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In the 3rd part of this series I want to talk about the importance of setting up, maintaining, and growing your site for long term profitability AND peace of mind.

IMMUNITY FROM GOOGLE SLAPS

If you’ve ever lost sleep over a Google slap you know what I mean when I talk about peace of mind. In the past I’ve had the wind knocked out of me by Google slaps, but nowadays my profits actually go UP after a Google slap.

There’s a couple keys to avoiding a Google slap :

#1

Setup you affiliate site PROPERLY so that you start out with a good landing page quality score, I’m not going to go into the detail in this post, rather check out this post I did a while back on how to make your affiliate site Google happy!

#2

Just setting up your site right initially is NOT enough to stay in Google good graces. You need a system in place to continually expand and improve your website :

1. Regularly add fresh content to your site. I have a regularly updated blog + fresh articles added to my affiliate sites on a WEEKLY basis.
2. SEO optimize your site. This includes getting backlinks, directory submissions, etc, etc. The fact is Google does factor in your PageRank, various “trust” factors, … really the overall strength of your site in natural search results side of things into your Adwords QS. This is the converge of natural search and paid search, and it’s very real.
3. Split test your landing pages. Not only will this help your conversions, Google will see fresh content on your landing pages if you’re continually split testing. This is a BIG plus!

I’ve used the above strategies to dominate my affiliate niches, laughing to the bank while my competitors get repeated pummeled by one Google slap after another.

CONTINUALLY IMPROVE YOUR CONVERSION RATE

There’s one more point I want to re-emphasis. And that’s, in addition to getting on top of the quality score, you need to continually split test your landing pages (a point I mentioned above).

Even if you only increase your conversions by 5% a month, over the course of a year, compounded that comes to an 80% increase in conversion rate a year.

Now if your conversion rate is increasing by 80% a year on all your landing pages, think of how FAST you’ll blow away your competitors that are not split testing??

You almost need to do this to assure long term profitability, especially with increasing competition in almost every niche online.

That’s all there is to it. In this 3 part serious I’ve laid out how I’ve developed a massive stable long term money machine.

Now the question is will you take my advice and do the same?

Or would you rather be an affiliate day trader launching one new campaign after another before your last campaign fizzles out?

I don’t care if each of your campaigns generate $50k profit a month, if they fizzle out after 2 months and you have to launch a new one, then you’ve got a JOB! In the long run someone who builds a long term money machine-although they might start smaller-will blow you out of water.

I’m back in Chicago right now for the Perry Marshall’s Roundtable meeting. And I gotta tell you, I’m learning stuff that would totally blow your mind. I’ll tell you more about it in future posts (what’s not confidential anyway).

My friend and fellow blogger Andrew Wee has a great post based on an awesome thread of comments on my last Affiliate Summit post.

Andrew has some really great insight on how to crank out content sites that generate $1k/month-$2k/month. Andrew answers a burning question a lot of people have: How do you find good writers (especially overseas) that will write quality (ie sticky) content.

Here’s what Andrew has to say:

“The reality is that you will get what you pay for. Proven quality costs.

A workaround is to find new guys on sites like elance, workaholics or rent a coder, who’ve yet to establish themselves and might be willing to do quality work on the cheap in order to build some positive feedback.

If you’re going along this approach, you might like to farm out a batch of 3 articles, and solicit 10-20 freelancers to work on your project. You could then do a ’survivor’ style elimination and work with your favorite 2-3 writers.

The important thing to note is that you need to spend time scanning and headhunting quality. You might be really lucky and have a talented freelancer fall into your lap, but it’s not likely to happen.”

And that’s great advice!

Finding good people, whether it’s a content writer, programmer, graphics designer, is a matter of going through the numbers. I’m personally willing to pay more for quality content, however, they’re lots of excellent writers out there that will crank out great content for you for $5 an article. You just need the patience and perseverance to find them.

However, there’s one really powerful shortcut, it’s called crowdsourcing. You can do this on sitepoint.com.

What sitepoint.com allows you to do is setup a contest for anything web design/graphic design related. You set a cash prize for the contest, and let talented web designers from around the world submit their entries.

You pick the best entry and only pay that person!

