I don't understand how AdSense comes into play with AM

[Bubzeebub]

Ok, bear with me veterans, as I'm a rookie at all this. My question is how does PPC ads come into play when you have affiliate links. Let's say you have links on your site to other non-competing sites, do you PAY for keywords to your site and hope that people click on your affiliate links?

[wrgvt]

I have content sites with affiliate links. For one of my sites, I drive most of my traffic to it via AdWords (it's just starting to work it's way up in the SERPs). My site's pages provide a lot of content about the products on those pages, with prominent affiliate links to the merchant site where they can buy those products.

I'm doing more than "hoping" they click on my affiliate links. I give them enough information and comparison data about the product so that they click on the affiliate links with either the intention to buy or are leaning in that direction.

[Bubzeebub]

so you invest with AdWords to get visitors to your site ...and then provide them with info so that they buy from your sponsor. Isn't that a risk (investment?) in that they may not buy? Have you experienced losses now or at first?

[Zygoot]

Yes it's a risk.

If you spend $100 on Adwords and only get $50 in return from affiliate programs, well than you have lost a lot of money.

I think that in the beginning most people lose money until they start understanding how it works and how they need to use services like Adwords to make profit.

[wrgvt]

Of course there's a risk. You can lose money fast with AdWords if you don't know what you're doing. I played with AdWords direct to the merchant for about a year to get my feet wet. I didn't invest a lot of money and I broke even for a while. Then I learned more and started making money. Nothing to write home about, but enough to let me know what I was doing was along the right path.

Based on the particulars of both my merchant's affiliate program and the products, I realized I could probably make more money if I sent them to a website before sending them to the merchant's site. I could provide more information than the merchant's landing page and let them do more comparison shopping of similar products so they could make the right choice. I put the web site together and started driving traffic to it with AdWords while it languished in the Google sandbox for search results. For a while I just broke even again, and then I had an "aha" moment and figured out how to more properly target both the ads and my site. Profits started multiplying quickly and I started running my AdWords campaigns at maximum cost and traffic. Now I'm making 3X-5X what I spend in ads and I'm adding more products to my site and more ads to my campaings.

It takes patience, trial and error, some risk-taking, a lot of reading and learning, and a credit card with enough room to run up AdWords costs while you wait for your affiliate checks.

I also run AdSense on that site. Those who don't find what they want or realize that the products aren't exactly what they're looking for often click on those ads. It's much smaller income than my affiliate sales, but it's more green in my pocket.

[Bubzeebub]

What's the best item or category to target? What's most profitable?

[rfung]

What's the best item or category to target? What's most profitable?

:) Bubzeebub, not to shut you off or anything, but you'll find out that besides the most obvious markets (adult/finance/meds), the products that are profitable are a closely guarded secret. Think about it, if you found out that post-it notes (as unthinkable as that may seem) was a huge niche market with big profits, would you come to a forum like this and announce it to the first joe that asked for it?...