Pay Per Click Traffic

Poll

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Author:
Daniel Brough

Pay-per-click advertising is a quick, powerful, effective way to market products for affiliate programs. New advertisers to the medium are often stunned at how quick and effective it is. (I myself remember making over $1500 profit the first month I tried my hand at it, and that was back when I didn’t know what I was doing)

The pay-per-click method is simple and straightforward. Place an ad to show on Google or some other pay-per-click search engine. Customers click on it. It brings them to a page where they can make the purchase.

It’s a wham! Bam! atmosphere that’s sharp and direct, but sometimes those of us who use the pay-per-click market get into the same mindset and overlook perfectly profitable products simply because they don’t pay out as much right away.

I’m talking about the power of residual income, and any time you find an affiliate program that pays ‘residually’ or mentions the words ‘lifetime customer’, you should take notice.

Here’s an example. Suppose you find two web-hosting providers, each of which has an affiliate program. Web host #1 offers an immediate payout of $90 per sale to you for anyone who buys their service. Sounds pretty good; it’s a high payout and you think you can get a good conversion rate on any ads you run for their services.

Web host #2, on the other hand, pays out only $10 per sale, but offers $10 per month residually for the lifetime of the customer.

Oftentimes, those of us who play the pay-per-click game get so in the mindset of ‘quick money’ that we tend to dismiss those affiliate programs that have lower payouts without really considering what may be offered.

Which of the two web-hosting services has the better payout overall? We know that web host #1 pays out $90 per sale. That’s ‘quick money’, right away, and a lot of the time it’s easy to think “a bird in the hand…”

But suppose a customer buys web-hosting services from company #2. Presumably, if he is pleased with the service, he’ll stay with it for a very long time, possibly the rest of his life. So even though the initial payout is only $10, the potential return of this one sale is $10 per month, for the rest of the customer’s life! I think that kind of payout deserves a second look.

So which service is the better to promote? The answer, of course, is both of them. Depending on how well each service converts to sales, and what the click-through rate is on your ads, either or both of the above services could be wrong for you to promote. But either or both could be very profitable.

The moral: Don’t dismiss low-paying payouts out of hand, especially if there is residual income involved.

About the Author
Daniel Brough is the founder of AdWord Wizards, a free mentoring program designed to teach anyone how to profit from pay-per-click search engines. Want to start a profitable AdWords campaign in less than 30 minutes? Come to http://www.adwordwizard.com and sign up for this free program.

A Quick Note From The Publisher... If you like the article above, you may be interested in the following article which is also related to Pay Per Click... The Future of PPC Advertising For those of you who haven’t used a Pay Per Click advertising platform like Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing, take notes. Pay Per Click advertising refers to a style of advertising where the advertiser pays to display a link, an image, or text ad based on the number of clicks. Specific keywords are bid on and results are displayed, and advertisers pay their click prices to have their ad displayed for their selected keywords (Sponsored Results or Sponsored links). PPC programs can deliver instant targeted visitors to your website in streaming amounts, but what are the downsides? Click fraud. It has been estimated that up to 38% of all clicks through PPC advertising are fraudulent. Allegations have even been brought against the major search engines for not doing their part to control the click fraud issues, and critics are quick to point out the fact that search engine companies earn 99% of their income through this advertising method. Industry analysis’s predict a change in the next few years as PPC advertising shifts to CPA advertising with search engines. This will eliminate the click fraud issue, because advertisers will began to pay for actions instead of clicks. This form of advertising will become the most dominant form of online advertising. That being said, is it still possible for a company to profit from PPC advertising? Certainly! A properly managed PPC advertising campaign can still be the most effective online advertising method for a company. It IS still possible to achieve a great ROI for a particular product or service, and will continue to drive the most traffic, clicks, and sales for online advertising for years to come. About the Author Evan Ernst is a marketing and search engine optimization specialist, who has several years...