Over the years, the aftermath of the mass affiliate ban on Google Adwords has left a bad aftertaste in a lot of internet marketer’s mouth. The panic and worry that have spread across the web has thus created a worrying rumor that PPC is dead and that it no longer works in affiliate marketing. Now while it is true that Google no longer allows their advertisers to promote affiliate products, PPC is actually far from dead. The fact that you can no longer promote affiliate products on Google Adwords is that it does not mean that PPC is dead because you can still use Adwords to promote your own products.
And the fact that if you want to promote affiliate products but can’t do it on Google Adwords does not mean that PPC is no longer working in affiliate marketing is because in fact there are a lot of other PPC products out there and that you use them to promote affiliate products still. Some of these other PPC platforms that stand out today are Microsoft Adcenter and also 7search ppc platform. If you do a quick research on an alternative to Google Adwords you should be able to come out with a dozen more of these alternatives to help you in your Affiliate journey.
Now that we know that PPC is still working well for affiliate marketing, here are some base rules that you should follow in your PPC affiliate campaigns.
Focus on user.
One of the most important rules for using PPC for promoting your own product or affiliate product is that you should always focus on your audience. Your audience or traffic is your lifeblood to your business. Hence you will want to provide a landing page that is very much relevant to what your audience is trying to look for in the search place. Think about it this way, in order for search engines to do well, they will have to please their searchers by providing them with the best and relevant search results.
That is the only way to get their searchers to trust them and like them enough to come back to their search engine next time when they are looking for something. Doing this will increase their base traffic and also their fan base that will ultimately increase their popularity throughout the world. The more you think about it this way, the more important it is for you to ensure that your landing page meets this very goal of them. Most of the time your ads would probably be placed in a location that stands out to the search engine searchers and if your landing page or ad is of low quality you are in a way jeopardizing their main goal and that is to provide the best search results to the public searchers.
Only relevant campaigns please.
There are many shady ppc marketers who think ‘outside’ the box and decide that they should promote irrelevant products to a niche that might contain traffic that has the suitable demographics to their products. To make things clear, here’s an example of such a campaign. Let’s say you are promoting a female weight loss product and targeting mid aged women who are married. Technically speaking, these same crowds of people also exist in the ‘cooking’ niche. Now if you are promoting your product using non PPC methods such as banner ads, then this is a very legitimate way to get traffic. However, most PPC platforms do not allow this kind of cross niche promotions because it is highly irrelevant to a search term (imagine searching for fish recipe and a weight loss product comes out as a result).
Hence if you are using PPC, you need to follow the rules and not try to ‘broaden’ your lead generation by promoting your weight loss offer in a non-weight loss keyword. In fact if you do this, you might even get banned because you are not following their terms and conditions.
Follow the rules closely.
As mentioned before, you should try your best to follow all the rules that are stated in PPC platforms. There is nothing more important than understanding the rules of that the PPC Platforms has set and then following the rules to the tee. PPC platforms are strict for a reason and sometimes ppc platforms such as Google would even cross the ‘reasonable’ line in just to make sure that they are protecting their business’ interest as a priority.
If you are planning to be in business for the long term, then there should be no excuse for you no to follow the rules that has been clearly set to help everyone prosper the legitimate way.
No more shady offers.
Needless to say, there are countless affiliate offers out there and some of these offers are just downright shady, unethical or barely legal. We all know what these offers are and they could be in those gambling niche, adult niche or anything that might not be morally correct.
Again you need to ensure that you are not promoting any of this shady stuff that is not allowed by most of the PPC platforms. If you are unsure if your product is allowed or not then you should take the initiative to ask first before doing any real promotions.
Beware of other accounts.
Of course when you have an account that is still working in Google, you need to be extremely careful not to cross the lines that Google have drawn in order to protect your own account. For example, if you are a PPC coach or a PPC account manager, you might want to be extra careful not to accidentally manage an account that is promoting illegal products (without you knowing) and then risk getting your own account banned because you logged into another person’s account. Google will link the accounts that you log on personally on your PC or IP. If one account is marked as faulty, then all your accounts will get the same treatment. This means, you could risk banning all the accounts of all your other ‘clean’ clients as well. Take extreme precautions and ensure that you are protected at all times before accessing other person’s account.
