We here at Jamersan have begun dabbling in affiliate marketing using Pay Per Click (PPC) traffic.  Thus far, our efforts have been successful.  In less than a week, without much time to work on it, our volume is up to where I expect to do nearly 5 figures in affiliate conversions over the course of the next month.  Not a bad start.

During out trials over the last week, I came across a little nugget of information I considered useful, and maybe you will as well.  I was under the impression that Google’s keyword recommendations for my campaign as well as the quality score were a reflection of the website I was sending my traffic to.  After some experimentation, I found that is not exactly the case.  Google’s keyword recommendations and an important part of the quality score comes from the keywords and terminology used in your advertisements.

I kept wondering why google would recommend keyterms for my landing page, and then turn right around and tell me that the quality score for that term was poor on my site.  This was basically Google’s way of telling me I needed to rewrite my ads, because they didn’t think my ads related to my site.

So, for our campaigns at least, the trick to a good google quality score is in the advertisement text.

Our efforts to date have not been overly successful.  We were able to dramatically increase this clients search engine rankings in nearly every category, and get them on the first page of Google for nearly every key term they are wishing to rank for.

We pushed craigslist ads for thier products to the top of the google rankings, and increased their traffic and exposure.

Unfortunately, none of this has turned into increased phone activities or increased sales.  The market they are in is drying up due to the current economic situation, and our efforts have not stopped that trend.

We will continue to work on it, and I’ll update you on our efforts.

I recently purchased an upgraded server, as I regularly do (at least once every year or two).  My first move was to swap this site over to “test” everything and make sure the server was working as expected before I move over more important sites.

Unfortunately, I have been unable to login to this site since I made the swap and my time has been limited so I have been unable to find the problem.  Over the weekend, I finally sat down and researched the issue.

My research found that mod bandwidth is breaking php5 and that when it is enabled, the _POST variable is not being filled and thus no form submissions work.  A quick recompile of apache and php5 without mod bandwidth fixed this issue.

So, I guess most of this week will be spend moving websites.