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’re several days into the Just Think Media Publisher Rewards Program. Have you checked it out yet? You should – it’s really simple: Make a sale on any of the Just Think Media offers you run on the Advaliant platform and you get 1 point. Take a survey about the offers and rewards that you want and earn 100 points. Plus, the top 25 publishers can earn an additional 25,000 points!

You can check out the list of current prizes you can redeem your points for HERE and you can get answers to your questions HERE.

This is is a pilot program that we are trying out. We need your input and participation to make this thing something that you really benefit from, so feel free to talk to you account manager or leave your feedback in the comments.

The program runs from May 15th – June 30th. We look forward to your participation!

I recently attended the eMetrics: Marketing Optimization Summit last week in Toronto. I sat in on a workshop on Web Analytics for Site Optimization given by Jim Novo from the Web Analytics Association.

At MediaTrust, we are constantly researching new ways to optimize websites and landing pages to improve conversion rates for our affiliates. This is a brief overview of some of the things I learned from Jim’s workshop:

What is Web Analytics?

Web Analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for the purposes of understanding and optimizing Web usage.

Build Sites with Web Analytics in Mind

Don’t waste time and money retro-fitting your website. Make sure you design your site with the latest technologies that support analytics. For example, if your website is a Wordpress blog, upgrade to the current version so you can take advantage of widgets and plugins. There is a free widget for Google Analytics! Awesome! Personally, I try to avoid designing Flash sites because setting up analytics on them is too complicated. You can use flash elements in your site, but an entire Flash site is bad for web analytics.

Quality Traffic

Quality website visitors are more likely to be interested in your product or service and have a high chance of converting into an acquisition or sale. If you have a solid source for internet traffic, you will spend less time waiting for your analytics experiment to end. Quality traffic will convert more often and it will be easier to figure out what’s working and what’s not. Sites that have both quantity and quality traffic will collect data quickly and they get you to your next analytics milestone sooner.

How Much Traffic? A/B Split Test or Multi-Variate Experiment?

Not only do you need quality traffic, you also need a lot of it! Google says it needs at least 500 visitors per week for an A/B Split Test and at least 1000 visitors per week for a Multi-Variate Experiment. The reason for this is because, essentially, A/B Split Test is only two versions of the page. Multi-Variate Experiments make more versions from the combinations of the specific areas you defined. For example, if you mark off and test four areas, and each area has three variations… 4×3=12 pages. You will need more visitors for Multi-Variate Experiments to acquire enough data and really tell which combination is performing the best. If you take the Multivariate route, I recommend keeping the number of testing areas and variations low. The more areas, variations and combinations you have, the longer your experiment will take. As they say, “Time is money”, so keep your experiments quick.

Define Your Page or Site’s Goal

With landing page design, usually the goal is to get the user to convert. In affiliate marketing, conversion is when the user clicks and navigates themselves to the end of your process or basically does what you want them to do. For example, in a shopping cart site, you want the user to purchase the product. Once you define your site’s goal, you will probably realize that it’s too difficult for the user to use your site and reach the end of the process (the goal). Focus on the user’s experience. Try going through your site as if you are the user.

“Humans Track Information Like Animals Follow a Scent”

The users of your site are trying to get information or accomplish a goal. They are looking for a trail of links and buttons to click, so they can find what they want. Jim Novo calls this a scent trail. If the scent is strong, users will follow it until they arrive at your goal. If the trail is weak, they will either abandon your process (go back to the home page), or abandon the site (totally leave). Make the scent trail to your goals strong!

