Can you make $10k a day promoting CPA offers with SEO?
In my last post I received a lot of feedback about the value of SEO versus PPC. After seeing how heavily the “gurus” push PPC, I did not expect many people to agree with my point. But apparently, a large percentage see SEO as an excellent complement to PPC for driving traffic to affiliate offers. It is evident that those of us who are SEOs are less vocal than our PPC-only counterparts. Thanks for your feedback.
One of the comments that caught my attention was that of “nickycakes” where he implies that only with PPC can you make a substantial income, because he has only heard PPC super affiliates are earning over US $10k a day.
NickyCakes:
Sorry, but quick results is not the only reason why PPC is better. SEO can’t even come close to the scale that PPC can. It’s nearly impossible to scale SEO no matter how long you wait for your pathetic results. I’ve only ever heard of one person who made more than 10k a day on SEO and that was if you averaged out the sale of his giant financial affiliate site. I know dozens of people who make well over 10k a day with PPC who used to do SEO and gave up because it’s simply not even close to as profitable.
- Mar 24th, 2009
At first I was going to respond in his and other similar comments, but I felt that a proper response would require a separate blog post. So here it is.
First of all, I think I asked the wrong question in the title of this post. The right question should have been: “Can you make $100k a day promoting CPA offers with SEO?” What???? Yes, that is the right question. Let me tell you why.
Organic search listings can get as much as ten times the attention (and clicks) than paid listings.
According to Enquiro’s eye tracking study, organic search gets the lion’s share of the attention of searchers. Jim Boykin of WeBuildPages studied the data from AOL’s leaked search query logs and came to the conclusion that the #1 listing can get as much as 42% of the total clicks in the search engine result page. Compare this to best case scenario of 5% of clicks on the right hand side where the bulk of paid ads are displayed.
In theory, this means that if you can make $10k a day placing ads on the paid search network, you could potential make $100k by ranking for the exact same keywords in the organic results. Now, of course, this is much easier to say than to do, so I will give you a concrete example. But first …
As you probably noticed, I said “search network”. It is not surprising that few affiliates making a significant amount of money rely on ranking for the first few paid search ad spots given how expensive they are. Most successful affiliates spend their time more productively and cost-effectively fishing for inexpensive keywords in the content network or by seeking out the often overlooked, but highly converting keyword phrases.
Another thing to consider is the fact that many of the less successful affiliates like to boast about how much they make and tend to exaggerate because they are not able to prove their claims convincingly (for competitive reasons obviously ☺). The truth is that most successful Affiliates and merchants who are making obscene amounts of money don’t see the benefit they get from bragging about their results. The ones who are quiet about their results are usually the ones who are making the most money and don’t want to drive unnecessary attention and competition to their ventures. Just ask Matt Inman!
I’ve made $10k per day as an affiliate doing just SEO
Now, let’s move from theory to practice. Not to brag, but I can say with the confidence of personal experience that you can net more than $10k a day as an affiliate. I did just that a few years ago with a single web site, when I was ranking #1 for “phentermine” in Google and Yahoo. This has been confirmed by a respected third party. I prefer not to comment about how much I’ve made since then or how much I make now that I am both an affiliate and merchant. I can tell you, that when you scale your affiliate efforts and become a successful merchant, you multiply your profits. The development of my product, RankSense, cost me a few million dollars and all the funds came from my affiliate marketing ventures.
You can do this too!
There are several ways you can do this, however I will focus on explaining how I did it personally and how you can too, by following the methods I used and modeling it for your own efforts.
How was I able to make so much money from obscure keyword such as that? Why didn’t I try to rank for a keyword that had significant more searches like “weight loss”? Would I have been more successful if I had taken that approach? The short answer is a big “NO”.
Tip #1: Brand search keywords are the most profitable keywords—period!
When somebody is searching for a specific brand of product, they’re the closest you can get to buying such product. They already know their problem and think that the searched product is the solution to their problem. Most of the time, they are only looking for the cheapest price. You don’t need to do any selling. You simply need to convince them that you are getting them the best deal.
