I want to get started on some affiliate programs and am currently researching keywords for my campaigns. After doing this though, I'm confused about whether to start out bidding on long tail keywords to avoid too much competition or whether to just follow the money and bid with the big boys for the top words. If I start with the long tails, should I be bidding on all of them that don't have a lot of competition or is there a minimum number of searches/month I should set as a requirement? What did/do you all do?
you always start with long tail as the new site will have no PR and won't show on the search results. To go with big boys you would have to be really loaded and have some product which would sell like crazy.
So when I gather together all my long tail keywords for my niche, do I need to make a separate page that is optimized for each long tail keyword? It seems like a big pain in the butt to do that for keywords that have almost no traffic at all.
no you dont need to make a page for each, just a page for all the related terms example landing page 1 keywords might have where to buy widgets for christmas buy a widget for christmas christmas sale on widgets landing page 2 keywords might have where to buy trinkets for christmas buy a trinket for christmas christmas sale on trinkets
Looks like you need to understand the basics of page optimization first. I have somewhere the great book by Brad Callen (not sure if I spell his name right)which concentrates on those long keywords and how to use them. Pm me if you want it and I will try to find it for you.