The hands-down best method for affiliate marketers is to build a website and a community, provide amazing and consistent content and then recommend goods and services to your audience. But, sometimes you just don’t want to do it that way and so you may consider PPC.
Pay-per-click marketing means that you pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement for the product, whether they buy or not. You only get paid when you sell the product, so this can be costly, but there are ways to make it work. Here are some things to consider.
* Pay Per Click Means Lots of Testing – Like with much of marketing, it’s all about the testing. You’ll have to try things in order to find out what works for a particular product or service. Run more than one PPC campaign using slightly different advertisements to find out what works best.
* Pay Per Click Works Best with Higher Priced Items – You don’t want to try PPC with items you’ll only make a few bucks off. Use it for the items where you will earn hundreds in commission, because it will cost more to get the right buyers to click through.
* Understand Keywords before You Start – It’s imperative that you not only understand the keywords your audience favors but also that you understand the rules of the product you’re promoting. Some require affiliates not to use certain keywords due to their own ad runs.
* Know Your Audience – Does your audience typically click on ads? If not, what’s the point in trying a PPC campaign? If your audience will click through, what do you need to put in the ad to make them curious enough to do it?
* Use Yahoo! and Bing – The clicks are cheaper although though the audience is smaller, and of course your audience is likely there. It’s a good place to start before you move over to AdWords and Google.
* Try Facebook – You can run PPC campaigns on Facebook too. The click costs aren’t that high and can work well if you’re marketing an expensive product that makes the cost worth it. Plus, if you can’t find your audience on Facebook you probably don’t have an audience.
And here is the most important PPC campaign success tip of all:
* Use PPC to Build Your List – Instead of using the PPC campaign to sell an item directly, use it to build up your email list. Give them something free to download, that solves at least one problem and gets them on your list. Then start promoting the expensive product you wanted to sell them. Building your list over selling directly is a tried-and-true way that affiliate marketers have used PPC for, for over a decade now.
To sum up, with any PPC strategy remember to only use it for high priced products, or to build your email list in which to market your products and/or services. PPC can work very well even today if you are willing to practice, learn about keywords, and spend a little money.