This is what I’d been thinking after reading about the latest Google slap of review sites as what some pay per click marketers are complaining lately in their blogs.

I love promoting affiliate marketing products in pay per click. It is the fastest way of advertising an affiliate product or even a site of your own products. You only need a few hours of your time to research and launch your campaign thru Adwords, Yahoo Search or MSN Adcenter – and depending on cost per click of selected keywords, your ads may land in the first page of the search page in only hours.

What I do not like about PPC campaign promotion is that, with the recent proliferation of keyword ranking spy softwares, it has become easy for any competition to find out about your converting campaigns, duplicate it and drive up the cost per click.

Now, add to that Google slap and some other search engine penalty crap, PPC marketing has become not only very competitive but also frustrating to an internet marketer. Especially to those who are new to the game.

The search engines, we cannot blame them for continually changing their rules or algorithm. They are in the business of providing helpful search results to their customers and so it is only natural for them to keep improving their search capabilities. If they don’t, they will be out of business in no time.

Other affiliate marketers, specially the ones who were able to build up their wealth first, will not stop at anything to drive the competition out of business. They will use their money to create what they believe is the best keyword ranking spy software so they’ll get first hand information on their competition’s campaign. Thus, the proliferation of this kind of computer programs.

So, what then is another way to promote offers online and be on the first page of search even without advertising via PPC for more traffic?

What I did was to go back and brush up on my search optimization skills and get outside help for the promotion of my sites.

I was already becoming very well versed in search engine optimization when I started to get curious about keyword ranking during the early years of my involvement with webmastering. In fact, it was somewhat accidental when I was able to rank our business website to number 1 of a keyphrase that has brought in so much business for us during our entire time of operation, an accident that triggered a more in-depth research on the subject.

Only one thing has put me off in continuing to become very good in search optimization marketing – it is so time consuming.

It’s ok if you are to promote only one site to get to the top of natural search. But, once you get involved with affiliate marketing, you are talking about creating site after site after site of products or niches that you are pitching to the internet buying public.

That’s a VERY HUGE job! I know, because I tried doing it. I tried a short cut way by buying softwares, articles, website templates and PLR products to create my affiliate sites but it didn’t worked.

Not one website created using the ready-made-products method ranked in organic search. Frustrated, I turned my attention to PPC.

But like mentioned above, PPC advertising has flaws and I don’t think it’s smart to just concentrate on it if you wanted to stay in this industry alive.

At least for me, though I still advertise in PPC, I now back up my web campaigns with a touch of search optimization methods that will keep my keyword ranking in the top organic results, of course with a little business outsourcing help.

So, to answer the question at the beginning of this post – keyword ranking in organic search is the best traffic source for me because it is not easy to duplicate even with the proliferation of keyword spying softwares. If you know how, not even the best pay per click marketer (assuming he or she is concentrated only in PPC) can match your keyword ranking in the search engine results.

That means there’s something new to learn again from this already “loaded” mentoring program for the benefit of it’s members.

The PPC Coach mentoring program, like what I mentioned in my earlier review of it, is a very helpful program in pay per click marketing by coach Will and his other partners who are all outstanding PPC marketers themselves.

I have to admit that I learned the right ways of promoting affiliate products in pay per click marketing through them. The most important of which being keyword research, some “super affiliate” techniques and testing or monitoring a campaign utilizing the best tools in PPC marketing.

What I admire most about this coaching program is the openness of knowledgeable members in sharing their wisdom in the affiliate marketing industry. That and the regular enlightening words and methods shared by the coach and others in the forum really make this bunch of marketers a group to reckon with.

I will cite an example of a priceless tip that the coach shared inside the forum – affiliate marketing information that not every “guru” would give away:

This was during the time when another PPC mentoring class (high profiled promotion, offered lots of prizes and giveaways to their affiliates who’ll send costumers their way, promoted by every known marketers who don’t really care if you need the program or not – they just care about the commission and prizes they’ll get) whose main “affiliate superstar” was proclaiming that he only needs to promote 2 or 3 campaigns to create a long term business.

