issue #15, October 2004 - Profitable Affiliate Marketing Ideas, PPC Click Fraud and more

1) The latest news about a live affiliate marketing experiment

2) Profitable Ideas for You to build an affiliate business.

3) PPC Advertising: Click Fraud - How big is the problem really and what can you do to lower your advertising costs ?

4) Two Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing and a step-by-step guide for building a different home based business.

Affiliate Marketing Experiment

Let´s recap first:
In the beginning of June 2004 I´ve used a new software tool called SEO WebsiteBuilder (a tool that allows people without any html and seo knowledge to build search engine optimized websites and earn money from affiliate programs) and followed the step by step battle plan in the software´s user manual to build Cheap-Posters-and-Prints.com to promote the merchant AllPosters.com™ and later Art.com, too.

To get the website indexed in the search engines, I´ve submitted it to a few web directories and also placed links from TheJungleMarketer.com to the new website.

In the first two months, the only way to get traffic to the new website and to test its performance was to use pay per click search engines. From Google AdSense ™ I could get clicks for a reasonable price and as my ppc ads were generating a small profit, I kept them running.

Before I search for link partners, I usually wait until a new website gets some PR, so other webmasters can see that there´s no risk for them when they link to me. This has proven to improve the response to my link exchange requests, saving me a lot of time. (for all who are new in the search engine marketing field, please read these free search engine optimization lessons)

In August, I noticed that a small amount of non-ppc traffic was coming to my new site and as a result, my affiliate commission increased slightly. And already in September, the fourth month after creating Cheap-Posters-and-Prints.com, my AllPosters ™ comission cheque passed the 600$ mark.

Thanks to AllPoster´s great affiliate links tracking system, I was able to see where sales were coming from and here are the statistics for the month September:

Profitable Ideas and Keyphrases that You can use to build Affiliate and Other Websites

A Word about Keyword Profitability:
When talking about keyword profitability, I often hear people referring to the KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index - devised by Sumantra Roy), but in reality it´s just a raw indicator and the real profitability of a keyphrase depends on more factors than only the number of searches and competing webpages.
(KEI = (search count)² / competing pages). I´ll give you a few examples:

As you can see, the first example has a huge KEI but you can´t expect that people who are looking for free printable shower games will spend money with you.

The second has a good KEI, too. With only 3 competing web pages it´s very easy to get a top ranking, but the search count is only 29. Although people will spend some money with you purchasing highchair seat covers, it´s still a low profitable keyphrase as the product doesn´t cost much money.

Example 3 has the lowest KEI but is the most profitable of all the above examples. With only 177 competing pages it´s still very easy to get a top 3 ranking, the keyphrase is highly targeted and compared to the second keyphrase it has a higher search count and the product has a higher price (which means higher profits for you).

With that basic knowledge in mind, let me share some profitable keyphrases and website ideas with you. I spent merely a few hours this week on Wordtracker to find hundreds of profitable phrases. The fastest way is to collect as much as you can get from Wordtracker and then import the results in Andy William´s Keyword Results Analyzer for WordTracker, press a few buttons and you´ll find those little gems in seconds.

KEI   search count   competing pages    keyphrase

1,976   90   4100  wooden high chairs
12,16   76   475  high heel chairs
4,221   56   743  wooden highchairs
10,446   43   177  wood highchairs
22,012   43   84  wooden baby high chairs
280,333   29   3  highchair seat covers

Idea: Build a website to sell high chairs for children, write high chair
reviews or incentivate customers to write the reviews for you.

6703,339   878   115  hair bows for baby girls
292,474   633   1370  black and white books for babies
69312   456   3  baby oil burns
7,619   120   1890  cool baby clothes
6,624   83   1040  funny baby clothes

Idea: All kind of products for babies are pretty good niches, because people love to spend money for their loved ones, especially babies. The keyphrases above (and many more) can be used to sell clothes and accessories. While the average commission per sale might be low, a high search count for some phrases makes them profitable.

53,319   254   1210  wheelchair motor
292,348   164   92  wheelchair accessible construction
4,886   93   1770  handicap lifts
1,039   43   1780  wheelchair elevator

I´ve already seen merchants with affiliate programs selling those items. As the product price is high you could earn nice commission cheques from a few sales only.

364,646   190   99  hurricane window protection
900   30   0  residential storm protection
8,898   94   993  window security bars
3,239   69   1470  security storm doors

Idea: How about protecting peoples´ homes ? I Guess it won´t take long ´til the next hurricane blows over florida´s coastal areas. If you can´t find affiliate programs for the above keywords, simply contact local firms and offer advertising space on those web pages.

And the final idea is a combination of marketing affiliate programs and generating revenue from selling ad space on your web pages. I´ve found this sub-niche while researching keywords for the "flower" niche.

