Pay-per-click is a great tool for affiliate marketers. Whether you’re using PPC to drive traffic to your own website, or to link directly to merchants, PPC has revolutionized how affiliates are doing business on the internet.

Ten Cents a What?
The premise of PPC is very simple. Rather than working SEO ‘magic’ to position your website at the top of the search engine results, PPC allows you to gain that exposure almost instantly, by paying a fee (per click) to display a small “ad” within the sponsored listing sections of the search engines results pages. The more you are willing to pay for each click, the higher your listing will appear on the page.

PPC, or pay-per-click, is a huge industry. The two biggies – Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture, formerly GoTo) and Google AdWords – process hundreds of millions of dollars in paid traffic each year. There are other companies trying to compete in this lucrative industry as well, but they tend to be more prone to fraudulent clicks, so we recommend avoiding them.

The majority of all search traffic on the web originates at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. Google has it’s own PPC model, known as AdWords. By advertising via Google AdWords, your listing can appear on not only Google, but also AOL, Iwon, HotBot, Lycos, AskJeeves, Teoma, and NetScape. Similarly, by listing an ad with Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM), you can receive exposure on Yahoo!, Overture, AllTheWeb, & AltaVista. Finally, MSN has their PPC setup known as MSN AdCenter.

As you can see, the reach of PPC via Google, MSN and Yahoo! is enormous – pretty much the entire internet, in fact. And that’s why PPC has become so popular among merchants and affiliates as well. As an affiliate, here’s what you need to know about PPC.

Hit the Ground Running
There are basically two ways you can use PPC to generate revenue as an affiliate. Firstly, you can run PPC ads designed to drive traffic to your own website. If you have a well-designed site with lots of good content (informative articles, newsletters, product reviews, or whatever your forte), this might be a good choice for you. The second choice is to run PPC ads that link directly to the merchant with your affiliate id embedded in the link. This can be very expensive if you’re competing against other merchants who can afford to pay more per click than yourself, but it’s a great way to quickly determine if a category is worth competing in.

The thing to remember about direct-linking to merchants is that YSM and AdWords both handle your affiliate ads differently. YSM allows multiple people (merchants + affiliates) to link to the same website, provided affiliates use (aff) in their ad listing to denote themselves as an affiliate. AdSense no longer requires this, but they also no longer list more than one ad which points to the same website. This is why we no longer allow affiliates to link directly to NetShops stores.

This is also a good time to remind you that in order to participate in the Hayneedle affiliate program, you must agree not to link directly to Hayneedle stores from PPC ads, and not to bid on our store names, such as “Hammocks.com” or “Patio Furniture USA.” You may bid on benign terms like “hammocks” or “patio furniture,” but only to link to your OWN website.