Affiliate Marketing Blog from UK Offer MediaWelcome to Kieron’s blog - the life and times of an Internet Marketeer

PPC versus SEO

In response to some of the comments from my last blog I thought I’d post some of the reasoning as to why I use PPC instead of SEO.

Well I guess the biggest reason has to be how instantaneous PPC can be. If I happen to come across an opportunity (lets say the Crazy Frog approx. 1 year ago) I can quite literally build a landing page/site and have a campaign up in a matter of minutes. From there I can also be making money a few minutes after that. If I were to do this via SEO then it would of course take much much longer. Maybe so long that the fad had died out or moved on *if* I manage to make it to the top of the SEO charts by then. And that is a big huge if.

PPC also gives me the flexibility to change campaigns on almost a minute by minute basis. For example one retailer I promote has just started having a special sale day every Saturday. I can find out what the sale is all about and write some very targeted sales copy to therefore attract some qualified visitors to my site.

In lots of ways PPC is a lot more stable too. Sure affiliates/merchants/agencies come and go and dabble their toes in the market you operate in which means you have to adjust the price. But in the long term these peaks and troughs flatten themselves out and you kind of know for some campaigns that if you spend X then you will earn Y profit. Btw it’s not *that* simple but you catch my drift. However if I was to leave my fate to the Google God then I’m quite sure I wouldn’t sleep at night. I know dozens of affiliates/webmasters who have literally had the ground taken away from them because Google changed its algorithm overnight and they have gone from position 1 on a keyword to position 1,000,001. This even applies to affiliates who have genuine good quality content driven sites that are very useful and used by hundreds of thousands of people. It seems nothing is sacred to Google and these webmasters have now bowed out and moved onto other ventures, admitting defeat.

So yes I do sleep better at night knowing that my ad campaigns are managed by me and not subject to a third party I have no control over. Although I do remember the early days when I really would lose sleep as I was spending close to $100 a day. Those were the good old days!

Finally, I actually do a bit with SEO but not a lot. The way I look at it is that if I apply some basic SEO rules to my sites then surely I’m bound to fall lucky and do well on some search engines for some search terms, right? It would seem so as a couple of my sites that I can’t advertise on Google (i.e. gambling related sites) actually do quite well. Similar with some other sites I have that are kinda 90% developed and sitting dormant. They are bringing in quite decent money.
But…I always look at the money generated from these sites as “bunce” as my old Scottish boss from my days at Duracell used to say. In other words, a bonus. I never ever rely on this income; instead I see it as a nice bonus to be enjoyed if/when I achieve it.

What I’m listening to right now: Big Daddy Kane - “It’s a Big Daddy Thing” Old School rap like they don’t make any more. Circa 1989.

Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 12:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.