Search marketing works because it matches consumers’ desires with a way to gratify them. When Web surfers look for something say, an expensive pair of Italian shoes, they are presented with ads related to their search for, say, “Borelli shoes” that probably even contain the brand name of the shoes they’re looking for in the main heading of the ad.

Were it not for search marketing, you would be limited in the number and types of affiliate programs you could join and earn money on by the content of your web site.

No sense trying to sell fine Italian shoes on your astronomy web site. The ad space will earn more money promoting relevant products, like telescopes, than by trying to sell shoes. You could create lots of web sites, each with unique and different content, but this requires quite an investment in time and money.

With search marketing, you have access to an unlimited variety of relevant audiences without the expense of creating or popularizing your own variety of content sites. This flexibility allows you to promote any product, any service, virtually anything at all simply by bidding on a few (or in some cases a few hundred) relevant keywords and displaying your ads automatically to a relevant audience.

Once your campaign is running properly, it can continue to earn money with very little additional effort on your part, beyond simply monitoring the returns. Some of my campaigns, once established, have earned tens of thousands of dollars a month for months at a time with no changes at all. Try getting a web site to perform like that without constant attention.

In short, search marketing is faster, easier, and cheaper than setting up web sites on your own to advertise affiliate programs (although if you already own and operate a successful site, by all means use that site as well). In addition to these advantages, the potential of search marketing to generate income is limited only by your own intelligence, drive, and initiative.

In this article, you learned about many different types of paid search options. You were introduced to the major search and content networks, and you found out why search marketing should be such an integral part of your affiliate advertising business. Now we know about affiliate advertising, we know something about search marketing, and we know we want to use these two disciplines together to generate wealth. I guess it is finally time to get started.

Learning the Lingo of PPC

In order to make money with PPC, it pays (literally) to know the language. Whenever you sign up for programs or read about them, you are presented with some basic terms that everyone seems to assume you know. I’m not going to make that assumption.

I’m going to provide brief explanations of the most common terms along with the many alternative terms or phrases it often seems each web site has its own way of speaking that’s different from its competitors’ lingo. Here are some of the basic terms you need to know:

• Conversion ratio. You might also see this referred to as conversion rate. The conversion rate refers to the number of individuals who click on an online ad and end up performing a specific action, such as making a purchase or filling out a registration form.

• Click value. I commonly call this the margin on a click. It’s the difference between what you pay for a click and how much you make on that click. If you pay $1 per click for one campaign and 5 cents for another, it doesn’t necessarily mean the 5-cent click is a better value. If you earn $1.75 per click with the $1 click and earn only 6 cents on the 5-cent click, the $1 click has a higher click value.

• Cost per click. The amount you actually pay for each click, as opposed to how much you bid per click.

• Pay per click. An advertising system in which advertisers pay for placing an ad based on the number of times someone clicks on it, as opposed to paying for each time the ad is viewed (per impression).

• Return on investment (ROI). Your return on your advertising investment (i.e., your earnings). If you spend $100 on a campaign and you get back $150, your ROI is 50 percent, or $50.

• Landing page. A landing page is the Web page that your link points to. It might be a link to a product description page on Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com or on some other merchant’s web site.

• Keywords. Words or phrases that people enter when they search for something on a search engine. Also called search terms.

• Negative keywords. Words or phrases that will exclude searchers using those negative keywords from seeing your ads.

• Performance tiers. Tiers are levels of performance. If you deliver above a certain level of volume in a quarter, some advertisers will increase your commissions. Your commission slides depending on how well you do with them.

• Natural search. When you submit keywords to a web site and click the Search button, the results you get are a mixture of natural search and sponsored search (or paid search). The natural search results are the ones the search engine finds not the ones people have paid for. Conversely, when you submit your web site to a search engine for free, it shows up on natural search results if it is accepted.

• Paid search (also called sponsored search). These are ads that publishers like you and other advertisers have paid to have included alongside the natural search results.

• Content-focused advertising. Advertising that matches ads to the content around them, which increases the chances that the readers of the content will be interested in the content of the advertisement. Also called contextual advertising or content match advertising.