Jon

I made a blog post highlighting the main ideas, really just the gist of things about how to use PPC marketing to your advantage. I left out a lot of small details from the original post before I put it on the blog, but that's because I didn't want to bore people with excessive detail. Anyhow, if you guys have any questions drop them in here..

The post - (original source - Super Affiliate Marketing Blog)

So word has it that I haven’t made many good posts lately that help people make cash. Well, I agree, so here’s how you can make some bank quickly and easily without breaking the bank too. Let’s take a quick look at Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing and see how underrated it is and how you can seriously make some cash without getting too wrapped up and hung up on the usual things that stop you from moving forward.


1- Create a site. If you don’t know how to, well, get someone to do it for you. It’s not that hard, hell, even I can do it and I am a retard when it comes to tech/design stuff. So buy a domain, get a cheap hosting account for it, toss up a WordPress blog and theme (takes the hassle out of creating a site), and you’re in business.


2- Depending on what your domain theme is, if it has one, make the site around an affiliate marketing offer. It can be a product, a service, doesn’t really matter which. Just pick something! There are no bad ideas or good ideas, everything can work in it’s own right if done correctly. If you are being a lazy bastard and need me to pick one for you, then choose a product that is cheap for the end user and serves some type of beneficial purpose. Ad networks have a billion offers, I’m sure you can find one. But try and keep out of finance/mortgage and ringtones for now, because those take lots of research, time and cash.


3- Great, you have your product picked out, now make a blog post about it. If you don’t know all that much about it, do some quick research on Wikipedia or Google. It’s also a good idea to put a banner up or a full page ad for it if you aren’t going to write a blog post about it. Either way, make sure the theme of the blog is about the product you are promoting. Maybe make the color scheme the same as the page where the user will buy something or fill out the lead.


4- So let’s assume you have your domain, host, blog with the offer all setup. Alright, so now comes traffic, the fun part! Let’s use Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter for it. Take $100 and deposit it into each of the accounts. You probably won’t use all of it, but it’s good to have it in there. With Adsense we can begin right away, but with MSN you may have to wait 24 hours or so until their slow asses get to approving the account. With both though, there are tons of free cash coupons and promo codes out there, and some on WickedFire.com that you can use and get some free cash to use.


5- Time for some keyword research. Before you start to use every keyword tool under the sun, let’s do a bit of manual work. First go and look at the advertiser’s page and pull keywords off there by hand. We want to focus on something called LONG TAIL KEYWORDS. We don’t want the one or two word keywords because they are very general, expensive, and usually being looked at for research purposes and don’t have many “buy now” people using them. A long tail keyword are those 3, 4, 5+ word keywords that really target a product. So for example, a good longtail mortgage refinance keyword I would use is “refinance los angeles california” or “bad credit refinance new york” INSTEAD of “refinance new york” or “refinance la”. You can even compare the prices, and you’ll see the longer ones may not get much traffic on it, but they are so cheap compared to the other more general ones.


6- So you have some general and longtail keywords. Fantastic. Now some people use misspelling tools and whatnot, which is a good idea, so go over to SEOBook.com into the tools section and use Aaron Wall’s misspelling tool. But don’t do that just yet, because that’s the last step. What you should do first is get a nice long list of longtail keywords of what you think people are using when they are in “buying mode” when searching on the engines for your product. So if the product is some kind of insole for a shoe, your keywords would be: buy shoe insole, cheap insole for shoes, doctor recommended shoe insole. Those are pretty good, and sure, they are nowhere near as robust as something like “shoe insole” or “shoe pad” but they are more likely to be in buying mode than researching mode. So your job, for the next 1-3 hours is to gather up as many of these keywords as possible. If you want to use keyword tools to do it for you, by all means, knock yourself out, but if this is your first time doing something like this, and you want to learn how to do it right, do it by hand, the old fashioned way, just until you get the swing of things. When you’re done collecting the keywords, run it through the misspelling tool, and save the end result. Make sure to also group the keywords into 5-15 keywords per group for Adwords and AdCenter. You’ll thank me later.