In his post, the coach explained that if you’re just starting, 2 or 3 campaigns will not sustain a long term business because if one of the campaigns fail (which is a big probability), you’ll lose a a big chunk of your income immediately. That is bad for your motivation, isn’t it?

What the coach suggested, and you’ll get to read this post in its entirety in month 1 – is to create at least 10 different campaigns with every single one of which is making at least $100 per day profit. He said that he had experienced doing big numbers in one campaign, made money but got burned afterwards – and it is not the right way to create a real affiliate marketing business.

He said that if an affiliate marketer or blogger was boasting that one or two or three campaigns is good enough for a long term business – he or she is playing with fire and will soon learn that to maintain being a player in this industry, diversification is the key.

He further described how members of the coaching program can go about diversifying by utilizing all the lessons and techniques available in months 1, 2 and 3 in which altogether contain valuable campaigns they can expand on.

You can read the whole post, including all the resulting discussion, in month 1 of the PPC Coach membership program.

Many more pay per click marketing tips and techniques can be found inside the forum which has more than 50k priceless posts already.

Meanwhile, I will have to end this post and find out more about the latest technique in PPC Coach month 1 – probably another tried and tested campaign by the coach himself or of one of his partners.

Yes, I did! On the 11th of May – I made 1 sale of the ebook with only 1 click and 25 cents adwords spend. The impression for those 3 keywords is only 167 resulting in 0.60% click thru rate. Remember, though, that I only used 3 keywords.

What do I think about this result? It’s too early to conclude if this would be a profitable campaign, but by looking at the result, I think I need to take a closer look at this niche. I admit that I don’t know much about dogs – much more about dog training. But if I do decide to ramp it up, I have to do a deeper research on this subject. And find more keywords to use for this affiliate marketing niche.

Am I surprised at this outcome? Not at all.

I’m not surprised because I don’t expect any sales from this study. It could be just a stroke of luck that the person who bought from this campaign is ready to buy and landed on my site at just the right time. Or maybe not. I don’t know yet. I need to see at least 200 clicks on this campaign before I make a decision whether to abandon it or to crank it up. So, for now it’s still in test mode.

Am I sorry now that I used this niche as a case study to show in public? Not at all.

See, even if other affiliate marketer use exactly the same method or keywords or landing page I used for this project, or even if they outdo this study (which I do encourage for others to do) – the only disadvantage will be that the keyword cost per click will go up. No problem. If I can’t afford to match the CPC, then I’ll just find a new keyword to use in the campaign. Or alter altogether the whole promotion, without pausing this case study.

The point of this result is that – even if the niche seemed to look saturated or very competitive, there is always room for making a sale or even lots of sales if the marketer will put in a decent research and focus on the affiliate product. Heck, I didn’t even researched this niche thoroughly, yet I made a sale. What does that mean to you?

Selling affiliate products covers a very, very wide market – that I’m sure. It’s not like the very small market we use to be in when we were still back in our homeland – supplying imported products to a very small (not even 5 thousand) market of buyers.

I’ll keep on slowly building-up my affiliate income (with the help of the affiliate marketing business mentoring I’m subscribed in) until it can replace the income we get from our headache-filled travel business.

Preparing Adwords Campaign For The Project

Creating the campaign in search marketing is not the last step in affiliate marketing with PPC. This is just the beginning of the almost never ending testing and modifying of an affiliate marketers promotion – where the ultimate goal is to produce a highly converting, cheaper costing campaign.

In short, more money in your pocket and less in advertising.

In the short time that I focused my attention to PPC – reading affiliate marketer blogs, testing my campaigns and promotion, following the tutorials in pay per click advertising from PPC coaches, etc. – one thing that I noticed is that, there is no single working formula to be successful in this industry. All, and I will say all of the successful PPC marketers have always different ways of finding his or her own success in this very exciting field.

All of them have developed their own methods, created or outsourced tools and/or other legwork and have even spent large amounts of money in PPC to find that high performing campaign. It always seems to be different from affiliate to affiliate.

