I’ve been working with PPC or Pay Per Click advertising for a few years. At my peak, I was spending around $300 a day and making around $1000 in profit. That’s pretty good. But that was back in the good old days when you could do most anything and Google played along.
Then it became harder to get that kind of return with your investment in pay per click. Google started penalizing your keyword choices you would use to trigger your AdWords ads. If it were something remotely related, the cost of using that keyword to make your ad show on the Google search results went up to $5.00 and $10.00 a click.
At the same time, the ads on our pages – Google AdSense, or Yahoo ads – started paying out much less. An ad that would typically bring in $5 a click went down to 40 cents. So if you’re spending a lot to get someone on your site to read your content and possibly click one of your ads – you soon found a negative cash flow.
And I tracked these things pretty carefully. There were a couple of nice Excel macros that would show if you spent X amount in AdWords and made X amount in AdSense or other – and your click through rate was X… well, you get the picture – the numbers stopped adding up to a profitable venture.
Then Internet marketers got wind of a new way to make money.
Affiliate marketing.
At first, I hated it. I would do a Google search and find some “genius” on mini websites, or product creation and I’d follow them for a few days only to find out that they weren’t the whizzes I thought they were. They were simply re-hashing someones info. Or so I thought.
And it took about a year for me to change my thinking. It wasn’t until I was launching my own product and wanted to know how to market it that I could see how brilliant affiliate marketing really is.
I mean, think about it. Imagine you create a product that teaches people a skill. You need to market it – but you are an army of one. It’s tough when there are only 24 hours in the day and you need to eat and sleep, too. Well, OK, maybe just eat.
Along comes a friend with an idea to market your product. She says – listen – what if I get 10 people with big mailing lists of say 500 people or more to sell your product for you. That would expose your product to 5000 people immediately.
But these 10 people won’t do it for free. You’re going to have to give them a piece of the pie.
Follow me now. Let’s say you agree to give them 20 percent of the pie. How badly do you think they would promote your product – if it costs $30? That would give them $6 for each sale.
Nothing to write home about.
Now let’s say you went crazy and offered them 55% of the pie. WOAH! They would get $16.50 for each sale. Ten sales and they’ve got $165…! And some lists convert at 20 percent – meaning 20 percent of their mailing list would buy your product. If they had 500 on their list and 20 percent bought your $30 product – they would make $1650.00! Not too shabby!
And this happens every day at website like www.ClickBank.com – and PPC Classroom – that I mentioned in the Title above – uses Google AdWords to send traffic to websites that partner with, or become affiliates of people who promote their products on ClickBank. This is wild and crazy – but many are making big bucks.
I’ll talk more on affiliate marketing and how you can profit from it – but what I’d like you to do if you have the time is to look around ClickBank and read up on affiliate marketing. And as always let me know if you have questions.
Talk soon,
Dave
