Earning from PPC Search Engine Affiliate Programs

What are PPC Search Engines?

PPC Search Engines are search engines that allow advertisers to list their site within their search results on a pay per click basis. Advertisers bid against other advertisers for the same keywords or phrases. The highest bidder will then have their site ranked #1 in the PPC Search Engine results for a certain keyword followed by the second highest bidder for the same keyword followed by the third highest bidder for the same keyword, etc.

When a visitor then does a search in the PPC Search Engine and clicks on an advertisers bided link, the advertisers account will then get deducted for that click. This only happens once per unique visitor. So if that same visitor clicked on the same advertisers bided link twice, then the advertisers account will only get deducted for the first click.

Why is it easier to earn from PPC Search Engines than other affiliate programs?

PPC Search Engine affiliate programs are a good and easy way to earn some quick cash online. It is a lot easier to earn from PPC Search Engines than most other affiliate programs because you earn from your visitors click-thru's to an advertisers site and not per action or sale.

Where can I find PPC Search Engines that offer affiliate programs?

There are only a few good resources on the Internet that lists a large amount of PPC Search Engines. Most of these are either outdated where they have a lot of PPC Search Engines that don't exist anymore or only mainly gives information about a PPC Search Engines advertising offers.

This is because it lists over 375 PPC Search Engines where you can easily compare what each PPC Search Engines affiliate program has to offer and you can even organize the PPC Search Engines results by Date Added, Minimum Payout, Earnings, etc.

I have joined a PPC Search Engine. How do I go about advertising it so that I can earn from it?

Once you have joined a PPC Search Engine, you can then easily get promotional links/ material from the affiliate section of the PPC Search Engine account where you can then use them to advertise the PPC Search Engine that you have joined.

Most PPC Search Engines allow you to advertise them by using search boxes, an xml feed, text links, referral links, banners, a portal page, and more.

Essential Guide To Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Which Engines Should You Use?

Following Goto.com's (now known as Overture) phenomenal success
with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, more than 160 PPC startups
have sprung up.

Out of these 160 PPC engines, only a few may actually have the
search volume to generate a respectable number of clicks for your
site.

Most PPC startups require between $10 to $25 of setup fee which
can be applied to clickthroughs. They offer low minimum bids of
$0.01. But with limited search volumes, they may bring you only a
few clicks each day!

My recommendation is to go for established PPC engines with high
search volumes that can generate higher clickthroughs. The big
boys are Overture (previously known as Goto) at
http://www.overture.com, Sprinks at http://www.sprinks.com,
FindWhat at http://www.findwhat.com.

Overture is the best because they serve over 2 billion search
queries monthly through their partnership with major search
engines such as America Online, Lycos, Altavista, Netscape,
Hotbot and InfoSpace.

You can test the startup PPC engines but commit only the minimum
setup fees. If they generate decent traffic, you can always top
up your account. That way you minimize your risk to only $10 to
$25 per PPC engine. For a list of over 160 PPC engines, see
http://www.payperclicksearchengines.com

How To Find Relevant Keywords?

Since you are paying for each clickthrough on your bid, it makes
good sense to ensure that your keywords are relevant to your
target audience.

One of my favorite tools is Overture's Search Term Suggestion at
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Enter a keyword and it shows the number of times the word was
searched - which indicates its popularity. The more popular the
keyword is, the higher are your clickthroughs. Overture also
generates a list of similar keywords and their search counts in
the previous month.

Overture's tool is one of the best ways for finding good keywords
to bid on. Another alternative is to download Good Keywords at
http://www.softnik.com/products/gkw/index.htm

Enter a keyword into this free software and it will display a
list of relevant search terms and their search counts across
multiple PPC engines.

You can also try JimTools' Keyword Toolkit at
http://jimworld.nu/keywords.html

JimTools can generate a list of related keyword possibilities,
some with search counts, from Goto, Google, Magellan and
WebCrawler.

How Much Do I Bid?

The bigger PPC engines such as Goto and Sprinks require a minimum
bid of $0.05. Startup engines have lesser minimums of $0.01.

How much to bid depends on your return-on-investment (ROI)
calculations.

For example: If you bid $1.00 per visitor, and 1 in every 10
visitors buys your product, your cost-per-sale is $10.00.

So if each sale of your product produces a gross profit of $15,
then your net profit will be $5.00 ($15 gross profit minus $10
cost-per-sale).

Your return-on-investment (ROI), before non-marketing expenses,
is 50.0% ($5.00 net profit / $10 cost-per-sale). Always price
your bids to achieve a positive ROI!

A great tool that you can use to compare bids for a specific
keyword across multiple PPC engines is at
http://www.compareyourclicks.com

To read about how you can maximize your returns from PPC engines,
go to http://internetmarketingfocus.com/article.php?sid=53

You'll learn how to reduce your bids while still maintaining the
same ranking or get a top 3 position for maybe just 1 cent more!

