I’ve been playing around with some arbitrage using a second (or maybe third) tier PPC site. If you do it right, you can easily turn ten bucks into forty or fifty. Here’s in detail what I did:
- Pick a niche that you know pays decent. For my example, let’s choose student loans. I already have a financial website, even though it doesn’t target student loans in particular, the URL is generic enough that it looks like something that would be related. (If your first thought was mesothelioma, just go ahead and leave this page now.)
- Open up your favorite HTML editor and make a new page. Name it student-loans.htm.
- While we’re here, go ahead and do some basic SEO to the page (why not? we might accidentally rank for something and get free traffic). Add Student Loans to the title, description and meta tags. Also, put an h1 on the page saying Student Loans.
- Find a decent student loan article at one of the article sites such as EZineArticles or Articleonramp and copy/paste it to your site body.
- Remove all built-in or included files related to navigation. We want the visitor to have ‘no way out’ except to click an ad or the BACK button.
- Log into your Google AdSense account and make some new ads. For my layout, I’ve got a left sidebar so I’ll put a 160×600 over there first. Then I’ll put two 250×250 ads right next to each other (in a table with no border) right at the top of the page. These need to be after the h1 tag, but before the article content. We want it to be the first thing our visitor sees.
- Find yourself a good rss feed related to student loans. I suggest you use Yahoo’s custom RSS feed maker (about halfway down the page). Just type in your phrase, in our case ‘student loans’ and you’ll get the feed link for that phrase. Copy it.
- Get your hands on a copy of rss2html, a spiffy little php program that pulls rss feeds and posts them to your site as HTML. Extract to your hard drive.
- Edit rss2html.php and paste your feed link into the variable.
Our example: $XMLfilename=
http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/rss?p=student+loans&ei=UTF-8&fl=0&x=wrt”; - Upload those two files to your site. Put an include statement after the article you swiped.
<?php include ‘rss2html.php’; ?> - Sign up for an account at goClick or another cheap-ass second-tier PPC site. You can get into goClick for only $10 bucks.
- Log into WordTracker or another keyword generator and get a ton of keyphrases related to student loans.
- Copy and paste your keywords into your PPC program, and bid the lowest amount (usually 1cent for the second-tier PPCs). Use the page you just built as the landing page URL.
Assuming you did all of that correctly, there’s a good chance you’ll see a nice return on your investment.
I’d like to suggest a few more things:
- Set a budget per day, say $4 bucks. At a penny a click, thats a lot of clicks coming in, and you don’t blow your wad all in one day
- Bid low and bid often (lots of keywords/keyphrases).
- Name channels for each ad set you put up if you’re interested in seeing which does the best.
- Install the Adsense Notifier for Firefox Plugin if you want to keep an eye on your cashzilla.
- If you don’t have AdSense, you can of course use YPN ads, but I’m not sure your return will be as high
- Same goes for the PPC side. MSN’s AdCenter wants minimum 5 cents a click, Yahoo! wants 10c. I prefer 1c clicks.
Lastly, for those of you who have no clue what I’m trying to describe, I’ve created a screenshot for you. Good luck and make big money!
