Beginner's Guide To Affiliate Marketing

Pay Per Click Programs
The two largest pay per click providers are Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing.
Google Adwords

Google is the king of pay per click programs. Cost to sign up is $5.00 (given as bid credit) and your ads can appear in as quick as ten minutes. Since Google is syndicated, ads appear in front of even more customers. You can target your ads to a particular country, area, or even zip code if you wish.
While there are less expensive pay per click programs, Google’s Adwords offers several advantages. Relevant ads rise, price monitoring is automatic, ads go live almost immediately, a low minimum deposit gets you started quickly, ad areas can be targeted by country or language, plenty of tools are provided for users and ad price can be set by the word or by the ad.
Google provides several tools to help users succeed. The Google Website Optimizer can help you test the potential conversion rate of your landing page. As with some other pay per click programs, Google awards relevancy. The more focused and relevant an ad is, the more viewers click through. The higher the click through rate, the lower the actual cost per click.
Once you register for a free account, you’re ready to start a pay per click campaign. Use the Google Keyword Tool to enter all of your keywords. If you haven’t already, you can use the tool to generate more keywords.
Start with As Many Keywords as Possible
Your keyword list should contain every word you can think of that applies to searching for your product. It’s okay to totally brainstorm and to add plenty of keywords with the Google Keyword tool. The point right now is to get as many keywords as possible.
Additional keyword sources include forums and groups. What words and phrases are people using? As you continue pay per click affiliate marketing, you’ll want to stay up to date on slang or buzz words related to your product. Consult an online or print thesaurus to find good synonyms.
Try typing your keyword in Google or another search engine. Visit the first few sites that come up in the search results. Click on View, then source to see what keywords the site is using. If the page isn’t encrypted, you’ll be able to read the list of keywords near the top of the source information.
Ad Campaigns are made up of ad groups. For instance, an ad campaign to promote tattoos could consist of separate ad groups focused on angel tattoos, dragon tattoos and fairy tattoos. Use different ad campaigns for separate product types, different projects or different websites.
Ad groups can be based on several different criteria, including design, style, misspellings, personality types, seasonal promotions, special promotions. Ad groups may contain just one ad or several ads.
Clean and Customize Keyword List
Look at your keyword list. Are there any words there that aren’t relevant to the product? Example: We’ve chosen a Clickbank tattoo site to promote. Three of the top designs on the site are an angel tattoo, a fairy tattoo and a dragon tattoo.
Our keyword list contains angel tattoo, tattoo design, tribal tattoo, tattoo removal, Celtic tattoo and skull tattoo, fairy tattoo and dragon tattoo, tattoo piercing, and tattoo needles.
The keywords tribal, removal, Celtic and skull can be deleted since they don’t directly apply to the designs we’ve chosen to promote. (This is a short example. Your first keyword list can be quite long before it’s cleaned up.)
We’ll now create one ad group on tattoos. There will be three ads in this group, one ad for each type of tattoo. Think of each ad as a sort of classified ad.
Google policy tells us how the ad must be written:
Line 1: headline, maximum of 25 characters
Line 2: maximum of 35 characters.
Line 3: maximum of 35 characters.
Line 4: URL
The word ‘online’ cannot be used on Line #1. Superlatives (best, most, etc.) are not allowed in any of the lines. Multiple exclamation points and other excessive punctuation is also prohibited.
Line 1: Ad Headline
This will be the first thing viewers notice. It should get their attention, be focused enough to weed out the ‘tire kickers’ who are browsing, not buying, and should consist of your #1 keyword search term.
Line 2: Emotional appeal to viewer. State your product’s best benefit here.
Line 3: Factual appeal to viewer. State your products most inspiring feature here.
Display URL: Include words here that emphasize the product benefit
Destination URL: Actual URL that takes viewer to landing page.
Note: Ad readers like numbers. Try including product price ($xx), percentages (20% off) or other numbers in your ad.

Writing Angel Tattoo Ad:
Angel Tattoos.
Exclusive Designs.
Quality Creations.
www.terrifictattoos.com

This doesn’t look bad but it’s missing a call to action. Let’s try again.
Angel Tattoos.
One-of-a-Kind Creations.
Get your Guardian Angel Now.
www.terrifictattoos.com

It isn’t Hallmark but it does include a call to action – something that can increase your click through rate tremendously. The click through rate is determined by how many times viewers actually click on your add in ratio to how many times the ad was shown. A good click through rate not only can result in more affiliate sales, it can result in reduced pay per click fees.
When writing ads, make sure you don’t exceed the character limit. Your keywords should be as focused and specific as possible. A call to action (buy now, hurry, limited offer, etc.) should be included. Note: the action phrase click here is not allowed.
The important thing to remember when writing pay per click affiliate marketing ads is that you pay for every click. Therefore, it’s in your best interest to make your ad so focused and targeted that only potential buyers click on it
You don’t want to pay for the clicks of web surfers who are just browsing. In the case of the angel tattoo design, the goal is to provide specific information for someone who is already interested in and looking for an angel tattoo.
The same would apply to the dragon tattoo ad and the fairy tattoo ad. The simplest budget option for Adwords is to set a low daily budget ($5.00 or so) and to set a click price based on the entire ad instead of for each keyword.
As time goes by and you see which keywords are getting results, write more ads based on those words. Do monitor your ads closely. If you get too many clicks and not enough sales, try putting the price in your ad.
Don’t activate any ads yet. In order for the ad to function, you need a page waiting for the customer at the URL you’ve listed.
Why not just send the customer right to the merchant product page? There are several reasons. Google Adwords does not allow landing pages (the page where the customer will land when they click on the URL) to contain pop-ups or pop-unders. Most merchant pages are highly ‘tricked out’ with some sort of pop-up or floating ad.
By sending the customer to your page first, you get a chance to capture customer information, pre-sell the product (a very effective practice) and establish your web page. If you have no experience with websites, don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be hard.
Landing Pages
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