7- We have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. Wonderful, now on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are. You don’t want to put too many keywords into one group because you want to keep your ads as relevant as possible for that group of keywords that it represents. So go ahead and make your ads. I typically write out 3-4 ads in the beggining, but sometimes as little as 2. It really depends on how confident you are of the keywords. Make sure to include the keyword, or the main idea of the base keywords (meaning, if the keywords all revolve around “back pain” make sure “back pain” is in the ads). Don’t be boring with the ad copy either, try and liven it up to get the attention of the searcher that will make them want to not only click on your ad, but also buy or fill out a lead for your product. Use your domain and page/site for this. Make sure all the traffic goes to your killler blog page.


8- Once you’re done with all of the above do something very important now.. Change the keywords so they are all EXACT and PHRASE matches. You can even go as far as to create seperate ad groups if you really want to, but sometimes that’s just overkill and may also screw up your other campaigns for good keywords. The reason you don’t want to go with broad in the beginning is because you’re on a mission now. That mission is not to make money, but to get your CTR up to a nice level. You’re going to want to be doing this for a good day or so. Don’t worry, you won’t lose much money, and afterall, a lot of those clicks aren’t just going to go nowhere, they’ll be going to your blog/promo page. You still have a great chance that they will also result in a sale/lead. So no need to fret about it.


9- Wow step 9 already, look how quickly we flew through this tutorial. Granted there are a lot of details being left out, but you will learn them on your own and pick them up pretty quickly too. You have to admit, this is a hell of a lot easier than you thought it would be right? So the reason I want you to use a blog or something with content on it and not just a redirect or linking directly to the affiliate code is because Google and MSN have this algorithm called QS aka Quality Score. They say, that if a site looks like it’s not selling something exclusively, meaning, that the site’s sole purpose is to spread information rather than sales then it should not be paying as much as a commercial site that has a huge budget. Also these types of results (your site) are relevant for users and give them what they are looking for, instead of a sales page and a “buy this thing now or you will die!” approach. We want the users to buy or fill out leads, but we don’t want to give them the impression that it’s ALL we want, so maybe tack on a newsletter signup link. You can use Aweber, they are cheap and good. Also tack on a few information links on the blogroll or in the posts. To really beef up your QS, send some inbound links from other blogs, directories, sites, forums, wherever really. Just pretend you are SEO’ing it as well as using it for a PPC campaign. Within 2 weeks or less your QS should jump, your CTR should jump, and best of all, your PPC bid price will drop! In the wise words of Borat.. Wowaweewa!


10- This is not over. Just because your ROI is 2:1-3:1 or better doesn’t mean you are leaving this alone and moving onto the next thing. Your ass needs to go over everything, step by step. Keep a list. What went wrong and why? What changes did you make to it, and what type of effect did it have on the sale/lead/traffic? Ask yourselves as many questions as possible. If you can’t answer it yourself, go to the forums and ask someone there. There is an answers to almost any PPC and affiliate marketing related question on WickedFire.com somewhere, and if we don’t have it, another forum will, or ASK about it, because as great as we may seem to think we are, we can’t read your mind and see what’s going wrong. Be as detailed as possible too!


So there you have it. A blog post of value, quality and meaning. Will it make you millions? I doubt it. But be realistic, you need to try things out and learn them for yourself before you can pass judgement on it or decide it’s “too hard”, because this is not hard at all. This is easy shit compared to any job offline that you may have had to do for a paycheck. So quit sitting on your ass and reading this, and go out and do something about it! The rest is up to you boys and girls, so go make me proud and try it!

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wfhnow

Great Post Jon...

jessecooper

So simple but so true. i love you jon

beejeebers

Your keyword research and matching advice is golden.

Great post.

But the other key is finding something that works. It takes 10 programs to find 1 keeper. So don't expect to hit it right on the first try. Set the max you are willing to lose on a program and then dump it and move on if it shows no signs of ever being profitable.

ImagesAndWords

Awesome

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Jon

It's all about the longtails my friends.. especially with PPC and Affiliate Marketing.. and it's not something new either, just overlooked and not spoken about much.

I'm sure a lot of my pals who are big boys with it will be pissed that I brought it up, but screw it, it definitely helps. Only issue about it is that there are no tools for it, probably because it's IMPOSSIBLE to get every keyword for it, as the variations are just unlimited. But I guess it's not about finding EVERY keyword, longtail or not, but finding the ones that bring in the conversions, but even then, some keywords may do shit for months, but then later on may bring in a ton of conversions. It's a coin flip really, and we have no control over it, so that's why I say to do it by hand.

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jerxs

Great post man!

