The Reason Most Partner Marketing Schemes Don’t Work And How To Avoid The Same Pitfalls: Part 4

Up to this point we have looked at how the SEO for our affiliate marketing shop begins as the keywords are selected and included in the hypertext of the pages, we have analysed how we can utilise social networking to create links to our shop and how we can produce articles which will carry links to the shop harnessed with keywords relating to what the site does, and how we can distribute thousands of separate copies of the articles around the internet for the search engines to unearth and build the number of links back to our website.

This is fine, solid SEO. The search engines will build the scoring of the shop against the rival sites and slowly, our affiliate marketing website will clamber its way up the results pages in response to customers searching on our keywords. The challenge here, is that is takes weeks. It is not a rapid process and here is a sticking point, since during the time we are climbing the results, it is costing currency to our service providers and if you are spending for article distribution services, that too. What we want to do is find a shortcut that propels us to the view of the customers in the meantime.

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will achieve this for us. As the name implies, it does cost. It’s advertising, what do you expect? But it can be strictly monitored so that it does not get out of hand. We must also keep in mind that folks (like me for sure, how about you?) tend to follow links in the ‘organic’ results on the page which is what most SEO is aimed at doing, instead of paid for links, but that does not mean it isn’t worth doing as folks will click on them, see your affiliate marketing website and hopefully spend money which earns you revenue. So, how to do this?

You could find a specialist, but my fear is that because they charge you a fee for every click, the twisted human being in me wonders if they do not get others to click the links. The straightforward way is, like the rest of your search engine optimisation, to perform it yourself and utilise something like Google Adwords. You are going to want a Google id later for the tools explained in Part 5, so if you have not already, go and sign up now via Adwords. What you need to do is to start a new campaign for your affiliate marketing shop and you will be guided through.

Pick your target territory (go for “All” if you have affiliate marketing partners in different countries and select the languages that may be relevant), keep the defaults for the other options and tell it how much you are willing to spend as a maximum per day. Leave the rest and then click “save and continue”.

On the subsequent page, give the Ad Group a name and then write in the advert text in the boxes below. CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR! Now the really important bit. Open a new tab or window in your browser, go to your affiliate marketing site and then anywhere in the page, right click and choose ‘view source’ from the list which will open another window with contains the HTML code for your shop. At the top, find the meta name=”keywords” bit 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 show the advert when people search on those words. It also obviously compliments our search engine optimisation program, and as users click them, again the affiliate marketing rating score increases.

The subsequent task is to bid on the keywords. Remembering your daily maximum, you have to decide how much you are happy to pay each time someone clicks on your advert to go to your affiliate marketing site. For now, just enter your default bid. If you are really intent to be on the first page every time, put in a high number but do remember that plenty will read your site which will cost, but not stay. You won’t pay that amount each time, you will pay the next amount up compared to 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 restrained because the Adwords monitoring tool will be able to help later.

So now, when you save it, the advert will be verified by Google and if there is anything wrong you will get an email. But by monitoring the Campaigns tab at the top of the screen, you can check how your advert is performing, how many times it’s been displayed and how many times clicked. All handy stuff, but review the Adwords tool and get familiar with it, go over the FAQs and the rules and understand better utilise it to enhance your affiliate marketing shop and further your search engine optimisation programme.

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