David Fiske A subtle blend of affiliate marketing and web development

Okay, I need some PPC help!
 
I have bought a couple of books (physical and ebooks) to help me turn my campaigns around. Whilst they contain some useful information, they are lacking on the finer points, neglecting to walk through a sample campaign.

Surely if Mr XYZ wanted to sell more ebooks, he would disect an actual campaign? Perhaps that's true in fantasy land!

Anyway, here's a fictitious campaign I have set up. The names I've used are made up and do not represent a real company.

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I link to a shop called Odds and Ends and they sell bits and bobs! Firstly, if I used PPC to drive traffic to Odds and Ends, I would get a lower return as the chances are that the visitor has a specific product in mind.

So I drill down. I find a Purple Widget and set about promoting that.

I create an advert that says:



PROBLEM ONE

How should a landing page look? Gone are the days (nearly) where you can link direct to the retailer's product page. So what do I have to put on the landing page? Does it need to be colourful and fancy, or should I just put one link on there deep linking to the Purple Widgets page?

PROBLEM TWO

This is the area I am really struggling on and would appreciate any advice on.

Assume each widget earns me £5 in commission. To begin with, I would be very naive to assume a conversion rate over 5% so my maximum CPC would be £0.25. Let's also assume bidding is fierce on the term "widget", so much so that the top bid is around £2.

Now from what I have learned so far, bidding above £2 is extremely risky and will probably cost me more than I could make back.

So, I have to start looking for long tail keywords, these being the three+ word phrases that are being searched for.

Assume (again) widgets are popular amongst university students. I could bid for the keyword "purple widget university student". however, that gets very low traffic and because it's got the word "widget" in there, other higher paid adverts appear.

So, ultimately, it's a case of bidding very high and shooting myself in the foot or bidding very low but getting extremely low, if any traffic.

Is there a happy middle ground?

Creating ads is easy. I can do that. Creating landing pages is okay. I can do that but I have a tendency to make them look too fancy! Finding the keywords is where I am struggling. The time I use one to two word phrases, I lose £100. The time I use 3+ words, I got 6 impressions over 4 days, with no clicks.

As I said above, I would be grateful if any PPC pros could suggest a few tips on what I can do to get that happy middle ground.

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