Pay Per Click advertising or PPC is probably the fastest way to get traffic to your website from a search engine. It is an effective means of affiliate promotion, if done correctly. As you may well know the word ‘pay’ in PPC means that you will end up paying for each time your ad was clicked and if the technique is not done properly, this could cost you a lot of money and with negligible returns.
Pay per click advertising however doesn’t always work for affiliate marketing. First, you must be aware of the rules at the site where you are getting your PPC. For instance, Google has rules about promoting affiliate programs with the Google AdWords PPC program.
While Google does permit affiliate links in their AdWords, they will only display one affiliate ad per search query, and this includes that of the parent company. They also will not allow links to replicated affiliate websites. So, since there are other affiliates selling the same product you are selling, the chances of your ad actually being seen and clicked are slim. Secondly, if you have a replicated website for your affiliate programs, your ad won’t show at all – ever.
There is a way around this though, and it means you got to put in a little extra work, and get more creative if you hope to profit from your affiliate programs, with pay per click drive traffic. Here are a few useful pay per click tips that are helpful for promoting affiliate products or programs.
Pay Per Click Tip 1
Don’t use an affiliate link. Use your own link for your own domain, and send the visitor to your website first. You should also have them pass through a squeeze page first to collect their name and email address which would prove useful to you in the long run. Remember, the money is in the list.
Pay Per Click Tip 2
Always start small with your PPC campaigns, usually doing small tests which are incremental. Do your keyword research, and set yourself a budget. Work within that budget to test different ads. Also, avoid using long affiliate links. These links are obvious to people, and many people avoid them. People do not like to be sold to.
Pay Per Click Tip 3
Instead of using PPC to sell a product, use PPC to get qualified leads and to build a list. You will find that this is a much more economical and effective use of PPC in the long run. It may take just a little longer to make the sale, but if you are patient, you will earn more money than you would have otherwise.
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April 6th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
An excellent post. While I agree that the focus should be in the list, you can also monitize with adsense, and other advertising to help offset the cost of PPC.
Also, we like to sell an inexpensive product. Then we gather the email address after the sale. This gives us an extremely qualified list, which we can then use for further sales.