SEO or PPC

[Silverfern]

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Hi

what are peoples opinion on:

PPC- Is this the only way to make money from AM

SEO- Is it nearly impossible to get highly ranked on search engines?

thanks alot

[drivetowin]

No - you can make money from SEO
No - it's not impossible, just difficult and unpredictable

[Brains]

Hi

I agree with KBUDDEN

PPC - can be expensive if in a competitive market

SEO - takes hard work but it does pay off if you get it right.

BRAINS

[charlton]

I think an ambitious affiliate should consider both.

PPC is instant, seo takes a lot of time, effort and learning. (as does ppc to get right but at least you can learn while testing)

I do ppc for instant revenue and am working on seo in the background.

I believe in working smarter not harder. If I am making £1 per click and have to spend £0.10 to get those clicks then thats great.

If you know what works on ppc you can then focus on seo for those words, that is what I am doing next.

I have a feeling that ppc ads are just as likely, if not more likely to get clicked on that the organic search results. That is why most merchants use adwords even if they have the no1 position.

For ppc to work you have to think laterally and be creative. Bidding on staight generic terms will be very expensive.

[drivetowin]

Charlton

Absolutely agree - its well worth doing both - and I think most succesful affiliates do - though the percentage of each varies from affiliate to affiliate.

Stats from a Google seminar about a year ago were that the clicks were roughly 50/50 between natural search and ppc for any given term.

[Silverfern]

Hi

Thanks all,

I've been reading adbout the google adwords campaign, and cant really understand the daily budget, if you have set your cost per click to £0.04 and your daily budget to £1.00, does that mean you can only recieve a few vistors to clickthrough a day?

Also other than google is there anywhere else that offers ppc?

thanks

[morleymouse]

mirago
oveture
espotting

are the major ones, providing paid listings to aol, wandoo, yahoo etc

yep if you set your max click to 10p and daily budget for that campaign to £10 10 clicks is the max you should receive in a day.

but both are easily changeable.

got to say most of my sales are via seo though, but thats only because I dont have the money to throw at PPC to perfect it and get a great return. given more money and time id probably move over to PPC as seo can change from day to day as search engines roll about

[Silverfern]

Hi morleymouse,

My concern is spending money on ppc, i'd love to be able to have a go at this just trying to get good search engine rankings, do you do all your AM without ppc and do well from it?

Are we talking hundreds of pounds a day then if you use ppc?

Cheers

[morleymouse]

if i remember right, which, on a sunday night is unlikely, some big ppc people on here spend upwards of £70k a month on PPC. personally, never even seen £70k

your budget depends on what you have really, if you start small and see that your making 200% return, then it makes sense to up the budget.

i have sucess full ppc stuff and crap ppc stuff, unfortunatelly owt im good with at ppc ends quicky, eg the bclub offer on buy.at recently, i loved that, but it was gone too quick compared with what i spent to what i made, i was very happy, shame I cant do that well with every campaign i run, with me very hit and miss.

you never know though you might just be lucky / good at ppc! best of luck with it

[Silverfern]

with seo it just looks incredibly daunting when searches reveal so many millions of results, is a good start having lots of links to sites with good rankings?

Cheers

[morleymouse]

seo isnt too tricky as long as you dont target keywords everyones after.

quick example at 'work' (the other job) i got their site to number one out of 104,000,000 results in about a month. granted no money at all can be made from this positon but it just shows that because nobody else was really gunning for it, it was easy pickings.

its all about getting keywors i nthe page title, keywords in the body of the page and getting links back to the page.

links from your site to other sites only dilute your page's worth, so less links is better, but if you have no links your classed as a PR hog, and get penalised.

so you need links out, but not too many, so try to get them to high PR sites, but try and get them recipricated.

get your keywords mentioned at least twice in your page title, and dont dilute them too much with crap words like "and" "the" "a" "other" etc

mention the keywors in the body of the page lots, but not too much or you get penalised for that as well

told you it was easy...

[Silverfern]

yeah sounds like a doodle i'll retire in a couple of years

Thanks for the advice, it's really appreciated, i've been wanting to give this a go for ages, need to find some spare time and try not to lose my marbles staring at a screen for hours on end!!!

[Matt Seigneur]

hi silverfern - may i chip in and ask if anyone has a free ppc quickstart guide?

i've been getting superb results from seo but very concerned about algo shifts lately so i'm taking a more direct marketing approach - ie. newsletters, etc to reduce reliance on google/SE's...

SEO is time consuming but well worth it, I think if you just build pages that people will be interested in reading then the keywords will naturally be in there as well, and it doesn't hurt to sprinkle those keywords in h1, h2, h3, tags as well!

Also with keywords try to use different 'versions' like for example, swimming, swim, swam, etc
PC, computer, personal computer, etc
I think thats called keyword stemming??!?

Link to internal pages as well (blabla.com/bla.html) not just the homepage (blabla.com)..

I think a newsletter would be a good idea mainly to keep in contact with potential customers and existing customers depending on your niche and if you are interested in it! Don't forget word of mouth -they can pass your ezine/newsletter to other people too - so again reduces reliance on the SE's!