Until today, we have identified three major ways you can make (more) money by using AdWords™:
- Promote your own products or service (the obvious path).
- Promote someone else's products and earn from comissions (the affiliate business). A particular case is mixing AdWords™ with AdSense™.
- Test new concepts (ideas, brand names, headlines, ad copy) for off-line businesses.
Let's rest a bit over the second point. Selling somebody else's products is the essence of the affiliate concept. But this concept is much more attractive online, where you can benefit from powerful advertising tools like Google AdWords™. If you're looking for quick ways to make extra money and you are on a shoestring budget, then this option is probably right for you, because:
- Any affiliate program is free to join. If you find one that requests a subscription fee, please let us know :).
- Apart from the time it takes, learning about affiliate marketing is cost effective. You can find a lot of good online resources or, better yet, get a good affiliate ebook for only a few bucks. It's not exactly rocket science, actually. You'll learn things like how to find the best best affiliate programs, how to promote them using AdWords™ (PPC) or how to track your results.
If you're completely new to this online-affiliate-business stuff, the best read you can get is Ken Envoy's Affiliate Master Course (a free one), or, even better, Rosalind Gardner's Super Affiliate Handbook. If you plan to use exclusively AdWords™, than you must get Chris Carpenter's classic Google Cash.
Your initial budget doesn't have to be bigger than a few hundred dollars, unless you decide so.
Still, there's some effort to put in your affiliate campaigns. And each part of the job you don't want or you don't know how to do is going to cost.
Here are the major tasks:
- Find profitable affiliate programs to join
- Build a website/landing pages
- Get an AdWords™ account (if you don't already have one)
- Set-up the campaigns: keywords list, ad groups, ads, bids
- Track results/test and tweak
- Cash the checks :)
- Expand
How much money can you earn? The sky is the limit. There are thousands of affiliate programs and millions of people to sell to. The trick is to re-invest your profits and to have a solid trial period for each new program you join — test your keywords, ads, sales, before you run the campaign at full speed — and be sure to make a profit at the end of each month.
Let's get into a bit more details...