In this video I answer the most common email question I get - “How do I get started in PPC to affiliate marketing”

Links mentioned in the video:

Affiliate networks:

Neverblue

Azoogle

CX Digital

PPC tutorials:

Adwords

Yahoo

MSN

Campaign building advice:

Campaign Structure

eCPC

Landing page or redirect

Domains and display URLs

Sorry for the frequent cuts in the video, but I had to edit out wind noise and angry birds.

One of the most important decisions when you are starting out with PPC is not how much you pay, but how you pay. The key is to pick a credit card that offers cash back on your advertising purchases. These rewards are getting better and better with some cards offering a solid 1%-2% or more. That way even if your campaign only breaks even, you are still making a 1%-2% profit. How much could this decision about how to pay affect the average search marketer? Say you spend $50k/mo on PPC, at the end of the year the credit card will pay you $12,000 just for using their card. You are spending the money anyways, so you might as well get something back.

So what’s my card of choice? I have always used the American Express Platinum rewards card.

You can’t beat the cash back, and the flexible credit limit, which is important for those big PPC spends. Also with AmEx you have have the Open savings which does cool things like automatically refunds your first $500 of spend at Yahoo every year. That benefit alone is worth it. Another benefit, if you want to incorporate or form an LLC, they have 20% off Bizfilings.com. One thing I have found with Amex is that terms are always negotiable so you can usually get better benefits than those listed on the site if you ask. Kind of like bumping your payouts with your affiliate managers.

If you are just starting out and worried about fees, a great choice would be the Blue cash reward card, with annual fee.

Recently, they just upgraded my old Platinum rewards card to a new Plum card. I had not even heard of it, but I was talking to a customer service rep and they sold me on it. It has some cool features like 2% cash back and no limit at all. I’m sure it will work out as great as my old card did.

Do you not read the terms of the offer you are promoting? This is a question that came up one night at affiliate summit. I was shocked to find that a couple people in the group didn’t. There is usually a lot of information in there that it critical, and ignoring it can lead to you not getting paid! That seems like a pretty important “detail” to overlook. When you are an affiliate, you incur the risk of fronting the ad costs. If you are not following the terms of the offer, you are putting your own money at risk. Even if you don’t care about the advertiser, you should read the terms simply to protect your own assets. Reading through a TOS and you might find out things like:

• if you can iFrame the offer
• if you can use the Advertiser’s images on your landing page or not
• if you can bid on trademarked terms
• negative keyword lists to use
• recommended keywords

Pretty mission critical stuff to your success or failure.  So read those terms before you agree to them!

It’s very tempting when starting out in Pay Per Click to always go for the minimum bids. Some people even avoid Yahoo because of their .10 minimum bids. But there’s a reason people pay $1, $2, or even $3 per click. They make money doing it! Obviously some offers require low bids, but most don’t. If you have a nicely converting offer, try raising your bids up and up. Eventually you will hit a point of diminishing returns where any higher CPCs will not yield any more clicks.

Remember also that the minimum bid is always going to be crowded with people (the bottom feeders) so if you can even bid slightly higher, you will be in a better position (quality score not withstanding). My advice to people starting in PPC to affiliate marketing is to explore some offers that require high click prices. Personally, I like offers that do well with CPCs in the $1-$1.50 range.

A common misconception about sending PPC to traffic to affiliate offer is that its a very high risk activity. Although there are very often large sums of money spent, and many possible things that can go wrong, overall I consider it very low risk. That risk can even approach zero when starting out, and here’s why.

1. Real time tracking eliminates much of the risk. You can monitor your spend and your earnings simultaneously. This way you can see exactly what is happening hour by hour throughout the day, and make adjustments on the fly. There are not many things in business that give you this level of control. You can simplify the whole concept to 2 bars - red and green. As long as the green bar is rising faster than the red, you are making profit. Check with your account manager about any reporting delays before starting an offer, and get to know the update frequency of your PPC service. There might be small delays, but for the most part, tracking is nearly real time. Watch your bars frequently and reduce your risk.

