The Reason Most Affiliate Marketing Enterprises Fall And How To Avoid The Same Pitfalls: Part 4

Until now we have investigated how the search engine optimisation for our affiliate marketing website starts as the keywords are picked and included in the hypertext of the pages, we have analysed how we can employ social networking to publish links to our shop and how we can write articles which will contain links to the site together with keywords allied to what the website does, and how we can publish hundreds of individual copies of the items around the internet for the search engines to read and build the quantity of links back to our shop.

This is fine, working search engine optimisation. The search engines will build the ranking of the shop against the rival sites and painstakingly, our affiliate marketing site will climb its way up the results positions in response to shoppers searching on our keywords. The difficulty here, is that is takes months. It is not a speedy operation and here is a sticking point, as during the period we are climbing the results, we are paying currency to our service providers and if you are shelling out for article distribution access, that too. What we have to do is find a shortcut that gets us to the sight of the shoppers in the meantime.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will manage this for us. As the title hints, it does cost. It’s advertising, what do you expect? But it can be strictly managed so that it does not get out of hand. We must also bear in mind that folks (like me for certain, how about you?) prefer to click links in the ‘organic’ results on the page which is what most search engine optimisation is put our site, as opposed to paid for ads, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile doing since some will select them, visit your affiliate marketing website and hopefully spend money which generates you cash. So, how to manage this?

You can find a specialist, but my fear is that because they charge you a commission for every click, the twisted person in me wonders if they don’t get folks to click the links. The easiest solution is, like the rest of your search engine optimisation, to work it yourself and use something like Google Adwords. You are going to require a Google id anyhow for the tools described in Part Five, so if you haven’t already, go and enrol now through Adwords. What you need to do is to open a new campaign for your affiliate marketing shop and you will be helped through.

Pick your target territory (go for “All” if you have affiliate marketing partners in other nations and select the languages that may be relevant), keep the defaults for the other options and decide how much you are prepared to spend as a maximum per day. Miss everything else and then click “save and continue”.

On the following page, give the Ad Group a name and then write in the advert text in the boxes below. CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR! Now the really important part. Open a new tab or window in your browser, go to your affiliate marketing shop and then anywhere in the page, right click and pick ‘view source’ from the list which will open another window with prints the HTML code for your shop. At the top, find the meta name=”keywords” text and copy the keywords shown between the quotes. Go back to Adwords and paste these into the keywords box for the campaign, which tells Google to exhibit the advert when users search on those words. It also obviously compliments our SEO programme, and as users follow them, again the affiliate marketing ranking score rises.

The next job is to bid on the keywords. Bearing in mind your daily budget, you want to chose how much you are prepared to pay every time somebody clicks on your ad to go to your affiliate marketing website. For now, just fill in your default bid. If you are really intent to be on the first page every time, enter in a high number but do remember that plenty will visit your website which will cost, but not stay. You won’t pay that much every time, you will pay the next amount up compared to the next highest bid, so if you bid 1.00 and the next best is 25p, you will most likely pay 30p. For now, be cautious because the Adwords monitoring tool will be able to help later.

Now, when you save it, the ad will be reviewed by Google and if there is an issue you will get an email. But by selecting the Campaigns tab at the top of the screen, you can check how your ad is getting along, how many times it’s been displayed and how many times clicked. All handy stuff, but learn the Adwords tool and get familiar with it, learn the FAQs and the rules and find out better exploit it to advertise your affiliate marketing shop and further your SEO programme.

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