A great way to create a passive income stream is to find a product or service you want to promote, write some creative content about it, and promote it via PPC.  The idea is simple – if you can come up with a conversion ratio that, when multiplied by your PPC costs, exceeds the payout that the product or service gives you, then you win.  Winning is good.

Let’s start with an example, shall we?

The tricky part here is creativity – it’s 4-fold, really: you need to pick a good offer, come up with a nice domain, write some solid content, and create your ads wisely.  This took several iterations to get good at – and even now not every one of my sites are home runs. Here’s what I do, in super brief description, from end-to-end: 

• Think of a domain that would adequately describe the site without infringing on any trademarks
• Go to GoDaddy, register the domain, set up your dedicated hosting server (hopefully you have one if you’re serious about doing this!) to point to it
• Create a virtual host for the domain (I have lots of domains on the same physical server), create a directory for the Web site content, create a test index file to ensure everything’s working, and hit it in a browser to make sure the DNS has propagated
• Install Wordpress in the site’s root directory
• Pick a theme for the site that suits your content – for example, if you’re going to create content on a automobile offer, pick a suitable automobile theme
• Write, write, write.  Come up with some good content that is informative, fun to read, and serves a purpose of promoting whatever offer you chose.  This is extremely important because your content is a big part of your Google Quality Score, and this will affect your CPC costs down the road.  Remember that your content should be helpful, accurate and informational. 
• Link to your offer throughout your site but not in any sort of overbearing way.  The goal is to encourage visitors that the product or service is valuable and that entering their email or zip code is worthwhile.
• Start a PPC campaign with long-tail ad groups.  If you’re promoting paid surveys, for example, use keywords such as “make money online survey” or “free fun myspace survey” instead of just “paid survey” or “fun survey”.  The latter keywords are more expensive because they’re more common, and many times the market on those keywords is very saturated.

After implementing all these steps, you’ll be up and running!  Again, this is oversimplified, but this is a true end-to-end business that just about anyone can start.

In terms of what to do going forward, you’ll want to tweak each of these steps to a certain extent.  As I’ve listed them above, you’ll want to spend the most time tweaking the bottom step and work your way up.  For example, spend the most time on monitoring and modifying your PPC campaign, a bit less time tweaking your content, and even less time changing your Wordpress theme.

The details of the PPC campaign are key because if you’re not getting enough conversions to pay for your PPC costs, this will be a losing venture.  It’s as important to find diamond-in-the-rough offers with higher payouts as it is to keep your ad groups very targeted.  Low PPC costs and higher payouts give you a much higher margin of error for a lower conversion rate.

This may come off more as a rant than an actual informative article, but I feel the purpose remains the same and that the information is valid for all affiliates.  What annoys me the most, more than anything, EVER, is when affiliate networks give their affiliates the shaft for no good reason.  Without naming any names (as there is still time for retribution on the networks end), I am owed nearly $4,000 in commission that is being withheld because the ads were ran on a site that I hadn’t listed in my application.

Uhh…. what?  If I had to tell every affiliate network each and every site that I owned my application would be 10 pages long.  What’s sick is that there are affiliates with ten times as many sites as I have, yet you don’t see them listing off all of their websites in the application, do you?  No, because there are many ways to promote a product and SEM is simply one of them.

Take zip-submits or mobile offers, for example.  I probably have 30 different landing pages set up to capitalize on zip-submit traffic.  Should I list all of those as well?  I mean, I literally have thousands of web addresses for various websites and landing pages.

Anyways, coming back to the original topic, if affiliates can’t trust the networks that they run their ads from it has a very negative impact on the industry.  The affiliate marketing industry is so new that it has not yet established itself.  Tarnishing its reputation affects ALL affiliates, not just the individual affiliates or networks.

Wow, so Google has effectively killed AffiliateWeb’s search engine rankings with their latest algorithm update, sending us from number 3 for the term “zip submits” to… get ready for it… number 46 (as of this writing). I’m annoyed, but that’s not the point of this article.

Many forums and message boards (www.wickedfire.com, www.sitepoint.com, www.digitalpoint.com, for example) are starting to make threads and comments about how shady zip/e-mail submits are and how they aren’t experiencing any conversions with them anymore. From an affiliates perspective it is probably quite frustrating, and I get that. Truth be told, I’m not running half as many e-mail/zip submit campaigns as I used to simply because there are a lot of them that aren’t converting anymore.

But, the real question here is, “why aren’t they *converting?”
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Many people don’t realize that there is an additional effective way to generate traffic besides using PPC, link exchanges and e-mail.  It can be a strange concept at first - you can pay someone to “deliver” qualified, targeted Web surfers to your site?  Where do these people come from?

Here’s the deal.

There are suppliers who exist in the online business world solely to deliver traffic to other Web sites.  They can do it in a number of ways - most commonly, for example, they own a network of sites that already get a substantial amount of traffic, and using a variety of methods they can send organic traffic to other sites.

Let’s look at expired domains for example.  These are domains, for one reason or another, that were not renewed by the previous owner.  If they are still receiving a small amount of traffic, a supplier may see this and buy up the domain (they’re so cheap nowadays, why not?).  The supplier might then slap a portal-like page on the site (example: www.webtraffic.com), that links off to other sites of similar topics compared to the original site or domain name.  The key for these suppliers is to buy up LOTS of these sites so they can cover virtually any topic possible.  That way when you want to pay them to drive traffic to their site, they can pull up 100 sites of similar topics (e.g. clothing, books, dog bones, etc.) and put your link into the rotation there.  And now you’re receiving traffic.

From my experience, depending on how targeted I wanted the traffic to be, the visitors would flow in at variable rates.  For example, for one of my sites I wanted only UK visitors to see it because I knew that would yield the highest conversions (I was selling a product geared toward people in England).  I used Revisitors for this particular campaign (and subsequent campaigns) because they gave me the most flexibility in terms of how targeted I wanted my traffic.  Plus the campaigns easily paid for themselves because I sold products and services with a fairly high CPA (cost per acquisition).  By targeting specific demographics, traffic came into the site noticeably slower than my other campaigns, but I knew it was worth it because each visitor was coming from a UK address to possibly buy a UK service.  You can verify the traffic sources using a free tool like Google Analytics which will analyze your access logs and tell you exactly what countries the visitors are coming from (among many other useful metrics).
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I had just finished Valve’s “Portal” and I came to realize that the submissive psychological messages directly relate to affiliate marketing. Yea, I know what you’re thinking, so hear me out here.

Many people jump on the affiliate marketing bandwagon because they assume that they’re going to get a free ride. Money, women, cars, and more money- in actuality, they find themselves working 10 hours a day for a while and constantly tweaking PPC campaigns and learning the ropes of SEO and SEM. Ahh yes, welcome to the affiliate marketing reality that we all know and love. It’s not all puppy-dogs and lolly pops, that’s for darn sure, and if you aren’t careful you’re going to get eaten alive.

At the same time, that’s why we all love affiliate marketing, right? This is truly an industry where those that can do, and those that can’t fail and move on back to their real-world jobs. I’ve seen it happen a million times and I don’t doubt that I’ll see it happen a million more.
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