Even though testing many different merchants can be a quick and easy way to uncover profits in affiliate marketing, there are times when you can’t break into a market without building a landing site. It could be because the merchant is already dominating all keywords, because there are too many other affiliates with ads to the same display URL, or simply because the merchant does not allow you to send PPC traffic directly to their website. In most cases, building a quick landing site can solve all of your problems, but how do you increase your chances of success and avoid wasting time on duds?

Searching The CJ Marketplace

One method that I frequently use is to simply browse CommissionJunction for top earning merchants. This takes advantage of the thought that if one or more affiliates are making a lot of money with a merchant, you can too. The best way I have found to accomplish this is:

  1. Log-in to your CJ.com account
  2. Click the “Get Links” tab
  3. Press “Find” to execute a blank search
  4. Click “Network Earnings” to sort the list
  5. Scroll down until you get past all “New” merchants

What this does is give you a list of all the top performing merchants in the CJ marketplace. But we shouldn’t necessarily be looking for merchants, we should be looking for markets. As you scan through all of the top performing merchants (the ones with full or mostly full green bars), process them in your head to recognize the markets.

Once you have found a high performance merchant in what seems to be a good market, perform a custom search for related merchants only. Take a look at how many different merchants there are, what the overall network earnings are, and how professional each of them seems to be. You are going to use a handful of them to build your affiliate website.

Building The Site

Before starting work on the actual website, think about how you want to attack this market. Think about the types of products available, the differences between merchants, the keywords people are searching for, and the competition you will be facing.

Because there are so many different ways to promote affiliate programs, instead of trying to cover them all (I couldn’t possibly), I will just tell you about a website that I built a couple days ago.

I started out by getting the idea just as I described above. The next step was to register a domain name. I wasn’t looking so much for a brandable name here, just a name that sounded trustworthy. For example, something like KitchenAppliancesGuide.com or KitchenAppliancesReview.com would work just fine (the real website is not about kitchen appliances).

The next step was to sketch a planned layout for promoting the offers. I wanted to feature and compare 5 or 6 different stores, with reviews for each of them, along with certain products that match the user’s search query. After sketching a rough layout, I simply borrowed a design from one of my other affiliate sites (modifying it slightly) and put the content together. I also copied some of my basic privacy policy, terms of use, disclaimer, contact us, and about us pages over from other sites that I have out there.

The only thing left to do at this point was build some keyword lists and put together the PPC campaign. I haven’t put a lot of work into this yet because I am still testing the market out. From start to finish, it took me about 2 hours to find the niche, build the site, create some simple content, and put up a few ad groups.

After I collect data from the PPC campaign, I will continue to build it to increase profits. The great thing about this is that I am getting 8 cent clicks in a market that has $10-$20 average commissions, and I think it has a lot to do with the landing site.

Give Physical Products A Try

If you’re having trouble promoting the highly competitive lead-gen offers in smaller CPA affiliate networks, you should really give ComissionJunction a try. I’ve heard many people talk about how much they dislike the network, but I have not had any problems at all since I began working with them. The major benefit of CJ is that there is such a huge range of merchants, and each of them has a massive range of products for you to promote.

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