Affiliate Marketing With Pay Per Click Advertisements

 Many people are attracted to affiliate marketing by the idea of easy money from only working a few hours per week. They think or are told that they do not need a website and that they can buy some clicks from a search engine and instantly be in business. The truth is that this is possible if you are fortunate enough to refer a motivated buyer who is searching for the specific product you are marketing. Those opportunities exist, but take extensive research to discover or create.

Using pay per click advertising to make money in affiliate marketing usually requires testing, tracking and landing pages. Many beginners do not start out using any of the techniques and quickly become discouraged after spending a significant amount of time and money. They try to sell products by simply directing searchers to the vendor's squeeze page. This will work a certain percentage of the time, but usually one ends up spending more for one conversion than the commission they will earn from it. Obviously this does not work.

Being able to determine a working formula requires that all clicks and conversions be tracked so that you know which ads, which keywords and which products are selling. More important, you know how much the ads cost, how much you are earning and the return on investment. With a strong tracking mechanism in place, it becomes easier to eliminate the ineffective efforts and focus on those that are making money.

Once you are tracking your results, you can then begin split testing campaigns. With split testing, you are changing one element of your marketing campaign and running it simultaneously with the original campaign without that one change. For instance, you could try different wording in your ad to see if one set of advertising copy was more effective than another. Sometimes changing a few words will make a significant increase in your return on investment.

Finally, most pay per click marketers use some form of a landing page. It requires 6 to 8 contacts on average with a customer to make a sale. This means that simply sending them to the vendor's website will have a relatively low conversion rate. The alternative is to Create a landing page where you can begin selling the product and build interest. It is also possible to add value by comparing the original product with competing products. This enables a searcher to comparison shop. Of course, it helps to have affiliate relationships with the other products so that in the end you earn a commission if there is a sale as a result of your efforts.

Pay per click advertising can be an effective means of making money in affiliate marketing if one takes the time to implement the necessary controls. Tracking and split testing ensure that that one is getting the most targeted traffic. Once you have targeted traffic, having an effective landing page enables you to build interest, add value and sell a potential customer on the product so that they are ready to buy when you finally send them to the vendor's site.