Update: hehe yeah arbitrage right…old post

I can’t help but notice that PPC ads are getting increasingly competitive. It’s no secret that affiliate marketers are beginning to look at PPC as a solid method of investment. For those of you who aren’t familiar with what I am talking about I’ll explain real fast.

PPC To Affiliate Marketing Basic Strategy
The idea is find an affiliate program that results in a PPA (Pay per Action) or PPL (Pay per Lead). Lets say for instance you find one that will pay you $4.00 for every visitor you send that ends up filling out a form for auto insurance. The next step is finding a good PPC campaign to generate your targeted traffic. At this point many prefer PPC Engines while most prefer Google Adsense. You then develop and write a few targeted ads and bid for your clicks. The idea is to generate enough leads to not only pay for the clicks but to pull a small profit. For instance if one in every 10 of your clicks on average complete the form to get their insurance quote, and you pay $0.30/click. You spent $3 and made $4. Therefore you profited a dollar. The art behind making the real money this way is to of course write quality ads that convert high while paying as low as possible for your clicks while generating as many leads as possible. Did I just make that complicated? I’ll iterate my point. If your making a dollar on your three then it may be worth it to bid slightly more per click and lower your profit dollar in order to make more leads/day.

Now that most of have quit reading because you already know this…
I wanted to point out a cool change up to the system I saw today. Someone was advertising on Adsense in the serps and directing the traffic to a PPC site.

Here’s a picture of his ad in the SERPS

Nice ad eh? If you click on it, it leads you to this page [1] http://www.hometheatredirectory.com/Results.aspx?query=Home%20Theatre

I thought this was a pretty unique idea. Buy clicks at low prices, convert the traffic, and sell for higher on other engines. This would be obviously stupid to do this backwards with Adsense ads, because Adsense ads don’t allow you to pick which ads show up on the page. Therefore you cannot guarantee that the clicks made on your site will cover the costs of buying that click.

For those of you who are wondering why this is showing up for terms like “home theater” I can only say I’m not surprised. I know from experience that expensive terms means expensive PPC costs. If you were going to truly experiment with this sort of investment, might as well go high so you can properly measure the results.