The worst conversion rate I got was 15% and could easily convert at 28-30% by simply displaying price comparison tables.
Now, combine those insights with a very hot niche like weight loss, a product with high demand such as Phentermine, crazy payouts with lifetime refill commissions and you have a golden opportunity. Unfortunately, the product is not longer available for sale on the Internet without a personal visit to the doctor. As I mentioned in my previous article, all opportunities have a small window where you can make the most money. Savvy affiliates study trends and try to seize opportunities as they appear.
Unfortunately, some merchants won’t let you bid on their brand terms in paid search, but there is not much they can do if you try to rank for their brand on the organic results. I’ve seen a few merchants who follow back all your links and request the web site owners to remove their brands from their page, but that is the exception. Most merchants are not that smart ☺
Tip #2: The most competitive markets are where most of the money is!
Many “gurus” recommend that you go to the obscure niches that few people care about because you will see results faster. Then in order to scale this, you need to find more obscure niches and do the same. You find dozens and hundreds of such niches and your profits will add up. This approach makes a lot of sense until you actually try to put it to practice. You will soon realize that each small niche is like starting all over again from scratch. The market research part of affiliate marketing is the most difficult part and it takes effort to get it right. Get it wrong and you will lose a lot of money.
What I prefer to do is to target a big profitable niche, a niche where there are a lot of people spending gobs of money to solve a perpetual problem like weight loss and then I divide the niche in sub-niches and work on the sub-niches, one at a time. I take this approach even when I have identified a single product I want to promote. I first go after the less competitive keywords, “cheap phentermine” instead of the more highly sought after keyword “phentermine”.
Tip #3: The brand hijacker technique!
Now, let’s say that you are trying to promote a really good offer like “PureCleanse Detox (#2117)”, with a awesome payout, great conversion rate and high demand niche, but the brand searches do not generate enough traffic. Here is what I do.
Have you ever seen the product pages in Amazon, where they recommend related books and some of those books get as many sales as the original item on the page? Why? Well using my technique you can do the same.
You can search for competing products on the same and similar categories that have more searches per month, then create affiliate pages for those products and add a section to your landing pages where you recommend the alternative or complimentary solution; which is in fact the one you ultimately want them to take. I recorded a Webinar last year where I explain this technique in more detail. You might want to check it out. You can access a recording of the live event here on my blog, HamletBatista.com
Conclusion
You can make a lot more money with SEO than you can from PPC, if you know what you are doing and you are targeting the most profitable opportunities. Do that and your profits will soar! Let me know what you think in the comments.
PS: If you want to learn more about my techniques, I will be sharing more super affiliate tips and specifically how I got to the first page of Google for “Viagra” and kept it there for couple of years, at the new must-attend Affiliate conference; Affiliate Convention, June 18 & 19 in Denver, Colorado. Put it on your calendar and make sure you do not miss it.
We are starting a new weekly series to our advertiser and publisher readers. This is intended as informal research we come across during the week that we think might be of value. Any comments are welcome, so post them below. With that short introduction, here are a couple things we came across that we think you’ll find of interest:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, anyone in online marketing knows about Twitter. However, even with the variety of tools and websites to enhance our Twitter experience, there is still some frustration lingering amongst users like me. As a new user how do you decide who to follow? Where can I find people in the industry with compelling content and a fresh, honest voice?
We’re just back from Denver where we attended the inaugural 
The show producers are already planning the follow-up show, which is tentatively scheduled for December in Los Angeles and we’ll be anxiously awaiting details. Thanks to Aunesty Janssen of AffSpot, Jim Hedger of Webmaster Radio and Ticonderoga Ventures for the unfettered access that our crew got to cover the event. Their tech team earned their pay with all the landmines they had to navigate around the technology that we needed to properly do our jobs. We look forward to the next event!
If you answered “no,” why not? 
