Marketing Lateral

So I was talking to a few people yesterday and I actually touched on some of the ways I tend to think. Some of the ways my brain tends to work in various situations. Especially when it came to things like affiliate marketing, PPC, etc…

I think the big problem some people have with affiliate marketing, or any type of marketing is when it is based on you wanting to rank for a certain phrase or phrases and sell a certain product.

Typically if you are going out to target… well let’s look at something on clickbank and do it right here.

Here we look on cbengine.com and actually see a high gravity paid survey offer. What is the first thing someone typically does when they look at an offer like this, or for weightloss, diabetes, make money online, etc? They go out and try to find keywords based on what the offer is. So in this case maybe they start researching various keywords and phrases related to paid surveys and might even look for one they can get as an exact match domain.

That is great and all… but do you think you may be wasting time trying to target keywords and phrases that are already loaded with competitors? Don’t get me wrong… the more competition the better the niche in my opinion. I have always said that competitive niches is where you want to be because the money is already there and you know it is there.

But what about taking the approach of thinking lateral when searching for keywords we want to target?

My way of lateral thinking, if you have ever heard the term before… isn’t exactly the same as some other marketers.

Many times when I approach CPA, or any type of affiliate marketing product I am likely to put the offer on a site that is completely unrelated to the offer.

{{GASP!!}} Did Don just say put ads on sites or pages that are completely unrelated to the ad?

Some people are probably going, “What the hell are you talking about Don that makes no sense.” Well in the typical stuff you hear out there it may not make sense… AT FIRST.

We are all wanting things like our AdSense ads to be extremely targeted to the content of our site. We are used to making an information site talking all about weightloss and only having weightloss offers on it.

That is great when you actually rank for the highly searched phrases, or target the high CPC keywords with PPC.

But the way I have been doing it for sometime now and with great success in both organic and PPC is completely different.

Let’s do a search for “Paid Surveys” in Google.

Some of the top sites that came up when I typed in that phrase was: yellowsurveys.com, surveyhead.com, bestsurveysformoney.com, getpaidsurveys.com, surveys4checks.com, paidsurveyslive.com, maximumpaidsurveys.com

Now let’s head over to quantcast.com and take a look at whatever info we can get about these sites.

See any common denominators here?

I sure do…

• The vast majority are female
• The vast majority are 18-49
• The vast majority is between $0-$60k a year income
• The vast majority never went to college
• And except for 1 instance… Asians were smart enough not to fill out the survey lol.

You just learned a lot about your potential audience here.

So now let’s start thinking lateral here… What else does this audience search for? Where could we put offers in front of the same audience but rank easily, or pay a really low CPC on PPC traffic?

You see,.. So many marketers and people in general that are trying to make it in affiliate marketing or PPC don’t think in this way.

They try and always make the ads on their site specific to the content.

What I am doing is making the ads specific to the visitors. So yes the conversions can be lower, yet the traffic can be higher so you end up with a happy medium. You also can end up with a lot less competition and scale it to your hearts content.

Ways you can find what these same people search for and are interested in is additional information you can get from Quantcast, and also Google’s ad planner.

That will give you some good ideas where to start searching for those other niches that are easily ranked for. Then you can set up your ads – CPA, affiliate products, lead generation, and your own products to a still targeted audience.

So let’s have some fun with thinking lateral everyone!

Later…………….