Tag: Fall Gardening

My introduction to Affiliate Marketing was through the Google Cash system that was selling through Clickbank. You could actually make money using only Google Adwords back then. You could easily purchase good keywords for what was then Google’s minimum bid of .05 (five cents). I remember paying $1,000.00 a day for clicks at .05 a piece and doubling my money. Others did much better, I’m sure.

Man have times changed, and not for the better. Perhaps it would take a smarter person than me to understand, but the Google Adwords bidding system has become convoluted, illogical and just plain selfish.

Why is it that I can find a word with NO competitive ads and for which I use the keywords I’m bidding on in the ads title and Google won’t even start displaying the ads until I’ve hit $1.00, $5.00 or more? This makes no sense to me what-so-ever.

Google talks about the bid price being determined by competition, relavency and other factors, but they are so vaguely explained that one can only guess at what Google is doing.

I just don’t see how I can continue using Adwords and making money at the same time. At .05 or .10 per click, I make money. With Adwords bids the way they are today, the margins are so thin, or completely eaten up by click costs, that it’s not possible to make a profit.

Since Google is willing to make it nearly impossible for me to make money, I’ve decided to take my business to other PPC providers

So, back to the title of this article, “Is PPC still a viable Affiliate Marketing strategy?”. I think the answer is yes, but not with the same ease of use that we’ve accustomed to with the OLD Google.

That leaves two big boys to work with and they are showing signs of improvement. Those two alternatives are Yahoo (Overture) and AdCenter (MSN).

First, let me say that you simply can’t get as many clicks with these PPC vendors because they’re just not as big as Google. But I think than through the yen/yang of change, Google is going to loose business and these two PPC engines will gain.

MSN Adcenter: I have been experimenting with this Pay Per Click engine for a little while now and it’s good. The user interface is uncomplicated and it gives very good estimates of where your ad will show (position) and how many times it will be clicked upon based upon different bid prices. We’ve always known that Google’s impression / click estimates have been garbage. This really makes picking bid prices for MSN easy. On my first few ads, it took over 24 hours for them to start playing. I don’t know if this will improve with time, but it’s kind of a pain now. Also, Adcenter only runs within Internet Explorer because of ActiveX code that it runs on your box. This probably makes things faster, but it’s a pain for me because I use Firefox.

Yahoo/Overture: I used Overture a bit about a year ago and just found it too hard to work with. It was slow, adding words was difficult and it took them forever to activate the ads. The good news is that Yahoo is totally revamping Overture and I bet they’ve learned from the success of Google. The new Overture should be much better. I don’t know if a beta is being run or not, but it would be nice to get in on it.

So I’m going to turn off all Google Adwords campaigns and work with Overture and MSN Adcenter for a while to see what happens. I think PPC is still a good strategy. It just makes sense! (cents?) But it will only work for us if we can accurately gauge how much we have to pay for traffic and we can test campaigns quickly. 24 hour delays in testing will make it too difficult to work with.

Want to find out about garden phlox and garden sulfur? Get tips from the Fall Gardening website.

There’s a lot of money in affiliate marketing. This is true, however, only to those are seriously and zealously working on his affiliate program. Success in affiliate marketing varies in every individual affiliate and for the most part, it depends on his will and perseverance. No matter how good an affiliate program is, it will not prosper if the affiliate marketer does not pay the price of hard work. One must exert extra effort especially on the aspect of promotion. Nothing will happen if the links or banners would just lie idle in a web page, an affiliate must be able to convince the visitor to click it and proceed to the business site to buy the products. No click-throughs means no income for an affiliate marketer.

You can actually generate a full-time income by means of affiliate marketing and you can do it at home, and yes, even while you sleep. You must have a good web site to begin with. It must have good promotional and informative contents, pleasing design, inviting banner ads and all other important elements in an affiliate marketer’s web site. It would be great if you have exhausted other means of advertising such as newsletters, email marketing, message boards and ad listings such as Google AdWords. You just have to go online once in a while to check your site and update it and to watch over the development of your marketing program. Does this sound so easy? It can be this easy if you have planned your affiliate program well and have taken all the steps towards success carefully and diligently. Now, there’s a tool you can use to help you go through the program with ease and confidence, the Ad Tracker. For many experienced and successful affiliate marketers, the Ad Tracker is a key to a successful affiliate marketing program. What precisely is an ad tracker? It is a marketing tracking software or program that allows you to trace and take note of every click-through made by visitors of your site and by other customers who got your referral link. There are ad tracking service providers as well, so you will just have to pay them to do the tracking for you. With the ad tracker, you can keep an eye on the progress of your marketing campaigns even offline. This tool or program is especially helpful if you are engaged in several affiliate and pay-per-click programs and have placed ads in emails, pop-ups and pop-unders, message boards, auto responders, Ezines, forums, several web sites, surveys and various ad service providers.

Of course, you don’t want all your efforts to be put to waste so you want to make sure you are getting paid for your hard work. Likewise, you want to make sure every dollar or cent you disburse in your advertising campaigns is wisely spent. With the help of the ad tracker, you will know accurately how many and which of your links where clicked on, how many clicked on your links, how many of your emails were opened and how many of those who opened your email clicked through the business site and purchased a product, how many products were purchased, which of your banner ads or links brought the most leads and sales and many other pertinent facts and figures you need.

Sales records and all data stated are necessary in any business as this could determine if your affiliate program is still worth continuing. This would also help you determine which of your marketing strategies is most effective and which is most beneficial for each product or service you are promoting.

Every decision and plan you make must be well grounded on facts. That decision or plan of action may not be the best, but it is something not to regret about when you had valid reasons for coming up with such decision or plan. You cannot just decide to terminate your affiliate program, just because you don’t earn big in an instant.

If you are serious with affiliate marketing, again and again, keep in mind that your success lies mainly on promotion and your hard work. If you don’t seem lucky enough to convince many of your site users to buy the products, don’t be disheartened and jump into a conclusion that your affiliate program is a failure. If it works for others, it could work for you, too. Know whether your advertising techniques are effective or not, which works best for your program and which doesn’t. Get an ad tracker to help you know all these and you’d surely be on the right track towards success!

Read about garden sulfur and building garden steps at the Fall Gardening website.