Which other industry gives you this much Freedom?

Lesson #12: Brand Leveraging

05. Jul 2007 | 8 Comments

What would you say if I told you there’s tens of thousands of Affiliate Programs out there that you can set up a campaign in Adwords for in 3 minutes & let it run, then come back 72 hours later & see if it’s profitable or not?

What if you could set up 30 of these mini campaigns?

I like to call this technique Brand Leveraging. It’s fairly easy & very straightforward, but there’s two condition’s that need to be met before you can start:

  1. The merchant must not have a trademark on their Domain Name / Brand Name registered with Google.
  2. The merchant can’t be bidding on their own brand terms (unless you want to fight them for it).

You can find heaps of good merchants to use for this on Commission Junction & Clixgalore.

Simply sign up to their affiliate program, start a new adgroup in Adwords & target the brand name whilst linking directly to their homepage (via your affiliate link of course). For example, lets say Earners Blog was the brand name, you’d bid on the keywords:

  1. earners blog
  2. earnersblog
  3. earnersblog.com
  4. www.earnersblog.com

Now write 3-4 compelling PPC ads & test for 72 hours. This will allow you to gauge the amount of traffic the brand terms get & will also allow you to split test the Creatives for the highest clickthrough rate. If you’re getting decent traffic then get rid of the 3 worst performing Creatives. This should also allow you to lower your bid fairly low (since you should have a decent quality score).

This technique allows you to leverage directly off people coming to the website purely on brand. This usually means they’ve either:

  1. Bought something from the site before
  2. Visited the site before
  3. Been told about the site from a friend

Either way I’ve got some very profitable & very very cheap campaigns running that really exploit this technique. I’ve found this technique works best on Shopping Cart style stores, since users will always tend to buy more than one product at a time.

Enjoy.

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8 Comments on "Lesson #12: Brand Leveraging"

Patung 06. Jul 2007, 2:45 am

Don’t most advertisers on CJ forbid you to bid on their names or variations of them?

chatmasta 06. Jul 2007, 3:58 am

I don’t understand how this will give you a high QS? If you’re putting your direct affiliate link in AdWords, I would think that would equate to a very LOW quality score.

Samuel 06. Jul 2007, 6:22 am

That’s right! This is very “project x”!

I don’t bother bidding on any keywords, unless it’s a brand name or a product name. It always bring in very targeted visitors, even though you can’t expect a lot of visitors.

A small number of targeted visitors is way better than lots of totally uninterested visitors, remember you’re paying for clicks.

If I were to bid on an trademarked term, it’s possible but adwords won’t allow me to use the keyword on my ad.

So I just add another alphabet to the keyword, another thing to add, you can have the trademark term on your subdomain or subfolder, adwords allow it.

Stuart 06. Jul 2007, 1:00 pm

Excellent comment Samuel, hit the nail right on the head. Having the trademarked term as a Subfolder works very very very well, that was going to be my next post ;)

Chatmasta, QS is based on the Relevance of your Ad to the keywords you’re budding on & also the landing page. So bidding on Brand terms are usually very cheap & very targeted.

freddy 07. Jul 2007, 3:39 am

but with CJ.com, the affiliate links usually have a base domain of something like: http://www.anrdoezrs.net, so Adwords woul have to show that domain as the Show link, even thoought you might be linking to buy.com

Customers are not inclined to click those links, or are they? or is there a way to get around that?

Samuel 10. Jul 2007, 5:44 am

Hey Stuart,

The trademarked term or product name on the subfolder works well because, most of us read from left to right! (Unless it’s olden Chinese words or olden Hebrew)

Now that we got a high quality score, we still have to write a solid pre-sell copy to get the visitor to buy or download, or take some action that pays us. (& benefits them)

Hey Freddy,

I strongly discourage direct linking, it may be a good way to research but not a long term strategy. You can simply cloak the link with your own domain or subdomain.

I’ve scheduled a blog post in 2 days time, showing you how to cloak without using any software. Oops, sorry for the blatant promotion of my blog ;)

Scott 10. Jul 2007, 6:30 am

Hey Stuart, or anyone who cares to answer.

I found an offer that looks like it could be very promising using this method. Like tons of cheap traffic, high converting offer, looks good.

But google isn’t allowing me to bid on the terms because they’re trademarked. Per the merchants TOS, bidding on the trademarked terms is fine. I’ve emailed google asking for an exception, but I’m wondering if this is a problem you run into often doing this type of promotion.

I’ve been reading this almost since you started it, still posting great stuff. Keep it up.

Stuart 10. Jul 2007, 10:37 am

Hey Scott I run into very similar problems all the time.

The key is to try out 10-20 merchants all at once then slowly ween out the ones that aren’t working or are giving you trouble.

I’ve never really been able to get around the trademark issue though. I’ve found that bidding on their competitors brand terms with a nice PPC Message can work wonders too in this case :)

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