How Do I Track Clicks?

Most of the time, you'll notice that the number of clicks tracked
by yourself is between 15% to 30% more than the clicks the PPC
engine reports.

This is because reputable PPC engines such as Overture have
installed anti-cheating mechanisms that prevent your competitors
from repeatedly clicking on your listings and wasting your bid
fees!

They will count multiple clicks within a specified timeframe from
the same computer as only one clickthrough while your own log
will usually register the multiple clicks.

There was once when I noticed that my log was registering less
clicks than Overture's reports. They were experiencing some bug
which prevented clicks from being properly delivered to the
advertiser's website.

Because I was tracking my clicks, I notified them of the problem
and they credited my account for the bad clicks. Tracking your
clicks give you a more reliable picture of how well your PPC
campaign is performing.

If you have access to your CGI directory, I recommend LnkinLite,
a small yet powerful tracking software that can track clicks to
your site in the background.

The Long Term Benefits From Pay Per Click Advertising

The long term benefits from pay per click advertising.

Businesses are starting to look closely at the long-term benefits from pay per click advertising. Pay per click search engines are primarily used for sales in the now time frame, but they are also being used to build a business identity that their customers will remember. This form of brand awareness can be applied to a company of any size, large or small. If you take a look at a traditional magazine or newspaper ad, the companies are using that advertising to increase their brand awareness. The purpose of the ad is to direct the customer to their products or services but there is no chance to make a sale immediately. They are referred to a website or a retailer. When search engine advertising, as potential customers search the web looking for a product or service and see the same site come up in their searches time and time again it begins to create that same brand awareness for that product or service.

Over 85% of all searches on the Internet are done through search engines and they are the best tools for enhancing a company's identity. They are identity builders, and they direct targeted consumers who are looking for your product or service right to your doorstep. In the long term, brand awareness can bring visitors to their site without additional advertising. By using the power of search engines you can use the Internet to deliver a targeted prospective customer who is actively looking for your products or services right to your doorstep and build long term brand awareness at the same time.

Advertising Using PPC Search Engines

Internet technology offers vast opportunities to promote your business with virtually no advertising borders, and you can find countless sources online directing you towards budget marketing via pay-per-click search engines for maximum effectiveness in the information age.

Enterprising people know all the benefits of optimizing their online advertising, and because of this fact the ‘pay-per-click' (PPC) technique has been developed to meet the need. PPC is certainly at the cutting edge of Internet advertising today, because you ‘bid' or budget on the exact amount you want to put into your advertising campaign, giving you the choice to state just how much you'll pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

For instance, if you bid five cents a click, that's how little you'll pay for your advertising - and you'll only have to pay that five cents each time a consumer clicks on your ad! Budget marketing via pay-per-click search engines should encompass the following integral steps of creating, optimizing and managing your advertising campaign or ‘sponsored search' on the most widely used search engines including Google, Yahoo, MSN, Earthlink, American Online, Ask Jeeves and CNN.com - just to name a famous few!

The most widely touted benefit of budget marketing via pay-per-click search engines is that it delivers your product information and your web site to the very consumers online who are searching for such products, be it business, science or technology-related, trips and travel, car buying, entertainment ideas or wedding planning! Your business specifically reaches those already interested in knowing more, and enthusiasts of budget marketing via pay-per-click search engines will tell you that no other advertising medium can give you that kind of bang for your advertising buck.

Other pluses of budgeting via PPC are that your ad can be targeted to regions you specify, whether you want the entire world to know, or just focus on your local area at the moment. Your ad can also be tracked towards search engines that receive the highest amount of keywords specific to the product or service on your website. Whether you have a home based business or you've just been appointed Director of a countrywide multi-national, your business will benefit from budget marketing via pay-per-click search engines. Seek out experts who will

Affiliate Strategies Of Pay Per Click Advertising Networks

The Untold Secret Of Pay Per Click Advertising:

An often misunderstood reality of Pay-Per-Click advertising is that many times you can't determine where you ad will be displayed once you sign-up with one of the PPC Search Engines. In the incestuous world of online advertising, companies are often simultaneously competitors and partners. This is never more true than in the case of Search Engine Advertising.

Even The Big Guys Do It:

If the Pay-Per-Click program you're using is from one of the major brands that has it's own consumer search destination site (Google, Yahoo, Lycos etc,) it's a little easier to tell where your ads will show up. However, even if you're working with the major players, your ads won't be limited to the Search Engine you signed up with. For example, Google has agreements with Lycos, Ask Jeeves, AOL, and other lesser known brands, to display ads from the Google AdWords program. Yahoo has relationships with MSN, and CNN.Com to display ads from its Overture Pay Per Click Program. Lycos owns HotBot.Com and has partnered with affiliates outside its network to increase the distribution of ads from the Lycos AdBuyer Pay Per Click program.

