I had a really detail e-mail from Iry the other day asking loads of questions about how to best maximise the adrank on his fledgling campaign. Here’s his question (s). I’m going to answer them within his text, there’s a fair few and answering afterwards would be too confusing!

Hi Kirsty,

1. We always say that we need bid high first to earn the quality score, it
doesn’t matter if we loss up front.

Now, I know a lot of people say this and I do tend to bid a little higher up front to boost the ad on initially. However, I rarely make a loss at this, merely a reduced profit. This kind of thing is personal in my opinion. Do what feels right for you. Perhaps practise this technique on a very small set of keywords and compare to another campaign where you haven’t bid as high?

a. Let say they are 7 – 9 advertisers for a keyword, do we need to bid until
the 1st place? Or we can bid about the 3rd-4th place?

You certainly don’t “have” to bid until you are in first place. Your position in the listings will depend on a combination of Adrank and what actually turns out to be affordable in order to make your campaign profitable. If merchants are in those top positions (or even worse, a PPC agency with a massive budget) it can be impossible to bid enough to get those positions affordably regardless of Adrank. Basically, your aim is to rank as highly as possible, as cheaply as possible, and still turn a good profit!

b. How many clicks that we are looking at before we reduce our bid?
i. E.g. $50/day budget per campaign
ii. Are the clicks referring to per campaign / per ad group / per keyword

How long is a bit of string? I can’t really quantify it. I usually adopt a bit of a “finger in the air attitude” to this (yes, scientific I know!) I monitor the CTR. This will usually gradually increase. Once I feel it has peaked I leave it running for another few days. You should monitor your adrank / CTR at the adgroup level. The rest will take care of itself! That said, as your entire Google Adwords account gets older it will acquire an adrank all of its own. This will assist your performance as time goes on.

c. When we reduce our bid, do we reduce the bid dramatically or gently? Do you
reduce the bid manually (means per keyword)?
I tend to reduce my bids gently on a daily basis if I think competition is strong. This lets me guage the point at which I can’t reduce further without affecting performance. You can also reduce dramatically, but there may be some Yo-Yoing as you try to find the right bid level to run a campaign effectively.

d. Another question is, what are the CTR that we are looking at to obtain a
good quality score? I know we should strike for the best but is 2 – 3% rate
acceptable?
2 - 3% is a reasonable CTR IMHO. However, do not get hung up on CTR as a measure of success. If you have an adgroup you’ve optimised the hell out of with a low CTR that makes you money, it’s a success. Money in the bank is the name of the game after all, and the odd adgroup with low CTR will not relegate your account to Google Adwords purgatory!

e. If the commission of a product is about $15, should we bid until $1.0 to get
the high position? ( assuming the conversion rate is 1%)
Not unless you have very deep pockets and enjoy losing a lot of money! Perhaps a better way to do it (particularly for a beginner) would be to work out how much you need to pay for a click to give your desired profit based on your estimated commissions and converstion rates. Say for example you paid $0.10 per click. This would mean that you would pay $10.00 for one conversion leaving you with $5 profit. Bidding $1.00 a click for this product would undoubtedly leave you in top position, but the kind of loss you might incurr with this strategy might take an excessive amount of time to recoup.

As a beginner, perhaps it would be better to follow a strategy not including any planned losses till you really, really have a feel for how Adwords will behave with your bid amounts?

2. Let say if there is a scenario when I look at the data

I would like to know does the Average Position actually include the previous
data before 1:00 a.m. as well.. If it does include, does it means that the
current position of my Ads are probably at 6 – 8 position because the
system has factor in the average position when my Ads were in 2.3?

You’d be best to manually check the search results to see where your ads are really sitting! Quite often an average position report isn’t entirely accurate. Sometimes it can be skewed by terms you may be showing for on broad match etc. A visual check would be best.

Kirsty .. Sorry, I know that’s lots of questions and I really hope that you
can help me on some of these questions which have been bugging me quite a
while.

I actually really like your life style and I hope one day I can travel like you
as well!

Good luck Iry, it’s a great old life… but it needs a lot of hard work to achieve. Seems from your detailed question you’re certainly working hard at it, so I’ll see you in the Caribbean for cocktails in a couple of years!