The superaffiliatemindset.com logo was done through sitepointe.com, it only cost me $200. And my company found a very talented logo designer!

They REALLY should have crowdsourcing for writers.

How many of you have had a successful ppc campaign running where the profits dried up and you had to pause it? I’m guessing a lot of you.

It’s certainly happened to me many times!

Even if you follow all my advice and develop a really solid ppc affiliate marketing campaign, and continually update and improve your site & your affiliate promotions, chances are your net profit & profit margins will still go down over the course of several years, definitely 5 years. Just think about it, the competition on Adwords is increasing in every market, bid prices are going up, and more savvy competition is entering the marketplace.

So the question is how do you develop a site that becomes a powerhouse, that is, it produces more and more profit every year, with increasing profit margins??

Here’s the trick: Build a content site around your affiliate domain.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “You’ve gotta be kidding me, content sites take FOREVER to get any real traffic. Besides you have to spend $1000s to have content written for your site.”

You’re interested in LONG TERM profits right?

Think of it this way, your content site is your long term insurance policy; while you get your ppc campaigns running right away and start making a profit, you quietly build a massive content site in the background that will receive an avalanche of traffic one year, two years, or even 5 years down the road.

The money you make off of ppc can feed the cost of building your content site. Now you want a content site that’s white hat and that has 1000s of articles that target long tail keywords. You don’t have to build it overnight, you can have your writers write 50 articles a month for your content site, and in 5 years you’ll have 3000 articles.

Let’s say this is your affiliate domain:

affiliatesite.com

You want this to be the hompage for your content site. As for your ppc landing pages, have them in this directory here:

affiliatesite.com/ppc/

Now make sure your affiliate landing pages are linked to your main content site and vis-versa. Now your ppc landing pages are connected to a large content site, Google will give you a GREAT landing page quality score + you’ll get free traffic in the long run.

What more could you ask for?

As a copywriter, it shocks me sometimes how webcopy is often the LAST thing on many of my clients’ minds when they build their affiliate sites. I have even heard it said that “it’s not the copy that makes the sale but the product”. And to this… I reply… DUH!

This is not to say that a lousy product will do as well. No. A product that delivers what the copy promises is of course the best. A great product means you don’t get refunds and that you increase the chances of your customers coming back and trusting your opinion of what they should buy.

HOWEVER, for that crucial first sale, you must CONVINCE that site visitor. You must PERSUADE him/her that what you are offering is THE best he/she can get. It is mute to try other sites. This is it folks. The best deal is in front of your eyes. BUY NOW.

Think about it. Many of us go to the mall with a fairly good idea of what we want to buy; but do we just go to a store, point at something and pull out our credit cards? No. We search for the saleslady/man. We want information about the product… we want to be convinced that the purchase we are going to make is the right one.

This mindset is the same for all online buyers - with a twist - you only have about 5-8 seconds to make an impact on the site visitor.

So what IS the formula to writing killer copy? I wish there was ONE formula, but there isn’t. Webcopy that sells is webcopy that takes everything into account: the product, its price, the target market, target buyer location, buyer mindset when he/she reaches your affiliate site, search engine optimization, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), and yes, MORE.

You may have heard most of these factors already but neurolinguistic programming?

NLP is the process of tapping into your visitors’ way of thinking (neuro), how they communicate verbally and non-verbally (linguistic), and how these affect the way they communicate and behave (programming).

By understanding or ‘getting into the head’ of site visitors, a great copywriter can use just the right words or use exactly the right language (at the right places!) to connect to the reader. The effect – convincing copy that connects exactly to the needs of the site visitor. The results – more sales of course

NLP is not something to play with. Use it incorrectly and you turn on all the WRONG responses. However, use it correctly and… CHA-CHING!

If you want to be a super affiliate, don’t just focus on the product/service you’re selling and your site design. Remember that your buyers are just like you – humans – and they need that ‘extra push’ to be convinced that what you’re selling is worth their hard-earned dollars. And in the realm of affiliate marketing, that extra push is often killer webcopy.

