As someone who runs an affiliate marketing training service, I’m often asked by students or potential students privately if they should promote a pay per click affiliate program.
First, let’s understand what we’re discussing here. You can promote any affiliate program multiple ways. You can choose to promote via pay per click, or you can choose to promote that same program with search engine optimization, or you can choose article marketing, which is my preferred method of targeted traffic generation.
So, there’s nothing inherent about any affiliate program that I know of that requires you use pay per click as the traffic generation vehicle.
Now, if someone in my service asks if they should do pay per click, my answer is: it’s up to you, but it’s not something I teach or prefer.
I think for most affiliates, pay per click is an expensive disaster.
Look, this is not a blanket statement. Pay per click affiliate marketing is incredibly lucrative for some people. But those people are a small minority.
I’ve done PPC before. I’ve purchased entire courses on it. I have close friends who are super affiliates who have done PPC as well.
And the fact of the matter is it’s an exceedingly difficult art and science to master. For most people starting off in affiliate marketing, you are going to lose a small fortune even trying to learn the ropes using PPC.
If you’re not well capitalized, there’s a really good chance you’re going to blow through all of your available funds before you ever turn a profit, and then you’re out of business.
Even people proficient at pay per click marketing often only hit one winning campaign for ever four they lose money at. They can still make money overall because they discontinue the four losers as soon as they discover via testing it isn’t going to work and then scale the one winning campaign.
But, no offense, if the masters of the game of pay per click affiliate marketing only achieve a 20% success rate, most people don’t stand a chance.
Article marketing, however, is something everyone can do–as long as you have dedication, can follow directions, and can write English.
I’m not talking fancy, Nobel prize winning writing. I just mean being able to string together sentences in a coherent fashion.
If you can do that, then article marketing applied to affiliate marketing can make you a lot of money over the long haul. That’s exactly why when I set up my affiliate training service, I focused on article marketing as our preferred traffic generation method.
Because it works. And it has staying power. And I fully expect it to continue working for a long time to come.
If you don’t want to get gobbled up by the pay per click affiliate program black hole that so many other victims have been sucked into, then I suggest a training service that teaches you all the ropes with article marketing–or search engines optimization, which is also free traffic, but takes a lot longer to achieve results.