The online community of bloggers has grown tremendously and more mom and pop businesses are catching the wave. Companies are creating a blog where not only can the public express their two cents, but businesses can also put a face to their brand, increase their credibility, and build a loyal community. On my last day at SES:NY I decided to take the blogging track and learn more about how to build the right brand awareness online as well as engage readers enough to act. If you’re new at blogging such as myself, what is the first concern? How do I grow my readership? The “Blogging for business” panel had some great tips and somewhat harsh realities on this subject. A great blog does not happen overnight; it takes time to gain trust in readers so that they don’t only return once, but they return again and again. Jennifer Evans, Director of Social Media at SiteLogic and Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Guide mentioned the importance of finding other successful blogs out there in your vertical, commenting, and engaging their readers so they may want to visit your blog. I wouldn’t say “stealing” is the right term for this, but I think it’s a great way to put your company out there via other blogs and also connect with fellow bloggers who have the same interests as you. Also, once you gain a strong readership, the cycle will reoccur and you’ll find newbies to the space commenting on your blog to do the exact same thing. Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing also said to make sure you’re leaving comments of value in order to spark interest. This is the audience you should be targeting for your readership.

Not only have bloggers taken over the Internet space, so has online communities. Barbara Coll, CEO of WebMama.com Inc. emphasized how search engines love niche online communities because it’s such a fast moving environment. I also sat in on Barbara’s solo panel “Online Communities: a bonanza of content for searchers and search engines,” which is one of the newly created discussions at SES. Using the example of Dell as one of the best online communities for business, Barbara mentioned how starting new threads can be good for keywords; however, multiple comments from one thread can be a search nightmare. Speaking of nightmares, there needs to be a transparent moderator involved, whether it’s the company itself or outsourced. And please make sure to retain those negative comments. Deleting them can only do more harm than good.

Also food for thought: would you want searchers to click on your company domain or online community/blog first? Personally, I would want them to click on their main site above any community – after all we are trying to sell a service before a rating.

My final thought on SES:NY is this. If users trust your content, so will Google.

Many affiliates have wondered if search engine marketing will continue to grow or if search has become an exhausted, time-consuming, risky way to promote an advertiser. Today at SES:NY I sat in on the Orion Panel “The state of search: maturing marketing place or poised for more growth,” which consisted of search engine professionals. Many agreed that there are many areas of search that have potential to grow and develop, however it all depends on how innovative we can be as marketers. They referred to a heavy reliance on traditional media and other forms of offline advertising to drive people back to search. The panel stressed how important it was for internet marketers to look towards television advertising to find trends to use in keywords. And the road splits two ways. Television can also use search as an advertising experiment to see how their message resonates online before launching. Advertisers can look to search as an immediate online survey for their brand or service and give them the proper direction to lead with. With a hurting economy, advertisers and affiliates are getting smarter and going beyond conversion to maximize their ROI. The search audience is also becoming more sophisticated and they are using better keywords. The panel emphasized how there are pools of new words to bid on that have never been touched and that Google is now working on making these categories more accessible. Their panel left the audience very hopeful that the SEM industry was not going anywhere; in fact it’s always evolving.

Speaking of innovation, I also got a chance to check out the Facebook workshop on “Harnessing the social graph.” Many affiliates have taken advantage of advertising on Facebook and have come away with a quick profit. So how do they do it? Here are some tips on how to best optimize your affiliate campaign in order to drive high conversions.

1. Creative Best Practices – Most Facebook users are engaged with what’s going on in the space, so it’s imperative to make your creatives stand out.

2. Writing a Relevant Ad – Make sure your ad copy matches your audience and objective.
3. Creating multiple ads – It’s important to understand what ad formula works for you, so try testing your creatives and change one variable.

4. Refreshing Your Creative – Building brand awareness generates demand over time so make sure your audience is seeing something new every time they login.

5. Metrics for Optimization – Analyze your results. What has the highest CTR?

Connecting the two panels together, I sat in on “Dealing with affiliates: a roadmap to success” to end my second day at SES. What I took from this discussion and I cannot stress it enough, is the importance of open communication, especially in the affiliate marketing space. I think paid search and affiliates marinate well together and if the right specs are shared, the possibilities are endless.

