About a year ago I have decided to expand my income resource. Until that day most of my affiliate income came from websites with organic traffic.

Yes, back in the old days it was very easy to get a high ranking on all of the top three search engines. Most of you will find it hard to believe but a change in a web page that you made today affects its ranking the day after. Well those days are gone and now you need to wait between three months to a year before you see your website on the first SERP (search results pages), assuming that you know SEO.

I am still doing SEO and will probably never stop. It’s a great source of income but it takes time before you get a return on your investment.
When SEO became more complex I used PPC for research – I tried to find the keywords that convert to sales. After I found the right keywords I started to optimize my website. At that time I did not used PPC to make money (that was a huge mistake!).

A year ago I started to do PPC as a method to earn money. I am still doing SEO to the keywords that convert well. However, unlike in the past, until those websites get to the top I continue with the PPC while keeping a positive ROI.

The common belief is that PPC = long tail keywords. I found that in order to start with PPC and keep a positive ROI you don’t have to start with a huge list of keywords. When you start to optimize a new website you don’t care much about the long tail keywords. You try to focus on 7-10 keywords.  The same you can do with PPC. Try to find your root keywords that convert and than start to expand your list based on those root keywords.

The advantage of this method is far from getting a positive ROI. When you start with a small list of keywords usually you will get a better CTR than if you had a long tail keywords list. Keep your CTR high as possible. It will help you keep your bids price low. When the CTR goes high the bids get low and your ad position climb up as well. You can read more about it in a previous post of mine: High CTR vs High ROI

It’s also a great way to save time – first you find whether your niche or product is selling and only than you keep digging for more traffic.

A tip for a newbie: start with the obvious.
I will explain more about this theory in my next post.

In the last few weeks the financial markets around the globe are in a big mess. As an affiliate marketer we experience the direct outcome by losing sales. It’s pretty understandable: people buy less in times of uncertainty.

You can sit back and accept the situation or you can find creative ways to take advantage of it to make money differently. Those who are running PPC campaigns probably noticed a decrease in their bids (at least for some niches). I know about some affiliate marketers who decided to halt their projects until the market will show some positive signs. I don’t think they are acting wisely. Even for those affiliate marketers who focus their work in 2-3 niches this period of time can be a good time to test new niches.

Here is my tip for you: When people don’t like to spend money to buy their goods they are more than happy to get it for free.
Did you know that you can give people free stuff and get paid for it?

I am promoting a basic product that for each lead I am getting more than $30!
The users only needs to pay $2.95 S&H.
Sound simple? well it can be simple if you know how to do it right.

You will not find those kinds of campaigns at ClickBank or CJ.
There are networks like NeverBlue, Hydra and COPEAC that offer a variety of “free gifts” campaigns. Some of those campaigns can be found in all of those three networks but some campaigns are exclusive for each network. If you want to do it right my advice is to sign up in all of the three networks and then to look for the products that you feel most comfortable to promote.
Another reason to sign up to all of the three is the fact that some time the same campaign will have a different commission on each network. Obviously you will prefer to work with the network that pays the highest commission for a specific campaign.

Try to think about creative ways to promote those kinds of products. It’s the key for your success. Think out of the box.

John Chow published a review about the new version of SpeedPPC: Pay Per Click Marketing 72,500% Faster. SpeedPPC is a useful tool to those who use the long tail strategy. With SpeedPPC you can create a complete PPC campaigns within few minutes.

In the past I talked about EfficientPPC which is another great software (and cheaper) for same purpose.

After reading John Chow review I had a thought that I would like to share with you: On the same way that EfficientPPC or SpeedPPC can be useful they can harm your PPC campaign.

After saying that its time for the explanation:

Right after you uploaded a new PPC campaign to Google, the campaign start to gain what so called “The Overall Campaign Quality Score”. Your campaign CTR is examined. In general, if you have a high CTR your ads will be seen on the top of the ads list and you will pay less per click. If you have a low CTR your ads will be seen on the bottom of the ads list or even will not be seen at all and you will need to pay more per click.

