by Wilson Cowden on September 19, 2018 Leave a Comment

Is it true that PPC no longer works for affiliate marketing?

Over the years, the aftermath of the mass affiliate ban on Google Adwords has left a bad aftertaste in a lot of internet marketer’s mouth. The panic and worry that have spread across the web has thus created a worrying rumor that PPC is dead and that it no longer works in affiliate marketing. Now while it is true that Google no longer allows their advertisers to promote affiliate products, PPC is actually far from dead. The fact that you can no longer promote affiliate products on Google Adwords is that it does not mean that PPC is dead because you can still use Adwords to promote your own products.

And the fact that if you want to promote affiliate products but can’t do it on Google Adwords does not mean that PPC is no longer working in affiliate marketing is because in fact there are a lot of other PPC products out there and that you use them to promote affiliate products still. Some of these other PPC platforms that stand out today are Microsoft Adcenter and also 7search ppc platform. If you do a quick research on an alternative to Google Adwords you should be able to come out with a dozen more of these alternatives to help you in your Affiliate journey.
Now that we know that PPC is still working well for affiliate marketing, here are some base rules that you should follow in your PPC affiliate campaigns.
Focus on user.

One of the most important rules for using PPC for promoting your own product or affiliate product is that you should always focus on your audience. Your audience or traffic is your lifeblood to your business. Hence you will want to provide a landing page that is very much relevant to what your audience is trying to look for in the search place. Think about it this way, in order for search engines to do well, they will have to please their searchers by providing them with the best and relevant search results.

That is the only way to get their searchers to trust them and like them enough to come back to their search engine next time when they are looking for something. Doing this will increase their base traffic and also their fan base that will ultimately increase their popularity throughout the world. The more you think about it this way, the more important it is for you to ensure that your landing page meets this very goal of them. Most of the time your ads would probably be placed in a location that stands out to the search engine searchers and if your landing page or ad is of low quality you are in a way jeopardizing their main goal and that is to provide the best search results to the public searchers.

Only relevant campaigns please.

There are many shady ppc marketers who think ‘outside’ the box and decide that they should promote irrelevant products to a niche that might contain traffic that has the suitable demographics to their products. To make things clear, here’s an example of such a campaign. Let’s say you are promoting a female weight loss product and targeting mid aged women who are married. Technically speaking, these same crowds of people also exist in the ‘cooking’ niche. Now if you are promoting your product using non PPC methods such as banner ads, then this is a very legitimate way to get traffic. However, most PPC platforms do not allow this kind of cross niche promotions because it is highly irrelevant to a search term (imagine searching for fish recipe and a weight loss product comes out as a result).

Hence if you are using PPC, you need to follow the rules and not try to ‘broaden’ your lead generation by promoting your weight loss offer in a non-weight loss keyword. In fact if you do this, you might even get banned because you are not following their terms and conditions.

Follow the rules closely.

As mentioned before, you should try your best to follow all the rules that are stated in PPC platforms. There is nothing more important than understanding the rules of that the PPC Platforms has set and then following the rules to the tee. PPC platforms are strict for a reason and sometimes ppc platforms such as Google would even cross the ‘reasonable’ line in just to make sure that they are protecting their business’ interest as a priority.

If you are planning to be in business for the long term, then there should be no excuse for you no to follow the rules that has been clearly set to help everyone prosper the legitimate way.

No more shady offers.

Needless to say, there are countless affiliate offers out there and some of these offers are just downright shady, unethical or barely legal. We all know what these offers are and they could be in those gambling niche, adult niche or anything that might not be morally correct.

Again you need to ensure that you are not promoting any of this shady stuff that is not allowed by most of the PPC platforms. If you are unsure if your product is allowed or not then you should take the initiative to ask first before doing any real promotions.

Beware of other accounts.

Of course when you have an account that is still working in Google, you need to be extremely careful not to cross the lines that Google have drawn in order to protect your own account. For example, if you are a PPC coach or a PPC account manager, you might want to be extra careful not to accidentally manage an account that is promoting illegal products (without you knowing) and then risk getting your own account banned because you logged into another person’s account. Google will link the accounts that you log on personally on your PC or IP. If one account is marked as faulty, then all your accounts will get the same treatment. This means, you could risk banning all the accounts of all your other ‘clean’ clients as well. Take extreme precautions and ensure that you are protected at all times before accessing other person’s account.

