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.

Ever wonder how the guys in the top PPC positions create those cool, high CTR and high converting ads? We use dynamic text insertion. Now that MSN has fixed their dynamic system with the abilty to specify default text, let’s use them as an example.

It’s pretty simple really. You just put the variable {keyword} in the postion in your ad where you want that keyword to appear. So if your keyword is the fictional band “toxic cucumber” and you are selling CDs for any band, your ad text might look like

Buy {keyword} CDs

and when the customer searches for “Toxic Cucumber” the ad title they will see is:

Buy Toxic Cucumber CDs

Now you can also repeat the variable in anywhere in the ad for more effect. So your ad could be:

Buy {keyword} CDs
We are the best place to find {keyword} CDs.
Order now for free shipping.

One thing you have to be careful is how the length of the dynamic keyword will affect the length of your ads. In MSN (and Google Adcenter) you are limited to a 25 character title. So what you always need to do is specify a default text that will be displayed when the keyword causes the ad title to be too long. You do this by using {keyword:default}.

So in our example we could use {keyword:The Latest}

Then if someone was searching on our keyword “system of a down” which would cause our title to be too long, the ad they would see is:

Buy The Latest CDs
We are the best place to find The Latest CDs.
Order now for free shipping.

That’s all there is to it. You can get really creative with ways to use dynamic insertion in your ads. Then sit back and watch your CTR and conversion go through the roof!

Yes you can get free clicks with many PPC services, especially 2nd and 3rd tier networks. It’s really simple too. Want to know the secret of free clicks: ask for them! It may sound ridiculously easy, but that’s all there is to it. Just a quick email stating that you are interested in testing their service, and if the tests are favorable you are ready to spend a large amount with them. Then ask if they have any promotional credits or matching funds they could add. Amazingly, this works quite often, and you get free clicks! Many account managers have these kind of discounts in their budgets, especially the 2nd tier networks, and it’s worth it to them in order to gain a possibly big customer. You’ll never know unless you ask, and you have nothing to lose. I have got literally thousands of dollars in free clicks doing this.

 

In addition to your stable running campaigns, it’s always good to keep an eye out for short lived trends to supplement your income.  A good example of this is the release of Halo 3.  This has been getting tons of press about the release Tuesday and the long lines of people waiting to buy it.  All this translates into huge search volume for Halo related keywords.  Your first thought as an affiliate marketer should be “how can I capitalize on this”.  Well, a quick scan of affiliate networks showed that Copeac, has a free Halo 3 zip submit offer.  With the search volume skyrocketing this week for Halo, it shouldn’t be too hard to pick up some nice leads.

Like holiday traffic which I have discussed many times before, capitalizing on pop culture trends and media hype is just one more tool for the successful affiliate.

Of all the stats you can gather in your CPA campaigns, eCPC is the king. Sure conversion rates, payouts amounts, CPCs, clicks, bounce rates, etc… are all important, but everything you really need is built right into the eCPC. By knowing the eCPC (estimated cost per click) and the offer amount, you can back calculate conversion rates, number of leads, click totals, and generally the overall health of your campaign. You should be able to get to a point where simply looking at your eCPC instantly tells you if it was a good day or bad day.

It’s also an excellent way to find good offers to test. When in comes right down to it, the payout of the offer, and the conversion rate doesn’t really matter. The eCPC tells you immediately if you can have a good shot at a profitable offer. Actually it’s the spread between what your average CPC you think you can get from your PPC campaign, and the eCPC that you want to look for. The greater the spread, the more profitable the offer.

For example:

Say my account manager tells me an offer is running a network wide eCPC on search of .72 cents. I happen to know that for those keywords I can buy traffic at .41 cents. That’s a decent spread and something definitely worth testing. That means for every click I send to the offer, I’m making.31 cents. If another offer has an eCPC of $1.43, but I know I would have to pay $1.40 per click to send traffic, I would pass with only a .3 cent spread. People get hung up on high payouts, but it’s the spread that really makes you profitable, especially if it’s a high volume search niche.

Keep in mind eCPCs are different for everyone and averages should only be a rough guideline to help you decide what to test. You never know what your own eCPC will be until you gather your own test data. Also eCPC can vary greatly among PPC networks. MSN traffic may have an eCPC of 1.21, where Adwords traffic is .80 cents. It’s important to find your own eCPC for each network and each offer.

(my apologies for the large number of acronyms in this post)