Does anyone here concentrate on ONLY serps on for traffic ? me too until today......

[smingle]

Ok I have always concentrated on serps for my traffic in Google.

Yes it does take a lot longer and yes it doesn't always work, but I make a decent living from serps alone.

After a conversation with someone the weekend (he knows who he is ) it got me thinking about PPC vs SERPS etc and I decided today to have a little try with this in mind

£25 budget - 1 product and only a few [exact phrase] keywords

Now I have spent £6.39 so far and made £24.50 from sales since 11am this morning. My end goal is to try to make at least £100 from this £25 investment.

Ok not a huge amount, but it is a nice little start so far and my CPC is very low at the moment.

What did I do ? I just took a very popular product and researched it in the exact same way I would do if I was SEO'ing the website, build a nice landing page and hey presto here I am writing this thread.

Conclusion ? if you only concentrate on serps for your sites, then maybe it is time to diversify into some PPC and test the waters, if you start small then you don't have much to lose

Cheers

[Mogga]

So is that after reversals? (or did you pick a merchant which states its reversal rate?)

[Bud]

You been having a bad day Mogga? LOL

[Mogga]

Originally Posted by Bud You been having a bad day Mogga? LOL

Nah not really, just being a bit cynical. Someone has to be.

[Fiver_321]

I only do SEO and NEVER do PPC - make a good living - but get virtually ZERO google traffic either (presumeably because Im an affiliate).

[drivetowin]

ZERO google traffic has nothing to do with being an affiliate (though no doubt this thread will soon be full of people wailing 'Google hates affiliates')....oh well believe what you want....

[JayFCF]

Sorry to go off thread smingle but i do back driveintown.

I did use SERPS only and was an AFFILIATE and still ended up on the FIRST PAGE on google in the FINANCE industry!!!

I also tried Adwords and had the same effect.

£18 spent - £92 made.

profit for a few days work £74

[moredial]

I have only ever used natural results. Last year was the first time I started to get any 'consistent' Google traffic. True to form, I am still waiting to see an increase in turnover from the increased G traffic. G may be 80% of searches now, but that is still research rather than buying visitors if my profits are any indication. Peaks in income always match peaks in Yahoo traffic. MSN traffic is still too low for me to be able to assess its effect.

As I find MSN gives the best results for research - no sandboxing of relevant articles and little spam in top SERPs, my bets still stay with SEOing for Yahoo for income.

If I ever saw a marked increase in income from those click happy G visitors then I may consider PPC - but the fraud levels would need to be a lot lower and easier to reclaims costs for me to even think about it.

The other side of the coin is that I am too busy to be able to spend the time necessary to monitor a PPC campaign. Maybe if I did PPC rather than forums when work is slow ....

[user1635]

Originally Posted by Fiver_321 ZERO google traffic either (presumeably because Im an affiliate).

Could that be an excuse because your doing something(s) wrong, and aren't willing to change?

Nice one in your first forray into ppc smingle. I prefer optimizing adwords campaigns to writing good content any day, but maybe I'm just lazy

[tbp]

I used SEO alone for my first 10 months in Affiliate Marketing. I made a decision that when I started I was going to spend as little money as possible (as with a new family I didn't have much to spare ), so I relied solely on SEO.

It was hard going at first, but encouraged me to make my sites as optimised as I can, and to learn as much as possible about the way google works (and in real life its nothing like the SEO tutorials you read online lol). I think it helped me a lot, as it made me focus a lot more on creating good websites, with good content, and I ended up with about 90% of my domains at number 1 for their keywords.

It was a steep learning curve, and for the first 6 months I made nothing, but I kept at it and one I worked out a format that works sales wise, and the best way to get results in Google, the money started coming in.

I then used the money to start a PPC campaign, small at first, but have built it up and its doing very well, getting a minimum return of 8 x what I spend on a daily basis, and recently much more. I`ve used the same strategy for my landing pages as per my sites, and so the conversion rate is excellent. Get around 25% CTR for my google ad's, and then between a 60 - 70% conversion rate from the landing page.

I think starting off with PPC can make you lazy, its easy to earn a bit of money with PPC, and a lot of people stick to that when in reality they can be earning a lot more.

I think that starting off with no budget, and literally making money from nothing (apart from domain / hosting costs), gives you a good grounding which you can then build on with PPC to end up getting the best results.

Im sure there are people who don't agree, but for me I think it was the right way to go. I don't think of making nothing for the first 6 months as a waste of time, as I actually learnt a hell of a lot from it. The hardest thing though is not to give up! It is encouraging when it starts working out though, as if you can make money from nothing, then with some sensible spending you can go so much further. It also means that I don't waste money on PPC, and squeeze every penny I can out of my minimal spend

Even though I use PPC now as well, its not a replacement for SEO, the two work together, and I still put my best into optimising my sites for SEO. When you have a site at number 1 in the serps, and a good adwords position, you can cream off a large amount of traffic (especially in the niche markets I operate in).