So you say you don’t like the niches and offers that your affiliate network has? Then make your own!

Once you have been doing PPC and lead generation for a while, you have a valuable skill in the general business world. Believe it or not, there are a ton of companies that still have no presence in search engines or PPC. Your skill at driving targeted leads and sales via PPC is highly sought after. Its just a matter of packaging your pitch in a way to promote yourself and what you can do.

Here’s an approach that I have found effective. Companies love PDFs with percentage and charts. So throw together a some graphs and charts from your Google analytics. Show how you can effectively convert xx% of clicks at a cost of $xx dollars. Show estimates of the sales or leads that you could bring the company each month. Give them a bit of your background and success in previous campaigns, by showing actual figures and sales generated for other companies with specific examples.

You will be amazed at how successful a pitch like this can be. If you structure your fees so the company has no upfront cost, and only pay out on a performance basis, you have a very compelling offer. So if you have the skills but are tired of the same old offers, make your own niche in an area you love and expand your business while your at it!

I have mentioned in a few other posts how a big percentage of our income is from private offers. Some people are wondering what this means so I thought I would give an example of one of our biggest money makers.

How it came about:

A friend of mine from I.T. days went to work last year for a mid sized investment services firm as a network admin. This company does a lot of business all across the U.S., but is still mostly old school offline with it’s marketing. They were looking to increase their online presence and my friend gave me a call to see if I would be interested in helping. I had a few calls with their marketing department to find out their goals and what I could help them doing with paid search and lead generation. Basically, the main goal they wanted was to get customers into their sales funnel via their qualified investment lead form.

The setup:

I helped them setup a backend system to track the leads coming in through the page. We both (myself and the company’s accounting dept) have access to the stats for the leads. It’s a simple script that were able to have a php developer build in only 3 hours. But it works great, and lets me track down to the sub id. I then consulted with their web designer to totally re-do the form page and make a few landing pages for my campaigns.

The payment:

We then worked out a payment plan where I am paid a CPA action for each lead, as well as a percentage of any final sale that is derived from that lead. The CPA part is important because it helps by set bid prices and know my profit margins. The secondary payment is key because it gives me an incentive to find better leads, and makes the client feel like its more of a partnership. Not to mention a great money maker for me

I run PPC campaigns on all the networks as well as now some media buys for this offer, and the traffic just keeps increasing. A great benefit is that I am the only person running ads for the company. Obviously there is other competition in the investment services niche, but not for this specific company and group of services they provide.

Replication:

This kind of setup and arrangement could be duplicated in almost any niche. It’s a pretty easy sell to the small to medium sized business that doesn’t have an internet marketing team in house and doesn’t wand to hire someone. The benefit to the company is that you front all the advertising costs and risk. They only get the benefit of a performance based system that delivers leads or sales. The possibilities are really endless.

You can even be proactive and sell yourself to companies that you know you could drive leads to with existing campaigns and keyword lists. The best deals and partnerships are not always going to fall into your lap, or be offered on your favorite affiliate network. Sometimes you have to work for them. You could research a list of companies in a niche you are good at then send an email to their marketing department. Tell them you are an established online lead generator, and can provide them with risk free leads. Throw in a bunch of impressive RIO stats from your previous efforts, and you would be surprised at the response you get.

It’s just another way of thinking about applying skills you have learned with CPA networks to more profitable relationships and campaigns. I see this as a much more stable and long lasting income source than network based offers.