This course is a complete guide to starting your own online business and it is full of great ideas derived from my own personal experience actually doing this stuff. None of it is theory; it is all very practical. Every week, I give the students assignments to complete so, in a step by step manner, we get your business up and running.

Of course, because it is a Personal Mentoring course, I am responding to individual questions along the way and providing personal guidance too. If I do say so myself, there is no finer course for starting a successful online business to be found anywhere on the internet.

Related eBooks

Originally posted 2013-07-21 05:59:45.

by Wilson Cowden on July 21, 2018 Leave a Comment

3 Main Affiliate Marketing Strategies You Should Know.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one of the most preferred ways to make money online. The reason is simple. is all about using leverage to make money. There have been cases where affiliate marketers made money within a very little amount of time, there have been cases where affiliate marketers made money with very little effort and there have been even more cases where affiliate marketers made money with a very little starting cost. In affiliate marketing, you do not need to have a product of your own. This of course sounds wonderful!
You can start affiliate marketing today and start earning money within 7 days. It’s no wonder why a lot of newbie marketers are attracted to the affiliate marketing concept. You do not need a product of your own; some say you do not need to have your own website. However expert marketers would argue that having your own website is a better long-term strategy but for now, let us just accept the fact that you can make money without a website of your own.

There are 3 main methods that an affiliate marketer can utilize during the course of their marketing efforts. They are the unattached, related and the involved method to making money with affiliate marketing.

Let us begin with the unattached method.

Being an unattached affiliate marketer is usually the most popular of all three methods. This is because as an unattached affiliate marketer, all you have to do is to refer targeted traffic (without any relationship or attachment to you or your business) to the merchant, and you get paid if a sale is made. What this means is that this method is very easy to pick up, and it is in fact, the easiest way to earn an online income via affiliate marketing.

In this method, you do not know who your prospects are and your prospects have no idea who you are either. Therefore, conversions are heavily based on the buying intention of the traffic and the ability to convert the prospects into customers by your merchants. The key part to this marketing model is to seek out a good converting offer and then drive targeted traffic to the offer. The best way to get the traffic that you need for this model would essentially be the PPC (pay per click) or search engine traffic.

When it comes to PPC, you will need to purchase the right traffic (usually coming from the right relevant keyword of your choice) and they are shown a small advertisement that you come out with. When these people click on your ad and goes directly to your merchant’s landing page (direct linking method), you will earn a commission if the prospects choose to buy. Usually, you will have little or no idea on the effectiveness of the product you are selling.

The related method.

In the related affiliate marketing method, you basically have a website of your own and have a certain amount of traffic flowing into your website. Your website could be in any niche and you will place banners or advertisements of the product of your choice (preferably a product related to your topic or niche and a converting one). In this model, your prospects know about you and they are going to your site for contents. Hence your site is usually a forum or a blog type of website where you have traffic coming in for the contents that you put out consistently.

This model takes a lot more effort and it can be time consuming to get your website established to a point where you have a constant flow of traffic. Most of the time, the offer that you promote is something you have never used before but you are promoting it for the sake of some money. The good thing here is that your prospects have a certain level of trust on you and they will click on your recommendations and the conversions can be on a higher level than the unattached marketing model.

The involved method.

As you grow with the first two models, you will find that promoting products that you actually use and you are very happy with the results that the product produces, you will be able to promote the product with a much higher passion. This is the best model according to expert affiliate marketers because you will try to create a relationship with your prospects and make your experience on the product known to the public.

If you are already on the celebrity or guru status, then your sales will skyrocket whenever you promote a product that you endorse and use. People will follow in your footstep and give the product a try. This method also ensures that most people will be happy with your recommendations. Your testimonials on the product will give the overall conversion rate a huge boost.
This is by far the best way to earn the most amount of income as an affiliate marketer, and you can hope to sell similar products to the same buyers over and over again. In this model, most of your traffic could be coming from a list that you have built over the years using your website.

This model is not about quick money, but it is a very good business building model which means this model is great for a long term affiliate strategy. Using a model like this also means that you do not have to jump from one product to another constantly.

Instead, you will have a few products that you use personally, and they will earn you money almost on autopilot once you have everything set up properly. However, this marketing model does take a lot of time and a lot of relationship building and branding awareness is required for the best results. It requires the most efforts but when done right, this model will earn you the most money for a very long time.

3 Main Affiliate Marketing Strategies You Should Know.

Originally posted 2013-02-07 04:20:34.

