Once you find profits within a particular market or affiliate program, you should start thinking about how to get the most money out of it. Many affiliates will see profits, think “Awesome,” and then go on looking for the next market to enter. There is nothing wrong with entering new markets (you should always be expanding your horizons), but why would you leave money on the table with affiliate programs that you know are profitable?

I received an email the other day, through my contact form, asking how to expand an affiliate marketing campaign. This individual admitted that they weren’t having trouble breaking even or making a profit, but that they couldn’t take their campaigns to the next level. Their biggest problem was that the long tail keywords didn’t deliver enough traffic. So, in this article, I will give you 17 different ways to increase your volume and profits on an affiliate marketing campaign.

1. Make keyword combinations – Even though you won’t get volume from each keyword, adding 100,000 new combinations to your account will almost always result in collective volume. Use a program like KeywordTransformer to easily create thousands of keyword permutations. You will probably need to ask an AdWords account rep to increase your account keyword limit before you can upload all those keywords.
2. Test lateral/related keywords – The most obvious keywords are what everyone else is bidding on. Think outside the box and brainstorm keywords that are not so obvious, but still closely related to your offer. Here is a great article on SuperAffiliateMindset about this very technique.
3. Promote related products and offers – This is most useful for physical products. If you find a market and/or merchant that are converting well and providing a healthy profit, promote more of their stuff. You will be able to greatly expand the number of keywords you are bidding on while sticking with a proven market/merchant.
4. Improve your ad CTRs – Doing so will allow you to get more clicks for the same price, which will either increase your volume or decrease your costs. Either way, this should help to increase profits. Here are a few ways to write better PPC ads.
5. Use your own domain name – Going direct-to-merchant is great for quickly testing markets, but once you find one that is successful, you must start using your own domain name. Doing so will help protect you from bidding wars, and will ensure that you ads are always served rather than being rotated with another marketer using the same URL.
6. Build a full website – Aside from meeting QualityScore guidelines, you can promote many different products within the same market and get traffic from free sources such as link referrals, search engines, and repeat visitors. If you aren’t convinced, have a look at Jeremy Palmer’s article about thin and fat affiliate sites.
7. Create SEO landing pages – If you notice that a few of your keywords are getting decent volume and decent conversions, but they have little or no competition in the natural search results, consider targeting them with SEO. This is much easier to do than you would think. You can either register a new domain name like “keyword-phrase.info,” or you can create a dedicated page on your existing URL that is specifically optimized for that keyword. Just make sure to get a few links with the keyword as the anchor text and you should rank for those terms in no time.
8. Don’t neglect the content network – Always give the AdWords content network a chance. Depending on the market, it has the potential to vastly outperform the search network. Clicks can be cheaper, quality control is less stringent, and volume is usually much greater.
9. Use other PPC search engines – I will admit that I focus 98% of my PPC marketing efforts on AdWords, but I always try out the other engines (YSM and AdCenter) before writing them off. Sometimes they work great and sometimes they don’t. In any case, they will give you access to more search volume and are worth trying out.
10. Buy traffic from unconventional sources – Once you know your estimated profit per visitor, you can experiment with buying traffic from other sources such as Text-Link-Ads, AdBrite, direct buys, etc. Because visitors from these sources won’t be specifically searching for what you are promoting, you will probably need to value them at a lower rate.
11. Collect email addresses – If you can think of other products that your target market would be interested in, you should definitely be collecting their email addresses. Offer a “free report” as an incentive for them to sign up and make sure you don’t kill you list by spamming it (give them good content along with the product recommendations). The opt-in box can be at the bottom or side of the page so that it doesn’t distract from the affiliate offer, and you can even forward a successful subscriber directly to what you were promoting in the first place.
12. Improve your conversion rates – Making more money per visitor than any of your competition is a sure way to expand your campaigns. Once you achieve this, you can afford to pay more per click than anyone else and command more of the available traffic. Here is an article I wrote about how to test and track your campaigns.
13. Compare multiple offers – If you visitors are searching for something generic, give them multiple solutions to their problem. Create a how-to guide or a review page that gives them a choice on which product to buy. Doing this is likely to increase your conversions because the page will have value and the visitor isn’t forced to take one action or leave.
14. Achieve higher commissions – Most affiliate programs have performance incentives. If they do not, ask your affiliate manager for a higher payout. As long as you have proven that you can make sales, you should not have a problem getting higher commissions. This will immediately impact your bottom line and will give you more expansion options over your competition.
15. Optimize your keywords – Don’t waste money on keywords that aren’t profitable and don’t short-change keywords that are very profitable. First, remove all of your keywords that have spent 1-2x the commission, or received 100-300 clicks, without getting a sale. Next, try increasing the bids on keywords with unusually high ROIs in an effort to get more volume. I wrote about tracking keywords with ClickBank but it can be applied to other promotions as well.
16. Target other countries and demographics – Some affiliate offers can only be promoted to a single country, and some are only applicable to a single country, and others have international appeal. Find out which countries are accepted (such as all English speaking countries) and market to them as well. I have one campaign where only 20% of the traffic comes from the United States, the rest comes from Canada, UK, and Australia. ClickBank products should almost always be promoted to all English speaking countries. Just make sure you track your clicks and remove countries that are not converting.
17. Be your own competition – Although this last point is against many PPC engines terms of service, you better believe some of your competitors are using it. Try creating a second PPC account, build a completely different website (with a different URL), and compete with yourself on the same keywords. Yes, you will get some of the same visitors (essentially paying for them twice), but you increase your chances of getting any given visitor and increase the chances that they complete the action through one of your pages. If Google calls, just tell them you are managing separate campaigns for separate clients

To come up with this list, I spent about 20 minutes doing a “brain dump” of every campaign expansion tactic I can remember using. I probably missed some of mine and I’m sure some of you have great techniques of your own. If you know of something that isn’t on the list, please add it as a comment

If you properly execute just a few of these 17 tips, there is no way you won’t increase your profits. The problem is that most people (including myself) are just too lazy to take the time required to really expand their campaigns. If you think about it though, it is extremely stupid to neglect this aspect of affiliate marketing because you will likely waste more time (and make less money) trying to find profits in markets that turn out to be losers.

In closing, as I mentioned in the beginning of the article, this post is a result of a question submitted by another person. If you have any questions related to any of the topics I have been covering (check the categories), please ask me in an email. I will usually answer your question personally and, if applicable, may turn it into a full blog post.