anyone here focus mainly on SEO rather than PPC?

[jman4663]

I think most people hear SEO and they assume you mean the goal of getting your site to rank in google, but I like thinking of it in the broader sense of organic (free) traffic. There are lots of creative ways to get traffic to your site, and $Free.99$ happens to be my favorite price

 

[Korrupt]

Out of curiousity, how long does it take you gurus to get a campaign in the positive using exclusively SEO?

Also, are you building your campaigns around offers or niches? I always feared it would be wasted effort if by the time I started ranking the offer gets pulled. That's a lot of work for no return.

Just curious ....

I'm no guru, but it does take a bit of knowledge to put together a solid SEO campaign overall, since you don't want to throw up any flags on google, optimizing the page, etc.

It usually takes me 2-4 months to get a really solid, converting campaign up and running. That's including google fucking with the page, link building, etc. On the other had, that being said, I do usually make just above even the whole time it's climbing ranks in Google. It's just that extra push you need to get to the first page for one or two keyword phrases that makes the huge difference in leads.

 

[otane]

So I have a ppc campaign up the same day I came up with the idea and bank off it for 2 months while you chase backlinks and do seo and I've been throwing my money away? I think you were throwing away 2 months of your life when you could have been banking while doing seo if you were smart.

PPC is safer in the long run. With Google changing their algos, and who knows with the others, your original strategy in SEO is toast. The only benefit I can see with SEO is trying to rank with the highest volume keyword in your niche. But trying to get there is another story.

 

[loyolabenson]

I try not to rely too much on 1 thing , so I balance it out as much as possible between ppc and seo

 

[xmcp123]

PPC is safer in the long run. With Google changing their algos, and who knows with the others, your original strategy in SEO is toast. The only benefit I can see with SEO is trying to rank with the highest volume keyword in your niche. But trying to get there is another story.

Are you nuts?
Search this forum for "google slap"
And let me tell you, having all the traffic coming off that site being essentially free(minus paid links if you bought them) is a HUGE benefit over ppc.
Plus getting traffic from searches you would never have even known were happening if you were only running ppc campaigns.
And that's not even getting into how much easier it is to establish negative keyword lists for ppc if you're also running seo.

 

[volknet]

I'm just now starting my first real SEO effort for a very niche product.

BUT because I know the power of PPC, I'm going to do both on this project.

The only reason why I am doing SEO is because I got a domain that is the .com of the main keyword so I think it should be fairly easy to SEO... Woo.

 

[otane]

Are you nuts?
Search this forum for "google slap"
And let me tell you, having all the traffic coming off that site being essentially free(minus paid links if you bought them) is a HUGE benefit over ppc.
Plus getting traffic from searches you would never have even known were happening if you were only running ppc campaigns.
And that's not even getting into how much easier it is to establish negative keyword lists for ppc if you're also running seo.

No doubt the traffic is free and nice, but you are nuts thinking you will get organically ranked in competitive markets if you are doing white hat.

Traffic from searches you would never have known? You can get similar results from content and exploring other keyword terms.

Google slaps? Get a new account, domain and you are back in action. How long would that take if your organic site was de-indexed from Google?

I seriously doubt the slaps will continue if their revenues starts to suffer. It is just a matter of time before YSM hooks up with MSN or someone else, competes with Big G, and all of their asses will up in the air for the next john (please no pics).

 

[GoogleSearchSux]

Black Hat SEO is more confusing than PPC for sure. If you are not a good programmer get ready to shell out more money for software than it will take to test a PPC campaign.

Don't get me wrong I am with Shady on doing both, I just feel like the learning curve for black hat is a little steeper than PPC.

Oh and I gave up on White Hat a few months ago... what a waste of time and energy.

 

[otane]

Black Hat SEO is more confusing than PPC for sure. If you are not a good programmer get ready to shell out more money for software than it will take to test a PPC campaign.

Don't get me wrong I am with Shady on doing both, I just feel like the learning curve for black hat is a little steeper than PPC.

Oh and I gave up on White Hat a few months ago... what a waste of time and energy.

I am with you and Shady on the BH side. I went through the blog farms and etc.,and got de-indexed a couple of times by G. The learning curve is steeper, but I think PPC is harder in terms of watching your money go from your pockets in the beginning.

Having said that, thank god BH is harder otherwise we would have the Arbitrage Conspiracy clowns doing an offer on it.