But one thing is for sure. If you will involved yourself in this, be prepared to work hard, be patient and persistent until you discover your own method of creating a successful campaign and product promotion. Do not be afraid to fail or to keep testing or even change your work because only through constant monitoring and modification will you be able to reach your goal of making money almost automatically.

With that out of the way – let us now go to the last leg of the campaign I created for this case study. There won’t be much to write anymore because most of the important topics were already posted in part 1, part 2 and part 3.

I will only show 3 keywords – broad, exact and phrase – for the screenshots and the video for now because I didn’t really researched thoroughly the keywords to use because it is very time consuming.

I’m not touching the topic of keyword research here because I admit that I’m not very good at this part yet although I pretty much have successfully chosen undiscovered keywords through repeated research. Like most who have aspiration in this field, I’m still learning like every rookie marketer.

Watch The Quality Score Video By Clicking Here

Google Adwords Keyword Selection (Screenshot 5)

Google Adwords Pricing Set (Screenshot 6)

Screenshots 5 and 6 will show how I set up the Adwords campaign for BitingPuppy.net but I was not able to capture the screen from the beginning and missing were “Target Customers” and “Create Ad” – although the ads I wrote shows at screenshot 5. For this campaign, I targeted only the U.S. and Canada.

That’s about it for this campaign project, and I want to add that though I only showed only 1 keyword, I am going to add more keywords to this campaign using the same landing page and I will use any number of keywords I will discover as long as those keywords will keep Quality Score at acceptable levels. I’ll keep it online, too, until I have used up a budget of $100 and see if it make any sales.

Creating A Landing Page

For this case study, I intend to use just 3 articles relevant to “biting puppy” keyword and its derivative. I will also search some cute puppy pictures to include in the website. I’m not very good in designing websites and not proficient in CSS, so my website will be a sucky one for testing purposes. It will also be created using tables.

The live site can be found by visiting http://www.bitingpuppy.net. Below is a checklist of all important things I consider are necessary before making the site live in a campaign:

1) All links are directed to a TRACKING LINK. This is one of the mistakes I did when I started PPC marketing – not tracking the clicks on my campaigns. I probably wasted a lot of money on my initial campaigns because I’ve been running them for months without any idea of how I can make my offers or keywords convert. I was too lazy to setup or learn an accurate tracking software that all I do is check my stats at Clickbank, CJ, eBay and other affiliate networks stats result. Little did I know that if I wanted to make the most of the money invested in affiliate marketing – tracking your conversion as accurately as you could will not only save you money but would also give you an idea which of your keywords are making the sales.

The best tracking software for this project is the one that is available at PPC Coach tool chest – a PPC training and coaching membership club. There’s quite a bit of learning curve in setting it up but once you get to setup 2 campaigns, the next ones are easier. I have written a review of this PPC coaching program here but I plan to write another review in the future.

Other than that tool, I probably have 3 other statistics tracking script in any website I deploy so I can compare my traffic and conversions. It’s a bit of work but at least I’m not running blind on any of my web properties.

2) The tracking link redirects to the right AFFILIATE OFFER (redirecting offer away from landing page). Now, this is an added advantage if you are using a tracking software with a redirection feature for some reasons:

There’s talk in affiliate marketing circles that some affiliate networks and merchants, are “stealing” an affiliate marketers converting keywords.

I think this happened to me, though I cannot prove it. Plenty of times in my past campaigns and promotions, I got lucky to find the keyword/s that convert. The first 3 days mostly, I was ecstatic to find that the keywords are sending in the sales and I get them cheap because my Quality Score is good.

Afterwards though, clicks and conversions start to decline until it totally disappear. Even the position of my ads went from number 3 position to number 8/9/10 and cost per click (CPC) which were initially low (sometimes I only start at $0.20 and at number 3 position) is priced more than 3 times the original!