Distribution Strategies Of Smaller Search Engines:

Once you go beyond the major Pay Per Click Advertising programs it becomes increasingly difficult to know where your ads will appear. Most of the second tier Search Engines rely exclusively on networks of unknown sites for their distribution. FindWhat.Com, Kanoodle, Enhance and Search 123 don't operate sites that consumers use to search the web. Because of this they have developed relationships with thousands of smaller sites to display ads from customers who sign up for their Pay Per Click programs.

Affiliate Traffic Isn't Necessarily Bad:

Just because a Pay Per Click Advertising program doesn't have its own search site to drive traffic doesn't necessarily mean that the traffic is of lesser quality. Like everything else when it comes to a successful PPC Advertising campaign, the key is to track and analyze results on a daily basis. Set-up independent tracking URL's for each PPC Search Engine you are working with, or use a third party tracking tool like Atlas One Point to track how many clicks you're getting from each Search Engine, and how much of the traffic is converting into sales.

Can You Cherry Pick Affiliates?

As a rule, most Search Engines won't divulge the list of affiliates they are working with to display your ads. Even if you are able to determine which affiliate sites are converting better for you than others, the Search Engines generally won't allow you to cherry pick which affiliates will display your ad. However, some Pay Per Click Search Engines like Google allow you to opt out of their affiliate network.

Conclusion:

Driving traffic by displaying ads across a network of affiliate sites is a fact of life for Pay Per Click Search Engines. It's not necessarily bad, but it is something you need to be aware of as you analyze which PPC Search Engines to use, and which ones perform. By displaying your ad on affiliate sites your marketing message is put in front of more people who are looking for the products you sell. The downside is once you move beyond the big brands and venture into the vast mysterious world of affiliate networks, there is a chance the quality of your traffic will decline. As long as you monitor your traffic sources for volume, and conversions, and adjust your campaigns accordingly you should be able to benefit from the increased distribution affiliates provide, while maintaining the profitability metrics for your Pay Per Click Advertising campaign.

Pay Per Click Advertising For Home Business Owners

The biggest stumbling block for most home business owners is marketing their business. Most will start at free to post FFA pages and safelists. Most free advertising will never be seen by anyone and as a result business owners get discouraged and quit.

Pay Per Click search engines are one of the most effective tools you can use to bring quick targeted traffic to your site. With pay-per-click search engines, you pay every time a visitor clicks on your link, anything from a few cents to a few dollars. Lets say you have a site that sells camping gear and you want to rank in the top ten in the search engines for the term camping gear. To be ranked in one of the top ten spots in the free search engines, you'd probably be looking at several months' minimum, if ever. But in the pay-per-click search engine you can grab a top ten spot anytime you want. That's because all you have to do is see how much the person who has the position you want is paying per click, and simply outbid them by paying one penny more. Then when your potential customer searches for the term camping gear your link will show up as one of the top 10 listings on the search results page. Each time someone clicks on your link, you'll pay however much you have bid for that position.

The advantages of bidding on keywords with pay per-clicks are that you get highly targeted advertising, because you only pay when someone actually clicks through to your site. Your listing get posted quickly and you can start profiting from increased traffic almost immediately. In order to be in one of the top ten positions, all you have to do is outbid your competitors, which is only a matter of a penny more per click.

Done right, pay-per-click advertising can be very profitable and to help you ensure your campaigns are profitable avoid keywords that are too general. General keywords will attract a lot of traffic but drive up the cost of your pay per click campaign and convert very few visitors to sales because general search terms aren't specific enough or in very high demand. Try using keyword phrases, two or three words that pertain to your business. Use any search term suggestion tool and put in your keyword. The results will show your term, how many times it has been searched and also show many different variations. Try to pick one that is more specific to what you're trying to advertise using two or three words. That will lower you're cost and be more targeted. The money you save by doing this will enable you to bid on more keywords and you can still get the same exposure without competing for the expensive terms.

How To Make Pay-Per-Click Advertising Payoff

No doubt everyone is in full gear, back from holidays and ready to make 2003 their best year ever!

Here's an article I wrote that's getting some really terrific response - it's on the high demand topic of generating more traffic and sales using Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Trust me folks, this article will generate some interest - it's getting one of the best responses of any article I've ever written.

How To Make Pay-Per-Click Payoff!

Profitability with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising comes down to how well you have chosen your keywords.

Choose too generic a term and you will lose your shirt - and fast. Choose too specific a term and you'll miss out on traffic your competitors will get.

For example, let's say you offer a travel guides for sale online - here are some possible keywords with associated monthly traffic counts and top bid as of the time this article was written:

travel: #hits (1198817) top bid: $2.11/click

travel guide: #hits (30859) top bid: .75/click

Italy travel guide (516) top bid: .22/click

If you zip on over to the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool,

you'll find well over 100 associated combinations of keyword phrases that incorporate travel - but may not even remotely related to your product.

