Paid traffic for an affiliate website

Whoa...

Suggestion, NEVER use your Google Adwords account to directly link to an affiliate offer!!! EVER!!!

When I was a newbie I was fiddling around with different Adword campaign ideas. I had just got my very first hosting account with HostGator, and had scored $100 FREE in Adword.

Well, since I didn't have my site ready, I built an ad, and linked to a Clickbank page using my direct affiliate link.... OOPS!!!

Google instantaneously suspended me for life from Adwork. No sh!t

If your going to run Adword campaigns, you need to link to YOUR landing page, whereby, you then compell readers to link to your affiliate offer... no problems that way!

Thought I'd mention it, so nobody else finds out like I did.

After rereading, I imagine you are referring to running paid ads to your own affiliate network perhaps???

All the Best,

Art

Hey Art,

Sorry to hear man, as for paid , I found banner ads on personal sites allow great rates. Those tend to do a little better then google adwords.

Paid traffic is where the real marketers make money.

It's simple, you have a converting/good campaign, you are literally printing money by uping your ad spend.

But its hard getting a positive ROI from your traffic, clearly, and that takes time to learn.

Firstly, let me say it doesn't really matter if you are promoting affiliate products or your own products. Paid traffic works just the same. The only difference is that with your own products you'll be able to test different sales pages and make various tweaks on the sales page until it has a favorable conversion.

For affiliate websites, you have to work with tweaking your landing pages to PRESELL whatever you are promoting so that when your visitors land on the vendors page, there are already in a buying mood.

Now as it relates to paid traffic, in order to make is successful you have to do some indepth market research to ensure that you get your targeting right. You want to get your ads in front of persons who are more likely to buy from you.

If you are doing ppc, focus on keywords that people would search for when they are close to make that buying decision.

If you are using placement ads, then place your ads where the demographics match that of your targeted audience.

Once you can do that, you can get a lot of stats from your ad campaigns which you can then tweak until you have a profitable campaign. With that being said, it is important to note that NOT every campaign will be profitable right off the bat or any at all. Thus you need to do your own testing and tweaking so that you can know what works and what doesn't.

Hope that helps.

If you can nail a positive ROI you are literally laughing, place all profits into long term success and then move onto another project - rinse and repeat.

Its a lot easier said than done however!

Yea probably wouldn't direct link most Affilate sites on Adwords...they are very picky about that. you can try 2nd tier ppc if you want but the traffic is never going to be that great. Having great lp's will get better results and will track better with a program like prosper202 or something like that. You are really trying to get sign ups and email addresses as well as drive targeted traffic to your offers. zips and registers are another beast too and the advertisement of those is handled slightly different

The best bet is to drive PPC traffic to a lead capture page. Then follow up until you make sales.

When testing out an offer, I would buy a paid solo ad in that niche to see the conversions.

Once you have done some testing and know the offer converts, then fire away with banners and media buys, PPC etc ...

Shawn

What if you bought a domain and forwarded to the offer ? Thanks

If you own the website and you know your numbers that it converts then i would run paid traffic at it all day long

> tools i use - visual website optimizer and retargetting, start small test , tweek and then scale up when you numbers are positive.

Even if you break even you are building your list for free ...