PPC Affiliate Marketing 101

Who’s the guest?

This post comes from Ryan Gray of SuperAffiliateTwins.com. Ryan Gray is an affiliate marketer that along with his two business partners (John Kirkpatrick and identical twin Brother Richard Gray) make upwards of $600,000+ a month using various marketing techniques. You can read more about pay-per-click affiliate marketing and how to make money online at their blog located at SuperAffiliateTwins.com. They will also be holding a real-life case study soon using this very manual.

PPC Affiliate Marketing 101

If you’ve read Jonathan’s blog for any amount of time you know he makes more money in a month than the average American makes all year. This is all thanks to being involved in Affiliate Marketing. At every conference I attend, I’m asked at least once how it’s possible to begin promoting CPA offers via pay-per-click platforms. This prompted me to write this simple beginner’s guide to pay-per-click marketing to give everyone out there a new look on how to promote CPA offers.

Many people feel that with Google becoming stricter with their quality score that it is becoming near impossible to promote CPA offers utilizing their technology. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While things are not near as simple as they were six years ago (or even a year ago for that matter), pay-per-click Affiliate Marketing is still a very lucrative market and there is a lot of money to be made.

Step 1: Set a Monthly Budget
Before you sign up for an affiliate network, create a landing page and type every keyword you can think of into Google’s Adwords, you need to determine a monthly budget. In this industry you have to be willing to invest money to learn before you can get started. It is very normal for your campaign to start out losing money. You have to find out which keywords are converting and which ones aren’t to become profitable. I recommend starting with $5,000 a month. Many of you may see this number and think it’s ridiculous. Well you have to look at it this way…

The average student that obtains a MBA (Masters in Business Administration) makes $60,000 right out of college. To obtain the MBA degree they invest upwards of $15,000 – $50,000. Compare this to Affiliate Marketing. I’m telling you to invest $5,000. It’s possible you can lose the entire $5,000 but it’s also possible that you could begin making thousands of dollars every month. You have to be willing to take risks in any business. Before you begin, put away some money you are willing to invest. Do not spend money you do not have or get yourself in credit card debt.

Step 2: Pick an Offer to Promote
After you sign up for an affiliate network, pick an offer to promote. Jonathan has recommended some excellent ones in the past (e.g. Azoogle Ads). I recently conducted a Webinar with Will of PPC-Coach. One of the main questions people kept asking is “what offer should I start out promoting”. People go on to say that their Affiliate Managers tell them that the “Electronic Cigarette or Acai/Colon” are some of the top offers on the network. I don’t want to say it’s impossible, but if you’re trying to start your Affiliate Marketing business with the top offers of any Affiliate Network, your failure rate is going to grow exponentially. The reason these offers are the most popular is because the most experienced Affiliate Marketers are running them. These guys are people like Jonathan and me who are willing to invest $10,000+ to see if they can’t become profitable.

Experienced Affiliate Marketers like to go after offers with high payouts with aggressive landing pages. So for a beginner, you need to stay away from these offers. Let’s look at this way. Say you have $200 of your $5,000 budget and you want to test on a campaign. The average Acai/Colon payout is $35. If you spend $200 it’s possible you won’t have a single conversion. The higher the offers payout, the more money you’re going to have to invest to see if the campaign is profitable. To begin, start with offers with low-payouts (less than $10). This way, you can spend $100, and if you don’t see at least a few conversions you know the offer is not going to work for this particular campaign. By choosing offers with a lower payout, you’re going to lower your failure rate.

Step 3: Build a Quality Website
Just 2 years ago, you were able to create a one-page website with multiple ringtone carriers on it, and send the visitor straight to the offer. Pay-Per-Click platforms such as Google’s Adwords began to attack these sites by automatically giving them a terrible Quality Score. Google wants to enhance their user’s experience. They don’t want a ton of junk ads all over their website. They want advertisements that are going to add value to their platform. Therefore you need to take the time to build a quality website. This is going to take longer than a few hours. By quality you need to make sure your site has the following:

* Several pages of unique content
- Do not copy someone else’s website and expect to make thousands of dollars. Take your time to create a full interactive website that visitors actually want to visit. This is where a lot of new guys mess up. They simply want to copy someone else’s idea, throw $100 at traffic and expected to begin making instant millions. Folks, it simply doesn’t work like this. If it was this easy everyone in the world would be working from their home promoting products on Adwords. Find a lower paying offer that you’re interested in, sink your teeth into it and become passionate about creating a quality website.

