Having left affiliate management, Gerodie’s focused on his new venture as an affiliate marketer and actively oversees and manages several properties with his business partners.

I invited Gerodie on the Friday Podcast to get his insight on:

• Techniques on setting up and optimizing PPC and SEO offers
• How your AdWords account history can impact your PPC campaigns
• PPC bidding strategies
• His perspective on spytools and analytics services
• How to continually keep yourself motivated to succeed and scale your business
• Business management and growth tips

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• Geordie on twitter
• Geordie’s previous appearance on the Friday Podcast

From his previous appearance on the series, you’d have heard about how he extensively uses automation in his PPC campaigns. Together with outsourcing business tasks, John has given his affiliate marketing business more room to grow.

During our discussion, John mentioned:

• His strategies to test out keywords (as many as 30,000 at a time)
• Keyword research and harvesting and the tools he uses
• How you multiply and permutate your keyword list
• Live example of constructing a keyword list
• PPC campaign optimization tips
• His new Keyword Grouper tool and it’s “intelligent keyword grouping” features

Check out the podcast below:

Links:

• John Hasson’s blog
• Keyword Grouper
• Simple PPC
• John’s Twitter account

Although I shouldn’t have been that surprised, still it’s quite amazing how different their approaches are from each other. Which goes to show that there are multiple avenues to achieve your goals with PPC and affiliate marketing.

Note: I’ll be painting in broad strokes here, so expect some generalizations.

(left-to-right) Jeremy Palmer, Amit Mehta, John Hasson

Jeremy Palmer is a name that comes up often, especially if you’re a Commission Junction (CJ) affiliate or if you attend the Affiliate Summit. I’ve found that Jeremy and I use a similar approach in looking at offline research avenues, including books, magazines and reports to research niches, and develop deep, content rich sites.

Given his experience as a web developer, I guess it’s not surprising that he tends to build sites from the ground up. Also, having presented and watched his Black Ink project unfold, I’ve seen how Jeremy uses a systematic approach to building his campaigns.

You can check out Jeremy’s appearance on the Friday Podcast.

–

Amit Mehta has spoken at the past 3 Affiliate Summits, and given his background as a researcher at MIT’s Lincoln Labs, it’s not suprising how he has a rigorous process to set up keywords and test them. In particular, his PPC optimization process and use of statistics, as well as split-test are among his strongest competitive edge.

Not forgetting that Amit’s quite the “mindset” man in my book (You would not expect anything less from someone who blogs at the SuperAffiliateMindset.com blog). His mental attitude and “inner game” skills sets him apart from many affiliates. Also, his business acumen and ability to scale his business through team building and outsourcing are pretty impressive.

You can check out Amit’s recent appearance on the Friday Podcast.

–

John Hasson might not be a name that you are familiar with, unless you’ve attended the last 2 Affiliate Summits where John has spoken at. With his background as a programmer/developer, I was very impressed at the level of automation and scripting that John uses in his PPC campaigns.

Having developed a number of shareware applications and his experience as a Microsoft .Net developer gives him an edge, especially when it comes to interfacing with merchant and affiliate networks APIs and backend systems.

John came out with a number of great insights, especially for new affiliates.

Stay tune for John’s appearance on this week’s Friday Podcast (coming out on Friday!)

Just about any PPC marketer will be concerned if they get an email like this because AdWords downtime could translate into a significant of profits.

Before you jump to the page and entering your account information, I checked that the HTML email was going to a *.cn (China-based) domain, so it would be pretty unwise to enter your username or your password.

Mozilla Firefox had earlier been patched with a “phishing site” notification, similarly Internet Explorer showed a similar warning when I tried to access the site.

Just take note of the destination URLs in your emails before clicking on them, also if needed view the message headers and you can usually spot their point of origination (unlikely that the Adwords team would be sending notification emails out of Africa or Russia).

There was also a port about this at KezNews.

We were talking about how paid search and organic search were converging, and the role of search engine optimization, even for PPC marketers.

Some examples of the convergence of SEO and PPC:

You can study your top converting PPC keywords and develop content pages based around them to attract organic traffic. (One of the strategies that Aaron Wall mentions in SEO Book).

In addition, I use the reverse method: Looking at the high traffic (and more importantly, converting!) keywords from either my AWStats account or Google Analytics from my niche blogs or HTML content sites, and creating PPC campaigns based on them (Highly targeted traffic mechanisms like Google Adwords Placement Targeting tool -formerly known as site-targeting – let you take a crack at attracting traffic with sniper-like accuracy).

So with PPC-SEO convergence, it’s very much a 2-way street.

Some highlights from Wil:

Diversify to break out of what everyone else is doing: Most affiliates will use 1 or 2 keyword tools in their research process. Wil uses 7 or 8. He might have as many as 17 tabs open on his browser during the research process.

