I’ve been meaning to post this Ask Kirsty for positively ages. I’ve really been suffering with heat and humidity this week and have a head full of cotton wool to contend with and I’m going wheel it out so you all don’t think I don’t love you any more. Panic ye not, the airconditioner is in the post as we speak and the office will hopefully have a better climate next week!
This particular “asker” had a lot of very good questions about many aspects of affiliate promotion.
1. In your post “Is There Still Mileage In Affiliate for PPC?” you say that most of your income comes from PPC, however, that post is about a year old. Bearing in mind the crisis and everything, is that still the case for you and do you feel PPC may still be a way to go in AM (particularly for new sites)?
I must say that this is no longer the case for me. Although PPC remains a big part of my marketing efforts my affiliate profit margins have been rescued in these troubled times by the addition of some SEO traffic. On some sites I now get 40 % to 50% or more of my traffic from organic search and estimate 30 to 40% of my overall sales come from free traffic.
That said, if you pick the right products and laser target your traffic there is no reason why you can’t have a perfectly good campaign on PPC alone. However I do now feel that SEO is essential to each and every one of my profitable sites. There are only two merchants I now work with driving PPC traffic alone and I’m currently working on an organic site for those also!
2. In addition to PPC and organic SEO, what other promotion techniques you find working for you and how efficient and time-worthy they are compared to the first two?
I’ve tinkered with Twitter, but I’m not aware of having gotten much revenue from that. It’s something I’m still learning about and monitoring though as I think it could be very important in the future. Other than that – there is the essential link building. It seems time consuming and is often frustrating but really pays dividends both in terms of traffic and improved rankings. I recently got one link that delivers me 800 very relevant visitors per month – just by asking nicely. Well worth the 5 minutes it took to write the e-mail!
3. Which of the common affiliate systems (e.g., Datafeedr, Easy content Units, others?) do you use on your sites (if any), and what features you like about the ones you use?
I don’t use any of the affiliate systems on my sites, I work with my own content and my husband creates feed magic for me in the form of shopping sections which I integrate into my WordPress blogs to make them look / feel more like a standard e-commerce offering. If I was going to use one though it would be Easy Content Units – its an incredibly clever system developed for affiliates by affiliates. Highly recommended.
4. I heard (but never tried) that affiliates can get deep links from the merchants they advertise. Do you think those are worth the effort as a way to build links for improving site SERPs and/or getting some traffic?
I don’t have too many of these (one in actual fact!) however that’s probably because I don’t ask very often. It’s definitely worth asking via e-mail particularly if you have a good relationship with the merchant and they have a blog or similar where they might be able to provide you with a link. “He who asketh not getteth Hee Haw” as we say in Scotland 
5. And the last. Many affiliates have lots of links to merchants on both their home and internal pages. Those links, however, may strip site of link juice and thus worsen its SERPs. My question is – do you practise nofollowing for the merchant links or any other way to go about that issue?
I use php redirected links on all of my sites. I do this for no other reason than ease of management. I suppose this is something you should give due diligence, but being a bit lazy I’ve not done much about it and still seem to earn a decent amount of money / get good traffic!
November 19th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
How do you find doing PPC on physical products? I assume the margins/margin for error is pretty tight?
I can understand how the American affilaite marketers can do it on those rebills where the you are going to get paid $30 to $40 a sale, but when the commission is only a few pounds does this not make it more difficult?
Also, why do we not have offers like those over here. Whether or not you agree with them, a lot of people claim to be making a lot of money on them?
November 19th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Great post as ever!
Here’s a quick tip. Do product reviews and often (i.e. more times than you think, but still not a massive amount) non-affiliated retailers will link back. It’s happened a few times for me.
You then build up PR, credibility and traffic from them which you can then monetise or use to spin off to other sites.
It’s a long term strategy, but it can be an enjoyable one!
TTFN,
Lee
November 20th, 2009 at 5:05 am
Just a quick note about point 5)
From my understanding the way link juice is passed on with Google has changed fairly recently.
Lets say a page had 100 links and the page had 100 points of link juice, then each would get 1 point.
In the old days(!) if you decided to no-index half of them, then the remaining links would get 2 points of juice each.
However, from my understanding, Google have now changed it so that if you no-index any links, the link juice is simply not passed on – ie each of your 50 indexed links would still only get 1 point each, the rest just evaporates…
Also, depending on who you believe, there seems to be evidence that the pages you link to are used by Google to determine your relevance to your keywords. So you may as well pass on the juice to the pages you link to as it may make them more relevant to what you are talking about and then benefit you too!
November 20th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Ref no following of merchants links, it does not work. There was a bit of a storm over this a couple of months back after Matt Cutts admitted that juice from no follows is NOT re-distributed across the rest of your do follow links.
Furthermore 301 redirects still pass juice to target pages, so using a PHP 301 will not necessarily stop PR bleed either.
Best not to worry about “bleed” and just come up with something that makes your links manageable… as Kirsty suggests.
November 22nd, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Interesting questions. I have used PPC as an affiliate for a few years now and actually have better results now. This however is not a reflection of the general trend of PPC for affiliate marketers. More likely a reflection of my own learning curve.
Having said that the search engines is really the best source of traffic that converts for me