Affiliate Web Marketing

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to a leading Adwords Consultant, Mr Binh Nguyen aka Binh Down Under. He has given me permission to share these discussions with you and in the coming weeks we plan to cover a whole host of topics about Pay Per Click Advertising. There is some awesome content in here, so if you are a PPC Advertising user or you feel that it will help your affiliate marketing then please read through it. We also welcome your comments, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask them below. I hope you enjoy the content and stay with us in the coming weeks. You won’t want to miss some of these strategies.

Hi Everyone,

There are many ways to Market your products and services online, and no way is better than another. However, my personal favourite has always been Pay Per Click Advertising, because of its speed and flexibility.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is a model used on search engines, advertising networks, and content sites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. The biggest traffic broker in PPC is Google Adwords. When you search for a particular term on Google, there are two sets of results returned. The main area of results is the organic search listings, and the “Sponsored Links” results located at the top and right of the page (with the beige background) are the PPC listings. See figure below.

The areas circled in red are the PPC listings, and the area circled in green are the organic listings.

One of the main reasons why the PPC model is used over other Internet Marketing models such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Article Marketing etc. is speed. You can literally set up a campaign in PPC and start seeing traffic and results in a matter of minutes. You can also use PPC to test new products and services to see if there is a demand in the marketplace for your products/services before spending more time and effort to do a full-blown SEO campaign. The tracking abilities of PPC allow you to keep a constant measure on which keywords, ads, and landing pages are making you money, and you have control over everything. You can also generate reports on demand to make smart business decisions from the data collected.

But what I really want to do today is not to explain PPC 101, but to teach you some real PPC strategies that you can immediately use for your business.

As mentioned earlier, the biggest PPC traffic broker is Google Adwords. However, Google Adwords is also the most strict out of all the PPC companies. Play by their rules, and you will create a sustainable business with longevity; go against these rules, and your profits can literally vanish overnight.

For the small and micro business owners, this becomes a very risky option, as it takes a lot of time and money just to test and discover what it really is that Google wants from your campaigns. When I first started in PPC, I lost a lot of money, but through my losses, I have also gained some very valuable lessons and experiences, which I’ve now been able to use on my clients’ campaigns to help them sell 5 to 6 figures monthly with PPC.

I’ll try to keep this as focused to the small and micro business as possible. Large companies and corporates have a lot of money to test systems and strategies before they put the bulk of their money on the winners. However, small and micro busienss owners have limited budgets to use for their advertising, which makes it more difficult for the micro and small businesses to thrive in PPC. Luckily for you, I have already done a lot of the hard work in testing and studying Google Adwords, and have come to, what I believe, is a very complete understanding of what Google wants and looks for in their advertisers’ campaigns.

Introducing the Quality Score

A few years ago, when Google introduced the new quality score algorithm, many business owners, who relied heavily on PPC as their main marketing channel, had their business profits wiped out literally overnight. The quality score is a score (1-10) that Google assigns to your ad groups to determine how much to charge you for your clicks. The higher your quality score, the lower you will need to pay for a click.

So how does Google work out how much to charge you?

Note: The explanation below includes some Mathematics to illustrate the Google algorithm. If you don’t like Maths, don’t worry, it is not necessary for you to understand it. It’s for illustration purposes only. Just skip the next 4 paragraphs and read on.

In Google Adwords, your ads are positioned depending on its rank number. The higher you rank, the more likely your ad will be clicked on. The rank number is determined by multiplying your maximum cost per click (CPC) (this is your maximum bid for a keyword) with your quality score (QS).

For example, let’s say there are two advertisers, Advertiser A and Advertiser B. If Advertiser A puts in a maximum bid of $1, and her quality score is 2, then her rank number is 2 (1×2=2).

Let’s say that Advertiser B’s maximum bid is $1.50, and his quality score is only 1, then his rank number is only 1.5 (1.5×1=1.5), and therefore will rank LOWER than Advertiser A, who is only bidding $1 for the same keyword, but have a higher quality score.

The amount that Advertiser A pays to be in that position is only 1c higher than what’s needed to rank higher than the ad ranked below her, in this case Advertiser B’s ad. This is determined by dividing the rank number of the ad below (e.g. Advertiser B’s ad) by Advertiser A’s quality score. In this example, the second ad has a rank number of 1.5, and the first ad has a quality score of 1.8. When you divide 1.5/1.8, you get 83.3333, so the first advertiser, Advertiser A, will only be paying 84c and will still keep their ad in the number 1 position. This is Google’s algorithm to help you pay the least possible for your ad. For this reason, you tend to always get a lower CPC (cost per click) than your maximum bid.

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, don’t worry. The main point I want to get across to you is this: you don’t need to pay a lot of money to be ranked in the top positions, you only need to know how. And the how here, is how to tweak and improve your quality score. The higher your quality score, the lower you will need to pay for your clicks.

To avoid boring everyone to death with a long and lengthy post, I will post the second part of this article tomorrow. It will explain the quality score and what you can do to maximise your quality score so that you pay as little as possible for your traffic.

Regards,

Binh Nguyen aka Binh Down Under

www.payperclickecademy.net