Advertising & promotion – Page 30

About PPC

PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click, which is one of four basic “pay for action” traffic software engines, and probably the most cost-effective way of targeted advertising on the Internet. According to an old Forbes magazine article from 2005, PPC accounted then for over 2 billion dollars a year and was expected to increase to around 8 billion dollars by the year 2008. However, as recent as 2011 Google’s reported income was over 37 billion dollars, 97% of which was derived from PPC advertising through its AdWords engine.

Let us take a quick look at how PPC platforms work – These engines create listings and rate them based on a bid amount the website owner is willing to pay for each click from that search engine. Advertisers bid against each other to receive higher rankings for specific keywords or phrases.

The highest bidder for a certain keyword or phrase will then have the site ranked as number 1 in the PPC Search Engines followed by the second and third highest bidder, up to the last number that have placed a bid on the same keyword or phrase. Your ads then will appear prominently on the results pages based on the bid amount in dollars you will agree to pay per click.

Monetizing PPC

How do you make money by using PPC into your affiliate marketing business? – Most affiliate programs only pay when a sale is made or a lead generated after a visitor has clicked through from your site to the advertiser’s designated landing/product page and make a purchase. Your earnings are usually not the same as they will be dependent on the web site content and the traffic market. But a PPC platform is designed to pay when a visitor clicks on any link or banner associated with the PPC program whether a sale is made or not.

The reason a website owner should incorporate PPC into into his/her affiliate marketing program is because earnings are easier to make than in any other kind of affiliate program not using PPC. This way, you will be making profit based on the clicks your visitors make on the advertiser’s links and banners. Unlike some programs, you are not paid per sale or per action, but rather per click.

PPC can be very resourceful as one of the methods of monetization on your website, because with PPC platforms like Google AdSense and/or Yahoo! Bing Network (AdSense and YBN are two leading PPC platforms) ads incorporated into your affiliate program, you will be able to profit from the visitor’s who are not interested in your own products and services, but might click on another link or banner which interest them more. These may be some of same visitors who leave your site and never comes back.

Earning PPC commissions

You will not only get commissions from those who are just searching the web and finding products and services they really want, but you will be able to build your site’s recognition as a valuable resource. Visitors who found what they needed from you site are likely to come back and review what you are offering more closely; and then eventually come back to search the web for other products.

This kind of affiliate program is also an easy way for you to generate some additional revenue. For example, when a visitor on your site does a search in the PPC Search Engine bar (resource in addition to links and banners) and clicks on the advertiser designated listings, those advertisers’ accounts will then be debited because of that click. With this, you will be compensated based on the advertisers’ bid amount.

PPC is not only a source of generating easy profits; it can also help you promote your own site. Most of the programs allow commissions received to be spent for advertising with them instantly and with no minimum earning requirement. This is one of the more effective ways to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who have more tendencies to purchase your products and services.

PPC and affiliate integration

What will happen if or when you integrate PPC into your affiliate program? – PPC usually have ready-to-use affiliate tools that can be easily be integrated into your website. The most common tools are search boxes, banners, text links and some 404-error pages. Most search engines utilize custom solutions and can provide you with a white-label affiliate program. This will enable you to integrate remotely-hosted, co-branded search engine ads into your website using only a few lines of code.

The key benefits? Not only will more money be generated for you, but it is in the form of extra money on the side. Plus lifetime commissions once you have referred some webmaster friends to the engine.

Think about it. Where can you get all these benefits while already generating some income for your site? Knowing some of the more useful tools that can be used for your affiliate program is not a waste of time, but rather another stream of income within your already established income. In other words, it’s best know more about how you can use PPC ad platforms’ resources with your affiliate program than miss out on a great opportunity to earn more profits.

If you are an active participant in the affiliate marketing business, you may also be in search of the best, most reliable tools and resources that will enhance your money-making ability. Understanding that your most important act as an affiliate marketer is referring prospects to product/service (‘product’) pages of vendors, merchants and advertisers (‘product owners’) in order to earn decent commissions, then you must consider building your own mailing list.

It is advisable to develop your own mailing lists, as opposed to buying them, because when you create and and nurture your own mailing lists you would – in effect – be customizing them to your unique and specialized business and tendencies, as well as the line of products you prefer to market. For example, if you are knowledgeable in real estate, you’d probably be more comfortable marketing real estate-related products, instead of products related to automobiles.

On the other hand, if you pay a reasonable price for mailing lists, it is quite possible that large portions of those lists might have have relevance to products unrelated to your area of expertise and therefore result in significant loss of interest in your discussions, marketing displays and products you offer to the members of those lists. Ultimately you end up losing money in more ways than one: What you paid for the lists; what you paid to advertise your affiliate products; and the value of your time.

Building your own mailing list of hungry prospects can be one of the best investments you will ever make, as it is time and effort worth spending on. When you strike a Joint Venture deal with another marketer and have a new product or service to endorse, you can look no further than one of your own mailing lists as it relates to the particular product being promoted by the other marketer. That having been said, it is unlikely that you would enter a venture deal that is unrelated to any of your lists.

There is a badly kept secret that most affiliates – as high as 90 percent of them – are not making money from affiliate programs; and in a majority of cases the reason for this can be summed up in two words: effort and skills. Unfortunately many affiliates devote too much effort to the least effective programs, and not enough to programs that work and pays really well, but take considerably longer to create and develop to the point where they become profitable. The “shiny objects” syndrome?

While having your own mailing list is not, by a long shot, the only effective method for making money in affiliate marketing, an affiliate marketer can make affiliate sales very quickly (sometimes in a few hours) after sending a sales message to a mailing list, provided that it is a sizable, responsive and well developed list; but as stated before, this kind of list takes time to develop.

Spending the time and money necessary to develop a mailing list (or mailing lists) is certainly time and money well spent because owning your own mailing list enables you to endorse products, an activity which is one of the fastest income-producing results in Internet marketing; beating out many other affiliate marketing methods, as you might imagine. In a nutshell, the affiliate marketer who gets ahead of the pack is the one who owns a huge and responsive mailing list of prospects.