I’d an interesting question come in from Rick that represents a bit of an extension to the information about selecting keywords in my Google Adwords For Beginners article.

I’m just starting and so far have 3-4 campaigns under my belt with $0
income so far. Just Search PPC to understand the process but what I’ve noticed
is that early on I bought keywords that were short and only used 100 or so but
then I heard that some people are utilizing up to the max of 40,000 keywords.

PS There’s so much to read and yours and Amit’s sites are pretty much my guides
everyday. Thanks for sharing and I hope to do the same once I start to make more
then $0/day

Hi Rick, and thanks for the compliments about my dear old blog. It’s really nice to feel appreciated!

Your current confusion is one of the unfortunate side effects of learning all about affiliate marketing online. There’s so much information knocking around (much of it conflicting) that its all too easy to get confused and wonder if what you are doing is actually right. Before we go any further, I think it’s important to say that you should always try and treat what you read as subjectively as possible. Much of the information you read can’t be applied generally. It may only pertain to one sector or even one individual.

I tend to take a bit of an “slow build” approach to the number of keywords in a campaign. First of all I look at very, very tightly targeted search terms and spend a lot of time winkling out as many of these low volume keywords as possible.

I then apply them to the campaign and let it run for a week or two. Once my trial period is over, I look at epc’s (earnings per hundred clicks). First of all I look at the overall EPC for the entire campaign. If it’s really healthy overall then I will broaden the reach of my search terms to attempt to get a higher volume of sales at a reduced EPC whilst still turning a profit.

If the EPC is not healthy I’ll do a detailed analysis to see if there are any keywords within the campaign that were doing particularly well. I will then switch off anything that’s just not performing and seek to expand upon the areas (if any) that are bringing in good levels of profit.

So in short, it’s quality as opposed to quantity of search terms that make for a successful campaign. If you blanket your campaign with every search term you can think of, you’re likely to spend a whole lot of money and possibly be looking at a negative number for your profitability.

Good luck with your first profitable campaign… it can take a few tries to get it right so keep in there and you will eventually find your feet!

Wayne dropped me a wee line after my last Ask Kirsty post asking for a bit of general clarification on a remark I made about link building.

Hi Kirsty,
I’ve read a lot of affiliate blogs and websites trying to learn as
much as I can and yours is the first I have come across that is based in the UK
(as I am). I will read reagularly from now on.

Wayne

Hey Wayne,

The thing about link building is that the amount of work and time required to build adequate links is connected to the competitiveness of the sector you are attempting to break into. Because the site I was referring to was within an extremely targeted niche with low numbers of competitors, I only needed a very low number of incoming links to rank well for my target search terms. The URL for my niche site is also keyword rich, which can assist with achieving good rankings relatively quickly.

For more information on “niche marketing” see this thread about achieving a number one ranking on Google in 36 hours, and check out Stu Fosters Niche marketing blog. Andy Beard also has shedloads of niche wisdom on his blog!

But back to the link building!

For the reasons I’ve outlined above, alas there is no magic formula to effectively building relevant links within a short time. However, you can make sure your link building efforts are more productive by making sure they are strongly relevant to the content of your web site. I firmly believe that these days quality of links is far more important than quantity (although you do have to strike a fine balance between both!).

So How Do Links Help Your Site To Rank?

Back in the good old days of search engine yore, to rank well in the search engines you merely had to get thousands of incoming links to your site and you were well into the search engine gold! Alas, those days are gone… these days link popularity is a different beast.

Link popularity is one of the many things search engines look at when deciding which sites are most relevant to search engine queries. At a very, very, basic level, a search engine will analyse the relevance of sites linking to yours. If you have a site about Blue Widgets and have carefully made sure that other sites in the blue widgets sector are linking to you, then your site will be seen as relevant. Personally speaking, I also try to get links from sites in broader, but related sectors also.

So What’s The Quickest Way To Effectively Locate Potential Link Partners?

I find the best way to perform link research quickly as part of my initial marketing activity is to locate other related sites that are actively seeking link partners.

