Free Affiliate Marketing Lesson - 5a

February 19, 2008 Filed Under: Affiliate Marketing Course

The video is taking too long to edit and produce. I only have a limited amount of time everyday to devote to these lessons so I want to make sure I get something out to you regularly so I’m going to have to hold off on the video for a few days until I get the hang of it.

In the meantime, let’s continue on. This is where things get interesting….

Affiliate Campaign Strategy Development
Now that we have set some goals, signed up for affiliate networks, reviewed some offers we are now ready to begin planning our campaign. As I mentioned these lessons will focus on PPC as the main source of traffic for our affiliate site.

PPC is the easiest, fastest way to generate traffic to a website. Ideally, as time progressed we would like to generate some NON-paid traffic in addition to our PPC traffic in order to make our campaigns more profitable. However, when we are setting up a campaign, you can’t beat the speed and ease of PPC.

With that out of the way we have to decide what kind of site we are going to build. Today’s lesson is going to talk about direct linking and how to PROPERLY implement this technique.

Direct linking is simply taking your PPC traffic directly from you ad to the merchant’s site without passing through your own landing page. All you have to do is generate an ad that gets the search engine user’s attention and watch the checks roll in while the merchant’s site does all the work for you.

This technique was affectionately termed Google Cash. Nice!

It was a simple math formula:

(# of Clicks * Merchant site conversion rate) * MyCommision Per sale > Adword CPC * # of Clicks

So for example if I average 100 clicks a day from adwords, the merchant site converted 10% and I made $5 per sale:

100 * 10% = 10

10*5= $50 a day in revenue

As long as my CPC was less than $.50, I would make a profit. The lower my CPC, the more Google Cash in my pocket.

Simple, too simple in fact. Instead of affiliates pre-selling customers and helping boost the merchant site’s conversion rate, affiliate were competing with the merchant for the same keywords hoping to get them for the right price so they could make a profit with minimal work.

Google, Yahoo! and MOST merchant programs wised up to this scam and effectively banned direct linking as a promotional strategy. It is important to check with your merchant before setting up a direct linking campaign as MOST have banned this technique but there are a few that still allow it.

Most recently, Yahoo! through some strong arming from Commission Junction has recently begun allowing direct linking. While I don’t agree with direct linking as a long term campaign strategy, I think this was a brilliant move for Yahoo! With Google dominating the search engine marketing game, this is one way Yahoo! can differentiate themselves.

So the question remains, if this is such a fast and easy tactic, why do I think it is a HORRIBLE long term marketing strategy.

Google Cash is purely a numbers game…. there is no skill involved in monitoring CPCs everyday making sure your scale is tipping the right way. Besides, what a volatile way to try to make a living. Think about it, you are a slave to your CPC. If a few competitors decided to jump into your market, all of a sudden your margin for error becomes even smaller. And what if one day Google slaps you with a $1 minimum bid notice. Now you are screwed.

Techniques like Google Cash were designed for people who believe in the get-rich quick plan. I want to do the least amount of work and make obscene amounts of money doing it!

Get real, the only way to sustain any real income in this business is to treat it like a real business. Real, hard, work…. that has the potential to provide a lifetime of income.

Next I was going to show you a live direct link campaign from MSN that I stumbled upon. In fact that was going to be the basis for the video but the editing was kicking my butt. Anyway, the campaign is no longer running so there goes that idea.

However, I think it is clear how ineffective this technique is for developing a steady source of income.

That is not to say direct linking doesn’t have a place. I still use direct linking in my campaign development. As easy as PPC is at generating traffic, direct linking is equally fast an easy for determining the profitablity of a potential offer.

There is no faster way to gather conversion stats on an offer (I generally like to get 100 clicks through to the merchant’s offer page before I evaluate the success of a campaign). If a site converts well (makes a profit or breaks even) using direct linking with a cost-per-click (CPC) of 10% of my projected commission, then I know it will be lucrative.

