How Long Will Your Affiliate Profits Last?
May 4th, 2007 by 
Amit
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?
Posted in Google™ AdWords, PPC Marketing, SEO Tactics, Website Content | 
Hi Amit, do you have any general tips for how to find good content writers? There certainly isn’t a lack of people willing to write but most of the places where I find them advertising, it is mainly 3rd world countries and their English isn’t very good. What is the best way to find quality authors?
To Mark: I have not used foreign writers but I am planning to try them out soon. There were several on Elance who were writing articles for 5 or 6 dollars apiece. Their reviews from past customers were quite good.
What about using the foreign folks to write the articles then have a local writer edit? The total cost could be far less than if you had the articles written by a local author.
I notice that this particular piece has not drawn a lot of comments like some of the other articles on this blog. Could it be because creating a content-rich website takes a lot of work and yields results slowly and surely but not quickly?
The keyword list you generate for PPC can be used to create a “hierarchical information structure” for your content pages. There’s a great discussion of this on pp. 58-61 of Shari Thurow’s “Search Engine Visibility”. This book, by the way, which is highly praised by Danny Sullivan and a number of other top SEOs, contains the best text I have seen on keyword placement for maximum organic search optimization.