Warcraft Affiliates

August 4, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, Modules, PPC by MatthewDC

If you’ve read all of the modules up to this point, congratulations. You are already on your way to starting your own affiliate marketing business. You understand the basics of affiliate marketing, you should have a clickbank account, and you even set up your first squidoo lens. The only problem now is, noone is looking at it. But don’t worry, we are going to cover all of the basic traffic methods I use, right here in module 7 and it’s sub-modules!

Traffic generation is a funny business. Much like all areas of affiliate marketing, everyone has their own take on what you should and should not be doing to build traffic. The methods I am going to share with you are all methods I have personally used and found to work for me. If you do them aggressively, you WILL get traffic to your site as well as increase your Google Pagerank and backlinks at the same time. All of these things will help you get to your ultimate goal, whether it be $1000 a month or $500 a day.

Due to the importance of this topic and the number of methods you can use, I am going to break this module down into sub-modules as follows:

• 7.1 : Traffic Generation with Article Marketing
• 7.2 : Social Bookmarking
• 7.3 : Forum Participation
• 7.4 : Pay Per Click (PPC)
• 7.5 : Outsourcing Everything

All of these methods go hand in hand to create a complete traffic building system. One method alone probably won’t be enough to get you serious visitors to your site. That being said, combining article marketing with social bookmarking is a very powerful traffic building system. If you have the right keywords, you can make some serious sales after about a month. So go check  out the sub-modules, learn everything you can, and then get to work writing your articles. Your almost ready to start cashing those checks!

Our next module is Module 8 : Scaling Your Campaigns

August 3, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Article Marketing, Basics, Free Training, Guides, PPC by MatthewDC

Keyword Research is so important that I couldn’t really figure out how to fit it into the modules. In most cases it will be the very first thing you do when starting a campaign or a new site. The problem is, in doing our training, we are starting from scratch and keyword research is much too advanced a topic for a beginning Affiliate Marketer. That being said, I felt like we needed to cover how to properly research keywords to use for naming your sites, article writing and marketing, and link building. Somewhere along the line I will implement a keyword module, but for now, this supplement will have to do.

I have seen countless affiliate marketers take on the subject of keyword research and it seems like every single one of us has our own unique spin on things. One thing everyone has in common however, is where we all start. Everyone you meet that does keyword research, starts with Googles keyword tool. So let’s go ahead and open up the keyword tool and take it for a spin. You should see a box that says enter a keyword or phrase. This is where we are going to type in the general idea of what we want our campaign to be about. Since this site specifically revolves around World of Warcraft, we are going to use that. I personally like selling leveling guides, so I am going to narrow down my search even more.

This is one area where I am going to be somewhat different than other marketers. When I do a keyword search, I already have my specific term that I want, so I am going to uncheck the box to use synonyms. I am going to type in leveling guide and click get keyword ideas. So your screen should look something like this when you are ready to submit.

Once you hit “Get Keyword Ideas”, you will get a series of results. We want to sort this list by clicking on “Global Monthly Search Volume”. This will rank the terms by the number of searches on average each month. By looking at these results we can see the average Cost Per Click (CPC) for the specific term, the search volume, and the competition for each phrase. I am not too overly concerned with the competition meter at this point because it is only showing the PPC competition levels, and we are going to be aiming for organic traffic, or traffic from search rankings.

Basically what we are looking for are keywords with a search volume of anywhere from 300 to about 10,000. This range should hopefully give us some terms that we can rank competitively for without having to do too much link building and article marketing. Once I find a term that I like, I am going to take that term and put it into Google. When I do this, I am going to put quotations “” around the term. This is going to give me a more accurate idea of the competition level for that term. Ultimately when I do this, I want to see 10,000 results or less. There are times however when I would accept a higher number.

For instance, if I see an ezinearticles.com listing, or a squidoo, hubpages, or other article site on the first page, that tells me that the competition is fairly limited. I can build a site of my own and do a couple weeks of article work and more than likely make the first page. I usually keep going through this process until I find anywhere from 10-25 keywords to use for my article marketing campaigns. So let’s recap what we are looking for.

