The jury is still out on PPC as a viable long term strategy. After making a few changes (deleting the old search campaign and transferring the content campaign over to search) there has been an improvement in sales, but I am still only breaking even. You could argue that as long as I’m not losing money this is a great opportunity to test different campaigns (niches, keywords, search/content etc.) to discover the real money makers. On this basis I plan on running the campaigns a little longer before I make any decisions on longevity.

I have to admit that during the whole PPC process I’ve missed the creative input that goes along with designing and publishing a website and then promoting it (despite my previous comments on the beauty of creating PPC campaigns without a website). While I’m used to driving affiliate traffic to other peoples’ sites (usually for digital download) I would find it interesting to put up my own store based on affiliate products.

The two ways to do this would be by taking a store’s product feed and publishing that on my site or finding a drop-ship, wholesaler who could handle the customer fulfillment on my behalf. At some point I would like to try both, but the easiest to set up would be to simply publish someone’s product feed.

One system I’ve come across to build affiliate stores is datafeedr . While datafeedr looks like it could have possibilities I recently came across the Pepperjam Network Store Builder. The PJN store builder looks very straight forward and seems to integrate well with WordPress.  Once again, as with any of these routes to market, success can be all about choosing the right niche.

I have a potential niche in mind and once my PJN application is approved, I’ll begin building my store, and will of course tell you how I get on.