In the market dominated by pay-per-sale affiliate programs, you, as a beginner affiliate, may struggle to generate substantial revenue. To persuade users to make a purchase, you need not only a well-thought-out marketing strategy but also an established reputation, which only builds over time.
As a newcomer to the industry, you may not be able to generate sales effectively.
On the other hand, pay-per-click (PPC) affiliate marketing may be a simpler way to get started. Perceived by many as an entry-level partnership model, it doesn’t require advertising expertise. As long as you have an established marketing channel with a consistent audience, it’s only a matter of producing engaging content for commissions to start flowing.
Keep reading and learn how you can start your own PPC affiliate marketing business and get tips on growing your revenue.
What Is PPC Affiliate Marketing?
A quick refresher: Affiliate marketing is a performance-based marketing model where advertisers pay commissions to publishers for promoting their offers.
Pay-per-click is a commission type where you receive a fixed reward for every click on your tracking link or banner. It’s essential to note that only clicks are monetized. Everything that happens beyond them, including form submissions or purchases, doesn’t affect your revenue.
Typically, you can withdraw your rewards once a week or a month, provided your total rewards exceed the minimum threshold of around $100.
Can You Promote PPC Offers Through Paid Advertising?
If we talk about Google or Meta (Facebook and Instagram), it’s strictly prohibited. In fact, both networks require affiliate pages to be genuinely useful; otherwise, it is considered a policy violation and entails penalties.
On the brighter side, push and native networks often allow you to send traffic directly to an advertiser’s website. For this, you need pre-landers that prime users for an offer through:
- Engagement: Ask questions to collect qualifying user data and direct them to the most relevant page. With some affiliate networks and programs, you can use a smart link that automatically chooses the most relevant advertisers for the user.
- Urgency: Display a timer with a countdown that shows the time remaining before the deal expires.
- Curiosity and trust: Tell a resonating story about how other customers solve a problem with a solution available on the advertiser’s website.
Pros & Cons of PPC Affiliate Marketing
Pros:
- Anyone can find a PPC affiliate program that suits their expertise and target audience
- Well-produced affiliate pages can generate commissions for years to come
- You don’t rely on conversions, like with other affiliate commission types, and earn immediately upon clicks
Cons:
- The cost per click is relatively low, which is why you need massive traffic to earn considerable revenue
- You should periodically scan your pages for broken links to avoid profit leaks.
How To Earn With PPC Affiliate Marketing
1. Refine Your Website
These tips help you build and optimize a professional and trustworthy website:
- Choose and stick to a niche: Focus on something that you’re passionate about and produce corresponding content to establish a consistent audience.
- Provide value: Ensure that your articles are original and contain useful information, like guides and statistics.
- Look professional: Provide your website with a transparent layout and clean visuals that align with its theme.
- Optimize performance: Host your domain through content delivery networks (CDNs) and tailor it to mobile devices.
- Add credibility: Create an “About Us” or “Contact Us” page to build trust by letting your website visitors know that you’re within their reach.
- Implement keyword strategies: Research relevant keywords and incorporate them into your articles to improve their search engine ranking.
Sticking to these guidelines will not only enhance your website’s appearance but also maximize your traffic, exactly what you need to apply for an affiliate program. You can check your volume of daily and monthly visitors through Google Analytics.
2. Find & Apply for a PPC Affiliate Program
Although advertisers may find your website and contact you by themselves, you will become an affiliate much faster by being proactive.
For maximum efficiency, research affiliate programs that pay per click through aggregators. OfferVault, one of the most popular options, allows you to discover affiliate program commission types, rewards, and categories – all in one place.
Remember this: Not every affiliate program is displayed through aggregators, which is why you might want to double-check available programs with Google.
Once the PPC affiliate program is chosen, they’ll typically have a form where you can provide your name, email address, phone number, company name, and other details.
Typically, affiliate managers contact you for an interview after you submit a form. If not, they get straight to examining your website, after which they inform you whether they’re ready to partner with you or not.
3. Produce Affiliate Content
After the advertiser provides your personal tracking link and banners, you can integrate them into your website pages.
Following these rules will get you more clicks:
- Make sure to place your affiliate links above the fold so they are visible
- Make sure your affiliate links reinforce the surrounding content and drive clicks organically
- If possible, play with the color of banners while staying brand-on to make them stand out from the rest of the content on the page
4. Comply With Relevant Rules
Publishers must comply with Federal Trade Commission provisions by integrating an affiliate disclosure – a text that indicates your financial connection to the product you’re promoting – into their affiliate pages.
Here are some of the most common PPC affiliate program limitations:
- Promoting affiliate products through clickbait, such as by offering false benefits
- Brand bidding or using the brand’s name in the paid advertising campaigns
- Redirecting users to affiliate links right from the search engine results page (SERP)
5. Optimize Your PPC Affiliate Marketing
Rarely do affiliate pages perform as you expect right off the bat. They require optimization, which, in the case of online content, is possible through the use of analytical tools:
| Application | Tool | |
| Web analytics | Web analytics provide complete website performance analytics, revealing your pages’ impressions, clicks, and positions in SERPs within a selected period. This data highlights your blind spots, enabling you to address them for improved performance. | Google Analytics, Sitechecker |
| Postback URL | The Postback URL is, in fact, a messaging method through which advertisers inform affiliates about whether the leads they’ve generated resulted in sales. Likewise, the postback URL enables you to track users’ actions after they click on affiliate links and banners, as well as their demographic and device information. | Voluum, Everflow |
| Link cloaking | Link cloaking helps you enhance user experience by replacing messy affiliate links with clean ones. Some link cloaking solutions also track the number of clicks. | Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates |
| SEO tools | SEO tools enable you to compare your pages with your competitors to identify growth opportunities. Likewise, these tools can scan your websites for pages that are out of index or have broken links. | Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz |
How to Join PPC Programs Through an Affiliate Network
Affiliate networks serve as intermediaries between publishers and affiliates. They contain hundreds, sometimes thousands, of affiliate programs that you can join and track within a single platform.
