Why A Lot Of Partner Marketing Activities Fall And How To Avoid The Same Pitfalls: Part Four
Written by Paul Rawnsley Tuesday, 15 February 2011 14:52
Heretofore we have analysed how the SEO for our affiliate marketing site starts as the keywords are chosen and inserted in the HTML of the pages, we have investigated how we can employ social networking to build links to our site and how we can create articles which will contain links to the website together with keywords associated to what the shop does, and how we can publish 1000's of unique copies of the items around the net for the search engines to find and build the quantity of links back to our site.
This is fine, working SEO. The search engines will build the relevance of the shop against the rival sites and gradually, our affiliate marketing shop will scramble its way up the results positions in response to customers searching on our keywords. The challenge here, is that is takes time. It's not a speedy process and here is a sticking point, since during the period we are climbing the results, we are paying money to our service providers and if you are shelling out for article distribution access, that too. What we need to do is discover a shortcut that fires us to the eyes of the users in the meantime.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will achieve this for us. As the wording suggests, it does cost. It is advertising, what do you expect? But it can be strictly managed so that it does not get out of hand. We must also remember that users (like me for certain, how about you?) would rather to select links in the 'organic' results on the page which is what most SEO is trying to achieve, paid for adverts, but that does not mean it is not worth doing because people will click on them, go to your affiliate marketing shop and hopefully spend money which earns you income. So, how to manage this?
You could find a specialist, but my worry is that since they charge you a fee for every click, the cynical individual in me wonders if they don't get others to click the links. The straightforward solution is, like the rest of your search engine optimisation, to work it yourself and use something like Google Adwords. You are going to want a Google id anyhow for the tools described in Part Five, so if you have not already, go and join now via Adwords. What you want to do is to open a fresh campaign for your affiliate marketing shop and you will be guided through.
Pick your target territory (go with "All" if you have affiliate marketing partners in other nations and choose the languages that may be relevant), keep the defaults for the rest and enter how much you want to spend as a maximum per day. Ignore the rest and then click "save and continue".
On the subsequent page, give the Ad Group a title and then write in the advert text in the boxes below. CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR! Now the really crucial sections. Open a new tab or window in your browser, go to your affiliate marketing site and then anywhere in the page, right click and select 'view source' from the list which will open another window with contains the HTML code for your shop. At the top, look for the meta name="keywords" part and copy the keywords shown between the quotes. Go back to Adwords and paste these into the keywords box for the campaign, which orders Google to display the advert when people search on those words. It also obviously compliments our SEO program, and as people pick them, again the affiliate marketing rating score goes up.
The following requirement is to bid on the keywords. Remembering your daily maximum, you want to chose how much you are willing to pay each time somebody clicks on your ad to go to your affiliate marketing shop. For now, just enter your default bid. If you are really eager to be on the front page each time, put in a high sum but do remember that many will visit your website which will cost, but not buy. You will not pay that much each time, you will pay the next amount up following 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.
That's it, when you save it, the ad will be checked by Google and if there's anything wrong you will get an email. But by monitoring the Campaigns tab at the top of the screen, you can see how your ad is doing, how many times it's been displayed and how many times followed. All good stuff, but check out the Adwords tool and get familiar with it, learn the FAQs and the rules and understand better utilise it to enhance your affiliate marketing website and improve your search engine optimisation program.
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