With the recent launch of The Self Publishing System well underway, I now wanted to share with you a method I’m using right now to find affiliates to help me promote this product. After all its the affiliates that promote your work that you want to succeed the most! A win win.
When I first launched The Self Publishing System right off the bat I hit PPC(Pay Per Click) search networks, which I not only singled out Google Adwords with, oh no that would be discrimination after all. Do not forget about Yahoo and now Bing, both have great PPC platforms to use in your new promotion campaigns.
For obvious reasons using the PPC search network to try and match my product with somebody’s related search term is the first thing I always try. And occasionally I’ll also add a Content PPC Campaign into the mix too.
If you’re not too sure about what I mean by PPC Search Network and PPC Content Network, let me explain this first…
PPC Search And PPC Content Networks
SEARCH NETWORK:
The best way to explain this is to use a character named……. Tom. Tom is at home right now in front of his computer with an idea that he wants to find a book about self publishing. So he opens up Google at types in…
He then clicks on that “Search” button and gets these results …
Now I know this is not the best image quality you have ever seen im sure, all this is for is to have you look at the two circled red boxes above. The two red boxes represent the search PPC network, they are paid listings that display along side the regular un-paid listings when someone enters a keyword search into Google, and in this case that keyword search was “Self Publishing Book”.
If you use the PPC Search Network its your job to match peoples keyword phrases with your ads products topic. So in the case of Tom’s search, all the PPC ads in the red boxes are related products to his search term, and its that ads job to try and entice Tom to click on it rather than the regular Google listings, if he does, the owner of that ad is charged a cost per click(CPC).
CONTENT NETWORK:
Here we use Tom again, only this time we join him after he has already clicked on one of the listings in the previous search, and as the paid ads did not appeal to him he ended up clicking on one of the natural listings, #4 to be exact…
Again see that red box? Welcome to the PPC Content Network!!
These ads are displayed along side content within a website -> “Content Network”. So now Tom is reading an article about self publishing on ehow.com, he can still be presented with PPC ads, only this time they are content based.
Now if Tom decides to click on one of the ads in the red circle the owners still gets charged for the CPC, but not as much as the search network. Why?….
Because the PPC Search Network is more targeted and more likely to get you sales than the content network(in most cases).
For example in Tom’s first search he was looking for a book about self publishing in a buying state of mind, so the results he was presented with were all possible targets for him to spend money.
In the second search Tom was already at a site reading about self publishing, and may have already found what he was looking for. So the chances of him clicking on your content based PPC ads are greatly reduced.
So why even bother with the PPC Content Network?..
The Great Thing About The Content Network
Think of it like this….
The PPC Search Network is usually a lone searcher looking for information. Meaning 1.
So even though we are fond of Tom, we sometimes might want to reach a bigger audience with one ad using the content network…
The PPC Content Network is usually a hoard of people with related interests in the website they are on.
And remember the Content Network CPC is usually much lower than the Search Network, sometimes its considerable!
Just remember that in the content network people are usually not really looking for information as such, they are more on that site because they go there all the time, or it could even be a forum where they discuss everything about that sites topic. So when using the content network expect your Click Through Rate (which is the # of times your ad is displayed and clicked on) to be awful!
Don’t panic about numbers just yet, here is how to use the PPC Content Network to get Affiliates..
Content Ads And Affiliates
I’m not going to take you through all the stages of how to set up an account and get a PPC Content Campaign up and running, if you do need these steps you can visit this Google Adwords page and learn all about it.
What I am going to do is show you the steps im using right now to find affiliates using the Content Network. My main idea behind all of this is that I don’t think in most cases affiliates go into Google as Tom did, and enter a search term like “Affiliate products to promote”. Some do, but the majority of them in my eyes are already hanging out together at sites all over the web.
Affiliates are everywhere, but it can be a pain to try and get their attention in order for them to promote your stuff! Meaning that you would probably have to sign up and register with forums all over the place to try and get at least one post in front of them, only to have it drop out the forums latest discussions in a matter of minutes, that’s even if the forums will let you post offers at all?
This is where this content network method works so well. My method is to find related and popular affiliate forums and websites, set up a PPC content campaign, enter in all the URL’s to those sites, write a couple of ads, and then launch that campaign with 2 ads to all those sites at the same time.
STEP ONE:
Head over to Google and search for “affiliate forums” hit Search.
Open Notepad or any text editor and have it ready.
Now as im doing above copy and paste all the URL’s you can(the more the better) into your blank text editor file, then save it. Remember that you can repeat this process with other related search terms like…
“affiliate programs”
“affiliate marketing”
“affiliate opportunities”
“how to make money at home”
And so on.
STEP TWO:
Start a new PPC Content Campaign as you would any other, but when you get to add managed placements you want to select the manual option which allows you to paste in the URL’s you choose, and not Google’s choice.
Now paste in all the URL’s from your text editor into the “placements” box in your content campaign.
When you write your ad try and make it stand out as much as you can, conversational styles work better although I might have gone too far with these ads 
..
I have an affiliate page for The Self Publishing System set up here ->Affiliate Center , and this is what I use for the ads destination URL. So if a potential affiliate clicks on the ad they will be taken to the affiliate center where they can pick up banners and other promotional tools to help them sell it.
For a daily cost I will usually use about 15-25 dollars, and a cost per click will start off at around 25c. These numbers can be adjusted once you start to get stats back from your ads when they go live. But I very rarely hit the daily budget maximum because the CPC is allot lower than the search network, so even though you enter 25c a click you will probably see about 10-15c on average.
Check over all your options and once your are happy launch your PPC Content Campaign.
STEP THREE:
After a while depending on what PPC Content Network you use(Google/Yahoo/Bing) you will start to see some results returned. Check over the stats to see what site ads are working the best, and also check your impressions to see if they are all displaying your ads? If not you may need to increase your CPC a little, but not by much.
Its also a good idea to split test different types of ads over your campaign, try new headlines, offers, anything you feel will be relevant to what affiliates are looking for in an offer. Test and Track;)
Why Does This Work?
The reason I think this works so well is because you are targeting a group of people on a site with your related offer, which means that the affiliates are able to see your offer from the site they are already on rather than have to search by themselves for one.
Also having an affiliate center set up with banners and promotional tools makes it so much easier for them to get started. They just click your ad to be taken to a page full of tools they can use to promote your product instantly, they hardly have to do a thing.
And last of all, if they start to promote your products and make sales they may go back to those forums and let others know too, which in turn could net you a few more affiliate via word of mouth.
Content Is King
Remember what I said in the beginning? You don’t have to just use Google, give Yahoo and Bing a try to see how their content networks differ from Google, you might be surprised?
You can still use the content network to try and sell a product yourself, if not only for the cheap CPC charges alone, but also because you know your offer is floating in front of possible buyers, if you pick your sites well this can be a goldmine of potential too.
This has been a long post, but I hope I got this method across without any problems. If you do have any questions let me know and i’ll be glad to answer them for you.
Good Luck!
Tags: affiliate marketing, affiliate offer, affiliate programs, find affiliates, how to find affiliates, product promotion