Similarly, a search under travel guide returns many search phrases including travel guide that may not properly target your customers.

You are still better to go one step deeper and find keywords more specific to your market - and as you will notice, the cost per click becomes much more reasonable which means your return on investment for PPC advertising becomes much greater.

So, that's all great information, but how do you find those "magic" keywords and phrases that will pull well for your business?

This is where your detective skills will come in handy. A little work will pay off in spades.

TIP 1. Examine Your Web Logs

Access your web logs - either from your dedicated server or from your shared server with your virtual web host. Most web statistics packages allow you to examine search terms that brought customers to your site from large search engines.

You want to look over a few months and find patterns of search terms that pop up again and again - those are the one's you'll want to start with.

TIP 2 Use Keyword Suggestion Tools

There are various keyword suggestion tools that you can access on the internet to assist you in finding commonly searched terms -- some even list combinations that you may not have even thought of. Here are a few of them to try out...

Google Adwords Suggestion Tool:

http://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Wordtracker

http://www.wordtracker.com

TIP 3. Scan the Message/Discussion Boards

Look for patterns of words, phrases or questions that people use on discussion forums related to your product or service. These boards are tremendously valuable sources of intelligence given that most posts start off with a question followed by several responses.

You want to make sure the discussion boards you choose are both relevant and moderated so to ensure high quality and high volume posting. On the topic of online marketing and advertising - my hands-down favorite is found within this master marketer's site...

http://www.infoproductcreator.com/part/net.html

Find questions your product deals with and you'll find clues to high-demand keywords.

TIP 4. Search your competitors keywords

Spend some time searching down your competitors using Google, Yahoo or other search engines. You can use the toolbar extension at http://www.alexa.com to help find out sites attracting higher traffic.

For Internet Explorer users, choose the "View" and then "Source" menu options to look at the code for a particular website. Look for the Meta Tag Keywords section as well as keyword patterns in titles and sub-heads as well as through the text for clues on top performing keywords.

You can then go back to the Keyword Suggestion tools outlined in TIP#2 to test the keyword combinations you've come up with.

TIP 5. Look at leading Direct Mail, Magazine Articles and Books on your market to get hints on common "trigger" keywords that pop up again and again. Try mixing and matching some of these keywords, then throw them into the tools used in Tip#2. Before long, you will have found a few gems to try out.

TIP 6. Test IT

Keyword targeting is not an exact science. As with every other marketing technique, you need to test it. Depending on your budget and how fast you want to get results, you'll need to decide on a PPC to go with. Note: You will get far faster results with the big guys - Google Adwords and Overture, so my advice is to test using these PPC's.

You should have narrowed your keywords down to a point where you are risking .05-.80 per click rather than $2.00/click, so your exposure should be minimal.

Finally, you need to watch both the short-term and longer term impact of PPC. Shorter term, you'll notice traffic coming from PPC right away in your web logs - so you'll get a sense of click-through rates, and eventually sales in 1-2 weeks.

Longer term though, being listed in the top 3 spots on the PPC's often provides you additional exposure through special marketing arrangements each PPC has made with specific search engines.

Weeks after your initial campaign you will often start to see a significant bump in search engine activity as the result of being in the top 3 of PPC's.

Be smart in your PPC marketing.

For the vast majority of businsses who don't have unlimited funds for marketing, stay away from following the flocks - try and focus on niche keywords. That's how you can make Pay-Per-Click pay You.

Advertising "Click Fraud" Rampant Online?

"Pay-per-click," by far the most popular form of online advertising, recently came under fire as charges of rampant "click fraud" gather steam on the Web.

Google and Yahoo! earn the majority of their money through sales of advertising to tens-of-thousands of online merchants, companies, and professional.

In fact, some estimate that 99% of all Google's revenue comes from advertising sales. Unfortunately, allegations of click fraud may well rain on Google's otherwise sunny parade and cause a whole scale revamping of current online advertising practices.

Pay-per-click advertising does exactly what it sounds: advertisers pay for each click on their ad, usually mixed in among search engine results or displayed on relevant websites.

"Click fraud" occurs when, for whatever reason, an ad gets clicked by someone or something (usually an automated "bot" that simulates clicks) with no intention of ever buying anything from the advertiser.

The sole intention of click fraud is to simply drain an advertiser's budget and leave them with nothing to show but an empty wallet.

Who commits click fraud?

Usually an unscrupulous competitor who wants to break a rival's bank, online "vandals" who get their kicks causing other people grief, or search engine advertising affiliates who want to earn fat commissions by racking up piles of bogus clicks.

