Until now we have analysed how the search engine optimisation for our affiliate marketing shop starts as the keywords are identified and inserted in the hypertext of the pages, we have viewed how we can employ social networking to publish links to our website and how we can produce articles which will have links to the website together with keywords allied to what the website does, and how we can post 100’s of individual copies of the pieces around the internet for the search engines to read and build the number of links back to our site.
This is fine, effective SEO. The search engines will increase the ranking of the website against the competition and slowly, our affiliate marketing site will scramble its way up the results tables in response to users searching on our keywords. The trouble here, is that is takes time. It is not a quick operation and here is a sticking point, because during the period we are climbing the rankings, we are paying cash to our service providers and if you are shelling out for article insertions access, that too. What we want to do is discover a shortcut that gets us to the eyes of the shoppers in the meantime.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will manage this for us. As the title hints, it does cost. It’s advertising, what do you expect? But it can be strictly controlled so that it does not get out of hand. We must also bear in mind that people (like me for certain, how about you?) would rather to click links in the ‘organic’ results on the page which is what most SEO is aimed at doing, paid for ads, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing because folks will choose them, visit your affiliate marketing shop and hopefully spend money which generates you revenue. So, how to manage this?
You may employ a specialist, but my concern is that because they charge you a commission for every click, the cynical person in me wonders if they don’t get folks to click the links. The simplest way is, like the rest of your SEO, to perform it yourself and employ something like Google Adwords. You are going to need a Google id anyhow for the tools illustrated in Part 5, so if you have not already, go and sign up now through Adwords. What you need to do is to open a fresh campaign for your affiliate marketing website and you will be guided through.
Choose your target territory (go with “All” if you have affiliate marketing partners in other countries and check the languages that may be relevant), keep the defaults for the other options and enter how much you want to spend as a maximum per day. Ignore the rest and then click “save and continue”.
On the following page, give the Ad Group a title and then write in the advert text in the boxes below. CHECK YOUR SPELLING AND GRAMMAR! Now the most crucial part. Open a new tab or window in your browser, go to your affiliate marketing shop and then someplace in the page, right click and choose ‘view source’ from the list which will open another window with contains the HTML code for your site. At the top, look for the meta name=”keywords” text and copy the keywords shown between the quotes. Go back to Adwords and paste these into the keywords box for the campaign, which instructs Google to show the advert when customers search on those words. It also obviously compliments our search engine optimisation campaign, and as customers follow them, again the affiliate marketing rating score goes up.
The following requirement is to bid on the keywords. Remembering your daily limit, you have to decide how much you are prepared to pay every time someone clicks on your advert to go to your affiliate marketing website. For now, just put in your default bid. If you are really keen to be on the front page each time, put in a high sum but do remember that lots will visit your shop which will cost, but not purchase. You won’t pay that amount each time, you will pay the next amount up following the next highest bid, so if you bid 1.00 and the next best is 25p, you will most likely pay 30p. For now, be conservative because the Adwords monitoring tool will be able to help later.
So now, when you save it, the ad will be reviewed by Google and if there is an issue you will get an email. But by selecting the Campaigns tab at the top of the screen, you can view how your advert is getting along, how many times it’s been displayed and how many times selected. All useful stuff, but check out the Adwords tool and get familiar with it, learn the FAQs and the rules and find out better exploit it to promote your affiliate marketing shop and boost your SEO program.
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