BloggingForProfitToday, or how not to set up an affiliate website

This internet marketing lark's not as straightforward as everyone tells you. The new website is nearly finished, but setting up a Pay Per Click ad through Google Adwords was another palaver! Apologies to any technical types reading this - I'm definitely not good on the techy language (nor the techy stuff, as you'll see...).

The website is http://www.bloggingforprofittoday.com/ - or that's the one I registered. Reasonably straightforward, you might think - says what it means and all that. But because it's hosted by Microsoft Home Office Live, its URL as far as Google Adwords are concerned is http://greatcopy.web.officelive.com/default.aspx (the official home page of the site). That won't attract the eye of the passing human looking for info on how to blog for profit; I wanted to get the word "blog" in there somehow.

But Google "disapproved" it because I put http://www.bloggingforprofittoday.com/ (my official domain name, you may remember) as the visible URL in the ad. They disapprove of non-matching URLs: the one in the ad has to match the "official" one. Not that they say so anywhere on the site - I had a spirited exchange of emails with their help desk before I discovered what the hitch was.



To solve the problem I changed the page you reach from the ad (the landing page) to the one with the main info on it, http://greatcopy.web.officelive.com/Bloggingforprofit.aspx, rather than the default home page. So far, so good.


As anyone who's ever seen a Google Adwords ad knows, there are three lines of ad text and the fourth line is the URL the viewer sees. You haven't much space for that fourth line, and http://greatcopy.web.officelive.com/Bloggingforprofit.aspx doesn't fit it. It does, however, go in the URL box (a fifth box when you're setting up the ad; you don't see it when you're browsing). So I got round the problem by altering the visible URL to greatcopy.web.officelive.com/Blog, which was allowed - and there the ad is, proud as punch, on the right hand side of the first page when you Google "blogging for profit".


When you click on it you even get taken to the right page, which is a major plus. If you click on http://www.bloggingforprofittoday.com/ you get taken to the default home page, which now has an article on it. I don't suppose that matters - the article may give the reader enough info to make a decision about whether they want to blog for profit or not, depending on the reader; and of course they can navigate to all the other pages on the site from the article - but it's not ideal.


It's been an interesting learning curve, and definitely not the most effective way to go about affiliate marketing! But at least I know one really good way not to do it next time... And the clicks are beginning to come in, so who knows - I may start to see some profit for my efforts soon. That would be good.