What is PPC?
Absolute Beginner’s Guide to PPC
Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC, is a quick way to generate a ton of traffic for your site. Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN all have marketing programs that allow advertising to put up ads above and to the right of normal, or “organic”, search results.
The difference between the highlighted “sponsored links” and normal search results is that advertisers pay the search engines to have their ads listed on sponsored links while organic search results are not paid for. Advertisers generally pay on a “per click” (whenever a viewer clicks on their ad) basis rather than a “per impression” basis (an advertiser would pay every time his ad came up on the page).
Generally, companies pay these search engine companies to list their own website or product. But what if you’re not a marketer for a company or have no product of your own to offer? Enter the world of Affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing allows independent internet marketers to promote other companies’ products for a cut of the sale or lead.
How Does It Work?
You can apply directly to companies to promote their products but that takes quite a while to track down enough companies willing to let you sell their products and it requires you to monitor each campaign individually. Solution? Affiliate Networks. Affiliate networks such as Neverblue Ads, Advaliant and Pepperjam find companies that want affiliate marketers to promote their products for a percentage of the sale or lead. The affiliate network then puts up a list of these campaigns and offers a tracking system to show which affiliate marketers are making which sales. Do these networks do this out of the kindness of their internet-loving hearts? No, of course not. The network, and especially your affiliate manager, takes a cut of the sale as well. What does this mean? It means you would probably get a higher payout per sale/lead if you worked directly with the company (cut out the middleman). However, Affiliate networks offer a valuable service in tracking down companies and keeping companies honest in their payouts. A good affiliate manager is easily worth the percentage he takes per sale.
Ok, Now What?
Now we’ve got the two halves of general PPC Affiliate Marketing: Search engine pay per click advertising, and affiliate networks. You pay the search engine companies and the affiliate networks pay you. As long as your Earnings Per Click (EPC) is greater than your Cost Per Click (CPC) you make money (EPC > CPC). We’ll go over EPC, CPC and a few other terms you’ll need to know in the next post.
A Reminder: There are many other ways to promote affiliate offers or your own products besides PPC, but these guides will primarily focus on promoting Affiliate offers through search engine marketing.
Recommended Affiliate Networks I work with: Neverblue Ads, Pepperjam, Advaliant.
