In part 1, I gave a quick background on my latest affiliate marketing efforts, suggested you sign up with Market Leverage and Commission Junction, and also talked about deciding on the type of offers you want to promote. Now that you’ve got the offer you want to promote, perhaps something in the dating arena, it’s time to move forward with setting up campaigns within the different advertising arenas, analyzing your stats, and testing keywords.
I’m just going to use the topic of dating offers as an example, but the tips I’ll give obviously apply to any niche or offer you pick.
Getting traffic to your offer
You can’t make money without traffic. So, getting people to see your ad, click on your links, submit their info, or even purchase something is the most important part of all of this. Deciding on where you want to get that traffic from is the tough part. There are so many options – Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, Facebook, Twitter, and many more. For this example, we’ll stick with AdWords and AdCenter since they are pretty similar. Sign up for both of them as you’ll want to diversify and test which platform works better for you. Most affiliate marketers seem to believe that AdCenter converts better, but it takes longer for a campaign to ramp up and receive traffic, where with AdWords you may see impressions and clicks more quickly, but not necessarily any conversions. Test them both and keep working with them.
Within each of the sites, you’ll be able to set up different campaigns. I like to to test different keywords, so if we are dealing with a Dating offer, then I may set up the overall campaign with the offer name. Then within the campaign you can set up your different ad groups. These are the ads that will be displayed and the keywords that they would show for. I set up different ad groups based on different groups of keywords. To get off the dating example for a second, a better one to understand this might be if you were promoting an affiliate link for a discount printer ink website. You could have Ad Groups for each different printer type or manufacturer (Epson, HP, etc) and then have all your keywords relating to that manufacturer or group. This way you can see which keywords are performing the best within different ad groups. I think that explanation makes sense, if not leave a comment and I’ll try to help explain some more!
Once you’ve got your Ads and ad groups set up, set your budget for spending and let it go.
Finding Keywords
Doing keyword research is probably the most time consuming part of this process. There are so many tools out there and different websites you can use. Ian Fernando just posted a video about the Google Wonder Wheel which is an excellent tool to use and gain ideas from. Within Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter there are also keyword research tools which are pretty helpful in giving you ideas. You can just put in your main keyword and it will spit out tons of related terms and even show you the search volume for them. I’ll post more in the future about keyword research as I get more into it. Right now, I don’t really have any set method or system that I use besides the research tools within AdWords and AdCenter.
Testing, Testing, Testing
The biggest part to making this venture successful besides effective keyword research is continually testing every aspect of your ad and campaign. You always want to be changing your keywords (removing some and adding others) to see what works, changing the text or copy of your ad, and also your ad headlines. Another tip is to make as many ads as you can! There’s nothing stopping you from creating hundreds of different ads and seeing what performs the best – this is what some of the big guys do…all day. Just changing a word or two can make a big difference.
Along with testing, you want to keep checking your stats to see what keywords bringing impressions, and more importantly, are getting clicked. Also, be ready to drop some money to see some rewards. I’ve probably spent about $200 to make the $60 that I did. So there is definitely a big learning curve involved, but you could stumble on a great niche or ad that converts great and makes all that money back for you right away!
I’ve just opened my own eStore ‘pcstockmarket’ (http://pcstockmarket.zlio.net)
online with http://www.zlio.com, and
I’d like to let you know about the service. It’s loads of fun, and it takes less
than 5 minutes to create your own online store. But, most importantly, there are
no logistics to deal with: Payment, product delivery and after-sale support are
the sole responsibility of partnering ZLIO Internet merchants! All you need is
a bit of imagination to select products for your store (from a catalog of over
three million items from the Internet’s top merchants). And best of all – you
get a commission every time your shop sells something (paid by the merchant, so
your products aren’t any more expensive than they would be elsewhere).