 

[JohnCJackson]

I havent done PPC in over 4 years. Either I wasn't good at it or the only traffic worth buying was the free traffic I got from Adwords. If I would have actually paid the total cost it shows in my Adwords account I would have lost a lot of money.

So for me, SEO= "easy", and PPC is difficult.

I've tried a few more times over the years mostly when I could find coupons or get someone else to run some Adwords for me ( I am banned for life), but again I always lost money.

I guess I am just better setup for SEO and have a better mind for it, for some reason.

 

[dangregory]

I don't do PPC and I get sales within three to five days of launching a new affiliate site. I like organic SEO because for me it's just simpler and more intuitive. Plus I can still do plenty of testing - start with an initial landing page, test it, then build out more onto my site if campaigns convert. Rather than keep jizzing around trying to have a perfect "quality score" so Google will lower itself long enough to run my ads, I'd rather just get traffic right away and make sales. But that's me.

Dan

 

[ChrisS]

Black Hat SEO is more confusing than PPC for sure. If you are not a good programmer get ready to shell out more money for software than it will take to test a PPC campaign.

Don't get me wrong I am with Shady on doing both, I just feel like the learning curve for black hat is a little steeper than PPC.

Oh and I gave up on White Hat a few months ago... what a waste of time and energy.

I disagree about white hat being a waste of time. I know Shady is going to want to kick me in the head, but I've had some great luck with white hat sites. I get a significant amount of monies every day off of sites that I literally haven't touched in years.

I'm not smart enough for black hat anyway

 

[megler]

I'm no guru, but it does take a bit of knowledge to put together a solid SEO campaign overall, since you don't want to throw up any flags on google, optimizing the page, etc.

It usually takes me 2-4 months to get a really solid, converting campaign up and running. That's including google fucking with the page, link building, etc. On the other had, that being said, I do usually make just above even the whole time it's climbing ranks in Google. It's just that extra push you need to get to the first page for one or two keyword phrases that makes the huge difference in leads.

you must be going after some hardcore keywords. I can get ranking in 48 hours or so, sometimes same day and on page 1 for longtail within the week depending on how motivated I am. The key is picking the right longtail words to start with - "buy" words vs "shopping" words.

As for profitable, if it's not making me $$ in 200-300 clicks from my LP to the offer, then I either need to change products (I do review sites) or bail on the niche.

Dave is right about his concern on product pulls - it IS a pain in the ass to get a site up just to have the product yanked (acai). I'm learning to make my articles more generic so that I can change my LP each time the product changes and not stroke out about it. You learn as you go with it.

Shady is right, PPC works synergistically with SEO, not independently. I stopped PPC because it's not my strong point and I blew my CC out on other stupid stuff. Also with a 20% conversion rate on some of my offers, I'm not freaking out about slim profit margins because my traffic is free.

 

[pary07]

i do
but thats only because I suck at ppc.

PERHAPS THE BEST ENCOURAGEMENT I GOT TO KEEP DOING SEO TILL TODAY.
I SUCK AT PPC TOO AND HUGE BUDGET IT NEEDS TO MAKE KILLING.

 

[itchy]

ppc boys know keywords and landing pages that convert

blackhats know quick fast FREE traffic

together = the perfect marriage??

i'm thinking of hooking up with some old mates of mine to give it a try seems pointless to me going back to blackhat now even though i used to be ok at it. ppc is so much more of a rush for me. i think someone said in another thread you need brass balls and deep pockets to do ppc (re weightloss) and they are right. there's no risk in blackhat if you do it right. you're so busy building spamming exploiting that even when part of your network is taken down many more sites are coming up. for me i burnt out on it, it just became boring doing the same shit and always hunting for exploits and angles.

ppc is an instant rush and the way i do it now utilising automated bots to hunt and research for me its far more profitable plus i think the earnings bar is set far higher with ppc - you have the opportunity to make millions not thousands per month. that is a challenge that cannot be overlooked.

fair play to the peeps who take on seo like eli and shady making shit look real and stuff. i respect your patience and skills. thats where seo is at now.

