Nothing is permanent in affiliate marketing. People seem to be lulled into a false sense of security that campaigns will continue to run, offers will continue to pay out, conversions will continue to happen, and so on. But you can’t count on anything. It’s like the standard disclaimer on every investment and stock, past performance is not indicative of future results. Yet, people always seem shocked when a hot offer suddenly stops, or a well running campaign is shut down. Count myself in that group. Even though you know it can happen, it’s always surprising when it happens to you. A few weeks ago, my top performing, longest running campaign on Google Adwords was effectively shut down. This campaign had been running nonstop for over a year, yet the algo change Google made totally killed it. I tried every trick I know to get it back up and running, but to no avail. It’s kind of sad that Google makes no effort to retain a “good customer”, but search relevance rules over customer loyalty it seems. At any rate, it just goes to prove my point that at any time affiliate income could all go away. So be prepared.

With a PPC text ad, 4 lines are all you get to make your impression. Yet most people give little thought to the display URL, which is 25% of your ad’s real estate. The display URL should be a major concern when writing your ad. I would venture to say that it’s more important that your description even.

Buy a new domain:
This is one place not to cheap out and try to save a few bucks by using a bad domain name. Go ahead and register a new one, or even multiple new ones to test a new offer. Using an old domain that you had lying around, that kind of fits the offer is a recipe for failure. Besides, 1 conversion could recoup the domain cost for a year.

Buy a good domain:
For some reason I don’t have any trouble finding good domains. I never buy .NETs or .ORGs, only .COMS. I hardly ever use hyphens or weird punctuation either. Remember, you are buying the domain to instill confidence in the searcher, not for SEO purposes. Obviously, the shorter the better, but multiple related words are better than punctuation I find.

Test display URLs

I like to run multiple ad copies in Google with the only difference being the display URLs. I have seen big changes in CTR from various URLs tested. Once you find the best converting URL you can switch everything over to that URL.

It’s been said a million times before, you need to keep testing in affiliate marketing. You just never know what may or may not work until you actually commit some money to testing. We’ve all heard it before, but here’s an interesting case in point.

I was testing a campaign that has been running on Google for about 8 months now, just chugging along. I had 5 ads that I was testing for a particular Adgroup, and in one ad I noticed that I had accidentally left out a word in the description that made it read like total nonsense. It had ran that way for about 2 weeks and the funny thing is, that ad performed about 23% better than the other ads. I have no explanation for why that is, but you can bet I left that messed up ad in place

It seems everyone and their brother has a content network now. After MSN’s launch a few weeks ago, now Ask.com is about to join in the context game. Here is what they have to say about it:

“On May 14^th, The Ask Sponsored Listings Team will roll-out an exciting new feature – contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, you can seamlessly extend your pay-per-click search campaigns to sites in our content network.
Reaching over 34 million unique users each month, the ASL content network includes premium content sites such as Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and Ticketmaster and more. Ads are targeted to publishers’ web pages by matching ad content and keywords to page content so the ads displayed are highly targeted to the reader’s interests.”

It should be interesting to see how these sites convert for affiliates. I’m willing to test anything once. Look for a review in the future from me….

It’s Friday, I’m in a giving mood, so I’m going to drop a pretty big secret here.  I’m sure most successful marketers use this all the time, but this will be new for the newbies.  The secret is…. Drumroll please……

Niche Cross Promotion - You can bid on cheap keywords not in your expensive niche, to drive traffic to your niche.  What does this mean?  Say your PPC niche was totally saturated and all the keywords were too expensive.  You need to think of a category of keywords that is not in your niche, but somehow tangentially related to your niche.

An example may help:

Say your niche was fireplaces.  So you research all the terms like woodburning fireplaces, gas fireplaces, stone fireplaces etc.  But you find out all these terms cost $2.00 to be in the top 8, and you need to pay $.50 to make a profit.  Time to look for another niche?  Maybe not.  Now is the time to come up with a related niche that may have cheaper keywords, yet drive similar traffic.  After brainstorming you find that people searching for terms like home remodeling or home refurbishing may be interesting in fireplaces as well.  Plus those keywords are competitive at $.50.  You have just cross promoted your niche!

It takes a lot of work to do this, but on super saturated and expensive niches, it’s worth it.

Ps. This works really well with ringtones

If you have been doing affiliate stuff for long enough you have probably seen a phenomenon I call ‘conversion creep’. Basically it is the gradual decrease in the number of conversions over time. It’s important to note, I’m saying the number of conversions, not conversion rate. Why does this happen? Well in scientific terms, you can relate it to the second law of thermodynamics, whereas in a closed system, unless acted on by another force any system will increase in entropy. In layman’s terms that means: if you don’t get off your lazy ass and work on your campaigns occasionally, you will lose money.

So what are some sources of conversion creep?

• Loss of keywords: This is the main problem. In Google they go inactive, in Yahoo the are removed, and in MSN you get the annoying emails. All these need to be acted on, because you are losing valuable keyword real estate all the time.
• Landing page leaks: Once you have a landing page running, things can pop up over time that you wouldn’t expect. Php/sql errors can happen, hyperlinks can stop working, and redirects can fail. It’s a good idea to check your landing pages often as well as your server logs for errors that could be costing you conversions.
• Ad fatigue: This one may be a small factor because you would think that searchers for a specific term are always new people, but that’s not always true. If you shake things up a bit by changing ad copy you can often bump up conversions that have slipped off.

