It’s 2014 and it’s been around 20 years since the birth of affiliate marketing. If you’ve been investigating affiliate marketing for a while you would know that back in the day it was pretty easy to earn money via Google PPC affiliate marketing. Now, not so much but can you still make money in 2014 via Google PPC? Absolutely! And yes, for the lazy people, via direct linking 😉
It’s been a while since I’ve posted about something other than my monthly reports. Mainly due to the fact that I was overseas didn’t have anything to blog about! It’s been about a good week, (on & off), getting back into things and I’m pretty much back into work mode.
Recently, I’ve been moving away from the PPV platform and have been concentrating my efforts into Google PPC – Direct Linking – SaS, (shareasale), merchants. After taking the master classes with AffPlaybook, (TOTALLY WORTH IT), I’ve learned a bunch of strategies to get me some online mullah. They were surprisingly simpler than I thought and after implementing some strategies I was quickly hitting $100 days again.
I decided that I would just pick one, and stick to it for a long while. This is actually a modification of one of the strategies, something REALLY REALLY simple, but just as powerful.
There’s 3 steps here.
1) Choose a merchant that pays out a decent ‘average commission’, (for me this is $6+), on Shareasale or any other physical product affiliate network. (Make sure you read these in their Terms & Conditions related to PPC!).
2) Find their ‘best selling’ products and create your custom link on SaS for them.
3) Bid on 3-6 related & specific keywords for these products. (for example, for the acoustic guitar niche, try bidding and linking to ‘left handed acoustic guitars’, ‘left hand acoustic guitars’, ‘left hand guitars’, etc. Make sure you’re linking straight to this product and not the merchants front page.
4) For your ads, make sure the keyword, in this case ‘left handed acoustic guitars’, is displayed in the header & in one of the description text boxes.
5)Â Set your bids to about 30-50 cents and see if you get clicks. Raise this SLOWLY, (by 5 cents) if you’re not getting impressions. Google often tells me that my bids aren’t even enough for the first page – but I still end up getting a decent amount of clicks & high CTRs.
The trick here is to find merchants with good quality scores, and to try and increase your ad CTR. As your ad CTR increases, and google likes your campaign better you’ll be charged less for your clicks. (I’ve gone from paying 25 cents per click to 6 cents per click over the course of 10 days! Mind you, my CTR for these ads are double digits, usually around 15%.
Another trick is to build HEAPS of these. Don’t just build 2 or 3, build hundreds. Do like 10-20 a day. Over the course of the month you might find only 4 or 5 winners out of 100-200 merchants, but that should be enough to hit $100+ profit days.
I’m still doing this and every now and then I find profitable campaigns. The cool thing here is, expanding your campaign is fairly simple. Just duplicate it to more countries and more quality traffic sources, (Bing).
Anyway, as you can see it’s not very complicated, just get started and see what you get 🙂
Any Questions?
I read most of yor posts since i’m learing ppv. I notice you mentioned in this post you are moving away from ppv. Is there any reson for this?
Hey Alex,
Good to know at least someone is reading this stuff lol.
I tried some experiments with Google PPC about a month ago and it showed more promise then the way I was doing PPV. I really wanted to learn it so I thought I’d just dive right in! Mind you, over 50% of my income is still generated through PPV.
I’m trying to get in the habit of choosing something and sticking with it for a good 1 to 3 months. I just picked Google to see if I can break through and I did. Currently I spend 20% of time with PPV/intext and 80% PPC.
Also I find that PPV is more expensive to test. With $20 I can get a good 50-100 clicks to test Google Adwords campaigns instead of 2000 pops that are usually un-targeted.
Hey sup dude,
awesome post man. i also took the long term class with affplaybook. I really like the stuff ur writing. i should of just waited to see your blog lol!. anyways, i am just wondering how you go about finding the ‘best selling’ product under a merchant. thank you.
Lol,
Thanks for your kind words David 🙂
Well, some merchants have a ‘best sellers’ section in them, some don’t.
For the ones that do, I make campaigns to each individual item/group, (or at least like 10 of them), and for the ones that don’t I do some research to see which products are getting a decent search volume in google and make campaigns for them.
Seriously, the more campaigns you set up and try, the more gems you find and the bigger your income gets, (well this is how it seem to work for me!)
~ Mateen
hi mateen,
thanks for the response. so as far as I understand: to find the “best seller” i simply check out the merchant website and check to see if they have any best sellers. THEN if I find one, the custom link comes into play. I can actually link my ad directly to the specific best seller page instead of the main page. am I on the right track?
That’s pretty much it,
IDEALLY you want one of the ‘best sellers’ to have some decent search volume but i pretty much try it anyway. You just never know what you’ll find. The more campaigns you set up, the more gems you find basically.
Good luck David!
Cool post Mateen. This is a strategy I’m very interested in. Have signed up for sharesale and having a look round but it seems very hard to find any merchants that allow direct linking with PPC. Any tricks to help find them?
Cheers Mart
Hey Mart,
Not that I can think of, you just have to manually go through each one. I personally didn’t find it that hard to find them, maybe it depends on the category you’re searching through?
Hi Mateen you say that your half of the profit comes from PPV. Can you share, out of this how much comes from direct linking in PPV? Thanks
Hi Lalit,
Sorry for the late response. 100% of my PPV income comes from using a landing page. I only direct link initially to see if the offer has any potential. Once I see some leads/sales, I’ll split test various landing pages until I’m happy with the result.