I’ve been asked on multiple occasions “What Exactly Is It You Do Online With This Internet Marketing Stuff”?  Well this is a very complicated question.  It has so many answers on many levels.  However to give you the most generic, yet targeted answer, I would say that I sell other people’s products online.  I don’t own any of the products that I promote.   I just work with the owner of the product to find ways to sell their product online at a profit and I get a commission for the sell.  It’s as simple as that.  Some products are physical products that a person will get shipped to their doorstep.  Other products are digital whereby a person just downloads the product after they have submitted their credit card information.  There are even occasions when I get paid for not selling a product at all.  In these cases, I get paid on sending the product owner a possible lead (a person that is possibly willing to purchase the product).

So How Do You Find These People To Buy A Product?

So have you ever did a search online using Google, Yahoo, or Bing and saw that their were ad listings on the very top and right hand sides of the page.  Those listings are are paid advertisements.  Advertisers like me will purchase those ad placements based on keywords that you may type into a search engine.  For example, say you were looking for “video game rentals” in the Google search engine. You will be presented with search results along with a set of ads at the top and right of the regular search listings.  I am an affiliate for Gamefly, a game rental service.  So what I would do (note this is not my ad) would create an advertisement for Gamefly.com as seen in the illustration.  If someone clicks on my ad and purchases a Gamefly subscription, I would be awarded $20.00 for that sale. The main thing you have to worry about when buying ads is your conversion ratio and the amount you pay per click.

 

Say in the above example, your cost per click is say $0.10.  Then you would have to convert someone to a sale in ($20.00 / $0.10) clicks to be profitable or risk losing money.

Here are a few questions I get when people ask me about what I’m doing online.

1. How would you recommend getting started on your first one?

Here is a course I found online search Google that does an “okay” job of introducing you to CPA marketing.

http://www.alpha-affiliates.com/backend/

Modules 1 – 5 are pretty good to get the background.
Modules 6 – 19 are the more advance stuff…..you’ll need to know it…but focus on 1 – 5 first.

I have another course that is a little dated, but also gives a good overview written by the same guy that I sent that pdf to you about earlier:

PDF = http://www.unlimited-trials.com/cpamarketing.pdf

2. Do you use the company’s landing page or always create your own?

I usually test out the company’s landing page 1st.   This is called direct linking.  Many times I can tell whether and offer will be profitable by doing this.  However, there are some offers that require me to create my own landing page instead.  Its basically one of those things you just have to test to see which one performs better.

3. What do you do that requires you to always be out there tinkering with stuff? Do you not just advertise a promotion and see what happens? Do you spend most of your time trying to climb the google search list? What?

Most of the “tinkering” i’m doing is adjusting bid prices, adding new keywords to my bidding list, checking conversions, and trying new traffic sources.   I don’t spend most of my time trying to climb the google search list (that’s organic traffic) as most of the traffic I get is paid traffic.

4. How much should I put into this while we’re trying to learn how to do it?

This is a relative question.  I would not put more into this that you can not easily afford to lose. (say if you were going to Vegas….its the same concept).
You should be able to get some good data if you were spending say 100 or 200 a month on this..

5. How do you loose money doing this? And how can I avoid losing money right off?

You basically lose money by spending more money on traffic (clicks on your ads) then what you are earning in conversions on the back end.   Say you are running an Eharmony offer and you spend 20.00 in clicks and only get say 3 conversions / sign ups (each conversion is worth say 4.00).   You’ve lost 20.00 – 12.00 = (8.00)

It’s inevitable that you’ll lose money up front as you are learning how things work (but over time with tracking your keywords and conversions) you’ll be able to get rid of the keywords that are not converting for you and focus on the ones that are.

In upcoming blog posts, I will discuss the topic of looking up an offer and putting it on an search network and test profitability.

Ollie James Hales signing out.