Some of the tools he uses includes:

• Microsoft AdLab
• Yahoo Site Assist (Google for it..ironically it’s a search engine UNFRIENDLY URL)
• eBay Pulse

And if you’ve been keeping up with SEO developments, you’d know that searcher mindset and intent are going to be key.

So in line with what I’ve been doing in demographic/psychographic profiling, Microsoft’s AdLab will not just let you harvest your visitors keywords, it will give you tools to understand the demographics – age, sex, education, location of your visitors.

Together with tools like Google Trends, and Quintura (useful for lateral keyword/thematic research), you can build a pretty comprehensive profile.

–

I predict that going forward, smart affiliates are going beyond merely harvesting converting keywords in a product-centered model, and move closer to the visitor in a consumer-centered model.

To some it may not be an obvious difference yet, but it’s going to be something that separates the Super Affiliates from the regular affiliates, as PPC bid prices and organic search algorithms continue to weed out the weaker players from the market in a Darwinian game of “search engine evolution”.

“Hi Andrew,

I’m an affiliate marketer and have been having success with my affiliate marketing efforts, I use PPC and free traffic means (primarily articles) to generate leads.

Lately, my sales have been stagnating…

How can I ensure more stability in my affiliate income?

Thanks.
Josh”

–

My answer:

Having worked with a number of Internet marketing veterans, I’ve noticed a couple of best business practises that I’ve seen these successful and experienced marketers use.

• The Micromanaging trap

There’s the Internet marketers “day trader” mentality that you’d want to avoid.

It’s something I used to do when I first started out – typically seen in behavior like staying logged in to your affiliate account all day and hitting the refresh button every hour to see if more sales have come in.

If you’ve looked at how stock day traders work, they’re like human rats sitting in front of their computers, waiting for the stock to go up (or down) 1 or 2 “ticks” (bids) and doing a buy or sell order. This isn’t any way to run a business and you’d be chaining yourself to your computer.

If it’s a new campaign, you might want to check in once or twice a day.

If you’ve planned a campaign well, you can set it to run on autopilot and tweak it every day or 2 days.

• Regularity and consistency

It’s important to distinguish between revenue generating and non-revenue generating activity.

Some marketers who spend more time writing ebooks than actually practising what they preach might give you advice that is highly suspect. Do your own testing and tracking.

I have heard one highly experienced marketer suggest that you write and submit 20 articles to the major article directories and wait for the cash to come in.

From actual practise, I’ve found that it pays to submit enough articles to establish a presence in your niche area (maybe 5-10 articles), then drip feed another 2-3 articles every week. This ensures that your traffic is more regular. (imagine the analogy of subscribing to a newspaper and getting 50-60 issues in a single day, versus getting an issue every day…it’s pretty much common sense, isn’t it?)

• Testing and tracking

You need to be able to analyze the data your sites are generating and go beyond just gathering a bunch of keywords from Google Analytics, awstats, MyBlogLog Pro Stats, or whatever other analytics package you are using.

You need to intelligently put together a picture of your visitor profile, track where they’re coming from, and put together new traffic mechanisms, whether a new PPC ad group, to test that new channel.

If anything, I think a lot of new marketers fall prey to the idea that you can just set up a PPC campaign, let it run on autopilot, never touch it again and expect cash to come flowing in….nothing could be further from the truth.

–

So your success in affiliate marketing has to walk a fine line between getting the urge to micromanage and fiddle with your campaigns every 5 mins, and the other extreme of setting it up, never doing further follow up and expecting something of a miracle.

Following the mantra of “test, track, test, track” will bring your campaigns to the next level.

Here’s a couple of techniques to bump your CTR (clickthrough rate) and conversions:

• Behavioral-based bid management

Research shows that consumers are surfing shopping sites and doing price comparisons during work hours. Bump your ad positions during office hours to get better ad positioning (and consequently, higher conversions).

• Match your consumers stage in the buying cycle

Your keywords determine your websites’ visitor profile. For buyers early in the buying cycle, they’d be looking for information, product reviews, so create an appropriate content site.

Buyers in the later stage, primed to buy, will be looking for coupon codes, bonuses, and other goodies, so a coupon site or inventive site will convert better for that demographic.

• Highly targeted landing pages

Spend more time focusing on targeted and highly relevant keywords. Instead of “holiday events”, shoot for adgroups containing “holiday ice skating show” or “holiday ice capades” pointing at a page containing specific event information and you’ll see your profits spike.

• Specific buy phrases

Especially during the holiday season, consumers might be typing buying phrases like “gifts for dad”, “electronics under $25” or “xbox360 christmas promotion”. Include these in your campaign and get ready for the ka-ching to come in…

For more tips, visit: Industry Newsletters for Holiday Season

Yes it’s going to be a 24+ hour flight, and it’s during the peak season where it was absolute murder to get my ticket.

