A Big Mistake Almost Every Affiliate Makes…

There’s one serious mistake that almost every newbie affiliate makes, and I made it a bunch of times when I got started. Once I realized I was making this mistake, I completely changed my strategy to ppc affiliate marketing and my business started to really take off for the first time.

So what’s this one serious mistake?

We’ll let me tell you about a conversation I had with one of my students on a group coaching call just this week.

Let’s call him Joe.

Joe was really excited, he wanted to know how to find a programmer on Elance to build him an affiliate site. He told me how he had found a high traffic keyword that had very little competition for the affiliate offer he wanted to promote.

He wanted to build an entire site around this ONE keyword.

I asked him if he had tested this keyword by just writing a Google ad going straight to the affiliate link (Googlecash).

He hadn’t!

So I asked him : “So Joe, you’re going to hire someone off Elance to build an entire site around 1 keyword that you’re not even sure will convert??”

Do you see where I’m getting at here?

Here’s where Joe went wrong :

1. NEVER base an affiliate campaign on ONE keyword (or just a few keywords). You’re building your house out of straw, and the big bad wolf (Google and your competitors) can come by and blow your house down!
2. NEVER assume that because a certain high traffic keyword has little competition that it’s going to be a goldmine. Chances are that this keyword has little competition because : it doesn’t convert OR Google is slapping all the advertisers for this keyword with high minimum bids.
3. NEVER build a whole site around a niche, an affiliate offer, and/or a keyword WITHOUT first testing to see if the market is viable. Doing a small scale campaign with a simple landing page or just going direct to merchant is a great way to test a market before you go gung ho and build a whole 30 page site for it.

The idea that you need to find all the keywords that have less than 8 ads and bid on them since they have little competition made sense when Google Adwords had first started and there were still a lot of great keywords that most advertisers had completely missed (and very little competition overall compared to now).

Now that Adwords has really matured don’t expect to find high converting keywords that have less than 8 ads (unless Google has tightened the quality score requirements for that keyword).

Here’s my strategy, bid on EVERYTHING, that is, every relevant keyword in your market and see what converts. More often than not, you’ll discover that the HIGH CPC keywords convert the best and usually have the best ROI.

Why is that?

Think about it, keywords are high CPC because they convert well! Advertisers bid higher on keywords that are making money. Now as an affiliate your goal is to have your ads on the bottom of the first page for these high converting keywords, where you’ll pay a fraction of what the advertisers in the first 3 positions are paying.