Once I’ve selected an offer that I’m interested in, I will slap together a short keyword list (between 10-50), throw up a direct-linking campaign and track my stats for 2 days or 100 clicks. Generally Google won’t realize I’ve broken the rules in that short period of time so I’m pretty safe.

This quick test helps me determine what kind of landing page I will need, how much pre-selling I have to do on my landing page and what conversion rates I can expect from the merchant site.

I know what you are thinking 100 clicks?! Is that really enough to evaluate with? No but I do it anyway and it works for me. I don’t want to spend a bunch of time and money on a campaign so if it doesn’t convert at least 1 in 100 at a break even rate, then it isn’t worth my time.

Yes, I am leaving money on the table. There are a lot of highly profitable offers that WON’T pass my test!

That is fine with me because all i need is 10 that do…. well actually 7 now.

Here are the methods for redirecting:

PHP redirect
This is my preferred technique. PHP redirect allows you to still track keywords while redirecting traffic to the merchant. It’s simple:

<?php

header(”location=http://www.where-ever-you-want-to-send-the-visitor.com”);

Copy and paste that text into a file
Save text file as ORDER.PHP
Upload ORDER.PHP to your root directory
Set your PPC destination url to www.yoursite.com/order.php
Sit back and collect checks until Google Slaps you with $5 clicks in the middle of the night and wake up to an Adwords bill of $500 and $20 in commission

301 Redirects

redirect 301 /order.html http://www. where-ever-you-want-to-send-the-visitor.com

Copy and paste the text into a text file
Save the file as .htaccess
Upload the file to your root directory
Set your PPC destination url to www.yoursite.com/order.html
Order your Bentley

Meta Refresh
Ever see those, “Click here if you are not redirected in 5 seconds”

Those are generally meta refreshes.

<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; url=http://www.where-ever-you-want.com/”>
</head>

<body>
please click
<a href=”http://www.where-ever-you-want.com”> here </a>

if you are not immediately redirected
</body>
</html>

Copy and paste into a text file
Save as gettinrich.html
Set your PPC destination url to gettinrich.html
Buy a digital camera to take pictures of you holding your over sized affiliate checks

Again, my favorite technique is the PHP redirect because I rely on PHP extensively to track my keywords and my ROI. I will teach you my technique for keyword ROI tracking later in the course.

I hope you learned a little bit about direct linking and how to use it properly to help set yourself up for success.

Think Critically,

Mike

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Comments

7 Responses to “Free Affiliate Marketing Lesson - 5a”

Chris on February 19th, 2008 9:08 am

Great post. I was curious about the redirects. Places like commission junction give you an affiliate link that includes an img src tag. And they say if you don’t include the img src tag that the can’t properly track you.

What do you do in this case?
Michael Mosby on February 19th, 2008 2:36 pm

Thanks Chris. I appreciate any and all feedback.

That is an interesting question. I’ve never seen that clause in any of the commission junction links. Can you point me to where you read it. That will help me figure out what they mean by that.

I only use the text links so there isn’t an img src tag associated with the link.

Just point me in the right direction and I’ll give you my advice….also I’ll contact my affiliate manager over at CJ to see if he can help us out.

Thanks again,
Mike
Gav on February 20th, 2008 5:19 am

Mark, nice post enjoying the ride so far. Those image links are in most of CJ’s links - well actually all of the merchants I use. I ignore them and just use the url - seems to work but then I haven’t made many sales so my testing data is somewhat limited
Lisa J. Stewart- Big Foot Web Marketing on February 28th, 2008 11:37 am

Thanks for the easy to understand no nonsense post. Many newbbies are intimidated becasue of too many buzz words and insider lingo other “make money online” sites use. I like the make it simple approach rather than impress reader with my vocabulary
Lisa J. Stewart- Big Foot Web Marketing’s last blog post..Using PPC ( Pay Per Click) to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing
Carl on July 11th, 2008 11:48 am

Mike,
I appreciate the redirect options. I also like to test with direct linking and agree that about 100 clicks can give you some decent data.

Carl