What if ?

Search Engines
It’s a well known fact that people use search engines. As a matter of fact the #1 used search engine is Google and serves up more than 112 million searches every single day. That number was recorded back in January 2003, now just imagine how many searches a day they serve now! So, onto a little more information about successfully marketing on the Internet and hopefully making a little money.

The Concept
Now that we have found and signed up for an affiliate program, and in this experiment we have chosen PayDay One as our test advertiser. This company offers payday loans to people who need a little extra cash. They give you a quick secure online application, and within 24 hours you get approved and the money gets deposited directly into your bank account. The idea of the affiliate program is they want to drive traffic to their website, so we advertise for them, and they pay us $25 dollars for each successful sale we send them. Sounds easy right ? Nope. There’s a little more involved

Driving Traffic
Build it and they will come. NOT ! ok, then picture this. Mom and pop hole in the wall restaurant in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road down in the country somewhere. Where do they get there business from? Word of mouth, mostly locals, maybe a few travelers. What if ? What if they made the best blueberry muffins in the north and somehow they ended up one one of those food network shows about amazing restaurants to visit. Now where does there business come from? Everywhere! By expanding our audience to the cable networks we have just presented our product (the blueberry muffins) to a vast audience all at once. Now imagine how much more traffic you are going to drive because of the food network. Alot of people watch that channel. Now, lets go back to the search engine theory for a moment. More than 100 million people use a search engine every day. I just did a search for “payday loans” and it returned 10,100,000 results. Now on each of those pages we have the opportunity to advertise. Obviously the higher up on the search results we are, the better chance we have of our ad being clicked on. That’s called driving traffic!

Understanding Advertising
When people do searches on Google.com and this is going to be the search engine we use for our experiment, you will find that searches also return relative ads on the right hand side of the screen. These are called google adwords. I’ll get into campaigns a little later but here is how what ads shown are determined. 1) keywords - ads are chosen based on what the user typed into the search bar 2) Pay Per Click - How much money the advertiser will pay for a click. (ex) If I bid 25cents on my ad meaning the most I want to pay per click and someone else bids 50cents per click then his ad will obviously appear above mine. It doesn’t cost me anything if no one clicks on my ad, but if someone does, then it just cost me 25cents. Now, after they click on that ad they are taken to the website that we signed up for to be an affiliate. Just because someone clicked doesn’t always mean it’s a sale, it means it’s a possible sale. We drove the traffic and sent them to the affiliate site, now if they decide to take the offer and request a payday loan then we just made $25 dollars. Hmmmm, let’s see. We spent 25cents and made $25.00 !!!! That is a huge profit and we did nothing, it all happened behind the scenes. How much work is really involved? Maybe a few hours a week if that.

Ad Management
Campaigns are something you should probably learn about. Think of a campaign as a series of ads. let’s use beer. The advertiser is Budweiser. They have many different brands of beer that they sell. We have the original budweiser, bud light, and well, you get the idea. These are the products. Each of these products all gets advertised in a different commercial, or Ad Group as Google calls. Each campaign has several ads. Ok, so are you with me so far. More simple. We have one Advertiser: PayDay One and we have created a campaign called PayDay One, and so far we have only one ad. We could create more ads and maybe later we will do some graphical ads but for now, we will stick with a simple text ad. When we find another advertiser we will create new campaign for each of the products that they offer and then multiple ads within each campaign. Got it ? (An advertiser can have multiple campaigns(products) and multiple ads per campaign) If you look at the image below I have one campaign with one ad and I have bid 10cents per click. If you ask me, that is one hell of a profit !! Anyone wanna get rich ? LMAO They say that people are making thousands of dollars a month doing this same kind of thing, just on a much larger scale. Let’s see what happens with our one single advertiser, one campaign, and maybe two ads. Can we make anything ?

The Bottom Line
The real bottom line is if you have a little patience, and a little money to invest to get started, and we are talking less than 25 bucks you could potentially turn your pennies into hundred dollar bills

Keep watching this blog for updates. The ad campaign is rolling for the affiliate program we signed up for and the ads are being served on google !!!

So the Affiliate Marketing Experiment … Let me go into a little more detail. From the documentation that I read you don’t need your own business, you don’t need a business plan, and you don’t need a product. Well ! That makes it interesting doesn’t it ? I think the idea here is to advertise for other people. So, if we advertise for other people and can actually turnover some leads or even sales then we get a kick back. Seems easy enough right ? Create an advertising campaign, market someone else’s product and I get paid ? Can it be any easier ? Maybe, but then again you just cant create an ad somewhere and expect to make a million overnight. So here is my very first banner, and now I have to find a place to go put it …

Ok, so maybe it’s not my first blog that I ever posted, but it is the first blog that I am posting with an intention behind. I have been getting these stupid get rich quick schemes in my inbox just like everyone else does. I’m sure you’ve seen them. “Make money with Google” ok, so what the hell. I’m gonna try it. It cost me like 5 bucks or so and a little of my time. Lets see exactly where this can go. If it bombs and doesn’t work, then so what, I’m out 5 bucks, if it works ? WOOHOO !!!!!