Don’t Forget Your Cloak

Link cloaking protects your commissions.

A link cloaker disguises an affiliate hoplink, and makes it look like a normal link to a webpage on your own website.

There are two reasons for using a link cloaker:

1. It stops the scumbags who use nasty parasite software to hi-jack affiliate referrals and steal their commission.
2. It takes out all the ClickBank hoplink gobbledegook, so it looks less like you’re just trying to sell something.

There are few link cloakers out there, but having looked around, the one we recommend is ‘Covert Links’.

Covert Links protects you from parasite software and is also good value for money and very easy to use. They also have good support too.

Here is where to get it: www.covertlinks.com/

However if you join an affiliate community (which we strongly recommend) you might get link cloaking software included as part the price of their membership package.

What Is PPC?

Pay Per Click means that you pay a certain amount to Google every time someone clicks on your AdWords ad.

The cost of the click is set by a blind auction on the Adwords website and depends on the popularity of the keywords you are bidding on and how much other advertisers are willing to pay to be high up the stack of AdWords ads to the right of the organic search results for those keywords.

(By the way, a ‘keyword’ can be a single word or a phrase)

Research says that you need to be in positions one to four to get a good click-thru rate (more than 2 clicks per 100 page views).

There are a couple of tricks with Adwords.

• Find keywords that have low bid prices, but convert well. In other words find phrases that people use when they want to buy, not when they’re just browsing for entertainment.
• Success with AdWords is all about testing – seeing which keywords and ads convert the best compared to others, and then putting your money into the ones that perform best.

You also need to make the headline in your AdWords ad be more relevant and compelling than the websites Google has displayed to their left.

That’s why you see all the shock-horror headlines in Adwords for online products,  like ‘Don’t buy First Date Magic – until you read this’ or ‘Hear the terrible truth about First Date Magic’ or ‘First Date Magic stole my baby, find out how’ etc etc

AdSense is exactly like AdWords, but instead of appearing on the search results pages on Google, AdSense ads appear on websites where the content is relevant to the ad. That’s why Google call it the content network.

AdSense is much cheaper than AdWords – and some PPC experts say that it is a clever option. The reason is that people type in keywords to find websites, not to find AdWords – but then once they’re at a site they are willing to be distracted by a very good offer – which has already proven its relevance by appearing in a website they’ve chosen to visit.

It can all seem confusing at first, but to be a successful affiliate marketer you need to understand PPC, because it is a very useful way to get traffic to your website fast.

So what you need to do is go to the Google home page and click on Advertising Solutions, open an account (free) and take the excellent tutorials and play with the keyword and AdWords tools .

There are also some good ebooks to read if you want to get serious about PPC .

And one last piece of advice – an AdWords campaign that has a high CTR (click thru rate) can drain your bank account very fast, so it’s best to stick to pre-pay in the early stages while you’re still learning.

Yes, Banner Ads Do Work!

We once created a banner ad with a great offer that got a 68% click through rate! That means out of 100 every people who opened the page the banner was on 68 or them clicked our banner!

We’ve never heard of a better CTR before or since – anywhere. The point is we know how to create very effective advertising. And now we’re doing it for you, free!

So given that you have a great offer and you put your banners in good positions, on high-traffic sites that are relevant to your market you’ll get fantastic traffic.

But unless you’re using them on a website you own, it probably won’t be cheap.

Large banners (say 700 x 80 pixels) with good positioning (ie at the top of the home page) can cost $7000 a month on popular dating sites.

Websites also use CPM to bill for advertising, which is Cost Per Thousand impressions (M is the Latin symbol for thousand). An impression is a single person looking at the webpage the banner is on. It doesn’t mean that they click on it or anything, just that they’ve probably seen it.

CPA is another way to pay for website advertising. It means Cost Per Action. It’s like Pay Per Click (PPC), but usually it will be used with a banner where you’re asking people to do something like give their email address.

However, if you’re already getting plenty of free traffic from product reviews, blogs articles etc, having banners in the mix is a great way to increase your overall traffic. That’s why major advertisers with deep pockets love banner ads – they really do work gangbusters when you have a great offer to go with them.

Never forget! With banners, or any form of advertising whatsoever, a great offer is crucial! No good offer, or angle, means no sale.