I belive 80% of traffic click on organic results. I do both, but focus on seo.

sorry i disagree on this - i don't really target a niche unless i can bully my way into the top 3 and that has consistently meant 20% ctr for position 3 and upto 50% ctr for 1st place. i've also been number 1 ranked for the 1st organic result cloaking direct to the offer on the main keyword and its been worth only a couple of sales a day at most. i tried ppc on the same niche for shits and giggles and was doing 10+ leads a day for a week. unfotunately i had to pull out of that niche due to $4 clicks. the margin wasn't high enough. i noticed a massive drop in clicks when google added those 3 places above the organics. a move i thought was grossly unfair (at the time lol). every niche is different though so it could have just been bad luck there.

 

[digga121]

don't crash and burn!

Thank god someone said it! I hate the seo vs ppc talk...
define:synergy - Google Search


You don't need to go all out. You need a few 25$ dollar coupons to experiment, and then scale slowly. If you go all out without experience you will crash and burn.

That is so true. I started out putting $10 in each campaign on Google, before I even thought of putting up $50. I put in an average of $25 a time at first, and ended up with $800 in my affiliate account. Now , I can take that money, and set up some more serious campaigns, and more offers. It is deffinetly all about experimenting. Something you can't learn on a forum.

 

[bgmacaw]

I use SEO because, if done right, there's less monetary risk and much lower cost.

PPC always seemed to have a number of problems for me so far as running affiliate campaigns. Beyond the age-old problem of the Google Slap there are also affiliate tracking and payment problems. Also, there's the issue of cash flow when waiting for payment by a company. That means using a lot of credit, which I don't like. I do use PPC for some of my own products where the money goes right into my account though.

 

[affiliatearmy]

I'd pay someone to set that up for me...

thats why black hat seo methods always seem to linger longer than they should. google probably updates there search engine methods every year or two. maybe small fixes every now and then to fight the major problems. but i know a few black hat sites that with a 500$ investment in a server and some domains you can seriously make some huge bank if you know what your doing.

Its really complicated shit and only people who know web coding, server working and all that tech stuff in and out know how to keep up with that shit. Best part about it is 1,500 investment could lead to 20,000$ + a month.

Funny thing is that most of those people dont know jack shit about affiliate marketing or marketing in general they are just brilliant with coding and knowing how the search engines work on a detailed level.

Any black hat pros got some extra time...:updown:

 

[xmcp123]

No doubt the traffic is free and nice, but you are nuts thinking you will get organically ranked in competitive markets if you are doing white hat.

Yeah, but who does that? Nearly everyone is shades of gray nowadays. And if you're smart about the terms you can go after things traditional SEOs completely ignore.

Traffic from searches you would never have known? You can get similar results from content and exploring other keyword terms.

No, no you can't. True longtail is fucking epically insane. They don't always show up in the order people search for.

Plus, lets see how much G loves you loading thousands of longtails just to hit a fraction of what can be gotten from SEO.

For example: Let's say we're promoting dedicated servers. We want to match queries that include the GB bandwidth, hd, and ram they want.
So with PPC, you'd have to have a massive set of the following.
{0-unlimited} bandwidth, {60-200}gb hard drive, {1-6}gb ram.
Now you have to deal with all those different combinations and different orders to be properly hitting those keywords.
Now comparatively, if I'm doing it SEO style, I just need to mention each number once and the keywords, and I'll at least be appearing somewhere in the results.

So how many keywords did you need for that? Ohhhh or you could throw money away on a broad match. And it'd still be messy.

Google slaps? Get a new account, domain and you are back in action. How long would that take if your organic site was de-indexed from Google?

This is a true issue, and why I argue in favor of a combination of tactics vs. just ppc.

I seriously doubt the slaps will continue if their revenues starts to suffer. It is just a matter of time before YSM hooks up with MSN or someone else, competes with Big G, and all of their asses will up in the air for the next john (please no pics).

Google has an odd way of looking at stuff. They see the slaps as the way to maintain consumer confidence in the ads long term, even at the cost of the short term. I doubt they're going to be throwing us a no-slap lifeline anytime soon.

 

[pary07]

One big reason I find seo good is "If you get your site to really stick in Google by making i a kick ass authority site and getting really high quality links , with time and as your domain ages, you are going to get more stronger and stronger!"

search for "buy viagra" and you'll find this site magicbluepill.com - 1 year from now, 3 yrs, 5 years, 10 years from now - it'll be there unless a really big shit happens. It actually works on G' algorithm that places a lot of emphasis on "age" of domian and this doesn't seem to change too much!