AdMoolah News and Views

I have dabbled in using PPC advertising to drive traffic to my sites, but now I am getting ready to do it for real. This will be for the main site that makes money for us. 75% of that revenue comes from a single affiliate program. About another 20% comes from AdSense, and the remaining 5% comes from other affiliate programs.

I have been doing some reading about PPC and here is the plan I have come up with.

Set Up Tracking
I currently use Google Analytics for my stats. I am adding goals to keep track of affiliate clicks, AdSense click and email list sign ups. I am also adding code to modify the URLs of the affiliate links when the user has come from a PPC ad so I can see which sales are actually from the PPC campaign.

Keyword Research
I’ll start by creating a keyword list for a single product. (All the product are similar, so it should easy to extend the list to other product.)

Here are some sources for keyword research I have come across. I’ve played with most of these before, but this will be the first time I will use them seriously.

• Analytics search data. What are people actually searching for according to Google Analytics?
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool
• WordTracker
• Nichebot
• Trellian
• Google Suggest
• Thesaurus.com
• Google Sets
• Google Related Keywords

I plan to go mostly for mid to long tail keywords to begin with. Once I have a list I will group them into related keywords. Each group of keywords will be used for a different campaign.

Create Landing Pages
For each group of keywords I want to come up with at least 2 initial landing pages for with significant differences on them to do A/B testing.

Setting up Campaign
I’ll set up the campaigns in AdWords. I’ll need to come up with ad variations for each campaign to test out the effectiveness of the ads.

Monitoring and Tweaking
Now its time to monitor everything. Which campaigns are getting the best ROI? Which specific ads do best? Which landing pages get the best conversions? Based on the results, I’ll start tweaking things.

Repeat
Finally, I can start the whole process over again for each different product.

I just signed up for The Black Ink Project. It is a free online course on using affiliate programs. I usually don’t go for these types of things, but the pitch was pretty good. They weren’t saying it’s a get-rich-quick type of course, it seemed like it was very reasonable.

There will be 4 1-week modules in the course. Each module has 5 hour long sessions via WebEx conferences. After each week of sessions there is a week off to do “homework”.

Since it’s free I figured I have nothing to lose except a little time, and I might pick up some good information. There is limited space, so sign up now if you want to get in on it.

While I mostly talk about AdSense on this blog, I have actually started to earn a lot more money from affiliate programs then I do from AdSense. I haven’t talked about it much because I don’t consider myself very knowledgeable when it comes to affiliate programs. In order to learn more about affiliate marketing I’m going to Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas next week.

I’m going to try to go into the conference with a very open mind. I want to try to expose myself to as many possible ideas as I can to see what I can do to expand my online business. I’m looking at it as an idea-generating opportunity.