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.

“Researchers at four universities found two areas of the brain that appear to compete for control over behavior when a person attempts to balance near-term rewards with long-term goals. The research involved imaging people’s brains as they made choices between small but immediate rewards or larger awards that they would receive later. The study grew out of the emerging discipline of neuro economics, which investigates the mental processes that drive economic decision making. “

In a more recent article, researchers link delayed gratification with intelligence.

However, what does this have to do with SEO or PPC? A lot.

I was trying to research why after so many years, we still prefer PPC over SEO.

Browsing through blogs and forums where you can learn about affiliate marketing and promoting CPA offers I noticed that the vast majority of the advice is to focus on Adwords and Pay Per Click. I was hoping this would change with the years, but since 2002 (when I started as an affiliate) it has always been the same.

I agree PPC is probably the easiest way to get started on affiliate marketing. It is quick and “easy” and SEO is hard and takes time to see results, but once that SEO work pays off, your rewards are huge.

I’m not here to propose that you stop your PPC campaigns and focus on SEO. No … I run PPC campaigns too, but I do want to tell you why you should use a mixed approach that incorporates SEO too.

Promoting an offer using paid search has many benefits:

1. You can see immediate results.

2. You can test many different things: ads, landing pages, search positions, etc.

3. You can do geographical targeting.

4. You can track conversions easily.

Nevertheless, focusing on PPC exclusively has a major drawback … can you guess what it is?

“Anyone” can do it.

Most PPC “gurus” don’t talk about this, but the reality is that most offers you can promote have a “window” of opportunity. A time frame when you can make the most money. It is the time where the demand is high and most of your competitors haven’t caught up to it.

Once everybody starts using spy tools and bidding for the same keywords, what do you think happens to the bid prices? They rise obviously!

That is one of the reasons why you have to be constantly looking for new hot offers to promote.

Now, let me give you an alternative route.

Let’s say that you try to focus on offers around similar themes like: business opportunities, dating, etc. You then try to create content sites that provide content for those niches and promote the offers in the content.

You start by sending PPC traffic to those sites, but after you figure out what works, you start shifting part of your PPC budget to content development and promotion. It is very surprising how cheap you can get quality content and promotion these days.

If you spend $1000 a month on PPC, spend  only $900 and invest the rest in content that attracts links. If you have a larger budget you might want to consider hiring a blogger that writes the content and promotes it using social media. Make sure the content and the links are well optimized for SEO and the site pages are getting indexed.

In a few days you will start getting free clicks from the search engines, clicks that you don’t need to pay for.

In a few months, your extra search engine clicks will give you an edge that will be very hard for your PPC competitors to reach.

I try to do this for every successful campaign I run, and that is why I love SEO. The return on investment is way too big to ignore.

How many of you incorporate SEO in your search marketing efforts?

You don’t do SEO … really?? why not?

Let’s say your primary goal is branding…

Perhaps you only care about the amount of traffic to the site because your blog makes ad dollars from page views. In this case, you need to fix your attention on simple metrics that you can gain from your analytics package: a) the amount of search traffic; b) the bounce rate of the search traffic; c) and the direct traffic.

Look for keywords that result in the highest number of visits and the lowest number of bounce rates. Despite what you may think, traffic with a 100% bounce rate is not even good for branding purposes. You need visitors that spend at least a few minutes and demonstrate a minimal level of interest in your content/offer. Also check to see if you are ranking on the first page for these keywords, and preferably above the fold (the first section of the page that does not require scrolling down). The difference in traffic generated between a #1 ranking and a #2 is usually tremendous.

A good way to measure the progress of your branding campaigns is to chart the increase in your direct traffic (people who type your URL into the address bar or arrive from a bookmark). Another important metric is the number of people that come to your site via brand searches (people who typed your company or site name into Google hoping to find you). Traffic coming from brand searches is usually the best converting traffic there is because these are visitors who have already expressed interest in your company or product. If you’re a merchant, don’t make the mistake of bidding in AdWords for brand searches. You should end up with the traffic anyways through organic SEO and it is not smart business to pay twice for the same visitor. However, if you’re an affiliate marketer, the situation is just the opposite. Some merchants don’t understand the process and still allow affiliates bid on brand terms. Some might even encourage it, and that allows you to make a lot of money. Take advantage of those few merchants while you still can!

