For you who don’t already know what GoogleCash and other programs like this are designed around using Google Adwords to make money, Its plain and simple, its affiliate marketing. Do these work? They most certainly do, if you know what you are doing.
Affiliate marketing has been around for quite sometime. Many big name companies offer affiliate programs. In a nutshell, you will earn commission of every sale or lead that you generate from your affiliate link. These programs are designed to teach you affiliate marketing and making money online through advertising through Google.
However what they fail to tell you is that although this may work, it is a very involved process. I personally have never read it, however I do have a copy of it that was given to me. But I have decided to give a basic walk through.
Affiliate marketing can be achieved through several possible mediums. Google Adwords, or pay per click campaigns is a method of driving traffic immediately. Another method is email marketing and banner advertising. Though many will agree and disagree, email marketing and banner marketing are still considered to be the most successful in your return of investment (ROI). However the best and cheapest method will be of course search engine optimization (considered the best, however takes a long time to achieve).
Starters, you will need to find an affiiliate network. Major networks include Commission Junction, Hydra, and CPA Empire. From here you can search through affiliate programs. If you know of sites you frequent a lot to purchase products, you can always check their site for an affiliate program. Many sites are offering them now, and for good reason. As an affiliate marketer, you do the advertising for them!
Once you have decided what affiliate network or affiliate program you wish to go with, the next step is building landing pages, or a landing site. These pages and sites are designed to convince and drive the viewer to click on the link and purchase the product, generating you commission. These sites or pages should be well thought out and planned. These sites or landing pages should be informative and help guide the reader to click that link. It is simple as that.
Once you have your site finished, the next step, advertising. Google Adwords is one of the biggest online advertising site. Although as big as they are, I have also had great success with Yahoo! Search Marketing. For beginning, you may use these, or Microsoft Adcenter. There are many vouchers you can find to start you off. Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing often times has $50 vouchers to start you off. Microsoft Adcenter has a $75 voucher you can use on sign up. I have a recent post offering voucher codes for Adcenter. They are only good on your initial sign up. Microsoft Adcenter and Google Adwords will charge an initial $5 that you can spend to set up the account. Yahoo! Search Marketing will charge between $30+for your initial deposit into the account.
Once you have set up your PPC (Pay Per Click) account, the next step, is selecting keywords for search, and writing your ad. Keywords or key phrases are what is used in the search box to find your ad. Take for example you are promoting a car buying site. You may want to use keywords such as “cars” or “buy cars”. It is a good idea to find at least 50 keyphrases and keywords. This might be hard, but there are tools out there such ad WordTracker that can help generate them. It is better to select keyphrases atleast 3 words long, like “buy car online” or “buy used cars online”. These are more targeted, and will filter out trash clicks. Remember, everytime someone clicks your ad, you will get charged no matter if they complete the offer or not. So it is better to start “pre-qualifying” your audience now. It will save you money. Clicks to your site mean nothing if they do not convert. Conversion is everything. You can have 1000 visitors to your site, but if only 2 of them convert into a sale, then it really doesn’t matter.
Example, lets say you pay $.10 a click, and each converted sale pays $10.00. If you get 1000 clicks at $.10 a click, you just spent $100.00. If only 2 of them convert at $10.00 a sale, then you got $20.00 back, but lost $80.00 in advertising costs. Hence why it is so important to pre-qualify your traffic. This is done buy keywords and keyphrases used, and how your ad is written. You do not want every person clicking through, it will only cost you more, and lower your chances of making this a successful campaign.
Once your keywords and keyphrases have been chosen, it is often best to write 2 ads, and monitor to see which one has a better conversion rate. This is known as split testing ads. If you haven’t done so, I would recommend getting a PPC tracking software. Prosper202 makes a good freeone. All you need is a domain or sub domain set up to install it on. Once you set it up and set up the campaigns and programs, you can generate tracking links to use on your ads to monitor the user from the time they come in through the search engine to the time they leave or go to the publishers/advertisers site. For more information on setting up a PPC Campaign, look through internet marketing forums. If you sign up for a PPC Managers account on google, there is free videos and tutorials that google offers for you to watch and learn.
After your campaign is set up, monitor the account for atleast 2 days. Look for conversion rates on keywords. Delete the keywords that are not converting and wasting money. There are always keywords that are wasting money. Group your keywords in ad groups. Make sure the similar keywords are in one ad group, and link that ad group to the appropriate landing page on your site for that keyword. If you send them to a general landing page, and they were looking for turbocharged cars, chances are, they will leave the site since they may not want to go searching your site to find what they are looking for. Not having ad groups is the quickest way to waste precious clicks and yield a high page abandonment rate. Continue to monitor, tweak keywords and tweak ads. Within a couple of days, your campaign should be making money. If you are still negative after 400 clicks or about a week, then its probably time to move on to another campaign, since this current one is apparently not working. Granted the way you set up your PPC campaign can cause you to fail no matter what campaign you do. Hence why it is a good idea to really understand pay per click campaigns and managment.
Other forms of online advertising include email marketing, banner advertising, search engine optimization, social networking bookmarking sites, social networking sites, and online classifieds. Believe it or not, online classifieds do drive a good amount of possible leads. May not make you rich, but its still free traffic. For my own independent consulting advertising, I use only free classifieds, and it generates enough leads for me where I do not need to pay for advertising. But of course, it may not work for your campaign. It all depends on how you setup your site. However, advertising and driving traffic doesn’t have to stop after the internet, viral marketing, or word of mouth marketing works the best. You can also do flyers and mailers, or any other type of advertising you can think of.
If you want to know more, I recommend reading SitePoint.com’s Forums. There is a section dedicated to internet marketing, and has a lot of helpful postings from seasoned veterans in the industry. If you do decide to persue affiliate marketing, I wish you the best of luck.
July 3rd 2008