What kind of advice would you give to someone trying to work the natural end of things? PPC traffic is quick and easy, but natural search is long term, slow and not so easy. You had mentioned to stay away from the mortgage and loan market, though this market is my newest project. Im not going to be focusing on PPC traffic, but more long term natural traffic, though PPC is not out of the question and im sure I will be pissing around with it a bit.


Will the WF seasonal project focus on PPC marketing or Natural SE traffic?

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pocketrockets

Excellent post, Jon. One of your best yet! I think #6 is one of the most important here and I totally agree with your 5-15 keywords per adgroup advice. If you have more than 25 keywords in an adgroup there is no way they can all be highly targeted enough to give you the best Quality Score possible and you are going to be paying more per-click than is necessary. Plus, it's easier to manage smaller adgroups and figure out which ones convert the best.

A lot of my campaigns I only run a few keywords which makes it very easy to track conversions. Earlier this year I thought I'd try a few hundred in an adgroup just to test it out. Well, it was no surprise when I didn't make any sales with that test, lol. It wasn't until I shaved down my keyword list to less than 10 per adgroup that I started to make any conversions.

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int_josh

good advice man

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Voodooman

Good post

nachoninja

great info here

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Aequitas

This is just getting crazy now.

I always love reading and learning and helping out the community but I already knew everything you just told me and this is not the first time this has happened, the only thing I did not know is if others were doing it as well and if I was on the right track.

Sure my methods are not 100% exactly the same as this but close enough to be considered equal, I've known about longtail keywords for a long time and I've got some new sites up and going for about two weeks now but those are not my PPC sites, those are just used for Adsence profit and a product here and there.

But anyway thanks for the informative posts and letting me know that I'm on track and at least headed in the right direction.

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Jon

Natural end is obviously going to take a hell of a lot longer. I think I'll just write a whole new thread for it because it's really like night and day when designing and positioning content for the SERPs rather than for some quick PPC campaigns.

Both. More so for natural though, because it's a hell of a lot easier and way cheaper too when you're dealing with blogs vs full websites.

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dekalog6

Thanks for the post. One thing I am having problems figuring out is how many adgroups to use in a campaign. If you are after little searched long tail keywords but only have 5 to 25 keywords per group, won't you need a lot of adgroups to get the volume you need? So do you have something like 25 adgroups per campaign then? That would mean writing a lot of ads especially if you are split testing.

Or do you find the targeted low volume keywords in only a few adgroups convert well even on a small number of clicks to be profitable?

Thanks

Jon

One of the biggest mistakes affiliates make with PPC campaigns isn't actually a major one, it's a greed and "let me get this shit started asap" attitude, which unfortunately brings in very shitty results most of the time. Then they see that as a failure and most always quit and move on to something else. I'm sure there are lots of people like this, hell, I was like that for a long time too, I just wanted things to move as quickly as possible.

You need to focus on ROI not just by what keywords or ads you write but how you group your keywords and how much time you are willing to dedicate to it. I'm not saying if you spend 10 hours on it you are definitely going to bank with it, but spend an hour or so on it if you're trying to change the way you make your ads vs the way you used to do it. You need to train yourself to take the time out and do the grunt work, only after you've put your time in with that, and learn the manual work, then you can switch over to API's and automation.

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Jon

You can do some research on the longtails and regular keywords alike on the Adwords traffic estimator tool and see what the search volume is. If you have some giant list, then by all means, pack in more keywords into the group, especially if those longtails aren't very popular. But at the same time, there are millions of longtail keywords to chase after, but what you want to do is find the ones getting SOME traffic, but where you can still get away with paying the minimum ppc bid price for it.

When your CTR jumps and your QS goes up, you'll be able to bid about a penny per click on Adwords with those keywords, so you can definitely pack a lot more of them into it if you're going for the long haul. This way if you want to kill off the campaign and dedicate your limited budget to a different ad campaign you can just keep those super cheap longtail campaigns running simultaneously and still rack up the leads/sales without tapping into your budget significantly. No reason to get rid of a campaign that only spends a few dollars a day and still has an insane ROI.

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greenvy

thanks for the post!

PPC has always been treating me like shit! I'll give your tips a try

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dekalog6

So you mean split the campaign into a more expensive popular keywords group and a long tail keywords group. Then if I decide to kill off the campaign I just stop the more expensive adgroup.