In an earlier post, Amit covered the aspects of surviving Google’s “quality score”, and how you can avoid the nightmare of waking up and finding out that 75% of your keywords have been deactivated and now Google’s asking you for $5-$10 buck minimum bids. I wanted to expound on this a little and share my view on URL/landing page “relevancy” and some techniques you can use that not only target your potential customer on Google AND on your website, but also give the big “G” what they want:  relevant text ads and landing pages for their visitors.

Let’s look at the following example:

Johnny Affiliate has a site selling “widgets” and has setup his campaigns with tightly structured adgroups and keywords using the word “widget” in both his text ad and display URL to improve overall relevancy.

Adgroup: “Blue Widgets”

Keywords: “blue widgets, buy blue widgets, cheap blue widgets, etc…”

Landing Page: Johnny sends his visitors to a landing page selling “blue widgets”.

This is a common example of how a lot of affiliates structure their campaigns but in the never-ending quest to lower bid prices and stand above the competition, we need to go further.

So how could we improve on Johnny’s campaign/landing pages and become even more relevant?

Domain aliases for display URL’s and landing pages.

Purchasing multiple domains and setting up domain aliases is a quick way to become more relevant in the eyes of Google AND your potential customer. For example, Johnny could purchase “Blue-Widget-World.com, Red-Widget-World.com, etc.” and use these domain names for each seperate adgroup. The benefits to this is that his display URL is  targeted to the customer looking for “blue widgets” and his keywords are in the display URL as well, helping his overall Google relevancy.

So what is a “domain alias” and how do I set it up?

Domain aliasing allows additional domain names to lead to the exact same location of your original website. For example, if Johnny is hosting his domain name “widget-world.com” and added a domain alias for “blue-widget-world.com” on his web server, then “blue-widget-world.com” and “widget-world.com” would take the visitor to the exact same landing page as his original site “widget-world.com”. The difference being the domain name in the visitors browser window would reflect whatever domain name was used to send the visitor to his site.

We can make the same site become seperate “niche” sites, all with one code base. Most hosting companies provide a web panel for your hosting account which will allow you to add multiple domain aliases, and then re-direct them to your main site. The next trick is to display the matching domain name on your webpage. This can be done by setting a simple variable name.

For example, if your web host is running PHP, you could add the following code snippet at the top of your “index.php” landing page:

Now if the domain name Johnny used in his destination URL to send visitors to was “http://wwww.blue-widget-world.com”, the above code would recoginize the word “blue”in the domain name and set the “$DomainName” variable to match that domain -same thing with “http://wwww.red-widget-world.com” etc. If it doesn’t find the word “blue” or “red” in the URL, it will just default to Johnny’s main domain name, “widget-world.com”.

He can display the domain anywhere on his web pages simply by adding the code below:

<? echo $DomainName; ?>

The code: ‘”Welcome to <? echo $DomainName; ?>! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” would display to the vistor as: “Welcome to Blue-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!” or “Welcome to Red-Widget-World.com! We have thousands of widgets at 70% off!”

Johnny can now send his “blue widget” customers to “blue-widget-world.com”, his “red widget” customers to “red-widget-world.com” etc. without having multiple websites. He has turned one website into multiple “niche” sites that target his customers directly.

I just finished printing out my boarding pass for my first class flight from Boston to Austin Texas. I’m leaving for Austin tomorrow and will be returning on the 24th of April, next Tuesday.

I’m meeting up with, Jeff, a good friend, business partner, and very successful affiliate in his own right. We’re actually scoping out some real estate properties to invest in the downtown Austin area.

We hope to purchase 2-4 hot properties through our limited partnership. Although you’ll never get the type of return with real estate as you can with affiliate marketing, it’s a great conservative long term investment.

This will also be a great opportunity for me to take a much needed vacation from the world of internet marketing! I’m having two of my business partners, Tom & Melanie, step in as guest writers until next Wednesday, where I’ll resume the daily post.

Tom is an SEO & social media expert, he’s also a world class web designer who has worked with the Who’s Who out of Silicon Valley. Melanie, owns a highly successfully writing company, she’s an absolute pro at writing copy and an SEO expert. She worked with several big name internet marketers and is privy to their techniques and secrets.

Tom and Melanie are really the secret to my success, I want you to read every post that they write the next couple days, I promise that you’ll be blown away by their insight and expertise. I have learned a TON from them, and I know you will too.

