To make money from affiliate marketing, the next thing that you must do to drive traffic to your landing page or squeeze page is by using pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or search engine optimization (SEO). There are a lot of other ways that are able to drive traffic but the two methods above relate to search engines and driving traffic that is arguably the most targeted.
In this learning affiliate marketing article, you are going to learn what are the benefits and downsides of using both PPC advertising and SEO. At the end of this article, it will be up to you on whether you are going to use either methods.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
PPC advertising is a form of advertising where you pay search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN in order to get ads listed together with organic search results. Affiliate marketers opt for this type of advertising as they will only pay if someone clicks on their ads. In short, you pay only for the traffic you receive, not how many times your ad appears.
Advantages of PPC Advertising
Pay per click brings instant traffic to a site. One will be able to test out their landing page as soon as they have it completed. Pay per click advertising also allows you to have multiple landing pages for conversion experiments compared to search engine optimization which normally only allows one page to be ranked highly.
Disadvantages of PPC Advertising
While you only pay for the traffic you get with PPC advertising, it does require you to pay. A lot of affiliate marketers that use this form of advertising spend a lot of time and money trying to optimize their ad copy and landing page in order to strike the chord that will make them money. Multiple experiments will cost you your limbs.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization involves tweaking your sites and pages so that they are search engine-friendly. It includes both on site optimization (keyword density, site structure and meta tags) and off site optimization (link building using various sites and services).
Advantages of SEO
First of all, you can do search engine optimization yourself without having to incur any cost. Also, resources are available everywhere on how to properly optimize your site for search engines. Frequent experiments can be done easily. Also, the results can bring in permanent targeted traffic unlike PPC where the traffic will stop once you decide to stop spending money on it.
Disadvantages of SEO
Well, it takes time before you can see any results. This is because search engines assign a probationary period for sites, especially new ones, before they are being ranked highly for certain keywords. Since it is free and can be done by almost everyone, competition can be stiff and you need to constantly work hard in order to get and maintain a high ranking for keywords that you are targeting for your site.