With so many programs at your fingertips, networks allow you to experiment with different niches to see what works for you. Managers will readily help you along the way.
As importantly, networks supply publishers with ready-made promotional materials, as Profitise does. Designed by professional marketers, they help you generate more clicks and multiply your profit.
On the downside, programs from affiliate networks offer lower payout rates due to a fee charged by the network itself. Likewise, networks are typically overcrowded, which may delay server response and payouts.
Create & Optimize Content for PPC Affiliate Programs With AI
Currently, 78% of global companies are leveraging smart technologies to maximize their efficiency and streamline their frameworks, and so can you.
Let’s glance at AI solutions that are especially useful for affiliate businesses.
Find Partners
When you want to partner with a company, and it doesn’t provide a submission form for affiliates, finding its contact email address can be a hurdle, which Lasso helps you overcome.
This AI tool only requires company names to search for their C-level executives across the web. What’s great is that Lasso integrates with HubSpot, one of the most popular CRM systems, transferring companies’ contact information directly into your database.
Spark New Content Ideas
You can never run out of content ideas with tools such as NotebookLM. Designed by Google and powered by Gemini, this AI assistant considers your entire website structure and suggests pages that naturally fit into the context.
Streamline Content Creation
Basic LLMs, like ChatGPT or Gemini, are indispensable for efficient content creation. They assist you at every step of the process, streamlining research, writing, and editing.
You can even use AI to produce entire articles, but do it with caution. Search engines prioritize human-written over machine-generated content, so ensure to detect and eliminate AI traces.
Automate Internal Processes
Zapier is an excellent AI tool that connects your applications and services to facilitate a routine-free workflow.
Here’s what Zapier can automate:
- Add information about new affiliate programs to Google Sheets or HubSpot
- Notify your team about project changes through communication channels, like Slack
- Send business offerings under set conditions through Gmail
- Plan a routine and share it with your colleagues within the corporate Google Calendar
Harnessing SEO To Multiply Your Affiliate Profit
SEO is your number one tool to drive organic traffic. If you manage to secure the first position in SERP, you may receive well over 25% of all clicks, which can be massive if you’re in a populated niche.
Read also: How to Make Affiliate Links Benefit Your SEO, not Hurt It
Internal SEO
Internal SEO involves everything that happens within your website’s front-end, which includes:
- Keyword strategy: Research the most effective keywords for your page topic and naturally implement them into your article.
- Meta tags: Produce attention-grabbing title and description that conveys the contents of your page; both should contain focus keywords.
- Page structure: Use short paragraphs (3-4 sentences) and diversify your content with lists, tables, and subheadings.
- Content quality: Ensure that your pages provide genuinely useful information and are enriched with white papers and e-books.
- Interlinking: Arrange your content into clusters based on their topics and interlink pages within them.
External SEO
External SEO is mainly about backlinking, a practice of acquiring links to your pages from guest posting sites or link exchange platforms.
Regularly examine your backlink profile for broken links, which may be caused by website changes, typos, and technical errors. Left unaddressed, broken links reduce your website authority, so you want to fix them as soon as possible by reaching out to webmasters.
Important note: Use SEO research tools to explore backlink profiles of your competitors. It’s an easy way to find sites that are open for linking and whose audience likely aligns with yours.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO encompasses everything that happens behind the scenes of your website:
- Optimizing your website for mobile devices
- Streamlining page speed through hosting services
- Enhancing your domain security with encryption
Technical SEO also involves indexing, a process of guiding crawlers – Google bots – through your website using robots.txt files and XML sitemaps.
Monetize Your Traffic with Profitise
Profitise is a leading insurance and solar affiliate network for affiliates who are selling quality web leads and phone calls. With hundreds of businesses already joined and even more to come, Profitise is the go-to place to monetize your traffic.
With Profitise, you get:
- Embeddable JavaScript forms to generate qualified insurance and solar leads
- Large lead market to sell your traffic instantly
- High price for your web and call leads
- Free assistance from your affiliate manager
Sell leads with Profitise as an affiliate.
Frequently Asked Questions
How to join pay-per-click affiliate programs
You can join PPC affiliate programs in several ways. Either find and apply for a program through the affiliate network or its website, or reach out to the brand’s executives with a partnership offering.
How to make money with ppc affiliate marketing
PPC affiliate marketing requires producing engaging content that persuades users to click on affiliate links or banners. Each click earns your affiliate commissions, which you can withdraw under the advertiser’s conditions.
What are the average earnings per click?
Pay-per-click programs often pay between $0.20 and $5 per click, depending on the quality of your traffic. For example, if your audience demonstrates an intent to install solar panels, your clicks will be more valuable for solar installation affiliate programs, and you’ll earn more.
