The easiest way to make more affiliate profits is to simply generate more traffic.
I generally use pay-per-click traffic for almost all the affiliate products I promote simply because you can control exactly how much money is going out- and once you figure out how many visitors it takes to make a sale with whatever you are promoting, then you will know exactly how much money will come in.
PPC advertising just makes affiliate marketing easier if you ask me!
First off, pay per click (PPC) does NOT mean Google Adwords. Adwords is just the most popular form of PPC advertising, but it is definitely not the only one. On that note, PPC search engine advertising is also not the only form of PPC.
You can pay per click on a variety of different advertising vehicles including banner ads, text ads, flash ads, email ads, etc.. So don’t limit yourself to just Google Adwords, or just search engines.
If you want to find more sources where you can pay per click, just go to Google.com and search for “pay per click advertising”.
Before you do any PPC advertising (or any advertising for that matter), you need a good tracking system to track your results. If you are doing search engine PPC, you need to know which keywords are producing sales and which aren’t. This will help fine tune your marketing system.
Included in this product is a software program which is perfect for tracking search engine pay-per-click ads. It allows you to use “trackers” for each keyword and will then display how much traffic that keyword is getting. Although most systems like Googe.com, MSN.com will have their own tracking that you can look at as well, it is best to have all of your tracking for all of your affiliate products in one place.
So what works in PPC advertising? Well, the truth is, 90% of the money you make from PPC ads will come from 10% of your keywords- The same keywords that produce results for you in the organic search most of the time.
Be very specific. “Golf” is going to be way too expensive, but “Golf swing instruction” may be much cheaper per click and will certainly produce more sales if you are selling golf instruction.
This isn’t really rocket science, it has just been made to be more difficult than it really is. The fact is, if you want to get big traffic from PPC keyword ads, then you will be spending some big money.
The more competitive keywords are going to cost more, so your sales ratio will have to pick up the slack.
Here is a formula I follow..
For the more competitive keywords that cost $0.50-$2.00, I just try to break even with my initial product while building a list. I will gladly spend $1+ per visitor and just break even because I know that a good percentage of those visitors will subscribe to my list, and/or buy my upsell (profit), and/or buy a backend product from me (more profit).
Most people just look at trying to make a bunch of money with their 50% commission of one $27 product that converts at 1% and are finding it incredibly hard, especially with highly competitive advertising vehicles like Google Adwords.
But if you just look at breaking even on the first sale, it becomes so much easier. Marketing in general becomes so much easier when the initial sale doesn’t have to produce a profit.
So let’s say that you are doing the “Insider’s View” video idea with a PPC advertising campaign. You set it up to where they have to subscribe to your list for the inside view video. You build your list this way by just breaking even on all of the sales that are generated from that video.
So for the very competitive words that generate a lot of traffic, just break even.
For the low hanging fruit, the words that aren’t competitive, don’t cost too much per click, and don’t generate as much traffic- these are the ones that can make you money up front. The problem is, they are not searched for as often and just don’t bring in the clicks that the expensive ones do.
It is also very important to be on the front page when you are advertising via search engine PPC. This not only generates the most traffic, but also the more hungry visitors who seem to buy much more often.
So whenever possible, get on the front page, spend the extra money to test it out and see how profitable it is for you and your product.
You might just be breaking even on the initial product, but your follow ups may make you a fortune. Getting the most of each visitor is what marketing is all about!
The more you get out of each visitor, the easier it is to generate tons of traffic to your web site. Why? Because you can spend more.
Put it this way, if your web site generates $3 per unique visitor, do you think it would be hard to generate traffic from say Google Adwords? You could spend $2 per click and still make money.
The biggest search engine PPC advertising vehicles are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, And MSN Ad Center. There are others, but I never found the others to be worth the effort.
However, there are a lot of sites that offer PPC advertising that isn’t search engine keywords. Like I said above, go to Google.com an do a search for it and you will get plenty of ideas.
It is a good idea to set specific days to do certain tasks that will build traffic.
For instance:
- On Mondays and Thursdays, check all PPC advertising and tweak the campaigns to make them profitable.
- Go to the discussion forums that are in your market at the end of everyday (after your to do list is completed) and make relevant post about the topic and leave your link in your sig file (don’t spend too much time at the forums, just get in and get out).
- Pick a day each week to brainstorm new ideas to generate traffic (I don’t work on Fridays or the weekend, so my brainstorm day is Thursday so that the ideas are in my head all weekend. I find this helps to come up with new ideas while I’m out and about enjoying life.)
- Whenever you find something that works well, outsource it. If you have found that it works, and are done with all of your testing or experimenting with that concept, then you can outsource it and move on to finding other traffic generation methods that work well for your business.