Mini Sites and Landing Pages for Affiliate PPC are Dead
I’m always toying with the idea of trying my hand at PPC/CPA affiliate marketing. Never have time to get started, so just stay stuck in niche research/offer hunting mode. Plus quality score issues seem to keep making it tougher and tougher. I don’t have time to build a full blown 20 page destination site just to test an offer, do you? Chad just blogged this:
Mini Sites for PPC are dead – “So where I do I see the current/future status of PPC landing sites? All of the new offers that we have been trying this year are built around what I call full destination sites. Basically you can think of the standard mini site described above, but increase that about 10 times. Articles, interactive content, dynamic content, and video even are now on these sites. This is in addition to the actual landing pages of course (that content is not on the LP). I’m also talking real unique content, not scraped wikipedia junk. Ideally, I also like to have most of the site indexed on all 3 search engines before starting the PPC campaigns for good quality score.”
Chad makes some good points BUT… Do you guys agree???
Read the rest then come back to discuss it.
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#1 Vlad wrote on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008:
I don’t agree with this 100%. I think a better title for this would be “Mini Sites and Landing Pages for Affiliate PPC are Dead on the long run”
For offer testing they are perfect and will always be. You don’t need more than 1-2000 clicks to realize if an offer is good or not and usually the campaign won’t get slapped so fast.
After finding a good offer start a larger site and update it constantly.
I use a different adw account for testing so that my main account isn’t affected by the constant slaps:).
If you didn’t get enough clicks and got slapped try removing the slapped keywords and adding them again after some time(couple of hours)-usually works.
#2 Linda Buquet wrote on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008:
EXCELLENT points Vlad.
If I said mini sites & landing pages kinda sorta don’t work as well any more, maybe no one would have much of an opinion. Hoped if I said they are DEAD, I’d get some people to comment and counter. (Plus that wording was in the title of the blog I’m quoting.)
Your comments are exactly the type of info that I hoped this post would stimulate!
Thanks!
#3 Nate Nead wrote on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008:
But even if we just consider that the “long run” will be effected, it’s still not good for those of us doing it…I want a long run, sustainable market.
#4 Linda Buquet wrote on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008:
So true Nate!
One of the ideas I’ve been toying with for a long time, is building a comprehensive full site around a certain topic that is broad enough to cover lots of different offers, yet focused enough to satisfy quality issues with Google and targeted enough to give the consumer a good relevent url to help with CTR.
Example – sample url:
bestrates.com. Build out a site with subdomains like mortgage.bestrates.com. That section would be full of articles about how to find the best rates on mortgage loans. Then landing page is at: mortgage.bestrates.com/freequote.html Same thing with sections on free insurance quotes and can loans, etc.
Obviously that’s not the market I would target, just running by the basic concept. To me it seems if free financial quotes for example was a market you wanted to focus on then this would do a couple things.
It would be worth putting the energy into to build out all the content because it would also be designed to pull natural search traffic. Varied enough to accommodate a variety of offers, segmented enough to be somewhat targeted for quality score and consumer click-through.
Anyway, that’s similar to what I think I’ll do when I finally find time to go out and do affiliate marketing myself. Have some great domains that will work. Different market, more complex plan but that’s the gist of it.
Yes? No? Maybe???