Monday, October 27, 2008

How to dominate PPC advertising without emptying your pockets

By Xerge Rio

You already know that affiliate marketing is a tough game for anyone involved, but particularly for the type of individual that wants to dip in and out of other markets and spread their assets across numerous different niches - which is always a good idea.

So unless you've already got a well trafficked website and/or a very large list that is highly specialized and relevant to the products you're aiming to promote, you've got a choice:

1. Begin working hard at building sites, hunting back links, writing a serious amount of articles, content and blogs...

...you'll see that eventually your efforts will pay off in spades. Just don't expect money - or indeed traffic - to come knocking at your door for the next 12 months...at least not consistently or in large volumes.

2. PPC traffic. Bam.

Well, PPC is the broker in this case and boy has it got some big affiliate checks waiting with your name on it.

Having such a huge array of potential markets to dip into and make money, the first option is simply not the best for the hungry netreprenuer. It's too much work and time required, unless you outsource all of the work - which can frequently be a huge energy drain and often ends up in tears anyway.

At the same time, people may discuss with you that PPC is also a huge time and energy hog, and that PPC can also end you up in tears, in particular after the major PPC search engines such as Google are becoming so competitive and particularly about the campaigns you set up and run.

But in order to get instant traffic and make money from literally every corner of the internet, PPC is still the ultimate way to tap into hungry buyers overnight (plus you don't have to worry about your traffic levels suddenly falling like you do with free traffic).

What we want is to beat the PPC system, make it easy to operate, and at the same time avoiding losing money and taking lots of time in the process.

In order to do so, you'll have to cover the next important aspects to making your PPC campaign an actual success...

1. Testing is very important

If you don't test which keywords are getting you money, and you don't test which way of presenting your offers (via your webpage/landing page etc) then you'll invariably be throwing money away. Once you know what is effective, you can dump the duds and literally save yourself thousands in wasted clicks.

Then, put that saved money into buying more clicks, or if you like, use it to outsource any of your hard work that you don't desire to do yourself any longer.

2. Target desperate keywords

It's far simpler to target individuals who are in a desperate mental state than it is to target "tire kickers" who are just snooping around, with no credit card in hand.

3. Take control of your budget, but don't limit it

Of course, the soundest way to save yourself wasted PPC cash is to keep a close eye on your campaigns. Yet, the common mistake here is to cap your daily PPC budget.

By doing this, you're essentially telling Google not to show your ads too often. This will save you money, but will also limit your exposure and will take you longer to find out of your campaign is going in the proper direction. It's far better to stop the campaign manually when things start getting expensive (providing you're not in profit that is!)

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