consuming and a bit tricky, the data that it can give you will help you to optimize your PPC Campaign like crazy.
  
  Tracking202 is hosted on the tracking202 server and is easiest to install. Prosper202 is the same software but hosted on your own server. Although the tracking202 team does not use or look at your campaign data, some people feel it’s just too much data for them to have on their servers.
  
  I won’t go over the details of using this software (because it is well documented and they have a forum - http://prosper202.com/forum/) but I can say that this is unbelievably good software that will help you to make more money if you put the time into using it.

 

Scaling PPC Campaigns To The 6 Figure / Month Mark:
I have a great video interview that I did with Wes from Tracking202.com on scaling PPC Campaigns to the 6 figure per month mark. It’s a bit of a longer interview but this is a great interview that I recommend you check out.

http://tv202.com/video/jonathan-volk-interview

Good Keyword Tip:
Some of the highest converting keywords are actually URLs. Some people still search the url instead of typing it into the address bar. You wouldn’t believe the amount of traffic that some of the higher traffic sites have typing in the domain into the search bar instead of the address.

Therefore you can often capitalize on this type of traffic with very little competition.

NOTE: Some search engines do not really allow this much anymore, but some still do. :)

Making A Content Network Campaign
Content network is where you advertise directly on websites that have partnered with Google’s advertising platform Adsense. This allows Google to read the websites content and show contextually relevant ads to the visitors.

When you bid on the keyword “bikes,” for example, instead of showing up in the search engine results you show up on websites that are bike related.    
Because these are two entirely different types of traffic, you should always split your search network campaign and content network campaign into two different campaigns.

Here are some rules to follow when building out your content network campaign:

1. Build a central theme for your campaign. You want your content campaign to have one main theme that is evident to you. The way you build this central theme is by having cross referencing keywords and adgroup themes.

Let’s say for example, you are building a campaign for a spyware remover program. You could have multiple adgroups such as “spyware removal” and have keywords based around that as well as “adware removal.” Doing so helps to build a central theme that tells Google exactly where you want to show your ads and to what type of audience.

2. Only use the BROAD keyword matchtype. Don’t use exact or phrase keyword matchtypes for content network campaigns.

3.  It’s ok to have duplicate keywords. For your content network campaigns, it’s perfectly ok to have duplicate keywords. In the example above, I would include the keyword “spyware removal” in both adgroups. This helps tie the two adgroups together into a central theme.

4. When you are building a content network campaign, you can use image and flash ads. I highly recommend trying some image and flash ads to see if you can increase your click through rate. Some websites only allow image ads and because of this you can gain more exposure for your campaign by uploading image ads. (Read up on the media buys section for more tips on creating effective image ads)

Other things to know about content network campaigns:
1. Content network campaigns are always going to have lower click through rates than search campaigns. Not to worry, Google content network click through rate is separate and does not affect your search campaign click through rate.

2. Content network campaigns are generally slow in starting out and increase slowly. Traffic starts very slowly and ramps up over the course of a month or so. It all goes back to Google figuring out what your central theme is. Once they have the theme and your campaign has run for a bit, your traffic levels will continue to increase.

Expanding Your Content Network Campaign:
Expanding your content network campaign takes a bit of intelligent research. Here is how I do it.
1. Look through your referring URLs. You can do this in the adwords report tab and click on performance report. These are the websites that have your ad on them. You can now see others who are advertising on the same type of website.
2. With those URL's look through each one and try to find some competition. Try to find someone as close to your advertising model as possible…
3. Google search: www.sitename.com (Yup, you’re searching for your competition’s actual domain)
4. Look through CACHED results as well as current results to see where their ad comes up.
5. Based off Ad copy, try to come up with new adgroup ideas. If some of their ad copy has some keyword you may have not though of… you’ve just found another potentially profitable keyword / adgroup that you can use.
6. Build that adgroup and … Profit…

 

Automating Building Of PPC Campaigns
Building your PPC campaigns can be a bit of a challenge and take some work. Making the keyword lists, ads, landing page, etc can take a lot of time to do manually.

There is this great program that I use to personally build 90%+ of my campaigns for search engine PPC called SpeedPPC.
SpeedPPC is a program that is unlike any other in it’s ability to create campaigns for you in literally minutes and provide amazing quality scores.
Here is how it works…

You enter your seed and expansion list into SpeedPPC. You then select which type of keyword matchtypes you want (Broad, phrase, and/or exact). After this, you make ad templates. After you have all these items, you click build and SpeedPPC builds the campaign for you and outputs files you can then upload to Google, Yahoo, and Msn… all at once.

 

In addition to helping you to automate the building of your campaigns, SpeedPPC helps to increase your quality score. And they PROVE it with a video. The quality score of a campaign built by hand compared to the quality score of one built with SpeedPPC is amazing. SpeedPPC's quality scores were way better.

It might sound too good to be true but check out this video of them building out a campaign. Of any tool, this is definitely the one to have if you’re going to be doing any level of PPC affiliate marketing.

Need A Landing Page?
One of my favorite cheap ways to launch a PPC campaign is using wordpress. Wordpress is a free (very SEO friendly) platform that can make launching a content rich site easy and quick.

Although there are a lot of free templates for wordpress, most will take a bit of tweaking to make just right for your affiliate campaign.
I also recommend you check out Affiliate theme. Affiliate theme is an amazing theme set based on wordpress. Affiliate theme is designed for affiliate marketers that can not code but want a custom looking website with the power of wordpress.

Another great place to check out is this Landing page designer website. This is an amazing website where you can buy a pack of 16 templates for $20!

Each month there is a new set of landing pages released and it’s well worth the money for the caliber of landing pages.

Need Help With PPC Campaigns?
If you need help with your PPC Campaigns, I highly recommend you check out PPC Coach. PPC Coach is a great service that gives you direct access to an entire community of people who are willing to help you with every detail of your campaign.

It also includes 3-4 direct lessons which include sample campaigns that you can run each month.

For more information on PPC Coach, check out my PPC Coach review.