Is Twitter the most powerful marketing tool since television? My first day at SES NY answered just that. Attending Guy Kawasaki’s “Nobodies are the new somebodies” keynote this morning opened my eyes to one of the newest social media aspects of target marketing: a tweet. So what is the buzz about? Twitter can be used as a versatile website to measure, monitor, and promote your brand or service. Guy made a great point by mentioning that not only is Twitter free to sign up and you’re able to reach your audience with just one click, but it doesn’t matter if you are Bill Gates or Joe living down the street, you still get only the same 140 characters to update your status. Guy also gave some interesting yet controversial Twitter tips such as auto follow everyone who follows you and to use TwitterHawk.com, which is a tool that auto messages fellow tweeters who have a certain keyword in their tweet. Laughing, Guy considered himself not a spammer, but more of a marketer. He said to take advantage of Twitter tools such as TweetDeck, which may not be limited to one account in the near future and ReTweetist.com, which ranks retweets (RT) by number in a single interface. Guy ended with a tip on “taking the heat” which I thought was right on target. Not everyone is going to agree with what you tweet, and I think that’s where the most interesting aspect comes into play on Twitter – whether it’s good or bad feedback it can only improve your company’s brand.

The Twitter buzz was also mentioned today in SearchAppalooza, which was sponsored by Chitika. One of the newest search engine websites: NearByTweets.com localizes twitter, which is almost making it too easy for marketers to reach their target audience. NearByTweets.com allows people to search for keywords in any tweet from fellow tweeters in a specific area. I encourage you all to check it out and let us know what you think.

MediaTrust will be attending SES NY from the 23rd-27th. The newest member of our MediaTrust blogger family, Jenna Walsh, will be roaming the event, sitting in on panels and keynotes and giving you her take on the event. Jenna is a self-described SEM newbie so you’ll get her take on being at a show like this for the first time. She’ll also weigh in on the real benefit of having a sound search strategy for your business.

From SES NY Site:

Approximately 5,000 marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search engine marketers (SEMs), including pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals attend SES New York each year to network and learn the tips, tactics and strategies that aren’t covered online. Your customers, colleagues and competition will be in attendance — will you?

Look for her coverage on Guy Kawasaki’s keynote, which will surely have a flavor of innovation about it, and follow her every move on her Twitter stream.

Don’t forget to tweet up if you’ll be at the event!

Have you saved something to eat it later and before the time passes you cannot resist the urge to take it? Well, an interesting study I found explains why. Apparently, there are two areas of our brain that compete with every decision: the emotional and logical parts.

“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?

Knowledge is power – It’s all about what you know and getting the edge on your SEO & SEM marketing efforts. One of the things we get the most requests for from our affiliate publisher partners is where to find the best resources for information and education. There is a big universe of knowledge and blogs out there to steer through – let alone find out which are the best ones without spending tons of time doing research. Search marketing guru Lee Oden has done a incredible job of aggregating the BIG LIST of SEM and SEO blogs. From their website:

Welcome to the BIGLIST of SEM and SEO blogs!
Below is a collection of over 400 blogs maintained by the staff at TopRank Online Marketing. This edited list includes blogs that cover a range of internet marketing topics ranging from SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) to blog marketing, marketing with social media and online public relations. Watch this list each week as we’ll be updating it every Friday along with the OPML file. If you’re listed, you can add a Big List badge to your site.

The list gets updated regularly, so link to it and stay on top of the latest trends in SEO & SEM.

Everyone in this industry knows how important solid SEO tactics are to increase how your offers convert. Sure, we can (and do) buy search terms, but wouldn’t you rather get all that traffic organically, for free?

Now that I have your attention, I want to tell you about a product called from Hamlet Batista called Ranksense. Experts are raving about it:

Search Engine Journal Says: “Besides making the SEO process much easier by automating and semi-automating it, the software gives you an idea of how this analysis should be properly performed.”

SEO Scoop Says: “Tools are an SEO’s best friend. Tools enable us to utilize a machine’s ability to quickly gather and process information…I’ve been testing [Ranksense] for a couple of months and I like it a lot.”

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that Hamlet’s posts are informative and spot-on. Because he’s such a cool guy, he’s offered to give Advaliant Affiliates a 20% discount on Ranksense! All you have to do is contact you Affiliate Manager to get the promo code.

Head on over and download the free trial, then get 20% off from you account manager today!