I kept wondering why this is happening so I researched what other affiliates have to say about this in forums and blogs and found out that it happened not only to me but to others as well. Most of those affected by it says that some network affiliate managers they talk to admit that “stealing” keywords do happen. Specially if you are direct linking to an offer, where merchants can see in their stats what keywords sent the traffic to them – it’s so easy for them to beat an affiliates’ CPC cost.

After reading about it – I also found out what other affiliates are doing to counter it. Their solution – redirecting the clicks from the landing page to the offer. It’s not 100% foolproof but it’s better than not having safe provisions at all.

I also avoided direct linking to merchants after this incident not only because of suspected keyword theft but also because new Google adwords rules about one domain URL in Google ads per offer. But in all my campaigns thereon, redirecting is always a part of my setup.

3) The articles, meta tags and alt tags for images contain the keywords of my campaign. I maybe over doing this project for just a test setup but if you’ve been online for a while like me, on-page Search Engine Optimization will always be a part of setting up a new website. It’s taking me longer to setup my landing page but I don’t want to lose the habit of making sure that all my sites – test or not – are SEO’d properly. But, that’s just me.

After all three criterions are incorporated in my landing page, creating the campaign in Adwords or in any search marketing platform is the next step – which is what the next post will be…..

(Go to Part 4 of Dog Training Project Study)

Selecting The Keyword

Moving forward, I will now choose a keyword (or keywords) that I’ll use in my Adwords campaign to promote this dog training product. Since I will be promoting Kingdom Of Pets dog training product, I will take advantage of the merchants affiliate resources and will use their keyword suggestion tool to research the market.

This is not normally what I do to research a keyword/s to target my campaigns. Most usually, I use various keyword tools for my keyword/s research (I’m sure you already have a favorite keyword tool for research). But like I said, Kingdom Of Pets have a very good affiliate resources and have done most of the work and all an affiliate has to do is concentrate on marketing their product/s.

So, from Kingdom Of Pets keywords – I chose “dog training behavior problems” (screenshot 1) and plugged that in Google keyword tool, I looked at the result and liked the keyword “biting puppy” (screenshot 2) because I saw that there is not too many competition for this keyword and it has a decent amount of search result on average plus the approximate CPC is only CAD$0.56

Kingdom Of Pets Keywords (Screenshot 1)
Google Keywords Tool Result (Screenshot 2)

Inputting a CPC of CAD$0.50 and CAD$20 per day spend, the estimated click per day is from 14 – 18 (screenshot 4). Not bad for a test campaign. From there, I’m now going to prepare my landing page.

Google Search Result (Screenshot 3)
Google Traffic Estimator Result (Screenshot 4)

Before I go ahead to start brainstorming about the landing page to use here, I wanted first to discuss a bit about a method I learned from other affiliate marketers about getting a good Quality Score in Adwords. Google’s quality score is about relevancy of your website or landing page with the keyword/s you are going to use in your campaign. That for me means, if your website URL, website contents and campaign keywords are relevant to each other – you will not have a problem getting a good (or even a perfect) Quality Score.That being said, I registered the domain name BitingPuppy.net because the .com TLD is already taken. I am very particular with scoring high in Adword’s QS that’s why I make sure that my domain URL contains the keywords in my campaign and product promotion.

You may also use a domain name you already own and just add a folder name or a sub-domain containing your campaign keywords like this: YOURDOMAINNAME.com/bitingpuppy/ or bitingpuppy.YOURDOMAINNAME.com but by so doing, it would not be possible to garner a very high quality score which I am so obsessed in always getting.

If you have a domain name on a niche you are promoting and wanted to test the product first, I’d suggest to just use a folder or domain name in your campaign. That’ll do the job, too.

(Go to Part 3 of Dog Training Project Study)

So now, for this post, I will document how I prepared the dog training product promotion and how I set this up in an Adwords campaign with emphasis on obtaining a good quality score to bring down PPC costs and drive a good amount of traffic by selecting a highly searched keyword.

This post will probably be divided into parts because I plan to cover a full scale affiliate marketing case study. So, without further talk, let’s get on with it.