0,257   248   239000  funeral flowers
0,2   43   9240  funeral flower arrangements
0,035   67   130000  funeral arrangements

The above keywords are very competitive and I´ve included them here only to show you the two types of things people are looking for when searching for terms that include "funeral arrangements". Funeral flower arrangements (funeral flowers) is a product sold by merchants with affiliate programs and in the category "funeral arrangements" I found a good amount of local keyphrases with very low competition, so the idea here would be to build something like a yellow page website and sell ad space (for a yearly fee) to local service providers.

Here are just a few examples of the local keyphrases

2304   48   0  bergen county funeral arrangements
1058   46   2  wyckoff funeral arrangements
484   22   0  damascus funeral arrangements
324   18   0  north malden funeral arrangements
324   18   1  riverview funeral arrangements
225   15   0  west jefferson funeral arrangements

PPC Advertising and the Click Fraud Problem

About three months ago I merely srubbed the surface by mentioning a disadvantage of pay per click advertising that lowers your profits: fraudulent clicks from your competitors who are trying to knock you out by inflating your advertising costs.

For a long time it was only a supect I had, but there wasn´t real evidence for that. I mentioned that usually only about half of the clicks were unique visitors. But in the beginning of October it was even worse, so I temporarily paused some of my ads.

Last week I found some great articles about the click fraud problem and the story of a guy who has been using pay per click advertising for some time, spending more or less the same amount of money each month. During the time period of a few days that he spent on a trade show in his business niche where all his competitors were present, too, his pay per click advertising costs dropped dramatically.

You can read this story and a solution to the click fraud problem in the article: Click Fraud: state of the industry (by Dmitri Eroshenko).

And here are two more interesting (or scaring) articles on the subject:

India´s secret army of online ad clickers

Scam tricks advertisers into paying for phantoms (by Tom Zeller).

Two Disadvantages of Affiliate Marketing ...

... and a Step-by-Step Guide to Build a Different Home Based Business without these Disadvantages.

1) You´ve built a website to sell products through affiliate links and now you want to target those higher competitive keyphrases which get way more monthly searches. To get a great boost in PR and link popularity it would be good to have your website listed in all the top directories, including Yahoo and DMOZ (Open Directory Project). The problem is that many of them don´t accept to include affiliate websites in their directories.

2) There are many niches where people are looking to buy low cost items like certain types of jewelries and accessories. These items sell pretty well, but when you just sell them as an affiliate, then your profits are usually very low or it takes a lot of sales to generate a reasonable profit.

So why not simply be the merchant yourself ? Instead of promoting other merchants, you could build a website to sell your own products. You can get almost everything at wholesale prices. And for only 150 bucks you could start your affiliate program at ShareaSale to get other websites sending you free traffic.

I know what your main concern is: You want to earn money online automatically, without having to lift a finger. And you want to go on holidays whenever you like and still continue earning money - that´s why you´ve chosen to promote affiliate programs.

Of course, when you sell your own products and have a website that gets traffic, you´ll have to make sure that there´s someone at the store on every business day. It means you´ll really have to WORK from home, but at least you probably will be making profits much faster.

Don´t worry about your holidays, there are two ways to get as much free time as you want and turn your real online store into an automatic business:

1) Get an employee: whenever you feel the need to take some days off, once your business is generating enough profits, employ somebody to do the work for you (taking orders, shipping, handling, stock administration, ...).

2) Switch to affiliate products: If you don´t want to employ somebody during your holidays, simply take down the links to your own products from your website and replace them with affiliate links to other merchants, so your website will continue generating sales.

The trick is to start your home business selling your own products and switch to promoting other merchants with affiliate programs whenever you go on holiday or even when you are totally bored of that niche and want to start another website / business. This way you are still totally flexibel.

Scott Patterson is just an ordinary guy who started his online store (selling evil eye jewelry) when he still had no computer nor marketing experience. His story is pretty amazing and not unusual for someone who starts an internet business: friends and family laughing, disregarding his efforts, but soon they stopped laughing when his website received top rankings for keyphrases like "birthday gift ideas" and "evil eye jewelry" and orders started pouring in.

Scott wrote a step-by-step guide that covers everything: how to find profitable niches, where to get wholesale products from, building an online store, using paypal to take orders, stock administration, order fulfillment, getting high search engine rankings for your store and more.

So if you think this is the right strategy for You to build a profitable home based business, I recommend you read this book: Online Store Handbook (by Scott J. Patterson).

Phew - that has been a long issue again. Guess You are a bit exhausted. How about a joke to cheer you up ? Here it goes ... (reload the page for a different joke).

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Whishing You a lot of Success !

Truely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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Sincerely Yours,

Guido W. Stiehle
TheJungleMarketer

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