Regardless of who does it or why, click fraud appears to be a growing problem search engines hope stays under their advertising clients' radar.

This problem isn't exactly news to the search engine giants.

In fact, on page 60 of their 3rd quarter Report for 2004, Google admits that they have "regularly refunded revenue" to advertisers that was "attributed to click-through fraud."

Google further states that if they don't find a way to deal with this problem "these types of fraudulent activities could hurt our brand."

Bottom line for Google and Yahoo! (which owns Overture, the Web's largest pay-per-click search engine): as word of click fraud spreads across the Web, they must act quickly to calm the nerves of advertisers who could well abandon them over doubts about the veracity of their advertising charges.

The search engines all claim to carry measures that identify and detect click fraud, but details about how they do it and to what extent remain sketchy.

They claim revealing details about security would compromise their efforts and give the perpetrators a leg up on circumventing their defenses.

This sounds good, but affords little comfort to advertisers who feel caught between losing out on their best traffic sources and paying for advertising that won't result in revenue.

One way to protect your business against click fraud is to closely monitor your website statistics.

Look for an unusually high number or regular pattern of clicks from the same IP address.

If you need help, enlist the aid of your hosting provider to aid you in spotting suspicious trends in your website traffic.

Also, a number of services such as ClickSentinel.com have sprung up online to help advertisers spot and quickly analyze and compile the data necessary to effectively dispute fraudulent click charges with the search engines.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Search Engine Optimization

There are pro's & con's to both Pay-Per-Click advertising and optimizing for natural search engine traffic.

PPC advertising has many great benefits. First of all, you get your traffic going quickly. I have used this advantage many times. I test new products and even new websites through PPC advertising before making a decision to promote or scrap my new website or product idea.

I am a firm believer in testing new products before throwing large amounts of money into advertising. PPC advertising is a great way to do this. For example, with Google's Adwords program, you can post your ad, pay a $5 sign-up fee and have highly targeted traffic to your website within an hour. How is that for efficiency?

Also, you can moniter your click charges and stop them before they get too expensive. By the time you have spent your budget on clicks, you should have a pretty good idea of how successful your product is going to be.

I think of PPC advertising as being the most useful when starting a new business or product. WIth PPC advertising, you can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords you need to target and which products are the most popular.

Once that testing period is over, however, it's time to look into Search Engine Optimization. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Once you know what keywords to target, it's time to put together a plan on how you are going to optimize your website. The drawbacks to search engine optimization is that it requires a lengthy amount of time to get your site to rank high with your keywords. That is why I suggest using this method after the testing period is over, when you already know your business will be profitable.

Search Engine Optimization is definately a slow way to get your website traffic if you plan on not using PPC traffic. It could be a long, expensive road before you even begin selling your product. Search engines can take months, even years to start pulling up high with the search engines. But, natural search engine traffic is definately the best long term way to get the majority of your traffic.

When getting your site to start pulling up in SE natural listings there are 2 main things that need to be done:

1. Add Content
   

2. Add Backlinks
   

Search engine traffic requires you to submit your site to many different search engines and wait, maybe even months for them to spider your website.

I have had much better luck with another route. You can pay a fee to have your website listed in a very high ranking directory like www.dmoz.com (free), www.yahoo.com's directory ($299), sbd.bcentral.com (only $50), or another website where your link is on a page that has a page ranking of 4,5,6 or higher. The sites I mentioned above have rankings of 8 or 9. When you have your link on a site with that high of a ranking, the search engines are spidering those sites constantly and will find your website and spider it very quickly. Not only will they find it quickly but because you are linked to a high ranking site, you will also rank higher with the SE.

When looking for backlinks, focus on sites with content related to yours and high page rankings of 4 or higher.

As for content on your site, try to include about 200-500 words of content or text on most of the pages of your site. Text makes your site bulkier. Make sure to integrate all of the keywords you want to target within the content of your site. Don't worry about cramming the same keywords in over and over. Search engines may possibly even blacklist your site for keyword stuffing, if you try to do that.

There is a lot to know about Search Engine Optimization but, those are the 2 main factors when getting started.

In summary, when starting out, I suggest using PPC advertising for testing products and keywords. Spend time optimizing your site for search engine traffic after you have tested your products and keywords.

Is Click Fraud Really a Problem?

Click fraud is currently a major topic in online advertising. Many argue that it presents a threat to the stability and viability of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, the key revenue generator for both Google and Overture. In actuality, click fraud is not a significant issue at all.

Click fraud occurs when ads are clicked for reasons other than a genuine interest in learning more about the product or service advertised. Click fraud occurs in two forms. In one instance, fraud arises from competitors trying to sabotage each other. One competitor clicks on the ads of another just to drain the budget of that company. The other instance occurs when webmasters (or people associated with the webmaster) repeatedly click Google AdSense ads (which are syndications of others' ads) on their own web pages in order to generate more revenue. While both Overture and Google have developed sophisticated technologies to detect click fraud, their systems are, and may never be, foolproof.