Disclaimer: In no way am I claiming that this project study will make me or you any money – should you decide to use it as a blueprint. The contents of this study is only to show you how I approach and implement my affiliate marketing techniques when I promote a product in a PPC campaign. As in any kind of business and money making endeavors, there is always risks and your success depends on several factors that I don’t have access to because I don’t personally know you. All datas and information presented here are accurate as of this writing. It is possible also that there are some innaccuracies that I missed while I did this project. Also, I don’t have control over any changes in data and information from entities I featured here so it falls into you to verify and do your own research before following the procedure here. This case study is for educational and informational purpose only and does not in any way intended to be treated as an advice.

With that legality out of the way, let us now proceed and go ahead with my case study.

Selecting A Niche

I will not go over how I selected the niche that’ll be featured here because there’s probably a gazillion information about how you can select a good niche online. But if in case you need some guidance in niche selection, a teleconference transcript on selecting a niche from The Black Ink Project can be listened to and viewed here.

For this project, I have pre-selected a dog training product from Clickbank and is being offered by Kingdom Of Pets. Although I’ve never promoted any of Kingdom Of Pets product/s before, I like their affiliate program specifically because of the amount of marketing paraphernalia, creatives and promotional materials that is available in their affiliate site for use by their affiliates. You can rarely find this kind of support coming from merchants and this kind of support is very important because it will benefit specially a new affiliate marketer by learning different methods of promoting a product.

To see what I mean, just go to Kingdom Of Pets Affiliate Site – sign up and at the same time subscribe to their newsletter to receive affiliate marketing tips.

So, the affiliate URL to promote Secrets To Dog Training is http://YOURCLICKBANKID.sitstay.hop.clickbank.net/

If you want to monitor where your clicks or sales are coming from, you may use a tracking ID with your affiliate link, like this: http://YOURCLICKBANKID.sitstay.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=YOURTRACKINGCODE. This will help you know where your clicks are coming from.

(Go to Part 2 of Dog Training Project Study)

This is one of the case study test sites that I am talking about in a post I did on 12Aug2008 where I used Gauher Chaudhry’s system of a landing page.

I wrote in that post that I would be creating a project on dog training but our offline family business and other pre-occupations kept getting along the way which have kept me from pursuing my original intention. I sincerely apologize for that.

Going back to the project, Gauher’s theory seems working because each of the 166 keywords (166 only! Pathetic!) was rated as either Good or Great by Adwords Quality Score. And to think that I was only using 1 landing page for all those keywords. But I intend to keep adding more keywords so that I can test this landing pages’ maximum potential.

Keyword research is something that I should keep improving on and I admit that this is the part where I keep dilly dallying. I am extra careful in using the keywords to use during the initial deployment of my test sites because I don’t want to be penalized with my Quality Score. Even in the landing page, I made sure that every keyword in my campaign can be found by the Google bot in case it comes to visit my site.

Damn, it’s finally paying off! I love this game! Of the original four niches that I tested so far, only this one can be judged as a winner for now. I hope to improve searching for niches better.

I didn’t make thousands of dollars in this study, in fact not even a hundred dollars. But for a single website to make almost $55 in a month surely beats the income of my mostly Adsense only sites. That for me is an improvement by itself. Now, I have to find offers to promote for all my Adsense sites and send traffic to them via Adwords, outside of organic traffic. Who knows, I might be able to re-create the past profits I enjoyed before Google clamped down on Adsense earnings.

Below are screenshots of my Adwords expenses for this particular niche and the other screenshot is from the affiliate network of the offer I am promoting.

I have to do better next time.

Click Here To Enlarge

Click Here To Enlarge

With Chrome, it’s back to what it was before where the keyword search results can be viewed as a whole page. It is more easier to read the results this way than with a scrollable frame. Now, depending on how you save your keyword research, the whole page result is a much, much better alternative as well.

I use to save the whole screen as a jpg, print it out and review everything offline. That way, I can have a clearer view of what keyword or keyphrase to target in my next campaign or content site.

Try it.

Google Keyword Tool in Chrome

Google Keyword Tool in Firefox

Google Keyword Tool in Internet Explorer