I was furiously taking notes I thought might be of use to blog readers during some of the sessions at the A4UExpo last week. I attended “The Confluence Of Search And Affiliate Marketing” by Kristopher Jones on the first day of the conference and thought he had some really pertinent points to make. Obviously, the below are not his own words I’ve only noted down some key points which appealed to me and how I interpreted them.

For anyone who is not aware of Kristopher’s work, he is one of the world’s top internet marketing experts, President and CEO of Pepperjam, a full service internet marketing agency which is one of the top 500 privately owned business’ in the US. In other words, he’s a super affiliate and he really, really knows how to generate revenue!

There were lots of really compelling stats right at the start such as 60% of affiliate sales are driven by SEM affiliates, 95% of sales come from 5% of affiliates, and much about how affiliate marketing is a great vehicle for merchants to improve sales. But this is a blog for affiliates, so we don’t need much convincing.

Kristopher’s original strategy way back in the day was to find a way he could generate a small amount of revenue each and every month for every merchant on the scene (around 2,000 at that time). His aim was to find $50 of revenue for each one, and he achieved this in 2000 / 2001. For those of you with poor mental arithmetic skills, he managed to rake in $100,000 US per month by following a very simple strategy. He found a very small, simple way to make a bit of revenue for a single merchant and then scaled it up to apply to every merchant in sight.

I suspect that brand name bidding had a lot to do with this kind of success back then, but its a very, very, pertinent bit of advice. You only need to find a way to make £5 a day from something 20 times to make £100 a day. That’s a very strong part of my own strategy. I always aim to get something up and out there every day. Following this formula I grew my own affiliate business to a full time income within 3 months.

Look to the long term - Perhaps this might seem an obvious bit of advice when it’s written right in front of you. However, many conversations I had at the Expo focussed on a distinct group of affiliates who still don’t look beyond next month and towards the way affiliate marketing will change in the future. It’s important to build quality landing pages and content which will support your affiliate business through periods of change. The old saying quality is king is well worn for a good reason.

Make sure you have a strong PPC account structure - We’re all very much aware of the mystic (or is it mythical?!) Adwords Account Quality Score. Much of the cost you pay and the rankings you achieve is based on an overall quality score applied to your account by the great “G”. According to Kris, by bidding on fewer keywords and making them strongly related to each other you can improve the old quality score, reduce your click costs, and improve your rankings. Also, if you have a keyword within an adgroup which has a poor click through rate, you should consider weeding it out or removing it to another adgroup to give your other keywords the best chance for strong performance.

Some Recommended Resources

Kris mentioned a few url’s of some online marketing resources he makes use of…

Competitive Research Tools
GoogSpy - Adwords competitor research.
Hitwise - Search behaviour and interaction data (although I believe this has a rather hefty subscription fee. Perhaps only for people with thousands of sites!)
SEO Digger - Analyse competitor sites to determine which keywords they rank high enough for to be in the top 20. Looks intriguing…
Compete.com - Competitive metrics for every site on the web.

Keyword Tools
Key Compete - Download competitors keywords and adwords. (Dunno about this one personally, I do well from stuff my competitors haven’t thought of yet, but that’s just me!)
Rapid Keyword - Generate keywords and typos (although there are loads of free typo generation tools knocking about.

A Final, Random Hint
If you’re creating an adgroup to target a common mis-spelling of a product name or keyword, spell it wrong in the adcopy. I’d imagine this only works with search terms where people genuinely think they have entered the right spelling into their search engine, as opposed to missing out or interposing letters.

• Ask Kirsty - Do I Need One Adgroup Per Search Term?
• Google To Remove Inactive Status on all Adwords Ads
• Ask Kirsty - Creating Ads With Good Google Adrank?