PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Looking for PPC affiliate marketing for beginners? PPC, or “pay per click” refers to how marketers use paid marketing platforms. PPC is also known as direct response marketing. Advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their advert. PPC can be used in conjunction with affiliate marketing products to send targeted traffic (visitors) to affiliate products. When you make a sale you earn a commission on the product. Using PPC as an affiliate should be done with some caution because you can spend a lot of money very quickly, and potentially without recouping it in sales.

ppc affiliate marketing for beginners

You can also use PPC programs on your website content to make money from advertisers. When someone clicks on an advert on your content, you earn a portion of the advertising cost. Google Adsense offers an advertising program which lets blog owners or YouTubers place adverts on their content. Google Adwords is the program used by marketers who want to run adverts themselves. You can also use other platforms which offer PPC advertising such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Bing etc.

PPC Commissions

Some affiliate programs offer to pay affiliates for clicks, rather than (or as well as) sales. So this is another way affiliates can earn money through placing banner ads on their content and hoping their visitors will click on them.

PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

If you want to use PPC marketing as an affiliate, it means you’ll be sending website traffic to a landing page or a website with the intention of selling affiliate products to make a profit.

PPC affiliate marketing for beginners can be a tough nut to crack. For starters pay per click platforms can be expensive and complicated. Ideally start out with a cheaper platform such as Bing, where you’ll learn the basics. Depending on your products, you may even not be able to afford the more expensive platforms such as YouTube.

With PPC, you need to know the value of a customer, your average return on investment per lead/sale and other metrics. When you know your numbers, you’re prepared before hand and know what you can reasonably expect to spend. Many new PPC business owners get frustrated and quit because they don’t know their numbers and expect to start making money straight away. But there’s a bit more to it.

PPC Affiliate Marketing For Beginners

Many business owners set up an advert using a PPC advertising platform, get no results and quit. But you need to understand the longer term implications of understanding how PPC works. Initially you shouldn’t expect too much from a single advert; especially if you’re new to affiliate marketing. The people who succeed online have tested and measured many adverts before they find a profitable one. Plus, many of their adverts don’t work first time!

ppc affiliate marketing for beginners

They spend money learning which adverts work and which don’t. By tracking all of their results and starting out with a low, manageable budget which they can afford, they learn how to run profitable adverts.

Once they find an advert which regularly brings back a profit, they can just leave it running and move on to the next one. They can also increase their budget and scale up very easily once they’ve hit on a profitable campaign. So it’s worth persevering and being careful with your budget in the first instance.

Affiliate Marketing Product Range

For many affiliate marketing business models, PPC is out of the reach of affiliates because of the competition. Advertisers bid for their adverts to be found by people typing in certain search queries on YouTube, or Google. Or the advertiser targets a certain type of person from a certain area for example.

ppc affiliate marketing for beginners

Depending on the topic and general search relevancy, there might be a lot of other competing advertisers who also want to get found by those same people. If those marketers can afford to spend much more than you can, you’ll lose the placing and be priced out of the market.

Unless your business model allows it, you won’t be able to run adverts on certain platforms and still make a profit. The cost of advertising may be too high for you to recoup your advertising spend and make a return on your investment (ROI) which is greater than your expenditure. And no-one wants to run adverts just to lose money.

In short, without a large value product range you may be unable to use PPC.

Affiliate Marketing – ROI

Many new affiliates will choose low value affiliate products to start out with, as I did. The problem here is that if you only have a product valued at $100, for example, you’ll only receive a $40- $50 commission at the most for the sale as an affiliate. This means that if you want to use PPC to sell your product, you’ll need to spend less than $40 or $50 to sell it. This is very limiting and it’s unlikely that you’ll succeed.

Just testing adverts in likely to cost you more than this and it can be easy to just lose money while you find this out.

With a high value product range, you’re ROI is much higher. If you have a number of high value digital products, subscriptions products (or recurring income affiliate products), and can earn multi-tier commissions, for example, you’ll have a greater chance of making a profit from running your adverts.

With a sales funnel like this you can earn a larger average return per customer. This in turn means you’re better able to run profitable campaigns than by only using low value items.

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