In the Affiliate Summit West (in Vegas) this last January I had a chance to talk to quite a few affiliates about what they thought about Google’s new landing page “quality” score, and the recent Google slaps, that put a lot of advertisers out of business.

I sensed anger and frustration from most affiliates. And I sympathize with that. I somehow survived the first Google slap in July, however, after the second Google Slap in November, I felt like I got punch in the abdomen-I was on the ground gasping for air.

I was scared, and on the verge of panicing, 75% of my traffic & income was gone!?! Once I calmed down I decide to take a whole new approach to my internet marketing efforts, I research everything I could about how to build a site that will make Google happy. And here’s the mindset you have to have: if I was building an SEO site and sending PPC traffic to it, how would I set it up?

With that thought in mind here’s some guidelines to building a site that will make Big-G happy:

1. Make sure you have at least 10-15 pages of unique content on your site, including a privacy policy, and a Contact Us page. And I do mean unique, not something ripped off from ezinearticles.com. Go to elance.com and hire a writer to write you articles for $10 a pop. And don’t tell me you don’t have a $150 to invest into building your site, your affiliates site is going to make you $1000s a month in profits, right? Then stop getting hung up over making a small investment into your business!
2. Have a link to a site map at the bottom of your site, so the Googlebots can easily read your whole site.
3. Have a ‘Resources’ link at the bottom also, that goes to a page that has outgoing links to respected, high-’trust’ sites in your niche. Be sure to throw in .org and .edu sites in there, Google loves that.
4. Add fresh content to your site on a regular basis, this could be a few articles a week.
5. Have targeted landing pages for your adgroups that have highly targeted and relevant content. Here’s what I mean, if you have two adgroups: widgets, and gadgets. Be sure to that your widgets adgroup goes to a page about widgets, and has substantial unique content about widgets. Likewise, make sure your gadgets adgroups, goes to a page about gadgets, and has lots of content talking about gadgets.

If you follow the above 5 steps, chances are you’ll get a good quality score for 90%+ of your keywords.

Many of you may already know these 5 steps, and will decide NOT to follow then! When I was at the affiliate summit, I hardly found one affiliate who was actually interested in making a Google happy site (we’ll call it that for now ). Most of them wanted to find a work around to the system. Some affiliates have decided that they’ll just change their display and destination URL every time a Google Slap comes around. Changing URLs seems to work so far.

As far as I’m concerned, this is just the lazy affiliate mindset!

You may think you can outsmart Google, and you may be able to do it in the short run, but honestly don’t you think Big-G will catch on? I mean come on, they hire the top minds in the world.

Here are some of the advantages of playing by the rules and building a real site for Google:

1. You never have to worry about future Google Slaps.
2. If you setup targeted landing pages with unique relevant content, chances are your conversions will take a jump (yes people ACTUALLY read the content on your site, especially if it’s relevant).
3. You’ll have a competitive advantage over other affiliates, since most affiliates will try to dodge the rules. Your quality score will continue to improve over time as you grow your site and make more targeted land pages, you’ll receive more and more traffic.
4. As you keep growing your site and you’ll get more and more free search engine traffic in the long run.
5. Your site will look and feel like a real website, and again, this will help your conversions.

Some of you may have 30 affiliate sites, and dread the idea of having to add content to everyone. I would take this approach: chances are that you make 80% of your profits from the top 20% of your sites, build those sites up.

I personally know super-affiliates who have dozens of affiliates sites, and make very good money. But let me ask you, how long term do you think this approach is? Click costs are going up every year, markets are becoming more and more competitive, Google will continue to tighten it landing page “quality” score requirements.

In fact, Google does not want people throwing up quick landing pages to make a fast buck, it wants people building and growing real sites, just like you would build and grow a REAL BUSINESS (there is a tip in that!)

So sure, the “let’s make 20 affiliates sites a month” approach may work in the short run, but in the long run you’re dead in water! There’s no way your going to be able to keep up with the increasing competition in dozens of different markets plus increasingly strict Google quality score requirements.

The bottom line is that you need to build a small handful of affiliate sites and keep growing them, split testing your pages, and responding to market changes, etc etc. Over time your affiliate sites will become a powerhouses, bring in MASSIVE sales from both ppc and free search engine traffic.

