Glowleaf

There was a post on wickedfire a while ago, that got me thinking.
There was this guy, with some very successful ppc campaigns, saying that he was a failure, because he couldn’t keep his campaigns running for more than 6 months. He whined that networks eventually screwed him with scrubbing leads, or that Adwords quality score killed converting keywords, and the list went on.

He had found the way to make money, and according to his claims, big money, but he was getting tired of fighting to ride the wave, of constant changes and the things he needed to learn and try to make another successful campaign.

His problem, as I see it, was the way he perceived things. For start, he was using the wrong business plan for long term income. Pay per click is a constant struggle, with google, with QS, with search habits, with the shifts in the niche’s industry, with other PPC affiliates. The second error, was that he did not invest.

I read a great expression on SeoBook, that explains the problem perfectly.
PPC means living on rent.
SEO means owning the house.
Its so simple, so concentrated, its almost poetic.

So, how to make the shift from short-term income to long-term? You need a mind shift.
Going from a landing page to a thin mini site is an obvious choice. Some quality articles, some incoming links with the right anchor text, and you have free traffic, that converts. It will never be as much as direct PPC, but it will increase the income a bit, and it will stay there when you shut down the campaign.

A second technique, that I used successfully in the past, is the following.

Start examining your converting keywords, and note down the top 20. Note down your longtail converters as well.
Then go to your favourite domain registrar, and see if those words or keyphrases are available on domains. Buy every one you can find, and point all the domains to your landing page.
Also, take a look at your stats, and see where your converting traffic is coming from. Are there any parked domains that convert for you? If so, then make an offer and buy them!
Are there any sites that constantly send buyers to you? Then talk to the webmaster, negotiate a deal for a banner, a bought link, or an article on his site reviewing your product and sending buyers to you.
Are there any sites that convert for you? Check out whether they are for sale!

The idea here is to own the keyword, instead of paying rent for it.

Think of it. Let’s say, for example, you sell “used cars in London”, and that longtail, is your top converter. You pay 10 cents for every click, which means that 100 visitors cost you 10$. If you can buy the domain used-cars-in-london.com, which (with the help of some backlinks) gives you 100 visitors per month and cost 10$, isn’t it worth it?

Even if someone already owned the aforementioned domain, and you bought it for 100$, it would still be a wise choice. It’s an investment, with a 10% monthly ROI. Yes, those 100$ would have given you 1000 visitors, but now you have 100 visitors per month for the same price. After 10 months, it breaks even. After 11 months, its pure profit.

You have just made the transition, from renting the keyword, to owning it.
Think of how much traffic you could accumulate if you owned every one of your top 20 converting keywords. The above numbers are deliberately low to make the example easy, but in reality, when you nail a converting domain, you nail it hard, and having 2500 to 4000 uniques per month from a single domain is not a rare thing.

The best thing is, you have the choice, of leaving everything as is, and simply have more traffic (and more income of course), or slowly removing keywords from ppc, and relying on the traffic from the owned keywords. As traffic from your investments starts to accumulate, you can keep the same traffic levels, while lowering your ppc budget, and have larger profit margins.

It’s not a difficult concept to grasp. It’s the transition from short-term to long-term, and it’s the way investors think. Stop working for money, and start making your money work for you.