2. To completely eliminate risk, you can use free clicks with new accounts. Most of the big 3 PPC engines have coupons, or links that provide free clicks when opening new accounts. Google and Yahoo always have them, MSN only occasionally. For example, the Yahoo banner on the right of this blog will lead to $50 in free clicks on YSM. (B.t.w. - You can now fund new YSM accounts with Paypal, no credit card needed. 2nd account anyone?) This takes the initial risk of spending money on non converting offers right off the table. If you were to bid .10 clicks that would be 500 clicks to throw at a new offer, which should be more than enough to see if it converts.

Everyone seems to have a pretty rosey view of affiliate marketing.  Maybe all the screenshots of huge stats make people think its relatively easy to make a thousands a day.  But there are things that no one seems to mention as well.  I always like give all angles of the story on my blog, so here are some things you might not have heard about PPC to affiliate marketing.

1.  You will pay for clicks you never receive.  For a variety of technical reasons that could fill a book, your click count that the PPC networks charge you will never match what you affiliate network shows.   I will follow up with another post on how to minimize this, but accept the fact that you will be paying for lost clicks.  Don’t forget to factor that into your cost estimates.

2.  The hot offer that you have been killing for months, possibly years, will end.  It might end on schedule, or it might get pulled.  But it will end.  So if you aren’t diversified in your offer portfolio, you will be in trouble.

3.  Your PPC campaigns will get shut down.  No matter how good you are, eventually you will get Google slapped, or keywords pulled, or ads denied.  You will need to be nimble and ready with alternatives for when this happens.

These were just a few I thought of.  Got any others?

If you want to learn PPC marketing, there are no shortcuts.  You simply have to put in the time, moving your way up the learning curve.  Luckily everything you need to be successful is out there and best of all, free.  Each of the big 3 PPC engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN all have extensive tutorial and learning centers.  If you go through each of these step by step, you will know more than 95% of the people out there.

So here there are, have fun learning!

Google

Yahoo

MSN

So you finally hit on an offer that is converting well, and most importantly: is consistent. You know your average eCPC and feel comfortable letting it run on auto pilot in un-budgeted spend mode. Now what? Expand it of course. The hard part is done, you already have tested and proven ads and landing pages built. So here are a few ways to expand the reach of your success.

1. More Keywords. Keyword research is never something you finish. There will always be more keywords to find for your niche. So keep bumping up the impressions with fresh keywords. You never know what winning keywords you will hit on next.

2. More PPC networks. Don’t just use the big 3. There are many networks out there just waiting to send you more traffic. Check out my latest PPC challenge for ideas.

3. More accounts. This one can be a little tricky and may run into the gray hat side of things. You can sign up for other accounts on the PPC networks that you already use. Some allow it some don’t so use your judgement. One thing you have to be careful about is competing with yourself. Obviously if you are running the same keywords from 2 accounts, you are your own competitor. This can actually be a good or bad thing, depending on how you work it. Create different ads that play off each other, especially if they are going to appear consecutively due to similar bid prices. Make one ad the opposite of the other. This is just another thing that takes tons of testing. But having more ads up there for the same keyword search definitley increases your chance for a click. (I plan on doing a full detailed post about how to compete with yourself later.)

4. Non-PPC traffic. Once you have tapped out every network you can find try other forms of promotion. Media buys are one idea. Many of these networks require a $10k deposit, but if you know your landing page converts it shouldn’t be an issue.

5. Everything else. There are a million other ways to send traffic to your pages. Building pages that rank organically is a huge topic worthy of its own blog. You can also jump on hot trends like Facebook ads or Stumbleupon traffic. The sky is really the limit.

Being able to expand a good offer is one thing that separates the big affiliates from the small timers. So don’t be afraid to ramp that offer up.