* SEO the Website
- Once you have several pages of unique content you need to make sure your website is Search Engine Optimized. While this could be a whole separate blog post, if you don’t know how to make your website Search Engine friendly, you need to do some research on that before proceeding with Pay-Per-Click Affiliate Marketing.

* Have a professional looking design
- You don’t have to go out and pay a designer hundreds of dollars to achieve this. Search the Internet for some free web templates. Find one that you can modify to be unique and build from there. Remember Google wants to add to their user’s experience.

Step 4: Keyword Research
This is another step where a lot of newbies fail. They think if they purchase a subscription to some random keyword generating software that they’ve found “the holy grail” of Affiliate Marketing. In this industry, it’s all about gaining the competitive advantage on your competition. Purchasing software that everyone else can purchase offers no competitive advantage. Let me give you some quick and effective keyword generating tips.

Say you found an offer and decided to promote screensavers. This is going to be our “root” keyword:

Root Keyword: screensavers

Now, let’s think of some “branch” keywords to add to the “root” keyword.

Branch Keywords:
download
install
buy
create

After we have some branch keywords, let’s get some “specific branch keywords”. This is where a lot of “winning” keywords can be found.

Specific Branch Keywords:
holiday
Halloween
Christmas
Father’s day
Mother’s day
Cartoon
Television

Once we have all these together, we begin to mix them and sort them into Ad groups. A sample Ad group could look like this:

Ad Group Name: download screensavers

Keywords:
download holiday screensavers
download Christmas screensavers
download Father’s day screensavers
download Mother’s day screensavers
download Cartoon screensavers
download Television screensavers

You see where I’m going with this? You’re using your brain as your keyword generator, which is obviously unique to you. Continue to bang out ad groups and keywords until you feel comfortable. I can’t give you an exact number… Also since you’re a beginner only bid on EXACT matches. If you mess around with BROAD/PHRASE an expert pay-per-click marketer is going to beat you out.

Step 5: Write Your Creatives
When beginning a campaign I like to test with about 4 creatives per ad group. This way you have a lot of data to work with as you’re going to want to achieve the highest CTR (click through ratio) as possible. The more people that click your ad, the cheaper your clicks are going to become, which will ultimately make or break your campaign. When writing your keywords remember to include the exact keyword in the headlines. For our sample “download screensavers” ad group we could include the following creative:

Headline: Download Holiday Screensavers
Ad Body: Download thousands of Holiday Screensavers for free at XYZ.com! The web’s best selection of Holiday Screensavers.
Display URL: HolidayScreensavers.XYZ.com

Notice how I tried to sprinkle Download, Holiday and Screensavers into the ad copy. Most all pay-per-click platforms are looking for your ad copy to be relevant to your keyword and ad group.

Please note: I’m just using Screensavers as an example. You have to be sure and check the pay-per-click platform’s guidelines/limits to see how much text you can use.

Step 6: Prepare to Launch
Once you have completed all of the above steps you want to be prepared to launch your campaign. Set your bids at a level that you feel will provide you with enough traffic. I actually like to ask my Affiliate Manager what the average EPC (effective per click) of the offer is and bid somewhere in the middle. If the EPC of an offer is $0.50, start your bids at $0.25. You can adjust up or down once you determine where your ad is and how your CTR is performing.

If your budget is $5,000 a month be sure to set your daily spend limit at $161.29 a day. Be sure to check your credit/debit card that it can handle this charge daily. If your credit card is declined, kiss this Google account goodbye (I’m speaking on experience). Make sure the funds you have saved up are available and easy to access.

Step 7: Launch
Turn on your campaign, make sure everything is working and get off your computer. If you refresh your stats every second you’re going to get very frustrated. Get offline for a full 24 hours. Let your campaign run.

Step 8: Optimize
After 24 hours is up, log on and see what’s going on:

If you have 0 conversions…
Investigate why. Is your quality score good? Is your site relevant to the keywords you created? Don’t give up; there is a reason why you don’t have any conversions.

If you have conversions but are losing money…
Find out what keywords are converting and which one’s aren’t. Throw out the big spenders that aren’t converting.

If you have conversions and are making money…
Look at the keywords that are converting. What can you do to get more out of them?

After you make your optimizations wait another 24 hours before optimizing again. Remember small changes always work best. Don’t do anything drastic.

Once you get your campaign profitable you want to optimize every 24-48 hours. Let things run and make small changes. Don’t give up, remember your budget. Follow my advice, work hard and you will make money! People are making money; the only thing holding you back is yourself. Don’t read a forum or expect to take some magic pill. There is NO substitute for hard work!