Many affiliates boast inflated earnings, and then spread misinformation, perhaps intentionally, to mislead everyone else. Their “secrets” no longer work and are therefore safe to release.

And then there are folks who hawk their ultra expensive Pay Per Click (PPC) training courses and software. Not saying these aren’t useful. Just saying it’s hard to get a real education on PPC. What forums should you read, what software, whose blog, and so forth?

A few years ago, I decided to give the PPC game a try. What did I know as a “high volume email deployer,” guy running an affiliate network (affiliate.com), and new to PPC?

Well, I started running dating and ringtones ads and within a few days was killing it. Markus Frind, CEO of PlentyofFish.com, was doing the same and was teaching his father, girlfriend, and other people who had no clue about Internet marketing about PPC.

And they were making a few hundred bucks a day. I decided to teach my boy’s Granddad how to do PPC on PerfSpot.com, and soon he was doing $1k a day. You can learn to do successful PPC from scratch too!

Here are some tips to get you started:

• Focus on international traffic. US traffic is too expensive. If you have a friend that can speak another language, ask them to translate your ads and landing pages.
• The two schools of thought are brute force and prototyping. Brute force is about massive keyword lists and automated programs that cull out the garbage. Prototyping is hand-building campaigns to find trends and clever ad copy. You can get the best of both worlds by prototyping first and then getting an engineer friend to scale for you based on rules.
• Rent A Coder and oDesk are best for submitting your engineering. The services are cheap and reliable.
• Run content network and weed out the bad sites. Try demo targeting. You’ll be surprised how differently combos for age, gender, geography, and time of day affect conversion.
• Rotate between direct linking and your landing page to see which converts better.
• Work closely with your reps from the advertiser, affiliate network, and publishers. Your relationships will give you the head start on what’s hot, plus give you sustainable profits.
• Every ad group should have just two or three ads, not just one and not ten. This allows you to choose winners quickly.
• When you start a new account, you want to build great account history, or else your ads will go under review if there are too many disapprovals.
• MSN converts better than Google, but it has lower volume.
• Always run the same offer via two networks: your primary (that makes the most money for you) and a backup (just to keep your primary honest with payouts and scrubbing).
• Learn Google AdWords Editor and Google Analytics. They’re free and most affiliates don’t understand that you can tie these together to create awesome reporting.

Scott Richter has had huge success in affiliate marketing and shares his experience in building and optimizing successful campaigns at scott-richter.com.

Download the entire FeedFront issue 8 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/20220412/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-8
FeedFront issue 8 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/10

Direct to merchant (DTM), pay per click (PPC) advertising has been increasingly restricted lately, with major merchants like Amazon and EBay stating they will no longer allow affiliates to use the merchant site as their landing pages in PPC campaigns.

What this means to affiliates is that they will now be tasked with building their own websites and landing pages that convert. Even though many affiliates made a lot of money using DTM PPC, the technique is flawed and smart affiliates should have recognized that long ago.

First, affiliates have been paying for traffic and sending it directly to the merchant. Unfortunately, when the merchant pulls the plug, as many are now doing, those affiliates will not have any residual traffic to a website of their own.

With perfected keywords, ads and their own websites, affiliates would have been able to continue without issue and have a site with some authority and customer trust.

Second, affiliates with their own sites could have been building a mailing list to use to contact people about similar or better products. Not a spam list, but a real list built from people that were interested in the product being promoted and possibly other similar products that can be featured on the same site.

Third, affiliates that perform well utilizing pay per click ads in the search engines have unique skills that many other marketers don’t have. Leveraging those skills to build traffic to their own websites provides them with an opportunity to increase their own authority and credibility with shoppers. Building their email list should take them to new levels that they weren’t aware they could achieve.

If you’re not great at building websites and landing pages, I recommend partnering with someone who is, or utilizing sites such as Elance.com to outsource the portions you can’t do yourself. In the ever-changing affiliate and online marketing landscape, the more you are able to utilize your skills and adapt to new requirements, the more successful you will be.

Deborah Carney (TeamLoxly.com) is an Affiliate Manager and Consultant that also hosts a podcast on Geekcast.fm to teach affiliates the ABCs of getting started (AffiliateABCs).

Download the entire FeedFront issue 7 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/17376069/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-7
FeedFront issue 7 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/08

The clumsy and lucrative early days of PPC arbitrage

While it’s been a decade, I remember the indignance, clear as day. To some, it might have seemed unjust, mean, or unworthy (to borrow a definition). To others (including yours truly), it seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

A casino gone mad.

The bank broken… spilling into our pockets.

Once upon a time, Idealab delivered a goose that ate pennies and crapped out ten dollar bills.

Goto.com smacked the search engine world upside the head, turned it on its ear, and spun it around so quickly that all the enlightened could see were dollar signs (and you thought I was going to say stars).

At the inception of pay-per-click search engine marketing, I gleefully bought clicks for pennies and giddily pushed traffic to affiliate programs that paid out crazy terms for new customer bounties.

All was well and good while the milk and honey and bourbon flowed and the VC and IPO money held out, but as the boom turned to bust and the click values rose, it became tougher and tougher to ride those double-digit long shots drunkenly home for ten races every day.

As the temporary insanity and irrational exuberance self-corrected and bid levels rose, I found myself playing the nickel slots less and less frequently.

All that’s left now is the schwag.

The author of the ground-breaking “Complete Guide to Associate and Affiliate Programs on the Net” (McGraw-Hill/1999) and other fine and dusty tomes, Daniel Gray is currently a recovering raconteur and metaphor mixing breakfast cereal Internet entrepreneur.

Download issue 1 of FeedFront at http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue1.pdf.