EfficientPPC or SpeedPPC will create for you lots of keywords in variety of combinations. For most of the keywords you will have between one or two impressions per day. The odds that you will get a high CTR for long tail keywords is pretty low. Since you have lots of long tail keywords with the campaigns that were produced by EfficientPPC or SpeedPPC, your overall campaign quality score will be low right from the start. This is not something that you would like to happen. Low CTR from day one harms your overall campaigns quality score.

My advice is to start with a limited list of keywords that you believe will best serve your offer. For the first few weeks your goal should be to get the best CTR that you can get for your campaign. A good CTR can start at 3% up to 20%. Better to start with the mainstream keywords although you will find that with those keywords you will loose money! Try to stay close to breakeven by reducing the bids but don’t try at that point to make a profit.

In most cases a CTR below 3% for the mainstream keywords will imply about a trouble with your ads or the demographic target.

After you have achieved a high CTR for your campaign start adding long tail keywords to it. At this point keep the balance between the keywords with the high CTR and the keywords with the low CTR so the overall CTR will be above 1%. You can keep your CTR even above 3% if you will add the long tail keywords not at once but in a group of keywords every few weeks while eliminating the keywords with the low CTR.

I hope you will find this strategy helpful.

I would like to share with you a case that I had to deal with in the last couple of days. I have a campaign that I am running on one of my websites. It’s going pretty well. Most of the traffic that I am getting for it is organic and some of it is PPC.

Few days ago I’ve noticed that something is wrong with this campaign. I don’t check my campaign every day (in my opinion it’s a waste of time). However, since I suspected that something is not working well I gave it a close look.

I was amazed to find out that the merchant changed the landing page for the link that I was using. This merchant has lots of affiliate links that you can use. I chose the affiliate link that fits to the pre sale page that I use on my website. I even used some of his colors and the graphics so when the user meets the sale page it will look familiar as possible.

I called the network and express my anger about the merchant action. Expectedly my affiliate manager apologized and he also justified my claims. However, I have no intention to continue my work with that merchant any more. Lucky me, he is not the only merchant that sale this line of products.

I never thought to check the merchants landing page on a daily basis and I am surly not going to start now. Imagine how much time it will take to an affiliate marketer to check 500 landing pages every day. On that time I can create a new campaign from start to end.

I tend to argue that this is the network responsibility - to make sure that the merchants will not change their landing pages without a clear notice upfront.

Aweber is celebrating their 10th anniversary. To those who are not familiar with Aweber, it’s one of the best email auto respond and email newsletter management service.
Aweber is in use by many webmasters and affiliate marketers including me

In the last year Aweber introduced a new analytics tool. It a nice tool for those who would like to take more out of their lists.

I am sure that Aweber will continue to develop their system and to come with more new features. Allow me to share with you my Aweber wish list for their 11th year of service.
My wish list is very short. Only two features that I am sure lots of my colleague will be very happy to use:

To receive the user data in the confirmation success page
The first one is very fundamental. Unfortunately in spite of many request from many more Aweber users this feature is not supported yet. As for now, Aweber allow you to get the user data in what so called the “thank you page”. It’s the page where the user is been direct after he entered his details, including his email address. At that point the user was not confirmed as a valid user. Aweber encourage the use of double opt-in. That means that a confirmation email will been sent to the user with a special link that he need to click on. By clicking this link Aweber confirms the user email address. After the user click on this link the user is been direct to a page of your choice. Unfortunately to that page Aweber does not send the user data.

As a result, if you would like to integrate Aweber in your system and to respond only to verified users, you can not do that!
Given the fact that Aweber encourage the use of double opt-in I find this lack very odd.

Aweber API
Yes, we all would be very happy if Aweber will give us an API to work with.
An API (Application Program Interface) will help to automate some of the actions that most of us doing by hand: Importing new users from other systems, removing users from a list, etc.  An API will give us more creative ways to integrate Aweber in our systems. It will allow creating more creative ways to add new subscribers.

I emailed my notes to Aweber. You are welcome to leave your comment here. What you would like to be added to Aweber service?