But well worth it…

PPC Classroom Live is the live workshop component to Anik and Jeremy’s PPC Classroom product.

Here’s a taste of the Super Affiliate lineup:

(Left-to-right) Mark Widawer, Ros Gardner, Greg Cesar, Anik Singal, Amit Mehta, Jeremy Palmer, Kirt Christensen, David Bullock

Certainly worth flying all the way there for a couple of days (the event is on December 1-2 in Vegas).

For some affiliates who’re new to the industry and trying their luck, affiliate marketing can be a gamble…

Especially if you don’t have a system in place and aren’t proficient at tracking and optimizing your affiliate campaigns…

But not if you can learn firsthand from the veterans.

There’re a number of tickets left at the promotional price of $297, and if you’re headed over, do stop by and say hi!

–> PPC Classroom Live!

SAA brings you Amit’s PPC strategies which help him generate more than $1 million each year in affiliate commissions.

It closes on Oct 31st, midnight EST.

To sign up, head to: Super Affiliate Accelerator now…

You might’ve received a notification about the site targeting Baby Boomers and “Generation Joneses” last week.

It appears to be a fairly “mass” campaign, rather than a targeted one because I’m clearly a “Gen Xer” (born between 1965-79).

Although guys like Shoemoney, PepperJam’s Kris Jones, Gauher Chaudhry and Amit Mehta do really well with PPC traffic to CPA offers, I’m thinking that building a dedicated niche community helps you get better leverage out of your lead generation efforts.

With Gauher’s background in information marketing, I’m sure he’s one of the frontrunners in putting this process into action.

This requires a paradigm shift, from going beyond just a product-based focus to a demographic/psychographic-based focus.

Just imagine BoomJ providing a variety of finance-related, health-related, biz op-related offers and you can see that the potential for revenue multiplication is very high.

It goes beyond providing an offer, to building a relationship, and that’s where the opportunities show themselves.

WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller has mentioned the start of the Niche Network Era. Some might say it’s a revolution, but perhaps it’s more an evolution of the social community idea kicked off by the behemoths like MySpace and Facebook, into something that’s financially sustainable and self-sufficient.

It’s more than just collecting warm bodies, it’s turning into a real business.

Signing up for the RevenueWire Affiliate Portal means you have free access to a conversion tracker, split tester and probably the most important for new affliate marketers, a comprehensive PPC tutorial, including keyword/keyphrase strategies, biddding strategies and measures to deal with Google’s Quality Score.

It’s quite a useful resource.

Related:

–> Copeac CPA Network

–> Wealth Ninja Affiliate Marketing Guide

–> AzoogleAds CPA Network

I was using the automated Blog submission software from SecretBlogWeapon.com to list my blog on a whole blog directories and traffic generators (it took about 2 hours…).

I’m expecting quite a number of high PR backlinks to result from this. And I haven’t even started on the 176 blog traffic generators yet!
Midway through my efforts,I stumbled onto something remarkable, which would help crank up my traffic and affiliate marketing income several notches.

What I found was so exciting that I spent quite a bit of time checking it out. I was really tired and lay in bed. But after lying there in the dark thinking about all the possible traffic I could be losing out on, I jumped out of bed and fired up the computer.

(So I’m a little sleep-deprived now).
Imagine, being given the top sponsored position in a search engine for FREE (yes, it’s your permanently!) AND free PPC traffic too.

Sounds too good to be true?

But back to that later.

My buddy, Stuart Tan, who owns Internet Marketing Singapore, is in the UK right now.

He’s participainting in Internet Marketing Guru, Yanik Silver’s UK Underground seminar. How ‘underground’ is it? Well, Stuart’s not been giving away much, though he’s put some snippets on his blog.

I especially liked him talking about Liz Sherwood.

Just imagine, in your first year of Internet Marketing and earning $60,000 a month.

Blows the mind!

To those Internet Marketing naysayers out there, I have two words for you: LIZ SHERWOOD.

Ha ha.

I’m a nosy guy (sorry, curious man) by nature. So I probed into Liz’s website to look at her latest venture.

This is where the top keyword position and PPC comes in.

Liz’s latest project: SearchBigDaddy.com

By enrolling in the project, you get the top keyword listing in this new search engine. Looks very Internet Marketing savvy, and PPC traffic.

When you recruit affiliates, your credits continue to accrue. It sounds like you retain the top search term, regardless of your recruitment efforts.

Sound too good to be true?
I thought so too, but anyway, I went ahead and grabbed the top keyword position for my search term (it’s blogging related…).

ps: Thanks Stuart for the tip. I appreciate the opportunity to jump in on Liz’s venture. (ahead of you…)

Here’s the link again: SearchBigDaddy.com.