Make Money Online As A PPC Affiliate

Posted by: Kai Lo on May 17 in Earning

This article is guested post by Kai Lo

Make money online as a PPC affiliate is not easy at all. Some “experts” would tell you that you will start making money within 2 hours, and I believe that is really misleading a lot of naïve beginners. Sure, you can lose $50 on PPC to make a $20 sale, and still call that “making money.”

Some of you might be wondering what PPC is. Basically, it stands for pay-per-click advertising, such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. Like the name pay-per-click, you pay when people click on
your ad. Affiliate programs, such as Clickbank, are great way to make money IF you have a well-planned out strategy, and they work well with PPC.

There is so much free information out there in the search engine. Many naïve beginners fall into the trap of thinking that if they buy an e-book from an “expert”, they will begin to make thousands of dollars easily. The words you see in e-books are usually the following:

“fast”

“easy”

“simple”

The REAL experts out there who are truly helping people for the sake of helping people won’t tell you making money online are fast, easy, and simple. No matter how many books you read, you will have to make several mistakes before you can succeed. Notice I didn’t say, “fail”, because I believe that word only goes to people who quit trying.

Clickbank has thousands of ebooks and softwares for you to promote. What most “experts” fail to tell you is that you should promote products that are either new or “unpopular”.  They tell you to promote popular products, but do you see the problem? The problem is that your competition is extremely high when the product is popular. Just because the product is “unpopular” doesn’t mean it isn’t great. Ultimately, you have to read the page that is advertising the product to decide whether or not the product sounds convincing enough for people to buy. If it sounds like garbage to you, most likely it is garbage to others.

When you are in the Marketplace page on Clickbank, pay attention to the “gravity” of the product. The gravity basically tells you how many times that product was sold by affiliates for the past so and so number of weeks. People tell you that direct linking from your Adwords campaign to the affiliate program does not work. Well duh, if you are trying to direct link a very popular product, forget about it! Google Adwords only allow one direct linking to be shown on first page of Google for the keywords that you are bidding on. The highest bidder will be the only one shown. What does this tell you? It is going to be

very expensive for your keywords to be shown! Confused? Lets use an example here. If 10 people are promoting product site xyz.com, only one person will show on first page, and that person must have the highest bid. You might be thinking, “Well, my affiliate link is different though.” Doesn’t matter because you need to put xyz.com as the display URL, and only one display URL can be shown.

What you need to do is find a niche that isn’t as competitive as “make money online” or “robot stock trading” to market, and the product must not be popular. For instance, some new guy puts up a product called “How To Become A Pro Wrestler”.  Take some time to look through this product. Does it have annoying pop-ups? Does it have annoying talking ads? Do you like it? Don’t worry about LIKING the niche, but do you actually like what the person is saying. There are plenty of junk ebooks, and when you look at the page, you just want to scream at the person for what a crap job that person have done.

Ok, so you like what the person is saying, and everything sounds convincing. Now, you go to Adwords to set up a campaign to market this product. We can go over some keywords tips. You don’t want to bid on competitive phrases such as “wrestling”, “pro wrestling”, and “wrestle”. Why? They will probably cost you a fortune! Also, people who are clicking on your ads for “wrestling” might be looking for wrestling shows on television, wrestling magazines, etc. That will cost you a lot for non-targeted audience.

You want a key phrase such as, “beginner’s guide to wrestling”. Now, you have targeted audience and the competition is a lot less so your clicks are cheaper. You want a variety of key phrases. “Wrestling lessons for beginners”, “how to become a wrestler”, etc. are some great ones to begin with.

After you have all your keywords, you need to setup how the ads will look to the audience. Your title can be something like, “Become A Pro Wrestler”, and the description should be something along the line of “Learn to become pro wrestler now! Buy guide $50”. Some of you might argue not to put the price in the ad, but I put the price to ward off people who are looking for free information. Whatever you do, you need a call-to-action phrase in your ads such as, “now”, “hurry”, etc.

Make sure the display URL is what people would see when they land on the site. The destination URL is your affiliate link so you can get credit – this is VERY important! Google will reject your ad if the display URL does not match the site.

A good way to check if you have competitors marketing the same product as you is to check some of the keywords you are bidding on. Type it in Google search to see if the display URL is already there on the right hand side. Don’t be discouraged if you see it there because your competitors might not be using ALL of your keywords. For example, they might be bidding on “how to become a wrestler”, but maybe not “wrestling lessons for beginners”.

Yahoo does not allow direct linking to affiliate programs so you will need a website. I don’t recommend a beginner to start off with a website. See how well you do with the product that you are marketing first on Google Adwords before you decide to make a website. After you have a website, then you can also add Yahoo to your PPC campaign to market the product. MSN AdCenter allows direct linking, and you should give AdCenter a try. The competition is a lot less in MSN so your clicks should be a lot cheaper than AdWords.

Try to aim for products that will give you $30+ commissions per sale.

Your goal is to pay less on your PPC campaign and profit more from sales. Aim for 1 sale per 100 clicks (1%) so if your clicks are 20 cents each, then you are paying $20 for 1 sale of $30+. If the product converts less than 1%, then 1.)something is wrong with your keywords, 2.)your display ad is misleading, 3.)the product page is horrible. Before you decide to leave a campaign because you are not making money, you need to look at your keywords and your display ads. My example of the wrestling book above should do well. Whatever you do, do not put the word “free” in your ad because you are attracting people who are looking for free information.

Key things to remember here:

-Market new products or ones that are not popular. Look for products that have little to no gravity in Clickbank. Just because the product does not have many competition doesn’t necessarily mean it is bad. Read through the website YOURSELF to determine if you should market it.

-Pick out several key phrases that have low competition, but they have to make sense to what you are trying to promote.

-If you are making a profit from a specific product, start making a website/blog to market that product. PPC isn’t the only way to make money!

-Make sure the display ads have a call-to-action word such as, “now” and “hurry”.

-Aim for 1 sale per 100 clicks, or 1 percent. If you don’t get the 1 sale per 100 clicks, you either reevaluate your strategy plan or stop promoting that particular product.

-Learn from your mistakes. Do not be discouraged if you don’t succeed at first. Keep trying, but you have to learn from mistakes.

About Kai Lo:

Kai Lo is a SEO enthusiast and passionate to help others succeed. Be sure to check out his SEO Blog and Make Money Online Blog.