When it comes to traffic, there are two proven
ways to
get targeted and interested buyers to flood to your websites or
affiliate offers. That is organic (search engines, writing articles
etc) and paid traffic (Pay per click being the most effective).
Whilst both methods are capable of bringing in huge amounts of targeted
traffic that are ready to buy from you, the paid option has certain
benefits over organic search engine listings.
First of all, paid traffic is able to bring in traffic in lightening
fast time as opposed to organic traffic. Whilst organic traffic from
the search engines might save you money over time, it's also important
to realize that time is also money!
So why do a lot of struggling marketers still shy away from paid
advertising such as Google Adwords? Is it because it doesn't work?
Well, maybe it didn't work for them personally but it sure does work
for millions of other marketers. So the real question is how to make it
work for YOU.
If you are promoting affiliate offers then the first thing to consider
is whether you will be able to link directly to the merchant's website
using your affiliate link in the PPC ad, or if you would be better off
sending your traffic to a landing page hosted on your own domain (or on
a free domain elsewhere if you don't own a domain yet).
This is a common hurdle for affiliates and there are pros and cons to
each method. Let's look at why you'd want to link directly to the
merchant's website instead of using a landing page on your own site:
1. You can quickly throw up an entire campaign and test the water with
a product
2. You don't need to worry about writing sales copy or actually
creating web pages
3. You eliminate one less hurdle for the visitor to go through before
making a purchase
Whilst all of these benefits seem pretty conclusive, the truth is that
there is actually a greater effectiveness of using your own landing
pages to pre-sell the visitor on the affiliate product that you are
promoting, such as:
1. You can warm the visitor up and prepare them for the sales pitch
2. You can tell your story and make the visitor connect with you
emotionally, which rockets conversions!
3. You can get the opportunity to capture an email address so that you
can send out multiple offers to the same person (all for the same
product if they don't buy straight away).
Another problem with directly linking to affiliate offers is that
Google Adwords will often penalize you for doing so, if other
advertisers are also doing this on the same keywords that you're
bidding on. Google doesn't want a ton of duplicate ads for a keyword,
so you need to be unique.
Ultimately, tests have proven that sending people to a pre-sell landing
page that either contains a personal recommendation, a review or a
chance to capture people's email addresses is likely to rocket your
conversion ratios beyond belief.
And in the lucrative but competitive world of PPC advertising, where
every click cuts into your profits, then a higher conversion ratio is
your ultimate goal.
Google rotates ads that point to the same display URL. If you and 99
other folks are advertising a specific affiliate product, and are all
using direct link, you dilute the number of times your ad will be seen.
Google will only return one ad per display URL when a search is
performed.