The real question is how much does click fraud actually damage the PPC industry? Gross fraud, i.e., when one person or technology consistently and repeatedly clicks on an ad, aside, which Overture and Google can easily detect, we believe that click fraud has no real impact on the industry. The following explains why.

Efficient market theory says that it is impossible to beat a market” because prices already incorporate and reflect all relevant information. As the PPC industry has matured, efficiency has begun to take root. That is, the price of each keyword has been driven up to the point where it reflects the highest price an advertiser is willing to pay for a click.

For instance, a book retailer may pay $1.00 per click based on internal metrics. These metrics dictate, for example, that on average 30% of clickers purchase a book and the average profit per sale is $4.00. So, for every 100 clicks ($100 cost), they make 30 sales ($120 revenue) and generate a $20.00 (20%) profit. Note that years ago, the same retailer may have been able to pay only $0.50 per click, but as the market matured and more retailers began advertising, competitive bidding forced the price up to $1.00 where the highest return the most advertisers can make is 20%.

The key point is that click fraud is already taken into effect when advertisers select the highest amount they will bid. For instance, there is no difference whether an advertiser pays $0.83/click for 121 clicks with 21 being fraudulent, or $1.00/click for 100 clicks when there is absolutely no fraud. In either case, the advertiser pays $100 and generates a profit of $20, and Overture and/or Google make $100. What changes is the advertiser's yield (e.g., the percent of clickers who purchased the book) which in turn effects their highest bid price. That is, with fraud, 30 out of 121 clickers (24.8%) purchased the book, and without fraud 30 out of 100 clickers (30%) purchased it. Without fraud, the bid price in an efficient market will rise from $0.83 to $1.00.

In summary, online advertisers must focus on analyzing and improving their internal metrics (e.g., conversions) and not worry about click fraud as it is already incorporated into keyword bid prices. Hopefully, the frivolous lawsuits and refund requests spawned by apparent click fraud will end as those in the industry recognize this undeniable fact.

Contextual Ad Networks...The Baby Boom Is Upon Us

No, this baby boom will certainly not swamp the Social Security
system (sort of a bad joke for those that live in the United
States, but many other countries...most notably Japan...have an
even more acute problem), but this baby boom is revolutionizing
the way that pay per click advertising is being spread across the
Internet.

One of the early participants in this pay per click baby boom was
Google, with its AdSense program. With this program, Google
shares pay per click revenue with a huge number of individual
partner websites that carry a few pay per click ads that are
distributed by Google. In essence, this creates a whole bunch of
little pay per click locations (websites) throughout the Internet
and hence the term "pay per click baby boom".

Conceptually, programs like AdSense are similar to what the
computer hardware folks refer to a distributed processing.
Instead of trying to draw everyone to a large pay per click
search engine site, little groups of pay per click ads are spread
widely across thousands of locations (websites) all over the
Internet.

Actually, this distributed processing or propagation technique is
not limited to pay per click advertising. For example, Amazon
uses a similar arrangement (called Amazon Associates) to sell the
products it carries on amazon.com and ClickBank has a sales
program called CBAdwords which operates in a similar fashion.

According my trusty Ouija board, it seems likely that most
commercial hubs on the Internet will be shifting to this
propagation concept as time progresses...all of those individual
partner websites that carry the message/proposition will
constitute the vast army of worker ants that keep the queen ant
alive and healthy.

From a pay per click marketing perspective, these programs make
brilliant use of leverage while providing highly targeted
prospects for the paying advertiser.

There are, of course, some interesting things that occur as a
result of all of this stuff. For example, consider what I call
the "cross fertilization effect": Suppose a person goes to
yahoo.com and performs a search that leads them to one of my
websites that happens carry Google AdSense ads and that visitor
then clicks on one of those ads...the net result is that Yahoo
natural search provided Google pay per click with some revenue!
Aren't these fun times that we're living in?

As these programs continue to proliferate, the individual
webmaster needs to exercise a little restraint and avoid the
temptation to go overboard by plastering these ads all over your
website and thereby diluting your own primary message/proposition
and confusing your hard earned visitor. When properly used,
these ads are just ancillary or complementary content that you
are providing to enhance the information and opportunities that
you are providing to your visitor...if something happens to
strike a responsive chord with your visitor, you might make a
little pay per click money.

If properly used, these propagation programs can result in the
classical "win-win" situation. However, if you over do it, this
can quickly turn into a loss for you (the individual webmaster)
and a win for your pay per click partners that are distributing
the ads. As in many things, moderation is important.


The dynamic search engine marketing industry continues to evolve
as users began to take advantage of the steady stream of new
features, tools and innovations provided by the ever increasing
number of search engines offering quality search results (it's
not all about Google anymore). The evolutionary time line for
Internet marketing continues to run at warp speed.

