As affiliate marketers it’s always fun to see big numbers. A lot of us use PPC and PPC can produce tremendous results in a short amount of time. My question to you is: Are You Overlooking Organic SEO as a revenue stream.
About 2 years ago I had the idea of creating a rather complex coupons & deals website to push organic traffic into merchant based affiliate programs. Such programs as you would find on Commission Junction, Linkshare & Shareasale. After a dispute with my developer and deciding to focus more on PPC to CPA type offers, I gave up on the project. We had loaded the site with a decent amount of content and since that day it’s just been siiting dormant on the web. Every month I get a check from CJ or Linkshare and don’t even know what it’s for. I log into my accounts to find that this dormant site is generating sales. All of my development costs that were basically wasted were paid back to me in strangling commissions. Pretty amazing if you ask me.
There are so many great tools out there like PHPbay, BB Wolfes WFReview Plugin etc that can help you build content rich sites in minutes. It may be worth your time to cast your net out there and create some sites that will pull in a stream of commissions without much work or expense.
Dormant site that helps you make money? Nothing can beat that.
Always surprises me how few webmasters on WF seem to do organic stuff. It’s far more stable then PPC and it means you have assets you can sell at any point.
I think the best plan is to get some stable organic earners up working a couple of days on them per week and then directly fund your campaigns using the revenue.
@Xentech – Good plan, I’m actually planning on building more organic properties. Having money rolling in without the cost of PPC is a beautiful thing. It also diversifies you so that if you lose some of your killer PPC campaigns, at least you still have monies coming in.
@Xentech – SEO is not more stable than PPC by a long shot. You have even less control. Google can decide they want to ban your site (even because of someone a competitor did to sabatoge you) and you are gone from the serps. All that hard work is down the drain.
If google slaps a ppc campaign you make another, if they shut down your account you get a new CC and make another.
@Wayne – Totally agreed. There is always going to be more money in PPC and you have much more flexibility with it. Always good to diversify though and have multiple streams of revenue. I love seeing a check here and there for doing nothing.
finally an affiliate talking about good old product sites. Yes there is still money to be made with out the PPC hassles.
Are program is in linkshare and pays out up to $35 cpa on a min $5 phone card purchase.