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Pay-Per-Click

Instant traffic.  It’s like opening up your donut shop and five seconds later getting knocked down by eager customers.  Same thing with pay-per-click advertising.  PPC, those paid ads on the top and side of search results, offers up the promise of an instant customer base–but without having to wait weeks, months, or never for your organic results to show up.

Even though organic results are “free,” they are often as elusive as clouds in the sky:  always changing shape, always moving.  Even though PPC is rarely a rock-solid guarantee of ranking, it does provide more certainty than the organic results.

Pay Per Click marketing is where you pay a system such as Google AdWords for clicks to your site.

When you publish a website or blog, it’s a long and involved process to get to the top of the search engine results (SERPs) organic rankings.  Many factors come into play:  the number of other sites that link to you, keywords, domain extensions, etc.

Even when you have nailed down all of these factors, you might still be sitting on page 27 of Google, wondering why no one is never clicking on your site.

But pay per click, or PPC, lets you bypass most of those problems.  Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter are the top three PPC systems available to online marketers.

Why Use PPC?

Pay per Click is more of a “known quantity” than the organic results.  Because advertisers are paying for the privilege of showing up on search pages, the PPC systems try to be fairly transparent about the process–or at least transparent relative to how the organic results work.

Also, online marketers can appear quickly on search pages, instead of waiting for many weeks for their pages to get “spidered” and recognized by the search engines for the organic results.

A Very Short History of PPC

When PPC first came around, invented by a technology incubator called IdeaLab, it truly was pay per click.  Online marketers could literally pay their pay to the top of search engine rankings.

Yahoo! bought out the IdeaLab product (which was called Overture) and further developed the idea.  But it wasn’t until Google developed its own PPC system that it really took off.

Google introduced new ideas that improved the quality of ads and advertisers.  AdWords began to factors in other aspects such as ad copy relevance that helped determine how high an ad ranked.  No longer could online marketers simply “buy their way” to the top.

Yahoo!, ever the imitator, revamped their system under the working title of Panama–mirroring AdWords.

Microsoft AdCenter is a highly regarded PPC system.  Its interface is considered to be clear and user-friendly, but the MSN’s low traffic prevents a lot of online marketers from using AdCenter.

Rinse and Repeat

Repeat the good, discard the bad.

You’ve seen pictures of those obnoxiously wealthy internet marketers with their red exotic sports cars, oceanfront mansions, and assorted bling?

Their secret is something that–on the face of it–sounds so damn boring and tedious that aspiring marketers usually ignore it.

Successful online marketing is a continual process of evaluating your wins and losses.  The big income earners discard the losses, identify the wins, and then magnify and keep repeating the wins.

The second point:  Successful six-figure marketers derive their massive income by combining many small streams of income.

Campaign analysis is more of a scientific, logical process where you’re examining the numbers.  You have to push your emotions aside and trust the numbers to tell you where to go next.

Push Product

You’ve got your affiliate marketing platform and it’s just sitting there, unnoticed.

Don’t wait for the search engines to find it and list it in the organic results.  This process, known as indexing, takes weeks or months–or never.  The fastest way to start driving traffic to your marketing platform is to use a pay per click or PPC system such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, or Microsoft AdCenter.

It’s like this.  Let’s say you want to be an actor or actress.  You can either wait around for years for someone to notice you.  Or you can pay out of your own pocket and get listed with agencies and directories, and go to fee-based contests and talent shows.

It’s called paying your way to the top.  And I highly recommend it.

Own the Clickbank Product

Take control of the product by developing your own marketing platform.

By “own” the product you “take ownership” of it by creating landing pages, blogs, or other channels to push the product.  Too many affiliates rely on poor methods like pay per click direct linking that does not give them “ownership” of the product’s marketing platform.

The preferred “ownership” method is to already have an established marketing platform.  Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines have a cartoon fantasy in mind when it comes to marketing platforms.  This cartoon fantasy revolves around people who first have established platforms, then secondly populate them with affiliate offers.  Marketers who do not have established platforms are called thin affiliates.

