When I first started out in affiliate marketing, I was 100% focused on using PPC to drive traffic. Over the past couple years this has been a VERY successful strategy for me. But in the last year I began to shift my thinking and focus. With PPC, you have only 1 shot to get the customer to convert. If they don’t take that action, they are usually gone forever. Which requires you to pay more for new customers. Then when the PPC stops, the money stops. This is becoming more and more troubling to me. Especially as niche markets are constantly maturing, and margins decrease. You have to evolve with them, or die.
So my new focus has been to build more long lasting sites. Ideally the site will have content that will inspire customers to come back several times or even recommend the site to their friends. That is the key, to make these consumer sites actually have useful content and not just spammy affliliate junk on wordpress. When you have real content, SEO is a no brainer and organic (free) traffic will follow. I have always found organic converts even better than PPC, and when the PPC is turned off the customers will keep coming. The added benefit of building sites like this is that your PPC campaigns will do even better because quality score will be great. Its like a positive feedback loop. Also, the site will have residual value even if the marketing campaigns end.
In addition to trying to build these authority consumer sites, another big focus is building a database of customers for each niche. Using newsletters or coupon alert signups (hot!), you can get the customers’ email address for repeat sales down the line. This may be the most valuable purpose of building a real content site. A correctly opted in list can be gold.
It’s going to get harder and harder to make decent money with the straight PPC to landing page formula. Using all these strategies in addition to the normal PPC route is the way I am building affiliate income going forward. What do you think?
haha
Hi Chad,
You’re spot on as usual.
I think we’ve started to see this over the last couple of years with the one page landing site to a CPA offer becoming less and less effective.
I’ve actually only just started my first list building effort in a niche that I’ve been in for a while. It really is a whole new skill to learn but you need every piece of advantage you can get.
Hey,
Been a reader via email subscription for awhile – really love your blog! Anyways, I’ve been thinking of switching to this strategy as I started out making trying to do just pure SEO / black hat but I fell in love with affiliate marketing before I got into it too seriously. I also wanted a less of a churn and burn strategy so building one big web property at a time is sounding more and more like a great idea. I hope my extremely small amount of black hat experience will help the SEO front when trying to get my large site ranked. What do you think of black hat SEO tactics and mixing them in with the overall strategy for SEO? Again thanks for the great reads and I might actually start commenting here and there.
Cheers,
John
John, thanks for reading. I don’t do any blackhat stuff so I can’t really comment on it. It’s not a technique I want to spend time on.
Nice stuff Chad.
Also mention that it takes quite a few exposures of your brand (website) to get a customer in the buying mode. Paid is very expensive in that regard but could be just 1 part of getting that exposure.
Organic & content rich site building should be a longer term strategy that people should invest in. it does take longer but it last for years.
I can agree with that as well.
Currently right now I am only running one site but the topic of the site, lets me promote multiple products. Which may or may not be a good thing, I can not totally say, though I do have separate landing pages setup.
Organic traffic is always better then PPC, because whether or not somebody does buy your product, you didn’t have to pay for them, other then your time of course.
But considering I am a web designer myself and am quite good at SEO, I designed my site accordingly so that once Google makes up its mind, I can hopefully start ranking well organically and brining in traffic that way. I may always use PPC to drive traffic to my site but the organic traffic won’t hurt either.
I would like to be able to gather emails and such from my site, but with the niche that I am in, I can’t really see why people would want more information. Gonna work on it though, having an email list to promote other products would be nice.
My latest “big offer” just died out & I’m now looking to build a site that has some substance to it, too. I’ve mapped out my plan, now just have to build it!
Agree 100%. It’s all about maximizing what you can make from each click from PPC. Eventually we will probably see so much competition that nearly all advertisers are taking a loss on the front end, and profiting on the long term value of the customer. It may not happen soon, but in that world affiliates would largely be squeezed out except for the ones that could build longer term value.
Real content sites, not affiliate landing pages are going to be required imo. I can’t see the relevancy of affiliate LPs going forward. I doubt Google will either. In the future, ecommerce sites and heavy content sites is what will dominate Google.
I am 50/50 on this. PPC makes me the cash now.
When doing a content site there are so mnay factors that you are sort of doomed to failure, ie the site might take four months to list, you may not get on front page you might get on page 300. You might get front page then slapped, so many factors you can not control.
I agree totally that SEO the way to go, while i do PPC 90% of time i spend 10% doing a site, have to say though contents sites seem to be so labour intensive and really poor returns.
I would love to ditch the PPC budget.
Kevin
UK
I think the main aim is to create a good content site over time. Adding useful information on a regular basis.
While the site matures and takes time to rank well, PPC can still be used for immediate traffic.
[...] Links: http://www.cdfnetworks.com/long-term-affiliate-strategies/ [...]
Tahnks for posting