An example of previous evolutionary periods (which by now may
almost seem prehistoric) would be the emergence of pay-per-click
advertising and the cooresponding rise of search-marketing firms
specializing in AdWords and Overture. As long as there are methods
for finding and retrieving information in digital databases by
using keywords or similar attributes, there will be a
search-marketing industry. How that industry operates in the
future depends on how the search engines operate and how consumer
tendencies evolve.

It's a constant sea of change, but the good things just keep on
getting better! Stay alert, and light on your feet, and the
opportunities will just keep on coming your way.

The above are just some observations from "the peanut gallery",
but I don't think I'm far off the mark about where things are
heading. With that, I'm off the soapbox and wishing you
success in whatever you do online!

We Are Right In The Middle Of A Pay Per Click Baby Boom

No, this baby boom will certainly not swamp the Social Security
system (sort of a bad joke for those that live in the United
States, but many other countries...most notably Japan...have an
even more acute problem), but this baby boom is revolutionizing
the way that pay per click advertising is being spread across the
Internet.

One of the early participants in this pay per click baby boom was
Google, with its AdSense program. With this program, Google
shares pay per click revenue with a huge number of individual
partner websites that carry a few pay per click ads that are
distributed by Google. In essence, this creates a whole bunch of
little pay per click locations (websites) throughout the Internet
and hence the term "pay per click baby boom".

Conceptually, programs like AdSense are similar to what the
computer hardware folks refer to a distributed processing.
Instead of trying to draw everyone to a large pay per click
search engine site, little groups of pay per click ads are spread
widely across thousands of locations (websites) all over the
Internet.

Actually, this distributed processing or propagation technique is
not limited to pay per click advertising. For example, Amazon
uses a similar arrangement (called Amazon Associates) to sell the
products it carries on amazon.com and ClickBank has a sales
program called CBAdwords which operates in a similar fashion.

According my trusty Ouija board, it seems likely that most
commercial hubs on the Internet will be shifting to this
propagation concept as time progresses...all of those individual
partner websites that carry the message/proposition will
constitute the vast army of worker ants that keep the queen ant
alive and healthy.

From a pay per click marketing perspective, these programs make
brilliant use of leverage while providing highly targeted
prospects for the paying advertiser.

There are, of course, some interesting things that occur as a
result of all of this stuff. For example, consider what I call
the "cross fertilization effect": Suppose a person goes to
yahoo.com and performs a search that leads them to one of my
websites that happens carry Google AdSense ads and that visitor
then clicks on one of those ads...the net result is that Yahoo
natural search provided Google pay per click with some revenue!
Aren't these fun times that we're living in?

As these programs continue to proliferate, the individual
webmaster needs to exercise a little restraint and avoid the
temptation to go overboard by plastering these ads all over your
website and thereby diluting your own primary message/proposition
and confusing your hard earned visitor. When properly used,
these ads are just ancillary or complementary content that you
are providing to enhance the information and opportunities that
you are providing to your visitor...if something happens to
strike a responsive chord with your visitor, you might make a
little pay per click money.

If properly used, these propagation programs can result in the
classical "win-win" situation. However, if you over do it, this
can quickly turn into a loss for you (the individual webmaster)
and a win for your pay per click partners that are distributing
the ads. As in many things, moderation is important.

It's a constant sea of change, but the good things just keep on
getting better! Stay alert, and light on your feet, and the
opportunities will just keep on coming your way.

The above are just some observations from "the peanut gallery",
but I don't think I'm far off the mark about where things are
heading. With that, I'm off the soapbox and wishing you
success in whatever you do online!

Traffic Arbitrage- The new kid on the block

A near risk-free and immediate way to create residual income [part one}

The Internet is a dynamic and ever evolving market place. It is full of promises and opportunities. It has the potential to turn people's fortunes around in very short orders. If you have been on the net for any reasonable length of time, such names as Yanik silver, John Reese, late Cory Rudl, Mike Filsame, Simon Garbowski and Mark Joyner to name just a handful, would not be unfamiliar to you. And if you are not familiar with these names, do not worry about it, you will soon be. These are regular folks that have leveraged the power of technology- the Internet to change their fortunes.

Apart from the big wigs, there are smaller folks out there who are raking in bundles of dollars everyday, using one or a combination of the various opportunities and income models the Internet has to offer. These income models range from Affiliate marketing, Resell rights, and Downline builders, to Auctiions, Dropships, Permission marketing, Google Adsene and now Traffic arbitrage.

Of all the income models, I like Traffic Arbitrage the most. It is simple, easy and can be implemented in very little time, even by those who know nothing about doing business on the Internet, once they get the hang of it. Making it even easier, is James Jones using his new Traffic Arbitrage page builder at Click Profit Pro.

