getting started with PPC affiliate marketing

[disgust]

I'm working on SEOing some sites, but it's taking time- I'm basically waiting for google to catch up with me now, but I'm curious about going the PPC route...

1) if the product you want to sell already has adwords advertisers (that you can see when you search), is that enough for you to give it up? or is some okay, but just not a ton (more than one or two etc)

2) what sort of a profit do you need per conversion to really make it "do-able"? is there any threshold you won't go lower than?

3) is it possible to find ways to make PPC money with CJ, or are they mostly picked through completely already?

4) do you send them directly to the advertiser's site, or do you send them to a pre-selling page that sends them to the advertiser?

thanks!

[disgust]

another question:

how do you track conversions for something like this? since you don't have access to place the code on the site you're sending them to obviously..

[SIRokai]

I need info on this issue as well...

J

[disgust]

no answers at all..?

[suzyvirtual]

I make a profit with ppc on exactly 1 cj program. I have tried others to no avial. but, it can be done :)

[skibum]

A look through many recent threads here will yield a substantial amount of info.

[PatrickDeese]

some aff merchants allow individual tracking ids - i used those quite a bit for a particular niche - just sent the "blue widgets" adwords clicks in with link like

subid=blue.widgets

It was handy for filtering out non-converting kws.

I don't think any of the CJ merchants offer that level of track - basically in that case you have to send the click to a tracking script, which would then redirect to the merchant.

definitely doable - just depends how much work you want to do.

[skibum]

You can use the SID field in at least some CJ links.

[Michael Anthony]

I make moneyfrom PPC direct on over 15 different industries, some direct deals, some through networks.

The trick is to grab a program early, before it's been PPC'd to death. A program that's been around for ages with say 100 affiliates running PPC for it is going to have small, if any returns.

However, the fact that it has 100 affiliates is also a good sign - it means there is money to be made.

It's tough trying to find a balance - if there is no competition, does it mean that you've stumbled over a goldmine or that it's been tried before with no success? Only one way to find out, and that involves speculative advertising.

I think that one of the reasons you've had so few answers is that the subject's been done to death on here in the past. Another example is the "How much can I/do you make a day/week/year" threads that pop up every few days.

Webmasterworld has a very efficient search function which can be used to find old threads about a given subject. Whilst I don't want to discourage new members from asking questions, it may be an idea to try this before posting the same subject for the twentieth time and then feeling that ww is useless as noboody can be bothered to reply yet again.

Perhaps Brett or someone could make a point of stressing this to new people as they sign up, if this isn't something that's happening already?