Why Super Affiliates Need to Use PPC Right Now

Recently my AdSense earnings have been dropping significantly (yes I hate Google, but I gotta pay the bills). For a while I was wondering what the hell was going on. Well my theories are correct and advertisers are pulling their ad money out of AdSense due to the recession. he clicks remained high but the payout dropped significantly indicating there are less people bidding on many of the terms I am going after. You can check out a good summary about it at Google AdSense Down.

I decided to try my hand on using AdWords PPC and affiliate marketing to make up for the loss of revenue. I realized that now is the perfect time to use PPC to make money from affiliates. My findings below:

Here are the two tests I set up.

1. Using a product brand name to drive traffic to a landing page.

2. Using long tail terms set on exact match to drive traffic to a blog post mentioning an affiliate offer.

The first test is still inconclusive in my book, so you will have to stay tuned to see how it ends up. I have been getting a decent amount of clicks on the ads and decent clicks from the landing page, but it has not led to any conversions. The learning that I did find was using SEO principals, you can optimize a landing page to drive down CPC by improving your quality score significantly.

The second test has been successful so far with a ROI of about 20%. Granted this test was on a pretty small scale, but there are two findings that I thought were interesting. The first is that I was bidding on long tail terms which did not have much competition and the CPC was fairly low, yet I was able to still make money since the entrants clicked on the AdSense on those pages much more than when I relied solely on organic traffic. This leads me to believe that as a publisher relying on CPC to support the site you should think about using CPC to drive traffic. People who clicked on an add to get to your site are more likely to click on an ad once they get there.

Super affiliates need to use PPC because cost per click is going down. You should use a mix of CPC and affiliates on your page to maximize ROI.  Keep in mind SEO best practices when setting up your landing page in order to keep your quality score up and your minimum bids low.