To do this, I first make sure I have created a comprehensive list of target search terms (more on keywords in another thrilling installment of “Ask Kirsty”. I then methodically work my way through these search terms by entering them into a search engine and appending them with terms such as: -

Add URL
Exchange Links
Submit Links
Link Submission
Link Exchange

i.e. Blue Widget Link Exchange, Submit Blue Widget Links… etc

This exercise can also be repeated for broader, related subject areas.

There is far, far more to building links than this… but I feel this is an excellent first step. One proviso, it’s important to vary your link anchor text and make sure you don’t build too many links too quickly. Similar anchor text and rapid increase in incoming links can trigger an adverse reaction from Google who is always on the lookout for scurrilous search engine behaviour!

I hope this helps… I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you how to effectively build links in 2 hours. But if I’d worked that one out I’m afraid I wouldn’t be sharing!

One of my lovely blog readers, Joe, has dropped me a wee line asking what the best strategy was in terms of his future affiliate site and content. Here are his questions!

Hi Kirsty,

Joe

Hello Joe!

Very good questions.

1. A year ago I’d have told you to go with the niche sites and not to get bogged down in the creation of a mega site. However, the affiliate world is shifting once more, and many affiliates are starting to swing back towards larger sites once more. These do tend to be in niche areas these days though as opposed to catch all shopping directory type arrangements.

Personally, I’m taking both the approaches you mention. I still create niche sites, because I can usually put one together very quickly and they are still making money. However, with content increasingly important I’m starting to create larger sites once more in order to give myself a good opportunity to create some really convincing content in larger niches.

In your case I would start off with one or two niche sites whilst you learn your affiliate craft. This will allow you to put all the vast swathes of information you’ve no doubt been reading into practise without it taking too long. If it takes you 6 months to develop a site within a niche only to find it’s not working out too well, I suspect you’d get disheartened and quit. I certainly wouldn’t blame you! If you really work at getting a couple of small sites to the top it will demonstrate that you personally can succeed. Then you can start the hard yards of a bigger site secure in the knowledge you are applying your own winning formula.

2. Contextual linking is definately the key to success in affiliate marketing. The more you are able to “presell” your users on a product before they leave the site, the better. You can verify this by taking a look at any network that provides performance data on creatives. Text links and product based items always seriously outperform banners and buttons.

Many affiliates (including me) use product feeds to feature 1000’s of products directly on their site. Increasingly there are many tools and scripts out there to assist you with this. Many affiliate networks do this. Affiliate Window’s Shop Window system is a good example of this. Paid on Results also has some really, really easy to use tools that will let you directly feature merchants products. However, feeds don’t create unique content… it’s up to you to do that as well and really add value to the site beyond the feed content.

For your first project I would recommend a site that focuses on a small group of products or even a single item. I have one site that is based around one product that makes me around £150 a month. The conversion rate is really high as it’s a product very few retailers actually sell. The site took me around a day to put together and another couple of hours to sort some incoming links. it’s made me £1000+ since I set it up. Not bad for a day and a bits work!

What I’m trying to say is that you don’t need to create a complex site with 1000’s of products right away to make money. Think small, and you might be surprised at the disproportionate rewards.

The best thing you can do right now, is start a site immediately. You are clearly thinking the right way about things, so just jump on in and create the site that will start your online career!

Good luck

If anyone else has a good question they’d like a detailed answer on from me, please use the contact form on the blog. I’m happy to publicly answer questions that will benefit other affiliates!

Nice additional article here on site size by David Fiske.

Steve, who sent me a query about affiliate chicken and egg syndrome a while back
has come back with a follow up question about blogging from an SEO point of view. I thought it was a pretty good question, so Steve’s agreed that everyone should get the benefit of my answer.

Here’s what Steve asked :-

“Just wanted to take you up on the offer of helping me with ideas for blog posts from an SEO point of view. I was going to do one for Jackpot Joy if you remember, but I’ve just posted the following article reviewing a brand new affiliate program that I’m heavily involved with called uVme.biz.

Any suggestions on the style of writing or improvements that could be made for SEO purposes?”

Hello Steve!

Your post is good in writing style, but it isn’t so strong on the SEO front. It’s very general in nature, and probably won’t capture much in the way of niche search terms. You have to think a certain may (well, I do anyhow!!) to write a post specifically for the search engines. Of course, there are many other ways to generate blog traffic.. but I shall get to that later on. In the meantime, here is my mini guide to getting your head round the SEO part of the gig!

