Picking Your PPC Approach

Now that you are armed with your niche, it’s time to pick your Pay Per Click advertising approach. There are several different ways to go about PPC affiliate marketing, each with varying degrees of difficulty, and the one you choose will depend on your level of experience and/or motivation. Here are the most common PPC approaches:

• Send your PPC traffic directly to the merchant. This is likely the easiest approach for the complete newbie, and one that will let you get the hang of the PPC basics without having to set up a website of your own. You will be able to set up PPC campaigns and test different keywords and ways to write your ads, and all of the clicks will go through directly to the merchant. You must make sure you use your affiliate link, though, in order to get credit for any sales made via your ads – otherwise, you’re just paying to advertise for the merchant itself with no return for you personally. This approach is ideal for people not sure whether or not affiliate marketing is for them, or people with no HTML or other web design experience. You can try it out before deciding to invest in paying someone to build a site for you, or investing your own time to learn how to build a site yourself.

• Send your PPC traffic to a landing page. A landing page (sometimes also called a “lead capture page”) is any web page that a visitor lands on after clicking on an advertisement or a search engine results page link (be it a PPC ad or just a regular link that shows up in the results themselves). Creating a great landing page is something of a fine art, since they must be optimized for the search engines to find your keywords and phrases, and also work as an enticement for the visitor to buy. A good landing page converts clicks into sales, it’s that simple. Landing pages in PPC marketing are also used to measure your clickthrough rates and determine which ads are converting better so you can adjust your ad campaigns accordingly (we’ll talk about click-through rates in a more in-depth manner a little later). You’ll need a domain name and hosting package to get your landing page online, so this approach is best for people willing to invest in web space. You can create your own landing page if you have web design experience, or you can hire someone to do it for you. There are many companies that specialize just in creating custom landing pages, and their prices are often very reasonable, especially considering you are getting a page created by people that do this very thing
for a living.

• Send your PPC traffic to a new website. This approach is likely the best way to see long-term benefits and results via a Pay Per Click marketing
campaign, and will also allow you to branch out into other types of affiliate marketing without starting over again from scratch. As with landing pages, you will need to purchase a domain name and hosting, and then either build the site yourself or hire someone else to do it for you. It will take some time to build up steady traffic, and you will need to focus on the content of the website in order to draw visitors in and keep them around, but you may find this approach the most rewarding in the long-term because it allows you to establish yourself as an authority and build rapport with your visitors, which in turn inspires them to click and buy via your affiliate links.

• Send your PPC to a new blog. This is a great approach for many reasons. Blogs are easy and quick to set up. Even the most novice of web users can set up a blog in no time, and they are free when you use a service like Blogger or WordPress. Search engines LOVE blogs and crawl them often, so your blog will quickly get indexed and move up in the rankings. If you update your blog often with new, fresh, useful content, and send your PPC traffic to the blog, you may find you have quite a winning combination for raking in some great affiliate earnings.

• Send your PPC traffic to an existing website or blog. If you already have a blog or website set up, then you likely already have search engine
ranking and some traffic. You can capitalize on that by adding the necessary information about the products you are marketing, and send your PPC campaigns right to the sites you already have. These are not the only ways you can go about doing a PPC campaign, but they are the most common. You can combine these approaches to come up with a way that works best for you, of course, but it will be different for everyone.