If you do not fall into the cartoon fantasy area, then this is for you:

How to Take Ownership of the Affiliate Product

1. Register your own domain or use an existing domain.
2. Create a simple landing page featuring the product.  The landing page can be a web page or a blog.
3. “Brand” the landing page.  Make it legitimate or look legitimate by creating graphic elements (banners, images, etc.) and adding Google Fluff pages such as About Us, Privacy Policy, and Contact Us.
4. Create original content based around the product’s niche.
5. Populate the landing page with affiliate links.

Find Product to Market

Too many affiliate marketers get sucked into promoting a product because of three reasons:  it is new, it has a high commission rate, and it has a high dollar payout.

All good reasons to choose a product.  But toss out the first factor – new.  So much hype accompanies the launch of some affiliate products–notably info products from programs such as Clickbank–that affiliates can get sucked in.  And then lose a lot of money in the process.  Clickbank in particular lists a lot of half-baked info products that the merchant never took time to refine.

Consider these factors when choosing an affiliate product:

• What is the Return Rate? Clickbank has a generous return policy.  Every product that gets returned erodes your profit every time it happens.
• Does the Merchant Adequately Support Affiliates? Some merchants could care less about their affiliates, while other merchants have what they often call an “Affiliate Resource Center.”  These centers are often a webpage that lists some ideas for how to promote the product, along with a few keywords and some banner ads.
• Is the Product Going Up or Down? Sites such as CB Engine and CB Analytics provide free snapshots into the history of Clickbank products.  Several factors are are at play, but Gravity is an important one.  Higher Gravity is better than lower Gravity.  But note, as in the graph, that extremely high Gravity in the 400+ range means that products are flooded with affiliate competition.
• Earning Per Sale.  Another huge factor that affiliates often ignore–often dooming many affiliates’ campaigns.  Earning Per Sale (EPC) takes into account all factors that will influence your eventual payout.  For a simplified and unrealistic example, consider a product that pays out $100 per sale.  But if every other product gets returned, in the end you’re only getting $50 average per sale.
• Product Commission Rate. In Clickbank, you should expect at least 50% commission rate.  But the high commission rates are due to the high profit margin of info products.  Physical products have much lower commission rates.
• Product Commission $ Payout.  Many affiliates are tempted by high dollar payouts.  They see $40+ payouts and decide to jump on the bandwagon.  But high dollar payouts by themselves are meaningless.  For example, a product may pay out $50 commissions…but the advertising rates on pay per click systems such as Google AdWords are so high that it is prohibitively expensive to advertise.

Clickbank Affiliate PPC

Are you ready for the Dr. X Mysterious “Affiliate Killer” Death-Annihilator “Crack the Code” System for Making $100,000 per year?

No?  Good, because that’s not what I’m giving you.  Personally, I’m tired of all the gurus who make it sound so spooky-spooky mysterious.

It’s a four-step process employed by successful online marketers the world over.  The process for making $100,000+ per year is the same as the process for making $10 per year.  The difference is in how you execute it.  And a little practice.

Step 1:  Find It

Find profitable products to market.

Too many affiliate marketers get sucked into promoting affiliate products (usually infoproducts) because they have a high dollar payout.  But successful, six figure-earning affiliates consider many more factors when researching potential affiliate products.

Step 2:  Own It

Take control of the product by developing your own marketing channels.

The best way to push an affiliate product is to first “take ownership” of it.

Step 3:  Push It

Send offers out and drive traffic to them.

Push the affiliate products.  Get them out there and under buyers’ noses.  Online traffic is no different from what any owner of a brick-and-mortar store wants:  people looking at the merchandise.

Step 4:  Rinse and Repeat It

Repeat the good, discard the bad.

Figure out what went wrong and correct it.  Capitalize on the good stuff.  Repeat the good stuff over and over.  This is what we meant at the beginning when we talked about “execution.”  The six-figure earners know all about rinse and repeat, and they do it well.