Pay Per Click Marketing & Management
(By a guest writer)
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First page: Getting Started With PPC
Coming Up With A Marketing Strategy
At this point you should have picked out a few offers that catch your
eye, and done a little bit of research into the competition and demand. It's time to think about how to market your site.
I'll use insurance as an example. If you bid on “free insurance
quotes”, you're probably not going to make any money, the competition is
simply too fierce. So you need to think outside of the box.
What kinds of searches do people perform besides “free insurance
quotes” that may have less competition?
What about “cheapest insurance for people with DUI's?” These types of
searches are known as “long tail keywords”, but if you think of enough of
them the traffic adds up. Not to mention bidding on long tail terms is cheaper and highly targeted.
I'm not going to give you a list of keywords, but think “niches”. Young
drivers, old drivers, female drivers, whatever.
Come up with a list of around 20 of these niches, and we'll move on to
the next step.
Building Keyword Lists
There are plenty of great tools out there to build large keyword lists
with. The best tool is your head. The
Adwords
keyword tool is great, and so are the
free
tools at Seobook.com. The Yahoo keyword suggestion tool is useful as well.
 There are some great paid tools out there as well. For example,
Spyfu.com
is a web based keyword scraper. You can actually find your competitors ads
and "steal" their keyword lists.
What you want to do is take each niche that you came up with, and build
up keyword lists around those niches. Keep them grouped by niche, it's
important, we'll talk about why a little bit later.
So, use all of the tools above, think of common misspellings, use your
head. Once you've come up with a reasonable amount of keywords for each of
the niches you listed above, 15-50 keywords per niche is is a good start,
you can move on to the next step.
Building/Optimizing Your Landing Pages
There was a time when you could slap up a one page website with an
affiliate link and call it good. I like to call that time “the good old
days”, because landing pages today have to be complete websites, and
complete websites require elbow grease.
Here's the way it works: I'm going to go into Google's quality score
system, because if you optimize a website for Google, then it should be
fine for the other search engines as well.
Google bases their quality score on the relevancy and the quality of
your website. If you throw up a page that looks like it was put together
in five minutes using Frontpage, you're going to get slapped with $5-$10
minimum bids.
So, to start, you need to build a site that looks like an actual
website to Google. This means a solid navigation structure, important
pages such as contact, privacy and terms, as well as with a decent amount of
useful content. It should also be optimized just like you would for the
search engines: using titles, meta tags, description etc.
So, build a “shell” website around the main niche that you're
targeting. Using my insurance example, I'd buy an insurance related
domain. I recommend a .com domain to gain trust from visitors, it doesn't
affect quality score in my experience.
 Set up a home page, and put up a nice article relating to insurance, 500+
words preferably. This page isn't necessarily designed to sell, most of
your visitors won't even see it, but talk about the website overall. For
example:
Welcome to myaffiliatesite.com! We specialize in finding the cheapest
auto insurance for every unique situation etc.
Be sure to link to all of the important pages I talked about earlier.
Also, you're going to have a page relevant to every sub-niche we came up
with - female drivers, young drivers, etc. Link to these pages
from the main index page. These are going to be your landing pages.
Each of your landing pages needs to be highly relevant to the sub
niche. On your “female drivers” page you want the title, headers
and the content to be relevant to “female driving insurance”.
As far as the layout of the site goes, I prefer a quick sales pitch,
explain the benefits, and give them several opportunities early on to
click through your affiliate links. There is no magic formula, however, and
building a Google friendly landing page that turns visitors into
conversions is an art form that is going to require some testing and
experimenting.
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