It’s a while since I’ve done an “Ask Kirsty” as a lot of questions I’ve been getting have been re-covering old ground. However, I had an interesting query a few days ago from Lee who has just found his first profitable niche which he has created through SEO. Here’s his question: -

Hi Kirsty!

I’ve been reading your blog for some time. You’re doing a great job. I
had a question or two, which I hope you will answer.
I’m new to Internet Marketing. I’ve only been at this for a few
months. After several attempts, which failed, I have finally found a niche and
created a website that is profitable. I modeled it on your perfume website you
created with a WordPress blog.

I’m selling a high-end Amazon product, and since December 1, I’ve made
$120. That’s not much to you, I’m sure, but to me it’s a big victory.

Here’s my dilemma. I’ve done no paid advertising for my website, only
ezine articles and web 2.0 type sites. (Digg, for instance.) I’ve still got
some article and social bookmarking type marketing to do on this site, but once
I’ve completed that round of marketing, so to speak, I’m not sure what
direction to take.

Right now, with the visitor value I have, I’m not sure that PPC
advertising (sending them to my site, not Amazon) would make me any money.

On the other hand, now that I’ve got all the details figured out about my
niche site, I could make about twenty more of these in short order.
I would appreciate any advice, direction, thoughts, etc. you might have
about this.

Thanks so much!
Lee

Hi Lee,

Well, first off… congratulations in finding your first profitable affiliate niche. I’m very glad I was able to play a small part in your success. $120 is a good effort in that time frame, you are most definately to be congratulated!

Transferring SEO success to PPC can be a bit of a thorny issue. The key is whether or not you can push traffic through your landing page at a CPC that will give you a decent profit margin. You haven’t mentioned which sector you are in or what your conversion rates are like… so I’ll just give you a general guide. So here it is! Sit back, relax and prepare yourself for my SEO to PPC success step by step guide!!

1 ) Identify What Search Terms People Have Been Using To Find Your Site
A good first port of call in working out how a PPC campaign might work for you is to find out what search terms people have been using when they arrived on your site. Most web hosts provide this service these days either free or for a small fee. If your host does not do this, then another option given you are using a blog based site would be to sign up for My Blog Log and use their paid stats package (I think it’s $25 per year). It’s quite easy to use, I’ve got it for a couple of my sites and I find it adequate to give basic referrer information. However, more comprehensive packages can give really useful information about how visitors behave on your site (but that’s one for another tutorial!!).

Once you have found your search terms I’d then use these to create a more comprehensive keyword list using a tool such as Google Adword’s Keyword Suggestion Tool, there’s a great keyword video tutorial I posted about the other day that’ll show you exactly how that works and which also has some handy tips on analysis for PPC.

Remember, your current sales are only based on what you have been able to rank for so far. By increasing your site visibility using targeted PPC you might just be able to significantly increase your $120 profit.

2 ) What Is Your Current Site Conversion Rate?
Take a look at your current site conversion rate as this will give you an idea as to how well your PPC traffic might convert. The only proviso I would place on this is that a low conversion rate might not necessarily mean PPC will not work for you. As I mentioned above… your conversion rate will be based only on the terms you are ranking for. If you discover these are not entirely relevant to the product you’ve been pushing then you could seen a higher conversion rate using highly relevant PPC traffic. Similarly, if you have good conversion rates then you will know the kind of search terms you are ranking for are highly relevant and that you can base your PPC spend on current conversion rates with a reasonable amount of confidence.

For the benefit of those of you who don’t know how to calculate a site’s conversion to sale, here’s a handy dandy wee formula: -

Number of Sales / Number Site visitors x 100 = Conversion Rate (so if you had 8 sales and 150 visitors your conversion rate would be 5.33%)

A couple of tips: – When following step one you may discover there is a completely irrelevant term generating traffic. If this is the case, you could subtract the traffic the term has generated to get a more accurate idea of your PPC conversion rate.

Also, do not base your conversion rate on the traffic that got through to your merchant. Base it upon the traffic that went to your site in the first place. This will factor in traffic leakage (i.e. those who came to your site and left without visiting your merchant) to your analysis of how you might run a PPC campaign profitably.

3 ) How To Work Out How Much To Pay Per Click?
Right. The next stage is to work out how much to pay per click based on the data you have about conversions plus data you will also have regarding the EPC (Earnings Per Click) of your current site. Basically, you need to work out the EPC you have been achieving on your SEO campaign. To do this, use the following handy dandy formula: -

Total Commission \ Total Clicks = EPC So, if your site got 500 clicks and this turned into £100 commission your site EPC would be 20p

Working out what you want to / need to pay per click will then depend on the competitiveness of your niche. Simply set up a PPC campaign and make your max CPC what your computations using the above methods suggest will work for your profit margins. As a newbie I’d suggest you don’t follow all the advice of these chaps who tell you to “bid high” first then reduce your CPC’s to maximise your positions. Yeah, this does work but your cash is precious at this time and that kind of advice is easy to give out when you know what you are doing and don’t mind the odd loss. That kind of advice could potentially wipe out newly found profit if used by the uninitiated! You can always up your bids a bit once your confidence in the campaign has grown.

4 ) Will Google Adwords Think Your Landing Page Has Sufficient Quality?

Ooohhh, and this is the stinger! I won’t attempt to answer this one here (my fingers would drop off with all the typing). Instead, I shall direct you to a guide that Kieron of UKOffer wrote: – How To Build A Page That Won’t Get Banned – With Examples

If all that sounds like too much work, try Yahoo or MSN…. they have improved a lot and I know Yahoo gives away a free £50 voucher to new account signups (not sure about offers currently available elsewhere).

