Business Emergence: Pay Per Click, and Pay Per Impression Marketing

The initial work in driving traffic to my affiliate websites came in the form of pay per click marketing via the search engines Google and Yahoo. Keep in mind that there are more search engines out there than just Google and Yahoo. I chose those because Google is the largest commanding over 80% of the search engine market, and Yahoo because it is one of a few that make up the remaining 20% of the search engine market. If you look at the pie graph it kinda becomes obvious as to why I made my initial marketing choice.

The first thing that I did was sign up for a Google Adwords account, and a Yahoo search marketing account. These are cost per click marketing systems. This means that your ads are shown to people until your daily spending limit is reached. You are not charged for your ads being viewed, and you are not charged until someone actually clicks on your ad. There are some interesting points to note. Both Google and Yahoo rotate ads, thus your ad always appears on someone's first page. You have control of how much you wish to pay per click, as well as how much you wish to spend on content match ads. Content matching is also very useful. For example if someone is searching for acai berry free trials, and someone has a website dedicated to all things acai while utilizing google adsense on their website, this website becomes a candidate for your acai ad to be shown on.

Signing up for those is pretty straightforward. Google only charges for their service once a month, while Yahoo implements a pre-paid account model where you have a minimum balance threshold before being charged again. The good thing here is that you are in control of your monthly budget. Once the accounts were set up I turned my attention toward the creation of text ads. When creating text ads there are some things to consider.

Items of consideration

Compliance
keywords
proper ad body

On the topic of compliance... the affiliate is informed by either the affiliate network, or by the merchant as to the articles of compliance that must be followed. This is very important because if compliance is breached you run the risk of losing the affiliate relationship with the merchant, and in some cases, multiple infractions could lead to being kicked out of the affiliate network. More specifically there are usually keywords that are protected that cannot be bid on by the affiliate, as well as trademarks that cannot appear in the ad body, or the keywords. A concrete example of this is... say American Express Preferred Rewards Gold Card. American Express is trademarked and cannot appear in the ad body, or in keywords. In fact there is a long list of words that are off limits for use as keywords. Do not let that be discouraging, because there are still many ways to market the card. A good example ad could be:

Reward Credit Card
No Annual Fee. 10,000 Reward
Points. Apply Online Now!
"your website here"

The keywords for this ad to be something like:

reward credit card
gold reward credit card
reward credit cards
no annual fee reward credit card

I also learned that Google started to offer image ads in addition to their text ads. I tried using that and achieved great success with it. You still need to specify keywords, but you no longer have to worry about ad body.

There are also CPM, or cost per impression, marketing offered by entities such as Adbrite. Adbrite allows the creation of text ads, as well as image/banner ads. This is also a powerful means of driving traffic to ones site. I tried this and had some success. Of course when you are choosing images you have to pay attention to the legalities of the image contents. For example, you cannot have a picture of a celebrity and point it to a product offering. With cost per impression marketing you pay per 1000 impressions. An impression is when your ad appears, or when your ad is shown to someone doing a search. The selling point here is the low cost per 1000 impressions. Many times just pennies per 1000 impressions.

I have learned all of these methods of marketing over the last few months and could write at great length about them. If there are any questions about any of these topics please feel free to ask.

References:
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2008 Market Share Analysis at MarketShare.hitslink.com
Cost Per Impression Marketing at Adbrite.com
Cost Per Click Marketing at Yahoo
Cost Per Click Marketing at Google