Jon

Yep! There's no rule that says you can do one but not the other. Take all of your keywords and create as many sub-categories for them under the primary campaign. You can group them so that one sub-campaign is just for regular 1-2 word keywords that are usually more expensive, and then make another group for the cheaper but less traffic ones, and even a 3rd group for misspellings etc..

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angelo

thanks jon. been waiting for your post. i hope you post 5 random niches again

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Jon

Five random niches eh? Easy!

1- Gourmet Pet Food
2- Goalie equipment (ice hockey)
3- Space Heaters
4- International Beers
5- Gaming Law (lawyers for online and offline casinos)

There, now go get busy.

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Aequitas

I've always liked to jump on the early launches of potentially popular television series, I wish I was around 10 years ago when Stargate SG1 launched, I could have ranked in some serious cash with that one.

But I personally like them because they can be somewhat easy to get into if you catch them early enough, they generate a lot of traffic, and its something that can survive for several years.

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beejeebers

Here is a long tail generator from seobook.com, it's very good but it doesn't scramble the keywords at all...

Free Keyword Phrase List Generator

sknydave

Very naice! /borat

cyberworkspace

so true. i spent the last 2 weeks solely on learning the ropes and doing ppc2offer. out of 15 campaigns, i was only to maintain one campaign on a steady qs level, the rest just ditched and quoted me for cpc like .40, .80 and ridiculously higher amounts which are the equivalent of google saying "fuck off, you're worseless".

of course, there might be affiliate campaigns and landing pages provided with them, that provide a good selection and density of relevant keywords, but the most just plainly suck.

therefore, everyone should test the landing pages at least with ranks.nl or something similar, to get an impression, whether it is worth to think about doing this offer with ppc2offer at all.

on top of thta, you will constantly running into the problem, that google is becoming extremly strict on checking whether target-url and display-url match, and whether the target url really is the landing page's url. in most cases, there is no way around getting your own optimised landing page, as:
target url = x.azjmp.xyz <> display url = "bestmortgagedeals.com" <> affiliate landingpage "lendingtree.com"

even if you do a cloaked redirect for the target-url like "bestmortgagedeals.com/lending", which gets redirected to x.azjmp.xyz on your server, you still don't match "bestmortgagedeals.com" with "lendingtree.com". but the latter is, what google is looking onto very strictly, at least in my case.

unless you get the provider of the lending page to create your own sub-domain or landing page for you (which probably requires your ability to deliver at least 5-figure traffic first), doing ppc2offer will become extremly hard.

so, i am switching all to going the way of managing my own landing pages now, as you suggest

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Xrproto

Sweet Jesus!

I just read through this and it answered some questions & pointed some things out that I've been missing!

I've been making money but struggling to get my ROI up & keep everthing consistent. Like yesterday I made a little over $200 with a 4:1 return the day before 0$ the day before $120 something with a 8:1 return.

What am I still typing! I'll be back later today and report what I've changed.

Thanks Jon!

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NYDAz

Keep it coming ...

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barman

I found an affiliate program I would love to try with first PPC > Affil site. I have a few questions though. Keep in mind, no matter what you say I am still trying this because I just need to jump into affil marketing already.

The problem is the item is $500+ and has a 10&#37; payout. When an item is that expensive, are there any tips out to make sure the ROI can stay in the black? Obviously the only way is to test the keywords and sales pages, but when it comes to expensive items, is there something to do differently than lets say opt-in pages or free trial items?

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nachoninja

They are going to pay you $50 to sell a $500 item?!?!?, zomgwtfbbq

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nachoninja

What would you say is the minimum number of searches a month for a longtail keyword to add to a campaign?

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barman

actually I think I just found an affiliate that is doing 25&#37; so that's a shitload better.

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Atomm

That's a great question....

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Jon

That is a great question, but I don't have a good answer for you, because longtails aren't easy like 1-2 word keywords are. Sometimes a longtail that only gets 3-4 clicks in a month, people would say "oh fuck that", and delete it, but that keyword can deliver a 100% conversion rate for all we know. That's why I'd suggest keeping all of the longtails you find for at least a month, so that you can look at them and see if they are actually getting you anything. But at the same time, when your QS and CTR are doing great, that longtail keyword may cost as little as $0.01, so why get rid of it anyhow? It's up to you and what you think is good for your campaign.

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ianternet

nicely done - so nice i posted it on my blog

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BeerHat

Excellent post Jon. I recently started PPC and Leads (Azoogle) and have sat here wondering why I really haven't gotten many clicks and it seems the minimum CPC keeps going up.