Filed Under: Best Ways To Make Money Online Tagged With: affiliate, best way traffic, earn money, marketers money, Marketing, ppc, product

by Wilson Cowden on May 19, 2018 Leave a Comment

List Building Tips

List building, list building and more list building! Everywhere you go and available at every corner on the internet, you will hear people absolutely raving about list building. It’s not like anything else that you’ve ever seen before. And the best part, the effectiveness of list building is showing no sign of slowing down at all. The best thing you could have ever done to help you with your business online would be listing building and that would be already a huge understatement.

Why is that you asked? Well investing your time, effort and money into list building will pay you back in ten folds in the long term. The bigger your list, the more traffic you will have. It’s like having an entire army of buyers that listens to very command that you will give out. Imagine earning thousands of dollars every time you send out an email. How cool is that? Unlike some marketers who reply on traffic coming in from Google or the other search engines, your list traffic will not die on you. What we are saying is that some traffic sources such as Google is out of your control. If these traffic sources decide to ban your account for no reason, you are pretty much doomed.

However, with a list of your own, you pretty much own your own traffic source. So it’s is pretty much a very secure way of making a living online. The hard part is how you can build this list that you need and how fast can you grow it into a sizable list that has the firepower to bring in enough money for you to live a comfortable life. If you have ever wondered how and where you could get the traffic to build your list fast then you will be delighted to see all the ideas that we are sharing here on this article today.

Paid Traffic Source.

One of the best places to start getting traffic to your landing page for the purpose of list building would essentially be the paid traffic source. Why is this so? The reason here is simple. Speed. One of the best advantages of getting paid traffic is the speed that you will acquire the traffic that you ordered. Unlike some of the free traffic sources out there which demands a lot of patience and hard work, with a paid traffic source, all you need to get the traffic you need is to pay and the traffic will start channeling into your landing page in less than 24 hours. Free traffic may take up to months before you see the first sign of traffic depending on where you acquire your traffic.

Banner Advertising

One of the king of paid advertising still survives even today. It is known as banner advertising. It is the source of income for many successful blogs. And rightfully so too because banner advertising can still be quite effective as well as impressive if it is done right which is contrary to popular believes that banner advertising does not work anymore. Sure banner advertisers will have to deal with banner blindness, but such a small problem can be quickly remedied with a change to the banner. Often, banner advertisers with a winning banner will do little tweaks to the banner such as changing the color of the border or changing the picture of the female model within the banner to maintain the banner’s effectiveness.

One of the main reasons to why banner advertising still works is because you can target your users effectively by using sites like Quantcast. With proper demographics you can essentially reach your target audience effectively. With proper demographic targeting you would be able to effectively find your target market, market to them and then move on to another site to get even more traffic out of it. The best part of it all is that with banner advertising, a lot of these banners are paid by impression. What this means is that if you have a very effective and click inducing banner, you actually pay a lot less than platforms that charges you for every click that you get.

Ezine Solo Ads.

Another of the traditional ways to advertise your online business and build your list is to get traffic from Ezine Solo Ads. Again with this kind of traffic you are able to target your solo ads with great effectiveness. The main thing that you need to understand before getting into a purchase on a solo ad is that you need to know the amount of reach you are going to get with an Ezine. You need to communicate with the owner of the Ezine to find out who are the people that opt-ins to their Ezine and what Ezine are they accustomed to getting.

Which proper information, you should be able to craft a campaign that is suitable and then use it to cleverly market to them with great effectiveness. The better you get at finding a suitable Ezine that has your target market, the better you will do with your Solo Ads. Another great factor that will determine your success with the solo ad is your landing page and of course we must not forget the fact that your email swipe that you will be using will directly contribute to the amount of traffic that you get. As the saying goes ‘Practice makes perfect’ so be sure to try your best to learn and not be afraid to learn from your mistakes and grow from it along the way.

PPC.

Finally, we arrive to a prime of the paid traffic source. Nothing beats a strong PPC campaign. Not only are you able to effectively choose your target market, you can even track and tweak your campaign and optimize your campaign so that you won’t have to pay much for the traffic and yet acquire the most desirable results for your business. There is without a doubt the reason why PPC is the king when it comes to paid traffic is because of the conversions that you will get from PPC traffic. Mind you, not only does a PPC traffic converts into becoming your list, more importantly you can get PPC traffic to convert into cash as well as long as you know what you are doing.

