There is lot of affiliate blogs that suggest that when affiliates are getting into a new niche they should “just look at what the top performers are doing in that nice and replicate it.” While it’s true that you can gain some great competitive intelligence from studying your adversaries, if you’ve got decent chops as a serious PPC affiliate, chances are you can smoke your competition with a fresh approach that makes them want to copy you.

A good example of this is the keyword scraping tools and services out there. They’re awesome tools to give you an idea of the breadth and depth of keywords other affiliates are using in the niche, but copy-and-pasting that keyword list into Adwords is not going to give you a competitive edge. The best way to use that data is to take the keywords you’ve spied out and map them into groups that reveal the “themes” they’re centered around. You’ll then have an idea of what themes are possible to build your own keyword lists on. Once you have the keyword themes, you know what to base your landing pages on as well.

Speaking of landing pages and creative, of course there’s ‘best practices’ when designing an effective landing page, including winning sales copy, but who’s to say that you can’t come up with something unique that converts better than the usual page? Test something radically different for a few days and see what happens. Google knows one thing for sure: when all the landing pages for a particular keyword look the same when a user clicks on each ad, the users tune them out. A large portion of users click on multiple sponsored ads before taking an action. If yours looks different, you’re going to get noticed.