Traffic Arbitrage? I am glad you noticed. Yes, Traffic Arbitrage! I would not say "Google Traffic Arbitrage" as many would, because Traffic Arbitrage goes beyond Google. Google is mighty and powerful, but if I could achieve the same results using cheaper search engines, why not. It does not always have to be Google. The cheaper the Cost Per Click, CPC, the better for our purpose. Remember, we are not looking for FREE traffic. We are buying traffic in one market to be sold in another market. And targetted traffic is targetted traffic whether it is coming from Kanoodle or from Google. However, for our purpose, we are using Google Adwords and Adsense.

But what is Traffic Arbitrage? Coming from education, I am sold on the idea of breaking concepts down to their component parts. To answer that question, let's look at the definition of Arbitrage. According to the Encarta World English Dictionary, Arbitrage is "The simultaneous buying and selling of the same negotiables or commodities in different markets in order to make an immediate and riskless profit".

Looking at our keyword phrase, and the Encarta definition, it is clear that the commodity of our trade is internet or web traffic. Also looking more closely at our Encarta definition, three operative phrases emerge, namely: simultaneous buying and selling, different markets, and immediate and riskless profit. Now, I do not know about you, but of all the three operative phrasology, I like the last best: immediate and riskless profit. Wow!

Immediate and Riskless! I am SOLD. Going, going and gone.

I don't know about you, but I do not know any businesses where you can make immediate and riskless profit, other than Traffic Arbitrage. Even in Traffic Arbitrage, there is a miniscle element of risk. Very minute. I just have to be hornest with you.But in the real sense of it, the profits can be immediate and near riskless.

How does Traffic Arbitrage work? I am glad you asked. It is simple once you understand it. And good a thing, it is not rocket science. If I do it, anyone one can do it PERIOD. It is as easy as that.

Now Google in her never ending wisdom, created two very compelling and successful campaign platforms- Adsense and AdWords. On the one hand, Adsense offers advertisers a way to reach deeper into their market without breaking their bank, by having Google place their campaigns on participating sites with content related to advertisers products and services. It also allows content creators a way to make a little money for making their webpage available for dispaly of these adsense ads. The advertiser wins because he is getting perfectly target traffic and deeper market penetration, and the content creator wins because he is making a little money doing what he loves to do.

On the other hand, AdWords offer advertisers a quick and cost effective way to drive immediate and targetted traffic to their sites. Like Adsense, Adwords are on a Cost Per Click basis, but unlike Adsense, they appear only on search displays on Google. The advertiser bids for a position on Google search results, and when a searcher clicks on the advertiser's ads, he the advertiser is charged the bid value of his campaign.

In part two of this two part series on Traffic Arbitrage, will look at the process of setting up a Google Adsense account and Adword account. We will also bring the components together to demonstrate how this genius technique can be use time and again to create residual income.

"Pay-Per Click" Ad Campaign: Earn More By Spending Less

What is "Pay-Per Click"? "Pay-Per Click", is an easy to understand advertising strategy. There are around 300 million searches at major search engines everyday. This causes 80% of internet traffic. Placing your websites on these search engines is very important in reaching as many potential customers as possible. But in order to be seen and clicked most frequently, your website should be viewed at the top most of the search list. Most people only reach up to the third page of a search engine so the lower your rank, the lesser the chance you will be clicked. In "Pay-Per Click" advertising, you pay to be always visible on the internet. You select keywords or key phrases about your website, and the highest bidder ranks the best. There is no upfront cost. You only pay after a visitor clicks your link. This is why it is called "Pay-Per Click".

Everyday millions of people around the world click on Pay-Per Click Advertising Campaign. With the booming internet industry and the ever growing online business, an ad of virtually anybody on the planet can be seen on the internet anywhere in the world.

The "Pay-Per Click" advertising campaign is the premier growth area in online marketing. Last year, an estimated $741.2 million was spent on "Pay-Per Click" advertising. The usual search engine optimization can take weeks or even months to produce results. "Pay-Per Click" advertising can attract customers at an instant. Why? Because, this cutting edge ad campaign can be placed on any website and can be viewed by potential online customers, anywhere, anytime and all the time. The only challenge is placing the ads on proper websites that will attract possible customers for a specific product or services.

"Pay-Per Click" advertising campaign attracts the right consumers at the shortest possible time. This is the most cost effective way of marketing products or services. You can also monitor the customers who visit your site, what they are looking for and what they are buying. With the right creativity on using the right search-phrases, we can direct the right people who are willing to do business with us.

"Pay-Per Click" advertising can easily be managed 24 hours per day and 7 days a week through the internet. This allows you improve the campaign strategy by effectively responding to the activities of both customers and competitors.

So what are you waiting for? "Pay-Per Click" now and let your business take the fast route to success.