Therefore if you are into paid traffic, think no further and test it out today as you might see a success if you have a great converting offer that everyone is looking for.

Originally posted 2013-09-02 05:12:42.

Filed Under: Making Money Tagged With: Banner Advertising, best business making money, Ezine Solo Ads., Home Based Jobs, internet marketing, making money online, Paid Traffic Source, ppc, seo

by Wilson Cowden on April 15, 2018 Leave a Comment

Short vs. Long Term Internet Marketing Plans

Marketing Strategies + Marketing Plans

As much expert Internet marketer or Gurus will put it, Internet marketing is a real business. And you are a real business person. As the ‘Leader’ or CEO of your business, it is always within your responsibility to plan ahead and think of strategies to constantly improve your business. It is only when your business is well organized will you and your workers (if you have any) be able to work at the optimum efficiency.

When it comes to running a business, besides being careful with your budget and getting things done, it is essential for you to draw a guideline and plan each step of your business strategy. There is of course the traditional short term and long term strategy in internet marketing. Let us unveil some of the thing that most business owners should now about these short and long term strategies in the context on internet marketing.

What’s the difference between a short term and long term marketing strategies of an online business? The first obvious difference between a short term marketing strategy and a long term strategy is that short term marketing strategy usually focuses on making some money right now. For example, in you are selling an e-course online, the short term marketing would be to send traffic to your sales page and make sales at the very instant.

For long term marketing, businesses should be thinking of long term and how to earn more money in the future even if you are not necessarily making money right now or even if you are actually losing money up front. With that said, let us take a more detailed look at the short term marketing strategies available to internet marketers
Short Term Marketing Strategies

Typical short term marketing strategies would be PPC (direct linking) and Forum Postings (direct linking).

PPC (direct linking)

As PPC (Pay Per Click) is a very fast and easy way to get the traffic that you are looking for, marketers who are just starting out would normally place bids on keywords to get traffic and direct them to affiliate offers or their own product to make sales. This is a good strategy for newbie marketers who are just starting out and do not have a huge budget or capital to instill long term marketing strategies. Nevertheless, when done right this short term strategy that help you get quick traffic and sales could easily place you in a position where you will have the capital required to employ long term marketing strategies.

Forum Posting (direct linking)

Another quick way to get traffic (not in large volume but moderately and usually the traffic volume usually depends on the size of the forum and how interesting your forum posts are) is to use forum postings.

The advantage of this traffic strategy is that it is a free traffic strategy. It will take time and effort to make this traffic strategy work but once you get the ball rolling, your sales will take off by it. The good thing about this strategy is that in many ways, you are setting yourself up to building brand awareness on the forum which is a long term strategy
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Long Term Strategies

Some of the most common long term strategies that successful marketers employ and swear by are Blogging and Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and List Building.

Blogs And Articles

Having your own network of content that points back to you is certainly a great way to brand yourself. Building a brand awareness around your business is a great long term business strategy because you can show your target market who you are, and help them to trust you most. The more they put their trust on you, the easier it would be to sell to them over and over again

Blogging not only serves as the center of your network, but your constant articles and article distributions that you spread out on the internet will can be very effective in educating your reader of what you know and at the same time you put an impression on their mind that you are the one who can solve their problems and if they ever needed help with their problem, it would be worth the money to invest in your products.

Search Engine Optimizations

As SEO traffic strategies take a long time to succeed and required a lot of constant effort to rank up, this long term strategy can usually mean that you might have to lose some money on the up front first before you can enjoy the full benefits of the targeted and free traffic from your SEO efforts.

Traffic that comes from the search engines is usually much targeted and that is why PPC is so popular even if you have to pay for traffic. SEO however, gets you this same exact targeted traffic for free. And if you are able to rank at the top of the search engines results for a hot keyword, your traffic volume will explode, and you will see a lot of sales coming in with very little signs of stopping and if you got to the top of search engines the ‘legit’ way, you can be sure to be able to enjoy lots of constant target traffic to your site for free and stay there for a very long time.

List Building.

One of the best long term marketing strategy that you can use for your online business is without the doubt list building. When done right you can have your own ATM machine that churns out cash whenever you want. Not only will you be able to sell your product to your list over and over again, you can even promote affiliate products whenever you like. Using a list you can also build strong brand awareness and the list that you built is ultimately yours. You will not have to worry if you go out of business if Google Bans you or if any ‘accidents’ happen to your business if you own a huge and responsive list. This is indeed long term marketing at its best.