PPC and Affiliate Marketing

By Karen Gross

Did you ever wonder how some affiliates seem to get so many sales? Consider what would happen if you were able to select the people who came to your site, determining in advance that they truly are interested in what you have to offer.

As an affiliate marketer, PPC (Pay Per Click) Advertising can give you just that.

A technique used in search engine marketing, PPC allows you to bid on certain keywords or phrases related to what you are promoting. The best part is, you only pay if someone comes to your site and clicks on one of your links.

Search engines index millions of new web pages every day. Every new page makes it that much harder for your site to get a share of Internet traffic through user searches. Page ranking, based on incoming links, fresh content, key word density and other factors, determines where each page will fall in the index.

What if your site is new or does not have a lot of incoming links? Generally this means that your site will be one of the last pages that the visitor will see, and only after searching through hundreds, even thousands of web sites of a similar nature. How can you compete?

By bidding and winning a keyword or phrase, you can level the playing field. You only pay when a user comes to your site and clicks on a link on your page, this allows you to bypass the page ranking system. You can have targeted traffic sent directly to your sales page, this works especially well for short campaigns. On longer campaigns, you have to be aware of the cost per click versus the commission percentage and bid accordingly. It would not be cost effective, if your advertising took up too large of a chunk of your fee.

As an affiliate marketer, you have effectively targeted your traffic to the keyword or phrase that most closely relates to your product and determined how much you are willing to pay for each click. Your advertisement can reach a far greater audience in a much shorter time and you don't have to wait until your web site works its way up the page ranking system. Some PPC networks will even allow you to narrow your targeted traffic by geographic location, industry and keyword topic, making your PPC traffic as targeted as possible.

Faced with search engine page ranking systems, a PPC campaign can bring in a flood of targeted traffic to your affiliate site. This is not a beginner technique, and should only be undertaken if you can afford the risk. It is a way to get your program directly in front of the people who are actively searching for the keyword or phrase that you have bid on.