Now, let’s say your primary goal is sales…

This has to be the goal of most affiliates and small business owners. When your primary goal is sales/conversions/actions, your first order of business is to set up conversion tracking properly. As an affiliate this can be tricky because the “thank you” page is under the merchant’s control. But in cooperation with your affiliate manager you might be able to get your tracking bugs installed on the merchant thank you page. Another alternative is to use your ad network tracking software, which often includes the capability of specifying your tracking bug on the affiliate backend. (I already suggested this feature to the team at Advaliant and I’m sure they will make it available in the next major update.) There is a more advanced technique that I sometimes use involving tracking IDs that I will explain in more detail in a future post.

Tracking conversions essentially means identifying the best keywords and the best sources of traffic so that you can adjust and improve your future traffic generation efforts. I like to set up PPC campaigns not just to drive traffic but also to use “broad match” to find lots of new keywords that I did not consider during my initial keyword research. Focus on the best-converting keywords and try to reach the top spots for them. Remember, the difference in traffic generated between a #1 ranking and a #2 is usually significant and worth your effort.

Final thoughts

Small things can produce big results, but in SEO it’s just as important to step back and look at the big picture. Tiny little tweaks like adding ALT descriptions to images is useful and necessary, but how many new visitors will you gain this way in comparison to the amount of visitors you would have gained by refocusing your keywords to ones with higher traffic and conversions?

If you do a search in Google for “search engine optimization”, “seo” or any similar term you will find countless outdated articles that promote practices that are not very useful these days – i.e.  website submissions, link exchanges, altering meta keyword tags, etc.

These seemingly useful tactics do very little for the ultimate goal of an effective SEO campaign—to drive meaningful traffic.  Because search engines have changed significantly in the last ten years, many of these outdated practices are no longer necessary; while some, like the massive link exchanges are actually considered search engine “spam”.

So if these techniques are not the way to higher search rankings, what are we left with?

Focus on Qualified Visitors

First, you need to think about SEO in terms of specific goals. Think of SEO as anything and everything you can do to your website or landing page to improve the number of qualified visitors who are attracted to it from search engines.  In order to attract these qualified visitors, you should strive to achieve the following 3 goals:

Goal # 1 The most critical is increasing your site’s visibility.  Before a user can find a website on a search engine, the search engine must find that site first!  What’s more, the search engine must also deem the site important (i.e. worthy of having a high place in the index).  At the moment, the major search engines rely primarily on a site’s incoming links. If many large sites link to your content, Google will assume your content is at least somewhat useful.  To increase your site’s visibility you must work on building quality incoming links.

Goal # 2 – The second goal is targeting.  If you want to get more qualified visitors to your website, you must understand which keywords are bringing you the right visitors—visitors that are likely to take action on your site (subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, etc.)  A lot of people who are new to SEO or the Web just want a lot of traffic — but traffic alone will not guarantee success.  What you want is the right kind of traffic, the traffic that will take action on your site. Targeting the right keywords is the best way to accomplish this.

Goal # 3 – The final goal that you should pursue is what I like to call the site’s presence. This involves getting as many pages as possible indexed, especially the ones that are most important to your overall goals. If your content isn’t getting listed then people aren’t going to be finding the most relevant content that you’ve created.

Three Simple Steps to Successful SEO

SEO is not simply about ranking #1 for a random keyword.  Many people will tell you that, but they are missing the point.  The purpose of effective SEO is getting as much traffic for qualified keywords. 

When the right visitors are coming to your site and taking action on your content, then you know you’ve accomplished successful SEO.  But how do you achieve this?  My strategy has 3 distinct steps:

1.     Research – Try to understand where your site is right now.  Are you targeting the right keywords? What’s your market? Are you missing any keyword opportunities? What are your competitors doing? Understanding what successful competitors are doing lets you learn and apply their strategies to your own site.

2.     Create/Promote – The next step is to create an SEO plan that will get you where you need to be. This usually involves creating or reconfiguring content to attract the right type of user with qualified keywords. Just as important, you need to promote your content so that users can find it. There are a lot of tactics to do SEO properly, but here are some basics, many of which I’ve previously discussed in my SEO blog.

• Keyword research
• SEO copywriting
• Social media marketing
• Link building and baiting
• Blogging
• Creating and submitting XML sitemaps
• Duplicate content
• URL rewriting and redirects

3.     Track progress – The final step, and this is one that people often forget, is tracking your progress! How far are you from your specific goals? Periodically checking in will help you understand where you are so that you can learn what worked and what didn’t, as well as those areas that you still have to work on.

It is important to understand that you need to complement your affiliate landing pages with useful content. It is very hard to attract visitors and links to pages that are only sales pitches. Use content pages as pre-selling tools that lead to the affiliate offers. The content pages should be the ones you are trying to optimize.

This is my first post on this blog and I am not sure how educated readers are on SEO.  I hope this has been useful! Please feel free to sound off in the comments.