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One of the most important things in affiliate marketing is understanding the PPC game.  For anyone who doesn't know what PPC means, it means Pay-Per-Click, and it is the text advertising that appears on search engines around the organic (or natural) results.  To see the difference, simply run a search on Google and you'll see the ads separated from the organic.

 

 

The biggest difference between these two is that the organic results are controlled by the search engine's algorithm, while the PPC results are paid placement, so they are ads that anyone can buy.  Here are some differences between the two:

Organic Search Results:

• It can take months or years to get placement in the search engines.  You probably are competing with thousands of websites for your keywords.
• You can "optimize" the way your site is "read" by a search engine, but you have no control over your rankings.  If anyone tells you they can guarantee to get you on the first page of Google's organic results, they are lying.
• The traffic is free, so if you can get it, its great traffic.  Some will argue it is higher quality traffic because people place a lot of value in who search engines rank on the first page.
• Algorithms change frequently, so you may have great rankings one day and not the next.
  

Paid Search Results:

•  You pay for your ad each time it is clicked on.  This is powerful because you only pay if a visitor actually comes to your site.  You don't pay to run a PPC ad.
• You bid on specific keywords, so you can target your traffic by selecting keywords that are relevant to what's on your site.
• You are paying for every click, so you want to make sure to have analytics in place so that you can see if your visitors are doing what you want them to do, and if not, make changes.

I am going to start with PPC advertising, because there is an instant gratification to it that I can start getting traffic within 5 minutes of launching an ad on Google Adwords.  siteMighty is built with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind, so I'll focus on getting natural traffic later on, but for now, I'm going to start with PPC.

Tomorrow, we'll take the first steps towards launching a successful PPC campaign.  The key to success is understanding who I want to target my site to, and then what they are searching for.  In other words, its all about the keywords, baby!