An excellent example is Rosalind Gardner’s Sage-hearts.com, this site was build for long term profitability. Rosalind is continually adding new content, and constantly changing the design and look of the site.

Do YOU have a strategic approach to affiliate marketing that’s based on building long term profits or just short term gain?

You’ve all read it over, and over, and over again in sales letters. Promises of instant riches with affiliate marketing, beyond your dreams, and all on autopilot. You’ll be in Maui sipping out of a coconut while $1000s a month are direct deposited into your bank account.

Bullshit!

This is the myth of the lazy affiliate, that once you get the wheels turning, you’re on your way to an early retirement. Sadly enough a lot of affiliate marketers still believe this.

Just like any other business, an affiliate marketing business takes a lot of WORK to get it going. I know that’s a 4-letter word to some affiliates! Honestly, it’s a lot of blood, sweet, and tears in the beginning. The learning curve to ppc affiliate marketing is steep, most people don’t stick it out long enough to reach the tipping point. Kind of sad since many of these people are SO close to reaching it.

Let’s face it, as markets on Google Adwords become more and more competitive over time, with the cost per click rising every year, the idea that you can “set it and forget it ” and make piles of money on autopilot with ppc is ridiculous. The day of throwing a bunch of keywords into a campaign, setting your CPC at 0.05 and instantly making 100% ROI are long gone.

Sounds pretty gloomy, huh? There’s hope for the affiliates that are willing to take their thinking (and their affiliate business) to the next level…

When I was a newbie affiliate, like many other affiliates, I was super-excited once I got a campaign running and profitable. I had finally got to the point I was consistently finding a winner! However, after a few months my profitable campaigns would keep dieing out. I had this happen to me in at least 5 different profitable markets.

I knew there was a piece of the puzzle that I was missing. If you read my last post you know that my mistake was rushing to launch new campaigns, and not building up & solidify my profitable campaigns, and here why I did this…

I was thinking like a “lazy affiliate,” I was totally focused on quickly getting as many profitable campaigns up as possible so I could make some quick money. I may as well have been selling wrist watches off the street corner here in Boston, because I was NOT treating my affiliate marketing efforts as a REAL business.

I said to myself: “Okay, I know there’s a way to make this work, there’s other super-affiliates that are making a fortune who’ve been doing this for years. What are they doing that I’m not doing, or what am I doing that they are not doing??”

When it finally dawned on me that I was not treating my affiliates efforts as a real viable long-term business, here what I changed about the way I think about, and conduct my affiliate business that totally transformed my business and my life:

1. I totally changed my focus to building campaigns that generate long-term sustainable profits. That’s when I decided to build up and dominate one market before I move into another. I wanted to lock in the profits for one campaign before I moved into another market.
2. I started writing out income goals for my business, what I wanted to make in 3 months, 6 months, a year. I put them up in the wall, somewhere I could see them everyday. Do you have goals for your affiliate business?
3. I decided to stop wasting money on ebooks that did not help me improve my ppc affiliate marketing efforts. I decide to focus on ONE thing and get REALLY good at it. In business they call this a core competency.
4. I hired a writer, and a web designer to design my sites and write the content. Once I had a good team in place my business profits skyrocketed to 7-figures. I will talk about this extensively in a future post.
5. I got a separate credit card for my business expenses, opened up a separate business account with my bank, incorporated my business as an LLC. If you have not done this, I would suggest doing it right away, even if you’re just starting.
6. Here’s a big one: I got an appointment calender, setup a daily & weekly to-do list, that I strictly adhere to. You’ve got to treat this business like a part-time job (or a full time job if you’re doing it full time). If you were working for a company (as an affiliate let’s just say), would your boss give you a big raise and promotion based on how much effort you put into your affiliate marketing business everyday, or would he fire you??

So ask yourself if your treating your business like a wrist watch salesman on the street corner or like the CEO of a multi-million dollar internet business?

PS On the upside, once you’ve worked hard over a period of a few years & have several solid campaigns going, that are setup PROPERLY for long-term profitability, you can choose to go into maintenance mode and cut back your workload and start a blog about affiliate marketing.