The Super Affiliate’s Guide to Dating PPC Marketing
The overall response and viral marketing of my “Super Affiliate’s Guide to ppc Marketing” has been amazing. The post itself has almost 100 comments, which blows away any other post on this blog. Not to mention my RSS feed is hovering around the 1000 mark. I knew the market was hungry for some new information to get ideas and activity flowing and I’m honored to have heard back from so many of you that have been inspired. Thank you to all who have linked back to the guide and I look forward to hearing back from many more of you. Some might think I’m insane for providing advice and direct campaign information on what I’m working on, but honestly, I’m here to help YOU out and as saturated as a market is, there is always money to be made. And with that, I now bring you the next installment in “The Super Affiliate Guide”, which will focus on promoting dating offers through PPC Marketing. (UPDATE: Promote your ppc campaigns through MSN AdCenter & Receive $75 in Free Clicks. Click here for my latest chapter in the Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing.)
Now that I have shown you how to setup a new campaign and promote your offers through Google Adwords, let’s see if we can get some started. I’m not a master in the ppc dating field, but with minimal testing and time, I have been able to pull profit margins around 50-70% on a few offers. Once again, we will focus on using NeverBlueAds since the original guide did the same, not to mention NeverBlueAds now has over 30 different “dating” related offers to test with.
General Dating Campaigns
You can login to NeverBlueAds and grab a nice well known dating offer such as American Singles, Mate1 or True. All three of these campaigns are high “Network Earnings” offers and all pay a decent amount per signup. This simply means they are performing well across the board for all affiliates. I like to refer to these three campaigns as “General Traffic”. They are all industry leaders in the dating market, but still winners for affiliates on making money. You can do a lot of PPC testing with these campaigns because they are broad and appeal to all audiences. Try testing a lot of keywords with low ppc amounts and track your traffic and conversions, weed out bad terms for conversions and traffic.
Targeted Dating Campaigns
The “General Dating” campaigns will most likely be the most saturated, not only because they have been around the longest, but also because they can usually afford to pay more per signup and they have a lot of in-house promotions across the web. If you are already focusing on the general campaigns or have done some testing, you may want to start some targeted campaigns which are less saturated and will likely convert MUCH HIGHER than others. Three examples of “Targeted Dating” campaigns are BlackSingles, ChristianMingle and BBW Personals Plus. All of these campaigns are also high earners and paying well per signup. Just by looking at their names you can tell what they are targeted to.
Now that we have taken a look at the different types of dating campaigns available to promote, let’s figure out how to make the most out of our search campaigns and ad dollars. As you already know, the dating market is incredibly competitive and just as saturated as almost any other niche. Here’s a closer look at just how competitive “general dating keywords” are.
The chart above (based of Google Adwords Search), shows the most searched (average) for keywords relating to “DATING“. While “dating” isn’t maxed out to the full bar for “search volume”, it’s “Advertiser Competition” is. Every one of the top seven keywords relating to “DATING” is maxed out on “Advertiser Competition”. The majority of these advertisers are the big media companies, the dating network themselves and the Super Super Affiliates who have managed to tweak their margins enough to make it to the top.
As much fun as competition is, not all of us have the ad dollars or time to try and compete for these big terms. The best part of it is, WE DON’T HAVE TO! The chart below is another report I pulled, but this time it’s based on the “Targeted Dating” campaigns that I mentioned above. I did a general search for “big beautiful women dating” to promote BBW Personals Plus, a search on “christian dating” to promote ChristianMingle and finally “african american dating” for BlackSingles.
Let’s go even a step further and see what type of rates and click volume estimates the high paying “general keywords” advertisers are getting.
With a maximum click of $10.00 per click to show all figures, averages for these “generic” dating keyword range from $1.74 to $2.40 per click for a TOP 3 position. You don’t need a top three position to make money and you don’t receive anymore or less for a lead if someone is searching for “dating” or “dating photos of people in new york“. Take a guess at which of the two will cost less! Bid on long tail keywords and the non generic keywords and you will make money. During my testing with a few dating campaigns, I was able to have some nice margins and traffic with only paying around .10 per click. I would prefer to focus on getting a ton of low cost click offers and having wider margins, then spending a ton per click and smaller margins. You simply need to spend more time on keywords and test tracking. Try focusing on long tail keywords. During my testing, I was paying pennies per click, yet the traffic was consistently converting at better than 10%. If you are being paid $3.00 per lead, buying clicks for .10 each and converting at 10%, you’re really earning .20 on top of every .10 you spend. It’s all a numbers game. Remember: You are paid the same price no matter the lead, so don’t stress over obtaining high cost / quality keywords!
If you haven’t already, apply for NeverBlueAds through this blog and you’re application should be approved without a problem and very quickly. To entice the offer even more, send me your affiliate id and I’ll send you a free t-shirt when you earn your first $50 with NeverBlueAds. (This has nothing to do with NeverBlueAds, nor a paid promotion by them. I simply want to help others make more money!)
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"With great power comes great responsibility".... my Uncle Ben told me that. Haha, just kidding! I'm Zac Johnson and I've been making money online for over 10 years now. In short, I started making money online while I was in high school... but my passion for marketing and making money goes back way earlier than that. I created ZacJohnson.com to help motivate you to start making money online, and live the life the you always dreamed of.
Thanks again for another great post Zac.
what is non generic keywords? can you list 1-2 samples? I am having hard time to come up with long tail keywords that actually bring traffics.
Generic:
“dating”, “online dating”
Non Generic / Longtail:
“dating tall dark men”, “dating in atlantic city, nj”
Zac,
I have been trying to promote the dating afilitaes and alls I ever get is a quality score of ok and then it gets slapped down to poor, but even when i have a ok quality score its still 30 cents a click I can’t seem to get 1 10 cent click.
