Pay Per Click Profits : How to profit as a Pay Per Click affiliate
by Dave Cottrell
Pay Per Click (PPC) is most often thought of as a way to get your product or service in front of a very targeted audience. By “bidding” on keywords that pertain to what you are selling, you hope that people will click on your links ahead of everyone else’ links, and even better, buy what you are marketing. 
Pay Per Click is a good way to market your product or service, and has been the key to success for many businesses. It requires good research and an advertising budget, but done properly, is very successful. An advertiser who has figured out what keywords bring in the most paying clicks for his product can pretty much write his own paycheck.
The downside to pay per click advertising is that you can spend a lot of money and get nothing in return. This has become an issue with Google’s PPC program. As the old saying goes, they have been hoisted by their own petard, or hung by their own rope. Because of their massive size, the cost for PPC on Google has become very expensive in many areas.
Unless your niche is unique enough, as in, you sell moon rocks for Martians, you will be competing with thousands and often millions of other people for the same keywords. The only way to rise above the crowd is to pay more than the rest of the crowd is willing to pay. That can get REALLY expensive.
Unless you are quite certain about what keywords will bring PAYING customers to your site who will pay enough to at least cover your expenses, Pay Per Click advertising on a big site like that can sink you.
The tantalizing news for so many, though, is the FACT that PPC works and makes many people who figure it out very wealthy. They are willing to spend fifty thousand dollars per month on Pay Per Click advertising, because it’s bringing in seventy five thousand dollars per month. The twenty five thousand dollar per month profit makes it well worth it. The problem is, that if you only take in twenty five thousand after spending fifty, you’re in big trouble!
The good news, as more and more people are discovering, is that you can now buy PPC advertising for a lot less on smaller sites. Contrary to what some think, it’s NOT necessary to only run with the big guns. Smaller sites that have a reasonable amount of good traffic, like Adlandpro, for example, are excellent places to buy PPC and offer a very good return on investment (ROI) for the savvy business person.
When you buy PPC ads on these smaller, but very busy sites, the price for great keywords is often mere pennies, rather than dollars.
But there is another way to make incredible money with Pay Per Click, and it does not require a big budget. In fact, about the only thing it requires is a blog! This is as a Pay Per Click affiliate.
The PPC affiliate program that most people are familiar with is the Google program. Unfortunately, many people have shared some very bad experiences they have had with them. I am one of the large number of people who have worked hard to make money with their affiliate program, only to be shut down completely for an alleged violation, without any way of finding out why or offering any kind of protest or defense.
For someone who has poured their heart into building a good site with good content, this can be devastating. There’s nothing you can do about it. There is nobody you can talk to about it that can help you in any way. If you get shut down by them, the door is shut. If you want to try again by opening a new account with a new email address, you can, but there is no guaranty that it won’t happen again. All that needs to happen is for your traffic to suddenly go up for no apparent reason (which happens all the time to a lot of sites), and they can shut you down, FOR GOOD, for the mere suspicion that you might be artificially inflating traffic.
(By the way, it’s not unusual for any site to get a traffic spike from time to time.)
There is a better and much more sound and lucrative way to profit as a pay per click affiliate. That is to become an affiliate of a smaller company that still has a lot of traffic and therefore a valuable pay per click affiliate program. A very good example of this is the Adlandpro Pay Per Click affiliate program.
Smaller companies are much less rigid with their affiliates and have a must greater (and vested) interest in seeing their affiliates succeed, since their own profitability depends to a very large extent on their affiliates.
In fact, it is a win-win partnership. The company provides all the programming, platform, database, payment system, coding, etc., and the affiliate simply supplies honest clicks. This is done by placing small snippets of code supplied by the company on the affiliate’s website and/or blog, and then by bringing good traffic to the website.
While the really big companies can be very heavy handed about where the traffic comes from, the smaller Pay Per Click companies that offer affiliate programs like the Adlandpro program are much easier to work with, and many, like Adlandpro, have owners who are very approachable, should any challenges arise.
The way to Pay Per Click profits with ANY company is not something that works with click through or paid traffic programs. Again, with the big PPC companies, it will get you shut down, with almost no chance of ever getting your money or your account reopened.
The fact is, as in almost every case, such traffic will not bring you any clicks, anyway.
The way to get clicks with PPC is by creating content on your own blog, on your own domain. If your domain is http:// theirdomain . com/ yourusername, you’re not serious about your business. Unless you are willing to invest the tiny amount of cost of your own domain name and hosting, you’re wasting your time.
It’s easy to put a blog on your own domain. Most hosts have several platforms on board, ready to be automatically activated. Wordpress is just one among several very good platforms.
Choose a niche you are familiar with out of the many available with any given Pay Per Click affiliate program. Make sure it is something you can write about at least weekly, and start writing. Put the code generated by the PPC program on your blog.
Advertise your blog. You can do this very discretely by using the social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, Tumblr and others. With a WordPress blog, you can install a plugin that will display social media share buttons below every article you write, making it easy for your readers to share.
You can also use programs like Buffer, Scoop.it and Hootsuite to share links to your articles on multiple social sites at once.
MAKE SURE not to let ANY of your shares look in ANY way like blatant advertising. Instead, offer a little snippet or information about your latest article. Ask yourself if that little bit of information, always under 140 characters, would make you interested enough to click the link to the article to at least start reading it. If not, work on it until you really like it.
Encourage your readers to comment. Again, WordPress blog platforms let you download plugins that make it simple for your readers to leave comments. These are really important and you should engage with your readers who do comment.
Link discretely to other, similar articles. Yes, you are linking to other bloggers and authors off your site, but remember that many of them will visit to see who is linking to them, plus your links will be connected to them, even if loosely, on the big search engines.
Set up email accounts for your social sites with files that are specific to each social site. You can set filters on most email programs to direct mail from each site to a separate file. Then you can go in an engage with those who are commenting and “liking” your article links on each site.
When you engage in this way, remember to think of the links and short comments as “conversation starters,” and have a “conversation” with the people who have connected in some way. A good way to do this is to ask questions, rather than make statements. Questions like, “Why do you say that?” or “What did you like about the article?” or “What is your experience with this?’ are just a few of the kinds of questions you might ask that will keep the conversation going and make it more likely that your visitors will come back to your site.
The more often somebody visits your site OUT OF INTEREST, the more like that person is to click on one of the Pay Per Click ads on your blog.
Add a signature file to your email and profile in any forums or blog sites you belong to. Include the domain name of your blog, and a very short, catchy line that briefly says something of interest and relevance about your blog. Avoid making it sound like a call to buy anything. Always work to make people want to come to your site out of INTEREST, not to buy something. Most people online, today, will go to a search engine or a favourite company site is they are wanting to buy something. To get them to your site, where they might click on a link to something they may DISCOVER they are interested in buying, you need to get them to your site out of interest, not out of need.
Make sure your visitors have a way to subscribe to your blog, so that they will get email notifications every time you post a new article.
Focus, focus, focus. It was recently brought to my attention by an owner of one of the popular smaller social sites that it’s great to have a blog and post lots of articles on it, but if they are on all different subjects and not really relevant to what the goal of the site really is, it’s not going to be effective.
This is something you, as a successful Pay Per Click affiliate, have to focus on and keep in the forefront at all times. Keep your blog relevant to the niche you are working in, research that niche constantly, and write good articles that will bring your readers back again and again for more. You can profit very nicely from a Pay Per Click affiliate program.
About the author
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