IMMania.com

The results for my Halloween costume campaign that recently ended turned out even worse than last year. I think last year I came in just around the break even point.

This year I actually lost a few bucks.

Once again, this hammered home the point to me that I shouldn’t even begin to contemplate running a PPC campaign for an offer where the average payout isn’t at least $20. Google Adwords or any other PPC search engine for that matter, will eat you for lunch if the payout isn’t high enough.

The ironic thing about this recently completed campaign is that the majority of the sales were made from organic traffic.

How’s that for a real kick in the old choppers?

Yep, I published an article to EzineArticles.com for this niche about 2 months ago ahead of the prime Halloween costume shopping season and got some free traffic and conversions out of the deal. The only cost to me was the 40 minutes or so that it took to write and submit the article. Another irony was that the other directories I submitted it to produced exactly zilch in traffic.

Just another reason why I love EzineArticles.com!

But the other source of organic traffic that also converted into sales was from a rather unlikely source:

Google Image Search.

And since I’m on a string of ironies here, the reason the images on my site got indexed and ranked highly in Google Images is for the very same reason that one of my sites got a big ass Google slap. This is because I created product catalog pages using the product links in Commission Junction.

I tried adding some commentary to these pages to make up for lack of content, but apparently that was not enough of an offering to appease the Adwords Team.

So it turns out that all of these images from the CJ product links were quietly getting indexed by the Google Images bot.

What’s more, it seems that there are enough people using Google Image Search as well as MSN Images to search for specific products and even exact brands.

Very long-tailed stuff here.

I was curious what it was exactly that caused the merchant images on my pages to get ranked highly in Google Images since none of these images have any content in the “alt” tags. It turns out that the Google Images bot was using the surrounding text to index the images, much the same way the Adsense bot parses things.

This had my curiosity piqued so I did a quick search for how to rank highly in Google Images. The ragepank blog has the number 1 position on Google for the search phrase:

google image results ranking

This is a blog focused on SEO maintained by Harvey Kane. I’ll let him explain the details of how images are ranked in Google Images and what you can do to optimize for it.

As my dissatisfaction with PPC continues to grow, I will be focusing more on organic sources of traffic for my affiliate marketing sites. Leveraging Google Images as an organic traffic source will be part of this strategy.