I’ve tried numerous keywords like dating in Indianapolis, in and 1000’s of others. I get nothing, but 30 cent clicks if I’m lucky 10-20 cent keywords, but they never even get clicked on.
Great post Zac. This is just awesome info and really valuable to people that are looking for details.
This is good information. Zac, I notice that using your own Domain name you get GREAT results.
I was able to buy MyLAInk.com which many people think it’s related to the MTV show LA Ink with Kat Von D, and I added a campaign related to Tattoos and I was amazed with the results.
To get better results make sure, you use a related domain name similar to your affiliated campaigns. you will get more leads.
Hey, thanks for mentioning. This was actually going to be discussed in depth in my next installment of the super affiliate guide!
Thanks for your input!
Wanted to check out your site LAink, but that persistent and very irritating Smile Central ad you got there made me change my mind, immediately.
Nice article, Zac.
Nice post, weirdly, I had just decided to try niche dating sites for my first campaign when I saw this post pop up.
Would you get a domain and a landing page together for this type of stuff, or push straight to the signup pages and only advertise on Content?
If you push traffic direct, what do you use as the display url? I’ve read that Google only shows the highest bidding ad for each domain name.
Anyway, looking forward to more good posts.
Kudos to you Zac for providing information that is almost never talked about!
I appreciate the info.. It definately helps us just starting out. CCP can be overwhelming when first getting into it. It seems like an easy way to drain your budget quickly if you don’t know how to approach it.
Hi
Great article again
What keyword tool are you using to compare the ‘Advertiser Competition” versue “September Search Volume” versus “Avg Search Volume” ?
I’ve looked around adsense and didn’t see it.
thanks
Wayne
https://adwords.google.com/select/keywordToolExternal
Zac,
Great job on another great ppc guide. I assume that this is geared toward creating a landing page and utilizing the search network?
Thanks,
Clarke
Thanks Clarke,
It can work either way, but during my testing, I did not use landing pages and was testing on the content network.
That’s nice to hear. It definitely saves a bunch of time doing it that way when your in the testing stage.
Thanks Again!
Whenever I link directly to the offer, Google tells me the display URL is incorrect. Any ideas, I am pretty sure I am not misspelling. Can you give me an example?
Thanks
Try buying a domain and redirect it to your affiliate url.
Zac,
I read that google didn’t allow us using redirect.
is it true?
Could you share with us the redirect code that you use? I’m not good in html
I will test some campaign using your technique on content network
Thanks
Herman
Another fantastic post - thankyou Zac.
A question - for your long-tail keywords, do you use a program to come up with the many thousands I assume you’re gonna need to get the volume for such dating campaigns? Or do you just spend a long time thinking of potential keywords and typing them in manually?
Thanks for your response in advance buddy, appreciate the help.
Adnan
Iam starting to notice keywords are very important.
Zac should I use Meta tags,keyword,description on a landing page. ?
Zac - Another good article. I have some experience with advertising on the search network, but never the content network. It seems like you can only bid one amount for all of the keywords…not separately like you can on the search network. Mine was set to “auto” by default. Do you have feedback in regards to this? How do you know what a good range to set your max CPC is? It just seems like content network has a lot less tracking capabilities, am I overlooking something?
This is a nice guide. When I think about affiliate marketing I think about adding affiliate links to an existing website. I’ve never realy thought about doing it from the other end - looking for offers to promote and then just setting up landing pages etc to promote them. I like guides like this that spell it out clearly. Thanks.
Zac,
Once again, another great guide to ppc. I’m going to implement some of the ideas you outlined here - and some other ideas I have. I was finally able to check out your other MoneyReign Network sites. I’m simply amazed at the simpliciy - pure genius!
I’m signing up for the RSS feed - on to 1000!
Zac - how much do those offers pay per signup (free or paid) through Never Blue Ads? Also do they accept NSFW sites as affiliates? AAW now pays $2.25 per free sign up with Mate 1 instead of $3.50 so if the payout with Never Blue is better and they accept NSFW sites, I’ll give them a shot by signing up through your link.
Hey Zac - thanks for the info. Still very confusing to me since I’m a newbie. I tend to give up easy when I’m frustrated because I’m not devoting enough time to this. I tried signing up for NeverBlueAds after your last post, but stopped when it asked for a site. I don’t have a site set up yet, so what do I put there for now. I have my blog site which is just a journal site. Do I put that one in for the time being??? Thanks for all your info so far.
Yes, you can put up your blog and it will be accepted. Just make sure when they phone you that you sound like you mean business.
Some more great work Zac. This is the stuff people rarely talk about. I am glad you have chosen to share.
I use a lot non generic words in my campaigns and have done very well so far. For someone just getting into AM it is the way to go so your not blowing through your budget too fast.
This is an awesome how to for this stuff. I have been trying to get into it a little bit and am trying to learn everything I can about it.
I think using the key terms with geo-targeting and then on a small company is the best way to go. Usually will get you a better value. But I have never checked the conversion rate in comparison to popular ppc places.
[…] The Super Affiliate’s Guide to Dating ppc Marketing - Zac publishes another great post on affiliate marketing. This is his second post in his ongoing Guide to PPC Marketing series. If you didn’t see the first post, you can check it here. Highly recommended read. […]
Same articles at http://www.pacdesco.net. Your site is getting scraped.
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Can you also describe your ppc landing pages a little bit? No, I don’t mean handing out your secrets, but maybe give some overall advice on how landing pages should look like for a dating campaign. Is a review website/page working for you? Thanks.
Amazing how the keywords can make so much diffrence. Great post. Lots of useful information.