Improve your PPC campaigns
Here’s a quick video for anyone that wants a few hints on how to improve a PPC campaign.
Mostly common sense but well worth the minute and a half it takes to watch. All the tips can be applied to travel industry affiliate marketing. One extra tip – get a cashback credit card to give yourself an extra 1% margin and help with cashflow.
Google UK keyword checker
How to research keywords from Google.co.uk
Useful for helping you decide what domain to register.
This is something you really should do when looking for domain names to register and also to give you the best chance of search engine success to decide what titles to give the web pages / blog articles you publish. It is also interesting to have a look at all the related words to what you have put in. To give you an example, I was researching cruise keywords recently because I think there is a lot of online growth in that sector still to come and noticed that as well as terms such as “cruise ships”, “cruise deals” that I was expecting there was also “cruising for guys”, “gay cruise” that hadn’t occured to me.
This tool is free and simple to use :
1) Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2) On the front page you can choose to tailor results to your country.
3) Whack in the keyword or phrase in the box as well as the word verification box and press get keyword ideas.
4) What you will see is the number of searches for the last full month and the average monthly number of searches from the rolling 12 month period.
I hope this was useful, please leave a comment if you have any tips or questions.
Another way to advertise your business
Reach over 1million Twitter users
Just came across a new way for companies to go viral.
Be-a-magpie is a German company that displays relevant ads on people’s twitter stream based on a keyword bidding system like Google’s adwords.
It’s certainly fast growing. On 18th November their reach was 400′000 people, now they are claiming over 1 million. For the twitterers doing the advertising they have got a nice website and it’s easy to sign up. You get paid by paypal which is pretty convenient.
My main concerns with this business are
- People don’t in general twitter to have advertising sent to them, so the risk of being seen as a spammer is very real. It will depend on how good be-a-magpie is at matching relevant ads. (they do let you pre-approve all ads and adjust the frequency of the ads). I just saw this on my twitter feed from someone using to market travel deals :
Twitter marketing really sucks! 4 months, 1,000 followers and $0 in sales. Do I feel lucky?’
- They are not affiliated to twitter so presumably twitter could act to shut the process down if they wanted. When I thought about it Twitter are probably quite happy for this to happen for now. Firstly they get to test if it’s possible to monetise their business but get the test done by a third party in case it all goes Pete Tong, secondly if the scheme did happen to work Twitter users using the scheme would probably be more active.
Why travel is so competitive for affiliate marketeers
Have a look at a generic, broad search term for holidays or flights in a major search engine and you will see that the vast majority of the time the top ranked results are not affiliates but major entities in the travel business. How then can a travel industry affiliate ever hope to make a success in the field and get a return on the time and money she or he spends?
First we need to look at why the field is so competitive.
The main reason is that some of the other entities you will be competing against will be owners of inventory. When I say competing this could be competing for keyword / search terms in the pay per click search arena or pure /natural search engine ranking.
Because most travel products are perishable (i.e. when a flight departs with empty seats there is zero revenue from those and no way to get revenue from that after departure), the owners of inventory can get into a mindset that almost all the revenue from a sale of otherwise unused products is “incremental”, a flight sold at £99, less tax and charges of £15 is £84 revenue compared to zero if the seat goes unsold.
So in a strange way the inventory owner might be persuaded to spend £83 on getting that seat sold = a large budget for PPC, SEO or any other marketing.
Compare that to the position of the affiliate. Even on a generous affiliate scheme where he or she might get 5% and would have to pay tax on that, the difference in budget is massive.
What can a travel industry affiliate do ?
The answer is to avoid the main and broad search terms and find a niche. The simple fact is that this area should be a lot less competitive so you have a chance of getting in the top 5 on a search engine and that means traffic and then the hard work begins of converting the traffic into sales. So much the better if you have knowledge of this niche and optimal if you have a passion for it.
