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This post is to show the benefits of marketing based on hot trends. It is not intended to be a step-by-step, all-inclusive tutorial for PPC marketing. It shows what is possible when following trends, but does not go too deep into the principles of ppc affiliate marketing.

Usually when I’m doing PPC affiliate marketing, I look for offers and markets that have the potential to be long term. It is sometimes hard to dedicate a lot of time building a website, optimizing for the ppc engines, getting bid prices down, finding converting keywords, etc when you don’t know if it will even generate enough income to justify the effort. There are times, however, when it is good to set up a quick PPC campaign to take advantage of hot trends being covered furiously on the internet, radio, television, print, and everywhere else.

Having made a few thousand dollars in 2005 buying up Xbox 360 consoles and selling them on eBay, I had planned on doing the same for Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii. As their launch dates approached (11/17/06 and 11/19/06 respectively), it became obvious that everyone else was planning for the same. This is when I decided to make some cash from the publicity rather than from the actual units themselves. (In hindsight, this proved to be a very good decision. The after market prices never went as high as the Xbox 360 did and the prices of the PS3 actually plummeted).

Step One: Identify An Upcoming, Hot Market

To make money with this method, you first need to identify an upcoming market. If you get in too late, the market will be too saturated for you to even break into. If you get in early, however, like I did with this market (started in early October 2006), you should be able to beat a lot of other people to market and get yourself established (i.e. Google AdWords will send you traffic).

Once you have identified a market and have determined that the climax is still far enough in the future, you will know that your chances of buying mass traffic are high. Now you need to make sure you can monetize that traffic.

Step Two: Determine the Best Way to Monetize

Once you are pretty certain you can get the traffic, you need to find out if you can even make enough money from that traffic. A lot of this will come down to the live testing, but in the planning stage, you should just check out different affiliate offers and commission options. For the PS3, a simple email-submit offer worked the best. I did test different offers such as commission based sales and longer lead forms (with higher payouts), but the people searching were so hyped up and impulsive that they had very short attention spans.

Step Three: Develop a Landing Page and PPC Campaign

For a promotion with such a short life, you might not want to spend too much time on the landing page. For me, I created a content-rich placeholder page and then swapped it with a simple iFramed landing page once it was approved for Google’s Content Network. This probably isn’t a good idea for a long term promotion, but with such a short term outlook, I was hoping to avoid a second review. You could also look into cloaking your landing page so that Google will see the content page while you send visitors “directly” to the offer.

When setting up the PPC campaign, I wanted to get as much traffic as possible from whatever keywords I could. I didn’t have time to be concerned about what keywords would convert and what keywords wouldn’t, and I actually believe that due to the nature of the offer, as long as the keywords were related, they didn’t make much difference. The structure for my AdWords campaign was about 10 targeted ad groups for each console and then about 10 catchall ad groups for each console.

Step Four: Get the Traffic and Test Offers

With the AdWords campaign turned on and getting traffic, you can start tweaking and testing. I started my bids out relatively high at 11 cents with the intention of dropping them to about 6 cents before the console launches. There was so much media coverage about these two gaming consoles that it was nearly impossible to not get a ton of traffic. I probably got less than 1% of the total volume in the market, but it was more than enough for me to make a nice profit.

As for testing offers, you should try different offers as well as different affiliate networks. I started out using some offers from NeverblueAds, but through testing about 4 other networks, came to a winner with Copeac.

Step Five: Watch the Money Roll In

If you did everything correctly, and got a little lucky, you should be getting an avalanche of traffic and converting it like crazy (due to the hype). Enjoy it while it lasts because it won’t be very long term.

Here is a look at my stats with Copeac, starting when the volume kicked in (I don’t know why it didn’t record any clicks on the first day) and ending with the end of the month. Average CPC costs with Google AdWords were about 4.5 cents per click for a nice-sized, mid-November bonus

(Note: since I was sending the traffic directly to the landing page via an iFrame, the clicks reported by Copeac were almost equal to the total amount of clicks that I paid for)

If you have had similar success with hot trends or just have something to say about this post (good or bad), please leave a comment. I would love to hear your thoughts.