Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising may be the most feared of all the ways to make money online. Your maximum daily advertising budget of $5, $20 or $100 can easily disappear without a trace. Over and over again. Well, almost without a trace, if you've at least attempted to set things up so that you can try to track who is clicking on what. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Becoming an affiliate and promoting someone else's product is so attractive, for all the highly publicized reasons: no need for inventory, no need to handle payment processing; even delivery is handled by someone else. But unless you are willing and able to run those little AdWords ads on Google, traffic to your sales pitch can remain at a trickle for years. And since bill collectors aren't exactly know for their patience, your affiliate commissions are going to be little else than an extended drum roll.
So, what do we have to do to gain the confidence to jump into PPC (AdWords in particular) and actually expect to make money online instead of just spend it? If that's all we wanted to do, an afternoon on Amazon would be a heck of a lot more satisfying. Let's take a look at some of the things that absolutely have to be done right and then we can plan an advertising campaign with realistic expectations of profit.
First, last (and in between, too) is the customer. Our customer. The one we want to click on our ad so we can help him get what he came online for a few minutes ago. If we'll just never forget that a buyer is after something in particular, not just "something," then we'll stand a chance to stay "in business" ourself. That is, send a lot of real buyers to the merchant for which we're an affiliate.
Therefore, we have to find the web searcher that has his credit card out - wouldn't that solve all our problems if we could just look through a little window? Well, we can, so to speak. But the 'window' is more like a speech filter ...a way to listen carefully to what the potential buyer is talking about. But, of course in this case it's what he's "writing about." How he is expressing his desires through that other little window we usually call a 'search window' or 'search box.'
In particular, we want to find the buyer who knows exactly what he's after. That's the one who is the most likely to be in the buying mode and not the looking around mode. She's not the one who has just typed in "baby carriage" but rather the one who typed "Mia Moda Atmosferra Convertible Carriage Stroller." That's the one with the credit card out, believe me. Or soon will have it out. The former searcher is just kind of finding out what's available.
There certainly are uses for the searchers looking for "baby carriage" but it's more for getting general traffic to your site to get your name out or to try to get AdSense clicks. But if you're out to make money right now, you've got to go after the "Mia Moda" searchers. That is, the folks who have decided what they want, because they probably want it "now".
You can use a bit more general keyword search terms, but be ready to pay for the extra traffic and make absolutely sure you have a way to track the purchases made by those clicks. You might just be able to find one or two that will pay for all those clicks and still make a profit, especially if you can optimize the keywords a bit, group them, add match and exact phrase versions, all in the pursuit of bettering your quality score.
So, to help protect that precious advertising budget and actually allow you to make money online, you should take extra time and effort to determine who's really looking for your product ...who's just looking and who's ready to buy. You can have the very best copy in the actual ads, but those ads make everybody driving by click on them and you'll be broke in no time. Knowing that a click on your ad is by someone darn serious about your product takes all the fear out of PPC.
People really are able to make money online with pay-per-click advertising. Some of them make absurd amounts. There is an awful lot of money in
affiliate programs. There's plenty of profit to go around, but keyword-to-buyer matching is but one of the skills needed to develop a profitable campaign. If you want to get around all of the pitfalls, here's a brand spanking new product that does all the groundwork, packages it up and delivers it for your deployment so you can jump right in and start to
make money online right away.