Ok, to write a good blog post for the search engines you have to sort of start backwards. First, get your subject areas. Then you have to place yourself in the position of your target market and try to work out how they think. Finally, you work out how they would behave within a search engine if they wanted to find out information about the product or service you’re trying to push.

I am going to assume that you are looking to target and recruit affiliates for this programme. OK, so you are looking to attract people who are affiliates, people who are interested in making money online, and possibly bloggers looking for a source of monetisation. I usually try to work out how I could target an article to appeal to one (or more unusually) all of these groups, or a small area of interest within one of those groups that would be easy to rank for.

So off the top of my head, I’d then come up with some post titles that would capture the search terms I think these groups of people might use. For example: -

Make Money Online With New Social Networking Site
Monetise Your Blog - Paid Signups On New Social Networking Site
Social Networking Affiliate Programme - UVMe’s New Opportunity

You might also try to cash in on some searches for competing sites: -

Make Money Online With New Facebook Competitor
Bloggers Monetise The FaceBook Generation

I then write a post which I think contains the information these groups would be looking for if they were searching for this information. I also keep in mind that I should include the search terms, plus related terms (Pseudonyms) throughout the text. However, you shouldn’t load the text with unnatural looking search terms. It puts the reader off and Google also actively looks out for pages engaging in keyword stuffing, and can impose penalties on sites naughty enough to be doing it.

So long as you keep it natural looking, and basically make sure every paragraph is relevant to your title subject, you’re doing the right thing.

I would also usually recommend you do a bit of search term research to determine what kind of information within your subject area is being searched for. However, as I’ve never heard of this kind of affiliate programme before, I checked search terms and found little or no clues as to how I might structure a post based on current search behaviour.

Blogs always tend to attract a lot of “long tail” search terms from people looking for very specific information anyway. A lack of search terms does not necessarily mean a lack of traffic, so don’t be put off by that.

As for other traffic generators, you can get quite a fair bit of traffic out of these various blog syndication sites if you write a reasonable title and include genuinely useful information. Services such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Bumpzee etc can provide good traffic. I’ve had the odd really good day or two on my blog when I write something folks really do like! Also, signing up to blog directories can be a source of incoming links and a wee bit of traffic.

I hope this post was helpful to a few people. I must say it was actually quite hard for me to write down how I think when it comes to SEO. I have been working in SEO for so long much of it happens without me thinking about it, so it’s hard to set out my process exactly.

If you’ve got any kind of question you’d like to ask of an experienced affiliate marketer that you don’t mind being published, please drop me a wee line. I think it’s really useful to all the newbie readers and would love to answer some more to provide a good resource for people just starting out.

If you’ve found my information useful, do please consider giving the blog a bit of link love… you’ll feel better for it!

I had an e-mail from Steve the other day. He like many others wanting to get a start into affiliate marketing was wondering how you got your site approved for a merchant without actually having a merchant to build site content around. Here’s his question: -

Hi Kirsty.

Ah, yes! The age old internet marketing conundrum. How does one create a website without anything to put on it?

Well, I guess you have to make your own egg and take it from there, lol. Being serious, you really do just have to get into things and make your first site about the niche you think is going to help you earn your first affiliate commission.

I know it’s difficult to create a site without merchants whose products you will promote. However, I’m usually inclined just to pick out the merchants I will be hoping to promote and then proceed as if they had already accepted me. OK, in some networks that means you cant get creatives, but there’s nothing to stop you copying a merchant’s banner image without affiliate code behind it just so you can demonstrate to the merchant how their brand will be featured on their site.

Honestly, 4.5 out of 5 merchants would accept your site if you’d done a tidy job putting it all together and weren’t doing anything naughty on the site, like putting their name beside pictures of nude women.

One alternative to building a whole site that often works for me is to create one mock-up landing page showing the site look and feel, and demonstrating its basic structure and content. That way, the affiliate manager should be able to make a judgement about the suitability of your site.