I made the mistake of just pasting a group of about 50 keywords and phrases into a single campaign.

Based on your advice I'm going to break it down into sub campaigns including misspellings (i don't know why I didn't think of that seeing that I do that with some BH sites).

One question though, does raising the daily budget substantially help get more impressions and therefore clicks?

skylark

Thanks Jon, I've been anxious to jump into the AM game!

Xrproto

Okay, so after reading this I relized what my problem was with my ROI ~ I had all my keywords in one campaign & one ad group with 5 different ads rotating.

So I turned everything off. Went through my first campaign & broke everything down into 10 different groups of keywords (long tail) which each had 1 main keyword in the long tail.

With in the 10 groups I've broke it down even further getting around 5 sub groups in most.

Then I made ad copies for each of the 10 main groups and then fine tuned them for each sub group.

Now I only had time to put up five of the new ad groups I came up with & turned it on 2 hours ago.

I come back and spent $6 and made $83.

I can't wait to see what turns out once I finish redoing this campaign and the rest.

Great info Jon!

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greenvy

hey Xrproto,

are you directing them to your own LP or directly to the merchants LP?
and are you using Adwords, YPN, or MSN?

I think my biggest problem is my LP

thanks for the update though!

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Xrproto

I'll will try to report more detailed later but I'm swamped right now.

I send them to my own landing page and currently using Adwords & MSN BUT believe it or not MSN is where I get the bulk of my traffic.

I redid this on MSN and just did it with adwords but my QS is in the shitter with adwords and I'm trying to get out. I hope by doing this will help with the QS on adwords & I still have a little more I could do with the landing pages for the adwords account.

I've added the following to my landing pages for adwords ~ bottom nav with home, privacy-policy, terms & conditions, about us, contact us and I've written unique content and I still am in the crapper...I'm hoping its because I had all my keywords dumped into one group per offer.

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geniosity

I THINK I've read this whole post, and maybe this has been answered elsewhere, but I seem to have missed it.

Do you guys bid on both the Content network AND search pages? Or just one of them?

Thanks for your help.

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Scrabbler

I use the AOL dataset for long tails....

Atomm

I know people say not to bid on the Content network, but at .03 cents, I figured what the heck. I just set up conversion tracking, so I'll see how it is doing. It's only cost me $6 out of $200, so why not test it.

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soul-healer

I really find this post interesting. I started PPC but didnt find it worthwhile to run long as i am missing many keypoint now i think i have learned alot from this i must say thanks to admin for writing this usefull post.

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xboxundone

just be weary if you get picked up by crappy myspace type site you can spend a fortune quickly for very little return.

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ScottDaMan

Seriously, this post in itself is worth more than most $97 ebooks. Thanks Jon.

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LazyD

This may be a stupid question but ill go ahead anyway...

Jon, you say to just start a Wordpress site, I know thats just one option among many, but if I choose to go that route, and at the same time decide to market certain niche products, for instance, goalie equipment...

How do you reccomend writing your blog posts, 1 specific product per an entry or multiple products of the same type (all gloves in one entry, all pads in another)?

I also assume its best to write them in a short review form as well?

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paowiee

I was wondering the same thing... but I'm going to mix it up a bit and add at least 5 posts and 1 every week to the 'blog' with normal posts and promo posts... let's see what happens

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Xrproto

I'm far from Jon but what I would do is make several post.

If I have several offers I can promote for "gloves" I would do a comparison post and I would also make a post about each individual glove. That way if the user is searching for reviews of multiply I have one that covers that or if they are searching a specific...I have that to.

In the comparison I would figure out which offer converts better and makes the most money and I would hype it further by even bashing the other ones I'm promoting, that works in some cases I've found.

The point is to build up a ton of content for the site so think of ways you can break a category down to write for.

I could be wrong but that's the aproach I've been trying to take to help with the quality score issue I have with adWords

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Richard Curry

Thats how I'm doing it with my blog, I've also heard of people getting rid of all links off the single post pages, so all the guest can click on is the ads, getting rid of links to home, about, next page and comments.. but can this hurt your quality score?

ScottDaMan

it will hurt your SEO, 100&#37; guaranteed. You need all internal pages at least pointing to the offer / home pages. Its not worth trapping your victims (oops, customers).

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