Don’t Use Pay Per Click for Affiliate Marketing…yet
Posted on March 10, 2010 by Amit
PPC is great, done right it can multiply your earnings.
But, if you are a new affiliate marketer, PPC comes at the very last of the equation and not at the first. That’s why the title of my post, don’t use ppc…. yet.
So why not, why should’t a new affiliate marketer use PPC right away?
Couple of reasons, but ask this question to yourself – Is there anything left in your site if you take PPC out of the equation. If your is any of these … no, may be, a little or no my site is still brand new, it means you haven’t built a foundation yet. And you aren’t ready for PPC yet.
Now let’s look at some of the whys of “No PPC yet” a little more closely.
1. Traffic Stops when your PPC Campaign stops, will your site survive
The moment you stop your ppc campaign, your traffic stops dead on its track, earnings vanish. As if your website doesn’t exist anymore. If that’s what may happen to your site, its not the right time yet to start ppc. PPC shouldn’t and mustn’t account for 100% of your traffic.
2. PPC makes you lose sight of your website, your website becomes transparent
A ppc centric plan makes you lose sight of your website. You start thinking in terms of Landing Pages, Quality scores, Click Through Rates and Cost per Click. All of these are essential in search marketing but are useless when your campaign stops.
If your only marketing plan is PPC, you forget about your main site and put a lot of emphasis on your landing pages. As a result your main site becomes transparent. Your Landing Pages exists there to deliver traffic from the search engines to the vendors.
3. Monetizing a website with PPC from the start is a top down approach
You need a bottom up plan. You need a foundation to build on. Ask yourself this. If you were to stop your ppc campaign, will someone come to your site. If the answer is no, its because you haven’t built a foundation yet.
So How Should it Be. What should you do
Build Your Site First. Make it thick, make it sticky. I wrote a post about how to build a thick affiliate site.
To survive the long run, forget the vendor, think about your site. Think of your site as a destination for your users, as a solution provider.
Build all the value you can first for your users to come back to your site. Make your site easily navigable, seo friendly. Build a community for your users, add a blog.
Track everything, use an analytics software. Know your visitors, your best keywords.
Once you have a site that is built with a bottom up approach, you will have gathered valuable information about what sells, what doesn’t, who buys them, who are your better vendors, what keywords work.
This’s When You Start PPC Campaigns
With this knowledge, start your PPC campaigns. Not only will your ppc campaigns will be profitable sooner, you will also have a good quality score (for Google Adwords).
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