Affiliate Marketing is one of the newest ways to make money online. Sure, the pro’s have been using it for years but it seems that now Joe Public is taking notice and is trying to figure out how to get a piece of the pie. Fortunately the pie is big enough for everyone to make money if you know how to keep ad costs in check and are able to keep your profits.

The number one reason that affiliate marketers fail is quite frankly…cost. Not the cost to set up a marketing page or to find products, that’s relatively cheap and easy. The cost I’m talking about is adwords and advertising costs to get people to their website. New affiliate marketers are spending hundreds of dollars just to finally get a sale on their $40 dollar product. The problem is that most of the people that have been around own the high sales niches and you’d have to pay way more than you should just to get a click on your website.

What you may not know is that those advertisers at the top of the list are paying less than what you are at the bottom of the list. The reason is simple, it’s called ‘cost per click’ or CPC for short. The higher percentage that number is, the more Google wants your ads to the top because even if they make less per click they will make more in the long run because a good ad will have more clicks per day hence making them (Google) more money.

One easy way to increase your CPC is to limit who sees your ad and when they see it. One simple way to do this is to change your settings so that your ad does not show up on the content network. This will give you less impressions and less clicks but it will raise your CPC percentage in a short amount of time. It does this because of the decline in impressions. A large amount of impressions with few clicks is killer on a CPC percentage.

So in the short term you may get less visitors to your site but if you have patience and raise your CPC percentage by doing this you will be paying less per click on your add and will eventually get yourself in the top 3-4 slots which is where you want to be. Once you get that you can then add the content network back on if you wish. This whole process only takes a matter of days to a couple of weeks to accomplish.

So the short answer is yes, affiliate marketing can be cost effective and lucrative if you know how to get Google to get you higher on the ad list for a fraction of the cost that the advertisers below you are paying for their ads.

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