Traditional PPC affiliate programs

Due to the popularity of contextual advertising, webmasters often forget the traditional affiliate programs, some offering similar options as far as paying for clicks instead of sales. If you find a program of this kind in your niche – and you have a page with some traffic – this might be a better option for you. If you place these ads on the right pages, you will be amazed how well they can perform. But, be sure to read the fine print before you send them your traffic, sometimes the PPC option is worse than the revenue share model.

With PPC affiliate programs where the publisher (you) places a link with your affiliate ID embedded to the program, you get paid for every visitor you send. You have total control over you own ads, no script are placing them for you, thus making you in charge of the relevance – or lack there of - of your ads. The price per click is mostly fixed, or in some cases depending on the quantity of visitors delivered, more visitors equal higher rate for every click.

In contextual advertising, the advertisers have the ability to set a max price AND a daily budget, leaving them in total control over their costs. For traditional affiliate programs this isn’t an option, they have a set price and static links, delivering traffic around the clock. This is potentially disastrous for any affiliate program, and a problem many affiliate managers solved by use of a required minimum conversion rate to get paid.

When looking at a traditional affiliate program – with a PPC option – you should look closely to see if they have a minimum conversion rate required for your traffic. If you are forced to convert your visitors into sales, and they specify the conversion rate, it’s easy math to see if you would be better off with a revenue sharing model. The amount you earn for sending the maximum visitors per sign-up should be greater than the commission for one sale. If it’s not, you are guaranteed to make more by the use of another revenue model. If the affiliate program offers recurring commission on their revenue share plan, you should think twice before choosing to get paid per click, you will miss out on all eventual recurring sales and commissions. If you plan on using the affiliate program for a long period of time, you will miss out on more than you can imagine.

Traditional PPC affiliate programs offer a very good opportunity if you have visitors interested in what they are advertising. The ads are usually placed on one, or a few pages where the relevance and click thru rate is high, on other pages you will be better off with other types of programs. Always compare your PPC stats with the revenue from other pages, to see if it really is as lucrative as you’d expect. Many times we get dazzled with the fact we get paid for EVERY visitor, not looking closely enough to see we would make more if we went another direction.

However, if you have a page with high click thru rate, you can make good use of any PPC program in your niche.

Contextual Advertisement – Get Paid Per Click

Sending visitors to an affiliate program, and getting paid for every click does sound easy enough, but is it the best option for you? Choosing PPC as a revenue model will be great for some, but not nearly as good for others.

There are different types of PPC programs; traditional affiliate programs and contextual advertising. While both types will pay you for clicks delivered, they have a few differences important to consider before choosing program.

Contextual advertising – where the publisher (you) place some sort of script on your pages, and other webmasters bid for the traffic derived from your – and other publishers – link. You get paid for every visitor sent, mostly as a percentage of the winning bid. While you do get paid for every click, it is hard, not to say impossible, to estimate how much you’ll get, it can very from a few cents to dollars.

Contextual advertising offers a very simple solution, making it a very viable option for webmasters with to little time to focus on monetizing their sites. All you need to do is place the script on your pages, and the ads show. If your pages, and the text on them, have a clear message, you will mostly see highly relevant ads. You need to understand that the very nature of this automated process is reliant on the spider’s ability to understand what the text is really about. If it fails, you will be left with a bunch of ads of low relevance. With a few exceptions, this will be certain to significantly lower the click thru rate, making you loose much of your revenue.

If you are using contextual advertising, it’s a good idea to check your pages to see what ads are showing. If you notice pages with strange ads, you can easily either edit the text or – if the program allows – specify what part of your page the ads should be based on. Making these changes is very important to maximize the return of your efforts.

With contextual advertising, you never need to worry about meeting conversion requirements; all you need to do is send the traffic their way. After that, it’s up to the highest bidder to make use of the newly bought visitor. If webmasters buying contextual ads don’t make money for a specific keyword, they will stop buying those visitors, thus lowering the price. When the price is low enough, it is once again possible to make a profit, the competition – and bidding – for the keywords hardens, thus making the prices go up again. Back and forth, so it goes.

Most programs offer various ways of traffic your performance, often with the ability to customize the statistics to meet your needs. I suggest you try to be as specific as possible at first, trying to pin point where the clicks are coming from. What ads never seem to attract people, and on what pages they can be found. If you have a few pages – with an equal amount of visitors – that don’t work well with the contextual ads, sort them out and add affiliate links to those pages instead.

As soon as you know your site’s behavior, it’s easier to maximize your revenue, whether it’s by use of contextual advertising, or traditional affiliate programs.

Choosing the right niche for affiliate marketing

Many affiliate publishers dream of getting a high rank for keywords in competitive niches, but not everyone can succeed. For those not in the first pages on the major search engines, the revenue will be modest at best. A much better way is to target niches and keywords closely related to highly competitive ones. The chances of reaching the top ten will increase drastically, as will the profits.

Competing with highly experienced affiliate marketers will naturally be a tough task. For a new webmaster, interested in affiliate marketing, choosing an easier niche and/or keyword is essential for success. Finding a profitable niche isn’t hard, finding a niche YOU can profit from is much harder. Many use the affiliate programs offering high commissions on popular products, yet only a few make a real income, why?

In the online pharmaceutical market, the demand for the products – with sexual enhancers as the undisputed no.1 – is massive. This has led to many, many online pharmacies popping up. Some are serious, some are only in it for the quick cash. Most sites offer some kind of webmaster opportunity, mainly in the form of an affiliate program.

For a new webmaster looking to build a profitable site, the ongoing hysteria of Viagra, cialis and other sex drugs will often make it easy to believe everyone will make money selling these kinds of drugs and medicine. This, how ever, is not nearly the case. Instead most webmasters find themselves pulling their hair in lack of enough inbound links to get even close to a top search engine position. At first, you might see a huge impact, climbing from page 20 to 11, but as you get closer and closer to the top pages, the competition tightens. If you would put all this effort into a site of less competitive nature, you would probably find yourself with a nice, steady stream search engine traffic.

If you have already got your mind set on a topic and area for your site, perhaps you can make a few minor changes to make it about something slightly different? In this case, the appeal of human sexuality will always attract customers for the business as a whole, but you need to figure out an angle for you.

One idea would be to find a few keywords related to alternative medicine, or herbal medicine. While the products sold on these sites often are of similar nature as pharmaceutical products, the keywords are not nearly as competitive as pharmacies. In all lucrative businesses, there will be frauds and shady sites, only trying to make a quick buck on a popular product or service. In pharmacy affiliate programs, this is really something to look out for. If you see a commission to good to be true, it probably is. If you choose to try to fight for these competitive keywords, be sure not to loose all your earnings by choosing the wrong affiliate program.

In most cases, finding a slightly different approach to targeting keywords may ease your way to making a profit, instead of seeing your site on the fourth or fifth page on Google. As your targeted keywords alter, you will attract other visitors, and you should find an affiliate program matching their needs in order to get good click thru- and conversion rates.