PPC seems unprofitable for affiliates, per declared EPC on various CPA networks

Hi kbellare.

I have done little affiliate marketing in my time so I'm speaking here mostly as an advertiser and PPC expert. I've had a few clients doing AM too.

First, I would be very careful of using PPC to promote low cost items. Margins are usually too low. If a client has mostly $20 and under products, I won't promote those, starting with the higher priced ones. I might not take on a client if that's the only kind of items he has for sale.

There can be exceptions of course. If he sells dog food for example, a buyer may come back again and again. The initial ROI is high but goes down as there are repeat customers. I don't suppose there are many such affiliate programs however.

The problem of course is that you are selling someone else's product. I know commissions can be low, two to ten percent. That's why it is hard to make a profit. It may not be a problem if the item costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. I made an affiliate sale once of $200 years ago promoted using PPC.

You mention cheapest keywords being $0.15. That's not true. You can get much lower than that, although it's not always easy. You are right about the conversion rate needing to be high. As you realize, it's because you usually only make a small percentage of the sale. In my experience, few rates are that high.

So you are left to use PPC on a) either recurring commission items, there are few of those, b) low commission but high priced item, which my $200 commission was, very niche so low number of searches or c) higher commissions like many Clickbank products in the 50% range or more but as I understand, sales pages often convert very poorly.

Second, you should learn all you can about PPC before using it to promote your offers. Invest the time and money. It will be worth it. There is a thread in here about a Warrior saying just that, that he likes Adwords and that it was worth it to him. I'm not sure if he sells his own products, probably does.

My advice once you do use PPC for affiliate marketing: use only long-tail keywords. Less searches but more profitable. It can still be tricky however. And because you will get a trickle with the longer tail, don't expect to make tons of money overnight. Build it up and when you have dozens or hundreds of campaigns, you could make a nice little living. This answers your first question. You will have to try it out and it will be time consuming.

Keep in mind there are some products/services that just don't sell well on the Internet. The trick is figuring out which ones do.

As for your second question, the trick is to have great ads and great quality score keywords. This lowers your CPC giving you better ROI.