This is the general outline of the system I follow …
- Research market trends to identify a micro-niche to target.
- Conduct initial keyword research to gauge demand and competition.
- Select one to three attractive CPA offers related to that niche (tap into my affiliate managers’ knowledge of what’s hot, what’s converting, and where the traffic is coming from), and research the offer across several CPA networks to identify a combination of the best payouts and best-converting landing pages (likely expecting to have to split-test this to find the highest EPC).
- Extend my keyword research. (The idea is to build a broad list first, hitting lateral keywords and testing these to identify my strongest and most profitable sub-niches, then to drive those words deep.)
- Write ads and place them on Yahoo for an initial test. If they do well enough there, then build out a silo site on my own URL and create landing pages to set up my AdWords campaigns for Google.
- Then? Set up my spreadsheets — and get busy … generating and testing ads and tracking clicks, conversions, bid prices, CPC, and EPC vigorously. The target is to hit and maintain a 50% gross margin.
- Adjust my bids according to what’s converting, while tweaking the bid prices by 30% increments in order to hone in on the sweet spot where I am landing my ads between positions 3 and 8 … all while driving more money to the winners while cutting out the the losers.
- Add more keywords and traffic sources.
- Refine my landing pages (through split-testing) and continue testing and tracking my ad groups. (If a particular keyword is converting well, set that up on its own URL and track it independently.) Considering adding a pop-under offer or bottom-up, enhance the incentive to submit, set up a traffic regenerator to rotate other related offers on the back-end, etc.
- Where appropriate — on my high-traffic sites — set up a lead-capture system and an auto-responder sequence to deliver value and roll out other affiliate offers at intervals. Run a one-time offer on my thank-you page and confirmation page (and test those as well).
- And throughout all this, the idea is to keep rolling out campaigns, rapidly, efficiently, testing and tweaking, dropping what isn’t performing, ramping up what is.
