Amazon, Inc. has been using ClickRiver PPC contextual advertising for their search results since 2006.  Thus far it has been a big hit, offering a high ROI to advertisers when compared to Google Adsense and Yahoo Publisher Network.

ClickRiver Pay per Click ads will be offered to Publishers on a limited basis until testing is completed.  Publishers looking for a new way to drive income should consider these new targeted contextual ads.

Affiliates who rely on Pay per Click campaigns to drive their revenues must be dedicated to the products/services they are selling.  Pay per Click can be a dangerous game if proper research and testing isn’t accomplished.  If you go into a PPC campaign with no prior thought, get ready to watch the money fly out of out pocket while not a single person who clicks buys your Affiliate product or service.

Researching the company that you will use PPC for will tell you whether or not it will be a profitable venture.  The most attractive companies are niche companies whose industry or products sees little competition on the Internet.  Once you have found the Affiliate program that you will run a PPC campaign for, you must create a landing page that offers an incredible pre-sell followed by links only leading to the company’s website.

Once you have your webpage up and running you need to commence your research of keyterms.  Develop a list using long tail keywords, it should be long, so don’t stop until you can not think of anything else.  There are a number of tools that are worthwhile for doing keyword research, but I have always enjoyed using the Keyword Research Tool at SEOBook.com.

Determine bid prices, your daily limit and start inputting your keyterms.  Next you will need to test the ads themselves.  A/B tests work the best in my opinion.  Test until you find the optimal conversion rate combined with click through rate and you will have your campaign set up.  This is a lot of hard work and it needs to be repeated throughout the entire campaign, but after this work is done you will reap the benefits.

1. Yahoo/Overture
2. Google Adwords
3. Business.com
4. Microsoft Adcenter
5. Ask.com

In the Business Tech section of CNN there is a very interesting article discussing the lucrative business of buying and selling domain names. In the article they interviewed a couple of guys who buy valuable domain names and monetize them using Pay per Click ads.

In the article they claim that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to buying and selling domain names. I do agree that we have really only seen the early adopters participating in buying and selling of domain names. My advice is to get while the getting’s good.

Head to Register.com for domain registration and Hosting

Feedback for http://affiliates.onecall.com is the following:

A. Are the features and benefits of the program clearly defined?

The basics are defined, but I would like to see something on the tools/coupons/support for affiliate use. How do you produce reports for affiliates? For the most part all I see is Features and very few benefits. Benefits sell … add more.

B. Is the editorial content persuasive but not over the top?

I like it, not too corny, good presell.

C. Is the signup process clear and easy to complete?

Yes the signup process looks good, easy form to fill out.

D. What did we miss? What is annoying?

Explain how you plan on helping affiliates. You mention that you have over 10+ years experience, and you have a wide range of products, but you don’t tell the affiliate how that will help them. Also, just by looking at this page, I have no idea what you guys sell.

E. Is the program competitive?

To me it seems like it is fair. I don’t promote any electronics currently, but I know that your cookie life and commission level is better than many in the industry and you seem to have a nice product line.

Feedback for http://synergist.onecall.com

A. Is the site easy to use?

When I signed in the cursor was up near the very top of the page even though I was typing in the field, that can be confusing for some. Other than the site is easy to use.

B. Does it have the right tools and reports?

I like the way the reports are setup … you have a lot of good info in there, the one thing I would add that will make people happy is the number of impressions. Its nice that you can export them to Excel. I like all the linking tools for the affiliates, it is a nice selection and they are easy to set up.

C. How can we make it even more powerful?

Go out and get some quality affiliates. Offer them value, benefits, or a plan on how they will make money for themselves with your company.

D. Don’t get hung up on the lack of beauty in the reports section, but rather focus on the data presented and the usability of the data. (We are still working on style for reports).

I like the style of the reports, I like the information presented, it is useful and easy to read and to understand.

E. Does the product building process make sense, is the building tool useful and easy to use, do you understand how the palletes are suppose to work?

I like the palette. Once again, easy to setup and customize and just as easy to implement into an Affiliate’s site.

F. Suggestions for improvements.

Fix the load times, they are running real slow. In your Privacy Statement you don’t have any guidelines for Pay per Click. Even if you don’t plan on setting any restrictions you should still mention PPC guidelines. Otherwise with the exception of a few comments I made earlier, I really like your site and wish you success.

Sign up as an Affiliate of OneCall.com

I received a question from a commenter asking about Denver Fabric’s struggle in Google since making page updates 5 months ago.  Just to preface, we lost our two main keywords in Google rankings, each falling back from the 1st page to the 80th page.

Here is the question:

Just wanted to know how everything worked out with your company when you lost your positions with Google?

We are still struggling to regain our rankings, although, we think we may have found out where we went wrong with our SEO work and our ranking is slowly coming back.

About 75% of our business comes from Search Engines, so this was a very hard hit on us.  Our long tail and a few other important keywords have kept us alive on Google.  This is why developing long tail keywords is imparative if you are reliant on the search engines.

I feel it was a good thing that we fell because it showed how reliant we are on Google and that we need to expand our marketing efforts.  So since the fall 5 months ago we have begun an intensive Adwords campaign, Advertising on various related sites, started a blog, and improved our International Shipping platform, in addition to our successful affiliate program on Share a Sale.  In the very near future we are going to roll out a new structured site, complete with a new shopping cart.

Even though our main two terms fell, because we were able to diversify the rest of our marketing campaign we were able to stop the bleeding immediately and we are posting on par sales figures for the year to date.   Our Adwords campaign has been successful utilizing targeted keywords and Advertising campaign has helped us learn of new potential niches within the fabric industry.  Our blog, Material Issues has been a hit since day one and just saw its 1st day with over 1000 uniques last Thursday.  The Web offers countless ways to promote your business, so my advice is not to put it all your eggs in one basket.  Using many channels to market your business/product allows you to take risks as a business without worrying if one change will crumble your company.