One of the biggest factors in succeeding or failing in affiliate marketing comes from the offers you choose to promote. Now your probably asking yourself "how do I know a successful offer when I see one". Well, I wont lie to you. After you have been doing it for a few years you sort of develop a sense for it. With that said their are still all kinds of little hiccups along the way that we could face such as:

• A poor converting landing page
• Merchant just sucks
• The market is just not profitable

As you fail and succeed in promotions you will start to develop almost a 6th sense for good ideas of what is *likely* to be a better offer. Even then this can fail you but hey, "it’s not all peaches and cream". I test at least 25 offers a week and usually come away with 1 that’s good and maybe 2-4 offers that I can *work on*. So there’s work involved but it’s so rewarding when you get one on autopilot.

Your probably asking yourself "can you show me an example"? So for this post let’s do an exercise together and do a walk thru on how we choose an offer and start promoting it.

Warning: The following material I am about to share with you is in a brutally competitive market and the payouts for the offers are quite low. I have gone another route of promotion for this landing page but I can tell you that if you copy this and go to Adwords with it, just be careful. It’s not going to take very long for you to lose money. Within hours I would say. You’ve been warned. Dont come crying to me.

For this example I have chosen the My Fun Cards offer from NeverBlueAds. It’s a solid offer and actually pays out $3.00 a lead. I want to first take a look and see where I can promote this offer. Most of the time the US Markets are brutally competitive so of my offer is for other countries there is likely to be an area that I can work in. We are in luck with My Fun Card:

 We’ve got great coverage here. There are a ton of ways to target this Ecard offer. Many countries allows us to utilize PPC Campaigns in Search and target some Placement Campaigns as well. ALWAYS be sure to read the terms of each offer. This offer has a few rules about promoting it. We cannot direct link to the offer and there are words that we cannot use as well. It’s all self-explanatory but failure to abide by these terms can have us forfeiting our earnings.

So lets have a look at the offer. We first want to look over the landing page and view the source code as well. We want to develop *out of the box keywords* so we can put together a keyword list.  Right off the bat I see this is a greeting/ecard offer so let’s look at keywords. For this I will start off with the Google External Keyword Tool. I type the word ecards into the tool and here’s what I get:

 This is excellent. I now have a bunch of terms I can turn out landing pages for. We can even go another step further and break these into specific landing pages and adgroups later. Let’s take the term "birthday ecards" and develop a keyword list for it. Type in birthday ecards and you’ll retrieve keywords to base your landing pages and adgroups around:

Now we would repeat this for every keyword that we retrieve in the first keyword example. We can even go another step further here. Now that we have laundered a landing page/adgroup keyword list lets work on retrieving *variations* of the keyword for maximum results. By doing this we can put together a more exhaustive keyword list that will have longtail keywords and probably some less competitive terms that we can rank in the search engines for AND use in our Pay Per Click campaigns. What I do now is use the GTrends Made Easy tool by our very own forum member Benjamin Maker. The idea here is to take EVERY birthday ecard keyword we have here and load it up into the tool. Utilizing the Wordze Subscription within the tool it will retrieve us a list of variations for EACH keyword. Can you see the power here? It will also tell us the competing pages in Google for each keyword. This is very valuable because it will show us the competition and how easy or hard it is to rank for those terms. This in itself can easily yield you top rankings fast with a wordpress blog. I should know

For this example though I just put in birthday ecards and let the tool run a few minutes. Let’s see what it retrieved for us:

Look over the terms. Anything with over 50 searches is good. Now look at the competing pages. I see hilarious birthday cards has 635 competing pages. WOW. With a simple wordpress blog post properly optimized with a title tag, some keyword density and proper meta description (yep it still works and helps determine SE users clicking on your listing) we can probably rank easily for this term. The idea here (And with everything) is to get the maximum results from your work. Targeting keywords this way will most likely get you paying less per click with PPC AND you get a really good opportunity to get listed in Google easily. Free search traffic is just added gravy.

Ok now that we know how to do our keyword research for our offer, landing page and future adgroup lets take a look at a landing page. For this market your obviously targeting a lot of younger people or people who are passionate about sending ecards. I like to keep it SS here. SS means simple stupid. A creative from the network hyperlinked with our affiliate link, a few paragraphs with our keywords and a few other keywords is a great way to go for keywords in one shot but we still would want to target landing pages individually. As a test with one of my blogs we can look at a simple landing page at free animated ecards. That’s how really simple it can be.

A creative hyperlinked, a few paragraphs of text with keywords, our affiliate url anchor text and hyperlink, a few bullet points and a simple call to action (Click here hyperlink).

This is just an example. In all actuality you should really choose a domain that relates to your offer. You should structure your site and pages around the offer as well. I used ecards because you can structure a site easily using these keyword techniques and the payout on the offer is worth it. Plus the offer is free to the user, it caters to a lot of countries making PPC campaigns far more widespread and you will show up in Google in many countries pages as well. Add the fact the offer can and does cater to young and older people, you have a widespread audience that the offer fits nicely with. It gets searched and there are many pages we can rank for organically for free traffic as well.

This is a basic keyword setup to get you going with an offer. In my next post we will talk about maximizing landing pages for traffic, efficiency, newsletters and getting the most we can from them. There are TONS of other things to get traffic from here and retaining it. I want to show you a step by step way of doing it.

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