The quickest way to generate targeted traffic and start earning commissions with an affiliate marketing business is to use google adwords. One doesn't even need a website of their own to make money online using adwords. Traffic can be sent directly to an affiliate link. Even though this is the easiest way to make money online I recommend those who advertise on google send traffic to their own website first for a couple of reasons. First of all traffic sent to a information pre sell site tends to provide much higher sales conversions than just using direct affiliate links. Secondly google has recently tightened its quality scoring of websites making the cost per click skyrocket for many who were sending traffic to direct links. This has priced many affiliate marketers out of using adwords and is widely known as the "google slap". I've found a good way to improve quality scores and lower cost per click is to write topical blogs and send adwords traffic to them. The blogs can have the affiliate links included in the text. For best results the text links should be the same or related to the keywords bidded on in an adwords campaign.



A critical part of adwords success is the ad itself. The ad needs to have a high clickthrough rate to recieve a lower cost per click. An ad should have keywords that the advertiser is bidding on included in the title. Many ads should be created and tested. The ads that have low clickthrough rates meaning usually below 1 percent should be deleted. One technique that can be used is dynamic keyword insertion. With dynamic keyword insertion google will put the keywords in the title of an ad automatically. To use dynamic keyword insertion in place of the title one must put {keyword:default}. In place of default a keyword or phrase should be used in case a keyword phrase bidded on is too long for google to automatically insert the keyword.



Keywords are another important consideration in using google adwords. The better keywords to bid on are usually specific lower traffic words rather than the higher traffic general terms. For example a keyword like "music" will not convert to sales as well as words like specific songs or artists names. The more closely the keywords are related to the topic of the website the better. Just like ads underperforming keywords with low clickthrough rates should also be deleted and new keywords periodically tested.



Where many go wrong with adwords is they set up an ad campaign and never go back to make changes. In order to be successful using adwords an affiliate marketer must continually make adjustments to fine tune their campaigns. This means they must constantly be testing new ads and keywords and deleting underperformers. If one does this consistently an adwords campaign is likely to cost much less and be more profitable.





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Aaron Ballantyne writes on a varitey of subjects about online business and owns a blog with usefull information about affiliate marketing. To learn more go to:

http://ajballan.typepad.com/affiliate_marketing