PPC And Affiliate Marketing

The key to making money as an affiliate is to get visitors to buy from your affiliate link. That’s obvious, but the trick is getting enough visitors to see the offer and buy.

It’s a numbers game. A conversion rate of 1-2 percent is considered pretty good. This can vary of course. What it means is that for every 100 visitors you send to an sales page, you can potentially get 1 or 2 sales. So the way to make more commissions is to get more visitors.

If you’re getting visitors by using pay per click advertising, you need to be sure to track your results. It’s too easy to jump in and set up a campaign, only to find out that you’re paying more for clicks than you’re getting in commissions.

Let’s say you are getting $20 for each sale you refer. To make an extra $100, you’ll need about 1,000 visitors to the sales page. If you want to earn $1,000, you’ll need to get 10,000 visitors to your web page.

Now you need to factor in your ad costs. For example, if you’re paying 10 cents a click, then for every 100 clicks you’re paying $10. Not too bad if you’re getting 1 sale for every 100 clicks. You’ve just made $20 in commissions. Take away the $10 for ad costs, and you end up with $10 for yourself.

Get 2 sales for every 100 clicks, and you’ll net $30 ($40 commissions less $10 ad fees=$30). But this depends on your ability to get traffic for 10 cents a click. What if you end up paying 50 cents a click?

Well, now for every 100 clicks, if you get 1 sale you earn a $20 commission, but you’ve spent $50 in ad costs, resulting in a loss of $30. If you manage to make 2 sales for every 100 clicks, you still end up losing $10. If you’re lucky,. and sometimes you will be, you might be able to generate 3 sales for every 100 clicks, and you’ll end up making $10 for every $50 you spend in advertising.

Here’s my point. Pay per click is a good way to get immediate traffic to your offer. But it isn’t always profitable. You can try to offset this by choosing products that pay a higher commission. But whatever you do, pay attention to your costs to advertise and the commissions you get. Make sure at the end of the day you end up making a profit.

Another thing to pay close attention to is how much you’re paying. When you first set up a campaign, it may be a good idea to put a limit on your daily budget. See how your ads are converting. You may need to target different keywords, or tweak your ads. Not all campaigns are going to be profitable. You don’t want to end up spending hundreds of dollars on clicks only to find out that you haven’t made any profit.

In some markets, you may find that you have to pay more per click to get on the first page of results. Find out how much you’ll have to pay to get on the first page of results, and consider whether or not you can make enough to cover your costs. If not, maybe you’ll need to look for another market to enter.

My point is simple. Affiliate marketing and pay per click can be very profitable. But only if you pay attention to your results. Learn about pay per click before you spend a lot of money. A great, inexpensive resource is Perry Marshall’s Ultimate Guide To Adwords. Do a search on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or go to a book store. For around $20, you can learn a whole lot about how adwords works. Be careful and be prosperous…