I am in the process of starting a new affiliate website. I stumbled over this niche while doing PPC and found one competitor who owns an entire network of websites in that niche. This guy has done a phenomenal job in regards to SEO and he dominates the ad rankings on Google.com with Google Adwords. For me this is a clear indicator that he must be working very profitable in this niche. An initial PPC test showed me that I have to put in extra efforts to get even a small share of this traffic. So, I might leave PPC traffic out for a little bit, but promote my website via SEO first. That gives me time to test and to improve the site + workout a killer landing page that I can use for PPC traffic. I am also using my in-house keyword tracking solution. This little script provides me with keywords people have searched for and clicked through to my website. This will be helpful in building PPC keyword lists as well.
For the PPC traffic I will build out the site a little more first to build a good foundation for quality score. I will then do research on keywords and design a plan of attack. Link building will be outsourced initially so that I can concentrate on the other pieces. The payout per lead for this product is above $20.00 and there are several products from different merchants available so that I have redundancy and can experiment with the different products. I emailed my affiliate manager at a certain network hoping to get some insight on which product converts best.
I am honest, I am following the leader a little bit – not by copying his website or content, but I use his websites as a guide to build out my own. He must have done a lot of testing in my opinion. I am not making a blunt copy because that recipe might give me short-term success, but in the long run it will not be the best way to do it. A copycat will never be number one and will always be a step behind. A copycat might get a call from the merchant or affiliate manager to stop copying other people’s work. It’s not my goal to be running behind or to do the work twice. I think this niche is large enough for a couple more players and therefore I want to position myself as such.
I don’t know how fast this will turn a profit. Outsourcing SEO work is expensive and I will be down several hundreds of $$$ first. I also expect to lose quite some dough on PPC marketing first. No risk, no fun, eh?!
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