• Global Monthly Search of 300 to 8000
• Search results of Less Than 10,000 with “Quotations”
• EzineArticles or Squidoo listed on the 1st page
• Keywords that seem relevant to our overall site topic

That’s really all there is to it. You will hear all kinds of different theories and practices from various internet marketers, but if your terms meet those criteria, you can probably make the first page of Google. The number of search results will determine how hard it will be and how much work you will need to put in to get that ranking, but even with search results upwards of 30,000, you can still get to the top over time, you just have to be resolved in doing so.

July 25, 2009 in Affiliate Marketing, Basics, Guides, PPC by MatthewDC

Pay Per Click advertising is a very popular method used by many experienced affiliate marketers. While it can be a very successful technique, it can also be overly expensive when not done properly. Today I will try to explain to you the basics of Pay Per Click, but I would highly suggest you try to get more in depth on the topic prior to beginning your first campaign.

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising has been made famous by search companies like Google or Yahoo. It allows you to place your ads on various participating sites, and pay a fee based on the number of times your particular ad is clicked. Google Adwords is the most well known and trusted of the PPC engines in use today. Website owners allow the ads to be placed on their site in exchange for a portion of the fee collected by Google when someone clicks the ad. Google handles all of the processing and money exchanges and you get to place your ad on highly visited sites without having to broker a deal yourself.

What Are Keywords?

Pay Per Click engines like Google Adwords work in several different ways, but the most common is by what we call Keywords. A keyword is a term that is associated with your site, that you would like to use to trigger your ad. For example; you run a World of Warcraft Leveling Guide site, and you know that people will be searching on Google for the phrase “WoW Leveling”. “WoW Leveling” would be considered your keyword. Keywords are the foundation of a PPC campaign and will determine when and where your advertisements will surface. To find out what keywords your competitors are using and lighten your workload, you can use sites like Keyword Spy (my favorite).

Setting Up a Campaign

When creating a PPC advertising campaign, there are several parts to the campaign that you must design. Each step is an intricate process and requires research in order to keep your costs down. The first step is to research keywords and find the terms that you would like to use to trigger your ad. Once you have your terms selected, you can most on to creating the actual advertisement. Google and Yahoo allow for text ads, video ads, and banner ads. The most common type is the simple text ad. You have probably seen these types of ads down the right side of Google when you do a search.

Text Ads require three lines of text and are your chance to sell the product. You need to make the ad enticing and with very limited space. There are entire ebooks on the subject of creating PPC ads and how to write the best copy, we will not go in depth as this is a basic introduction to PPC. However just keep in mind that even professionals are constantly testing multiple ads and everyone at some point or another will write a dud.

Once you have your keywords and ads fleshed out, you simply need to make a bid on the keyword. The bid will determine how you rank within the results for any specific keyword. If 100 people are bidding on the keyword “WoW Leveling”, and you bid less than they do, your ad will not show. The actual algorithm is somewhat more complicated than that, but bid price plays a large factor in how you place on Google.

The Google Quality Score

The other major factor that goes into how your ads rank on Google is the Google Quality Score. Google assigns a score to your landing page based on an unknown series of criteria. The quality of your ad (having the keyword in the title) and the content of your landing page seem to be the most important. The higher your quality score, the less you will pay per click to advertise on Google. Again, whole books have been written on optimizing Google quality score, so we won’t delve any deeper onto the subject.

What to take away

PPC Advertising can be a great way to gain traffic to your sites. However, it is not wise for a new affiliate marketer to rush in head first. If you use the wrong keywords, create horrible ads, or bid too much for your advertising, you can spend a lot of money in a very short period of time. Read up on the subject, look into how to select your keywords and write proper ads, as well as how to increase your Google quality score before you get started. If you do the research, you will be able to use Google Adwords to bolster your affiliate marketing business and make a substantial income doing it. To get more in depth training on Google Adwords, check out Perry Marshall’s Google Adwords Course.