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.

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!)