Merchants really want to accept as many affiliates as possible and take advantage of the exposure they can bring. Putting in an application to a merchant for the first time can be a bit daunting, but it really doesn’t have to be. Even if you get declined, most merchants will be happy to tell you why and what they need you to do to bring the site up to speed. I’ve reviewed many affiliate sites during my time as an affiliate programme manager, and I declined very few for the reasons I’ve talked about above.

Seriously, just jump on in and get cracking on the site front. Once you have some form of site the next one will be 1000% easier to get up and running. If you want an opinion on a site, please do feel free to ask me to look at it. I’ll give you my opinion on how merchants would view it.

Hope this helps you along a bit, and don’t forget to link to your favourite blog when you get your first site finished! I’ll give your first site a link from the post too and get the spidering of your site kicked off.

Alrighty. Another one for the internet marketing newbies.

One of the most frequently asked questions I see from people looking to get into the industry is “How much can I earn from affiliate marketing?” or “What are the average earnings from affiliate marketing?”.

Now, here’s the thing. In affiliate marketing your earnings are determined by your knowledge, natural abilities, and most importantly: - the amount of work you are prepared to put in. Every affiliate marketer is an individual approaching the medium from a different direction, and with a different idea of what they are going to promote. Your earnings are determined by your own efforts, not an industry standard.

So What Does Kirsty Earn?
Well, there’s little point in me telling you what I personally earn. Why? Firstly, I don’t want to talk about it. Secondly, and more importantly, an exact figure won’t automatically mean that’s what you can earn. You’re not me!

However, I do know that an idea of income levels is a great motivator for many people. With that in mind I can tell you I’ve earned enough to buy two houses, and go on two year-long travel experiences. Not good enough? Well. I’ll give you a phenomenal example of affiliate earnings I know for a fact to be entirely accurate.

Kieron of UK Offer made a hugely inspirational forum post over at sitepoint a while ago. His earnings are quite literally unbelievable, and his success is a standard huge numbers of affiliates aspire to. If I reckon I eat, sleep, and breathe the industry this talented chap IS affiliate marketing personified! Wow. I haven’t seen so many zeros since the launch of Big Brother 8! His post should show any budding affiliateer that there is literally no limit to what you can do if you put the time, energy and flair into this game.

However, none of this helps you work out how much you personally can earn.

So…..

How Do I Reach My Target?

Righto. Simple answer to this question. How much DO YOU WANT / NEED TO EARN?

That’s what affiliate marketing is. You can earn as much as you want to if you put the time in. First off, a decent income is not a distant ivory tower. If you treat it as such, that’s what it will be. Unreachable.

The best advice I can give to you on this is to compartmentalise your target. It works beautifully for me. £1000 a month can seem a lot to aim for if you have never earned a penny at affiliate marketing. So… break it down into manageable amounts over a set period. Lets say you have 6 months in which to bring your moolah up to £1000.

- £1000 a month requires an average of £32 profit per day in a 31 day month.

- So over 6 months that equates to you finding or doing something every day that will earn you £5.33 every day on an ongoing basis.

That may seem a big ask, and not everyone can pull something that will sell out of thin air. But if you break your targets down in this fashion they will no longer seem as daunting or unattainable. Have a target. Have a timescale. Do one thing each day to reach it, and you WILL succeed. Don’t waste time on fantasing about what you could do “if only…”. A decent income is within reach. But YOU have to stand up and grab it. You won’t get it by reading this or any other article.

Your success is inside, so pull it out and get on with it!

I got an e-mail from a blog reader recently. He really wanted to get some advice on getting a start in affiliate marketing. Like many people who are strongly interested in giving things a go, he’s been having real difficulty working out just what you have to do to get that first precarious toe hold on the affiliate marketing ladder.

I replied to his initial e-mail and asked for more information on what he was trying to achieve and asked if I could publish my reply to help other newbie affiliate marketers.

Here’s what Mark wanted to know: -

Well I have often wondered whether it still is possible to do ok in this field, people say so many different things it’s hard to know what to do, but deep down Im dying to give it a go and see what happens.

Dear Mark,

You are facing what is probably the biggest barrier to entry in this area of marketing, so you’re not alone!

It is still possible for newbies to enter and do well in this field. Read the rest of this entry »