5 ) Recording Which Terms Are Converting For Your PPC Campaign

Make sure that you have a method in place for recording which of your PPC search terms are converting to sales. That way, you can weed out the non performers and concentrate your efforts around money-bearing search term areas. It’s important you have some form of tracking in place before you switch on a campaign.

Finally, don’t forget to set your daily budget with your PPC provider. I was recently saved from a very costly incident by my daily budget on my Adwords account. I ONLY lost £230 instead of several thousand after a broadmatching incident I hadn’t anticipated. You have been warned!!

Good luck!!

P.S. If you haven’t already done so, give my Adwords For Beginners Tutorial a read through.

*edit* Just had a very, very pertinent point made in the comments, so I’m replicating it at the bottom of the post for all you chaps who don’t read comments on blogs.

1. Joe Connor Says:
January 11th, 2008 at 3:45 pm e

Good stuff Kirsty,
It’s also worth mentioning that it takes time to develop a profitable and efficient adwords campaign why is why many people give up thinking they can’t make a profit.
When I start a new campaign I accept that I’m going to be paying to learn on the job and it can take literally years to weed out all the dross with negative matching and Google is very adept at sliding around the edges of negative matches – there’s no negative broad matching option.
Go easy out there in PPC land.

Well, it’s time to get back to work folks… and what better way to start your new year than by getting organised with your keyword strategy?

A nice chap called Ian Fernando dropped me a wee line recently to see if I might be interested in taking a look at a tool he had created to help work out which keywords are converting within your PPC campaigns. He’s created this tool with newbies in mind, but I reckon a lot of people would find his excel-based solution useful.

Whilst I was fiddling around on his site I found another great video tutorial in which he explains how he uses Google’s Keyword Research Tool to identify potential keywords and then uses excel to analyse them to work out which search terms are likely to deliver traffic at a reasonable CPC.

They say you learn something new every day… and I must say I liked how he was using the Google data. I’m a bit more of a seat of the pants gal myself (but then you sort of get a “feel” for keywords after a few years!). I think this tutorial is an excellent look at how to get your keyword strategy organised.

Once you’ve gotten your keywords into a nice PPC campaign, you’ll be needing to analyse them to see how your precious PPC spend has fared. Ian has come up trumps again with this great video tutorial on how to work out which keywords are bringing in the bling: -

Even better, Ian has uploaded his great spreadsheet to Google Docs so that you can log on in there, have a good old fiddle about with it and chat with other users (possibly the man himself as well) about how to use it.

Well, here I am sat sitting here in my affiliate jimmy jams contemplating yet another year that has simply flown past. Kieron , Ray and Nadeem (in Two Parts) have already published fine overviews of their year. I could reflect in the same organised way they have… but to be honest 2007 was an absolute blur and much of it involved me visiting some of the most exciting places in the world.

So I can encapsulate my year thus. I ran my affiliate business at the same time as travelling the world. During my 2007 tax year I achieved a 400% increase in turnover working 3 days a week and visited Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand for a total of 10 and-a-half glorious months before heading home on a 6 week jolly via Fiji, Hawaii, San Francisco, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon, and finally New York.

My highlights from the trip would have to be: –
Railey Beach in Thailand, a spookily beautiful place with towering limestone cliffs surrounding it. I also met up with an old friend from uni there and we spent a quality week with him. It was just like when we were young and irresponsible again!

Wai U Tapu Thermal Park – Rotorua NZ – I’ve always been fascinated by volcanoes and their wily ways. I felt just like David Attenborough!

Spending my 30th birthday drinking Bollinger in a spa bath looking out over a tropical rain forest in Australia… Nuff said

Seeing a piece of art with a hefty price tag that absolutely took my breath away in Katherine, Australia and being able to say “What the hell, I’m having that!” without thinking of it. Actually, I wish I’d taken a picture of the gallery owners face when two scabby looking young backpacker types wandered in and spent $4,300 without blinking. Now THAT was a work of art folks!

Sailing around the islands of Fiji on a beautiful old boat, visiting all the famous film locations where they filmed movies such as “Castaway” and “Blue Lagoon”, sipping Fijian beer and generally making remarks such as “wow” and “this is the life, isn’t it?”

That’s me in the green dress!

Driving out to the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon when we were visiting Vegas. Truly amazing places I never thought in a million years that a wee lassie fae Colmonell in Ayrshire would ever get to visit!

Is this a God Dam?

Visting the Empire State Building in New York… and also getting to be very rude to New Yorkers. Those people really know how to let you know their feelings on any issue (which generally seems to be that you’re an idiot and must do things their way). However, they forget they learnt it all from their Scottish / Irish roots so I had a great time abusing everyone right back… from casual street hustlers to tour guides, bellhops, taxi drivers, and finally innocent passers by, everyone in New York caught it in the neck from a short, irate Scottish girl. I think they secretly enjoyed it

I’ve no idea how Duncan managed to take this picture… there were about 2,000 other people in that foyer!

Finally, the best bit of this year has been getting home and doing 3 months solid work at the job I truly love. I have had so many ideas when we have been away and so little time to develop them. It’s a real pleasure to now be able to work on them and really strengthen my revenue streams. I already know what I’m doing in 2008… I hope y’all have made your plans to make the best of what is likely to be a challenging year for the industry.

Bring it on I say. My resolution? To be innovative, keep ahead of the game, and to represent the affiliate industry as a good example of professionalism and ethics. I hope we can all do the same this year.

Thanks to everyone who’s subscribed and read my blog this year. It’s always a real pleasure talking to you all!

Happy New Year!!!

Oh, I’ve also realised I’m getting married this year. AARRGGGHHH!!!!!!!