Go to Google and type in make money online and Google will present you with millions of websites either offering advice on how to make money online like Pacdesco. Or offering quick money making schemes which don’t actually work. I’ve decided to cut all the crap and get down to the nitty gritty of making money! This article is going to focus a cheap start up cost and making money as fast as possible which involves using PPC or pay per click marketing. Before we start a PPC campaign we need a few things in place to get us going.
1 -Make a website! Your not going to make any money without a website, stop moaning about not being able to create one, either get, pay, or bribe someone to make one for you. Get some cheap hosting. If you can’t get anyone to make you a website throw up a wordpress blog with a nice theme. Problem solved!
2- Make you website aound an affiliate marketing offer, either a product or service, it doesn’t matter. I recommend staying out of the finance and ringtone market untill you have some more experience. If your struggling for ideas and need me to wipe you bum take a look at my advertising networks article there you will find info and affiliate schemes available.
3- When you have your product/service picked write a blog post about it. It would be a good to use the same colour in your blog as the affiliate website has. If you don’t know much about what you are trying to sell do some research, it will be a lot easier to write about something you know about. If your not going to wite about the product directly have a banner on there. Make sure all the posts you are writing are on the same theme!
4- Now we have a site, hosting and some motivation to make money, lets start driving traffic to your site. Doing this organically can take a lot of time and money so were going down the PPC route as previously discussed. Lets use Google Adwords and maybe MSN. You can pick up vouchers for these cheap from digital point forums if your really skint put $100 or 50 quid into each account.
5- Keywords, One of the most important parts this so listen carefully as this is where a lot of people lose money on adwords! Don’t slap a load of remotely connected keywords to your theme where going after long tail keywords which usually have less competition in them and cheaper. And by and large better quality traffic which is what we want! Go onto the site where the product is that you are promoting and lift off 3, 4, or 5+ word keywords. For example instead of using “refinace london” I would use “bad credit refinance london” you get the point. If your stuck use the keyword tool in adwords to help you come up with terms. But make sure they are long tail. They might not get much traffic but we don’t have a massive budget so a cheap CPC is makes more clicks and probably more quality traffic. You can add a few more generic terms but dont go over board or those terms will sap up your budget!
6- You have some long tail keywords but these might be more research orientated than buying. So we need to make sure we are capturing people who are more likely to be in buying mode. say you were selling microphones use stuff like “buy Shure SM58 Microphone” “Cheap SM58 Microphone” ETC. Once you have these, group your keywords together into relatitive themes of around upto 15 keywords per theme, this will save you time later.
7- We have our keywords, the site, the domain, the product. We are now ready to move on to getting some traffic finally! Take those groups of keywords and make one primary campaign for them in AdWords and the sub-campaigns for them based on which keyword theme they are. You don’t want to put too many keywords into one group because you want to keep your ads as relevant as possible to make sure you have a “great” quality score to make you ads rank as high as possible for as cheap as possible. Write some ads, don’t be boring with these you need to capture people to click on your advert! Make at least 2-3 adverts for each adgroup, as time develops see which advert is the poorest performing advert, rewrite it and run again for a week or two then repeat the process as an ongoing operation. Make sure the keyword of your theme is in the advert. Writing a good advert comes with experience and there are tips for this around the internet, if people want I will make my own guide up as a follow up post, leave a comment if you do.
8- This is another stage where people lose money, put your keywords on [exact] and or “phrase match”, or even run both for the same keyword for a week then pick the best performing one and pause the other. This is for making a good CTR in Goolge which is one of it’s quality score measures. After your ads have built up some history start putting them on broad match, or keep them as they are, it’s up to you to judge how well they are doing and if they are making money for you.
9- I want you to use a blog or website with content on it and not just a redirect or linking directly to the affiliate code is because Google and MSN have this algorithm called QS aka Quality Score as mentioned before. They say, that if a site looks like it’s not selling something exclusively, meaning, that the site’s sole purpose is to spread information rather than sales then it should not be paying as much as a commercial site that has a huge budget. Also these types of results (your site) are relevant for users and give them what they are looking for, instead of a sales page and a “buy now, buy now!” approach. We want the users to buy or fill out leads, but we don’t want to give them the impression that it’s ALL we want, so maybe tack on a newsletter signup link. You can use Aweber, they are cheap and good. Also tack on a few information links on the blogroll or in the posts. To really beef up your QS, send some inbound links from other blogs, directories, sites, forums, wherever really. Just pretend you are SEO’ing it as well as using it for a PPC campaign. Within 2 weeks or less your QS should jump, your CTR should jump, and best of all, your PPC bid price should drop as well.
10- Now you should be making some money, all donations welcome. However never stop tweaking and optimising your account, the world of SEO and PPC changes all the time. Keep track of what you have done and changes made, so if anything goes wrong you know what it was. If you can get the affiliate site who’s products you are selling to put conversion code on the “thankyou page” on their website, they will be more than likely unwilling to do this but if they do you will be able to track exactly which keywords are converting and which are not. If you think a keyword is not performing, don’t keep it, pause it! you can always unpause it later if you think you were wrong. Keeping adding in any more keywords you think might be a good converter.
There you have it, there are a lot of things I have missed out in this post I know. But if I were going into super detail I would still be writing this post forever more. If the post is popular I will cover specific aspects in more detail. If you want any points expanding on in future posts then leave a comment or e-mail me
martin.davies@thewebconsumer.com and I will expand on points made. Please note, you will not make millions from this but it should be a nice earner, remember you can always setup new sites with different offers or optimise your site to rank organically for some of the terms you are bidding on so you don’t have to pay for them in adwords