Running a PPC to affiliate campaign is definitely NOT a set and forget system, like some people seem to think. You may get lucky right off the bat, but it takes constant work and tweaking to stay successful.

For about the last 6 months I have been #1 in a very competitive niche at Azoogle. From what my AM tells me, I completely dominate this niche. So how did this happen? Very simple: hard work. You can’t just slap together a campaign in a few hours or days and expect to do really well. You may get lucky for a while, but eventually your earnings will dip. It’s difficult to keep a campaign profitable over the long term. Without giving away my offer, here is how I did it in general terms.

1. Keyword research and structure. Of course a good keyword list is very important. Start with a great tool, and then add every variation you can think of. More important almost than your master list, is how you break your KWs out into groups. Correct adgroup structure is a huge factor in your campaigns success. The more targeted your ad is to your keywords, the better your CTR will be and conversion rate.

2. Make a good landing page, then keep making more and split testing. You just never know what will convert until you test it.

3. Know your seasonal trends for your niche. Everything has seasonal patterns. Even the most non-seasonal product has peaks and valleys than you can exploit.

4. Buy more traffic. Once you have a well converting campaign, try it out on every possible network you can. If you don’t you are leaving money on the table. Don’t believe what you read in forums about PPC networks. Test them for yourself. One of my best converting networks is one that everyone in the forums calls crap. To me it’s gold though.

5. Know your niche. This is the most important tip I can give. Research everything you can about the product and market. Know the demographics of the target customers. Know their age, sex. geographic location, marital status, income level, browsing habits, and what they ate for breakfast this morning. Read the trade journals for the industry. Find out everything you can, because every piece of info you learn will help target your campaign. This is a step that many affiliates skip when just going for the quick buck, but if you really want to do well it’s essential. Think of yourself like a marketing contractor for the publisher’s company. They are paying you to know as much as possible about their consumers so you can better market their product to them.

I think if you work hard enough, you can eventually own any niche you want, even the most competitive ones. It’s just a matter of how hard you want to work.

If you are going to be in affiliate marketing for any length of time, you are going to experience ups and downs. It’s just a fact of life. One day you are the king of the world and trying to decide what color your new sportscar should be, and the next day you are wondering where your next meal will come from. That may be exaggerating a bit, but everyone experiences big swings.

I’d say the biggest frustration for me with affilate marketing is tracking issues. No matter how hard you try, it’s just not possible to reconcile the number of clicks shown by the PPC engine, against what you show in your landing page logs, against what your affiliate network says. There will never be an exact match. I actually attended a session at pubcon where the guy did a whole hour about the life cycle of a single click from PPC to affiliate. It was pretty amazing, and I really wish I had taken better notes. Basically the summary of his lecture was that due the nature of the Internet, clicks can never match up. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, especially when you are talking your hard earned money. But it’s just something you have to get comfortable with I suppose and build into your margins when running calculations.

In the last week I have had to make some drastic changes in how I do things. I have implemented a totally new tracking system, which should keep tracking issues to a minimum and allow me to better see what is actually happening with my PPC campaigns. Then when the ups and downs come, I should be better suited to figure out why.

This post is keeping with the contrarian theme of the last post.  When people talk about keywords these days, all you hear about is long tail keywords.  These generally refer to the low volume, low cost, higher word count keywords in a niche. I am all for using these words to your advantage; I certainly do.  But it seems people have forgotten the importance of the “short tail” or top keywords.  There is usually a group of 10 terms or less that account for 95% of the search volume for a given niche.  So much time and energy is given to working that long tail, that some people seem to ignore that the vast majority of money to be made in a niche is in the top keywords.  They are definitely harder to rank well in, and more expensive, but you can make your margins in sheer volume working the “short tail” keywords.

So my advice for the day is, let everyone talk about the long tail, but don’t forget about where the real money is made = the “short tail”!

You really do need to think outside the box to be successful in affiliate marketing. Sometimes copying what others are doing does work, but that will only get you so far. To truly break out from the pack, you need to think differently about what you are doing.

Part of thinking outside the box, is constant testing. For me that means testing totally crazy stuff, because you never know what might hit. Sure, most of it will fail miserably, but occasionally you will get a winner.

Here’s a funny example of something I tested that was off the wall. I don’t like to give specifics of what is converting well from me, and what niches I am in (can you blame me?), but ringtones are always safe to talk about. Everyone does them. So I got to thinking about the standard boring, “pick your carrier” landing page that everyone uses. I asked myself what would be the opposite of this landing page? This is what I came up with.

Yes, that’s the whole landing page, no need to reload your browser.  Just a white background with 2 small words. The amazing thing is, the bounce rate was about the same as the page I was running at the time! Conversions were a little lower probably due to a few lost carriers not supported by the offer it was going to, but surprisingly it worked pretty well. Since then I have hit on something that works way better, but at the time it worked great. I found my current landing page by “crazy” testing, just like this.

So get creative and stop following the pack!