Capturing Affiliate Leads with Pay Per Click Advertising

I’m a cheapskate so I hate the thought of spending money on traffic for a one-time shot of making money. I decided to make my first foray into pay per click advertising with a landing page whose goal was to attract newsletter subscribers rather than just make one sale. The idea is that my initial PPC investment buys subscribers I can promote products to on a recurring basis over time.

Pay Per Click Setup
Since the concept of Affiliate Whispers is to learn and apply methods that other successful marketers use I leveraged the following resources when building a small pay per click campaign:

• Super Affiliate Accelerator @ SuperAffiliateMindset.com
• Uber Affiliate Marketing Guide @ Uber Affiliate
• Super Affiliates Guide to PPC Marketing @ ZacJohnson.com
• Pay Per Click Ad Writing Tips @ DerekBeau.com

Thanks to those guys for putting together the great resources! Better yet they’re all free, with the exception of Super Affiliate Accelerator which I think is well worth the cost.

Landing Page
A simple Wordpress installation was perfect for hosting my landing page, associated articles, contact page, privacy policy, and about page. A free theme from Internet Marketing With Blogs gave me a great foundation for a sales page, I used Aweber to place a newsletter signup form above the fold and also at the end of the sales page.

I wrote my own copy, trying to take as many lessons as I could from CopyBlogger so we’ll see how that goes. Two theme appropriate images were used to help pull their eyes down the page and I stuck the first lead capture form close to the first image to help draw their eyes to it. One thing I debated was using eLance to create the articles for the site but ended up spending a few nights writing those myself as well.

Quality Score
Apparently the articles all inter-linked with the contact page, privacy policy, and about page did the trick for quality score. Thanks to Zac I knew how to check my quality score once I got my campaign loaded up and it was a green “Great”.

Domain Name
I’m not sure how great my domain name choice was. Since I’m not promoting a product on the sales page but rather an “end result” I tried to go with a name that would make people visualize that end goal. The thought is they’ll sign up for the newsletter with the intent of reaching that goal. It’s only a two word domain name with no dashes so it’s kind of brandable, if that’s a word.

The Offer
Who’s going to sign up for a newsletter without a little prompting right? I offer a niche specific free report for anyone that signs up. I also offer to point them to a bonus of a free product trial upon signup. I tried to work in some potential conversions right off the bat. Once they’ve confirmed their subscription they get access to the free report which is also a teaser for a Clickbank product and the free trial offers which are leads from Never Blue Ads.

Campaign Reflections
I just kicked off my Adwords campaign so we’ll see what my CTR, minimum bid, and newsletter signups turn out to be. Perhaps I tried to do too much for my first attempt at PPC marketing, I could have just tried Google Cash to get the hang of it, but Amit makes a good point when he discusses the research and patience required for a successful campaign.

It took me about two weeks of evenings after my day job to get the research done and the domain, articles, sales page, auto-responder, offers, and Adwords campaign setup. We’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, I learned a lot just going through the steps. I probably have more questions now than when I started; all part of the learning process.

Paying for Leads
As I setup my keyword bids, one thing I thought about was how it’s too bad you have to pay to learn. That’s one thing that I like about Jim Cockrum’s Silent Sales Machine, the prospect pays you (by buying something on eBay) to become a lead vs. you paying for a chance to market to them like with Adwords.

I guess one major thing that separates Adwords lead generation from eBay lead generation is the much larger volume that Adwords can drive, in addition to the fact you actually need to have your own product in order to generate the lead on eBay. We’ll see how my first test of PPC lead generation goes, stay tuned.