Try PPC Affiliate Marketing They Say, You’ll Be Rich They Say

With a new year comes new impetus for most of us, this means getting of our back-sides and reviewing what we’ve done whilst making plans to help us do better. During my review of last year I realised that from about September onwards I’d started to stand still and was actually investing very little back into my online plans. Sure the time was there but in terms of pumping some money back in I just wasn’t doing it, the problem with standing still is that in reality and relative to inflation you’re not still but going backwards. Time for a change, so this year in order to try and boost my earnings to the next level I’m starting with a shot at PPC affiliate marketing. It’s very important for me to never lose site of my overall goal here, financial freedom. I’m not fussed about being a millionaire or any other sort of status tag, just to earn enough online to be financially free.

What I’m trying to do here is promote affiliate deals (the sort of offers you find on Commission Junction, Never Blue Ads and ClickBank) by paying for clicks through the various PPC networks. To get things of to a good start and with the idea that I don’t mind losing a bit of money I’ve jumped straight in with Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsofts AdCenter and FaceBook. Whilst I’ve run these types of campaigns for clients before I’ve never used this method at all in order to create an income for myself so it’s all new to me.

Having some amount of common sense I did decide to read up quite heavily before I started, a couple of the blogs I regularly read are very into this type of marketing. MSDanielle, GoogleLady and Zac Johnson are all big experts on this type of affiliate marketing so who better to learn from? If you’re also considering giving this a go then I suggest you go and read through their archives before spending any money. Even so I’m well aware that I’m bound to lose until I get my feet properly wet.

So how does this all differ from what I’ve done in the past, I’ve made money from affiliate deals before? Up until now I’ve made all my money promoting affiliate deals using free traffic. In order to do this I create a website, pour out new content and then when an affiliate deal matches I use that website to promote it. All the traffic is coming from the search engines natural results so any sales I make are all profit. The problem with doing things this way is attracting enough people to make large (or even decent) amounts of money, at best natural search traffic is only going to be partially targeted so conversion rates are traditionally quite low. PPC is different, you can absolutely target your affiliate offer to the exact phrases that you think people will be searching for, you can also use GEO targeting to make sure you’re only getting your offer in front of eligible eye balls. The downside is that you have to pay for this traffic, because of this it’s all about maths and percentages.

Say for example I decide to bid $0.10 on a keyword and that $0.10 is how much each click costs me (in reality your bid price and what you pay will most likely be different), in 1 month that keyword attracts 10,000 clicks on Adwords. My Adwords spend for that month is $1000. I’m promoting an affiliate deal that pays me $25 for each new member I get, in order to cover my costs I need to sell 40 memberships. Lets say my campaign receives an average conversion rate of 1%, so out of the 10,000 people that clicked on my advert 100 will convert, this gives me a total income for the month of $2500, or put another way $1500 profit. Nice, if only it was that simple. What happens if my bid of 0.10 isn’t actually high enough anymore, other marketers have discovered my niche and now I’ve got competition. In order to get the same ad position I’m now bidding $0.30, my monthly spend on Adwords has now gone up to $3000 and I’ve lost money ($500). Go back to my original 0.10 bid scenario, what happens if the conversion rate changes? The market is now full of my offer and so conversion rates have dropped, my conversion rate for that keyword has gone from 1% to 0.65%, instead of 100 new memberships a month I’m now getting only 65 or $1625 of income ($625 profit). As long as it doesn’t drop below 0.40% then I’m still covering costs but is it really worth all the hours for $625?

The way I see it

if (Income - Expense >= Time And Effort) then I’m onto a winner.

The above is a very simplified example of just what PPC affiliate marketing is all about involving only 1 keyword, in the real world for each product you would ideally have several campaigns with each campaign containing multiple keywords. It’s quite a robotic way of making money online and requires a lot of discipline and some amount of money to get started but for those masters of it the rewards can be huge. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a month can be made by those with the right approach, for me my goal is to be able to make $3000 a month profit using this method by the end of June. As it stands I’m 5 days in and about $70 down for the month, looks like I need to do some more reading!

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