How to Get Started as an Affiliate
February 20th, 2008 by 
Amit
Now I know I’ve been talking about a lot of advanced topics recently. I’ve had a number of readers ask : “Hey Amit, all this is great, but I’m just getting started. What you do recommend that I do?”
Now based on the amazing success that many of the students in my coaching program are having I recommend starting affiliate marketing with direct linking campaigns promoting clickbank products.
Why?
First off direct linking requires no website, that right, all you need to do is sign up for an affiliate id through clickbank and you’re good to go – it takes 2 minutes.
Building a website is probably the biggest hurdle many affiliates face when getting started in this business, that is, unless your a professional web designer! I know it was a HUGE hurdle for me, it took me weeks to learn enough html to make a simple webpage with tables that didn’t look like a 5 year old threw it together!
Needless to say, I don’t make my own sites anymore. I have people who actually know what they’re doing handle that!
Now what’s direct linking? If you don’t already know it’s where you simply put your affiliate link in the destination url of your Google Ad, taking the visitor right to the affiliate site.
How cool is that?
As long as your commission are greater than your click costs you’re making a profit.
This is by no means a long term business strategy, but it’s the FASTEST way to learn Adwords, and direct marketing, for that matter.
Here’s a few basic steps to take to get started :
- First a relatively obscure niche in clickbank, a highly competitive niche will be difficult to break into with direct linking. Obscure little niches work great with direct linking though, as long as they has a decent sales page and a viable market.
- Use a tool like Keycompete.com or Keywordspy.com to dig up a nice broad keyword list
- Clean up junk keywords out of your keyword list
- Use EfficientPPC to setup a ONE keyword per adgroups campaign, with two unique ads per adgroup
- While you’re setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC, Setup clickbank tids for each keyword. There’s a number of ways of doing this, the easier way is to simply assign a number to each keyword and use that number as your tid (since clickbank severely limits of the tid to 8 characters you can’t use the keyword itself). This is critical to your success, you need to be able to track which keywords are actually making sales.
- Launch your campaign on Adwords with a starting bid of 0.20. Closely monitor your campaign. (1) if you’re getting virtually zero traffic, up your bids. (2) If your getting lots of traffic ( > 500 clicks) and zero sales, you’ve probably got a dud, move on (3) If your getting traffic and consistent sales, you’ve got a winner, now you need to optimize and make it profitable!
I don’t have time to go into more detail in this post, but I’m planning a simple direct linking case study where I pick a clickbank niche and show you what I do, step by step, and how to make it profitable.
So stay tuned!
adwords affiliate marketing basics clickbank direct linking efficientppc
Posted in Google™ AdWords, Super Affiliate Mindset, affiliate marketing | 
53 Comments »
Thanks Amit, lok forward to the case study, all the best,
Keith
Amit,
Can you answer my question I had a campaign profiting and everything, but it seems that my bids are way to high there at $1.35, but I’ve read into a few other affiliate blogs and they say sometimes they start out at 1.50 then slowly decrease it as there position levels out or stables up, but they decrease it slowly as there quality score builds along with there ad rank
Can you answer that? Why my bids are so high when I first launched it I was getting 20 cent clicks with a good CTR level and it was profiting then I added some broad terms and impressions flew out there window because I didn’t use keyword selectors (broad, exact and etc) can you tell me what happen here?
Just seems like Google is pulling me towards there way on upping my bids?
Amit,
BTW by the way my quality scores are still reading OK they was great when i first started by campaign, but there still ok with min bids at 10 cents, but I’m just getting too high of bids I’m thinking I need to keep paying out and let the account build up, but then my ctr never goes higher then 1 percent or right at that…
I’m using targeted ad groups which I’m not going to get in details because I know this is a profitable niche because it was profiting for two days straight until i screwed it up.
Can you help me amit please?
To Tyler DeWitt:
When you choose broad keywords, make sure that you have a good list of negative keywords to suppress the ad.
That is probably why you’re getting so many impressions with no clicks. Your ad is displaying for irrelevant keywords.
Let’s say you’re promoting the Xbox 360 gaming console with the keyword XBOX 360 (broad). If someone searches for XBOX 360 Manual, your ad will show because the keyword xbox 360 is broad. In this case, you will need to add the negative keyword -manual in order for your ad to not show up when someone searches for xbox 360.
It’s probably best for you to leave your keywords on phrase and exact match until you’ve come up with a good list of negative keywords.
Royal Radande,
Appreciate feedback which I already know that to be quite honest with you I’m using exact keywords now.
Amit passes up the most important thing on his blog and thats responding to commenter’s. I guess he really don’t have to though
Hey Amit,
Great start here and you are right when you said that people that don’t know about html will take weeks to learn. That’s why I always recommend a blog as a landing page. As I explained in my free e-book about using Blog as a landing page.
There are hostings that have CPANEL and Fantastico which with few clicks they can create a blog (automatically).
And now that Yahoo! are accepting direct linking to affiliates will be more easy for starters.
There are going to be a lot of people loosing a lot of money tonight.
What about Adwords new policy?
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/02/update-to-display-url-policy.html
Is “Google Cash” dead or am I not reading that right?
Is this the end of redirects with Google?
DeWitt,
This is a blog not a forum. The kind of attention your
asking for, you call probably get with Amit’s and Andrew Wee’s package. Or you could just re-read some past post. I guessing there are about 100 post from Amit for this site by now.
nice dude, thanks for the info. I didn’t even know adwords allowed direct linking, but hey why wouldn’t they?
Your informations are very insighful Amit.You know PPC advertisement is something that I have been really having a tought time grasping. Nevertheless, I know that if I continue to read it about it, I will soon get the hand of it. I hope.
REC,
I think the answer is no. As far as I can read, this was always Adwords policy. It’s just that they’re going to get strict about enforcement.
Copied from http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/02/update-to-display-url-policy.html
Display URL: http://www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: http://www.trackingurl.com/google123
–> Landing page URL: http://www.google.com would be acceptable
Display URL: http://www.google.com/adwords
Destination URL: http://www.trackingurl.com/google123
–> Landing page URL: http://www.trackingurl.com would not be acceptable
—————————————–
Notice that as long as the visitor ends up at the domain in the destination URL, you’re good. Passing through a “tracking URL” (or affiliate link) does not seem to be a problem.
Amit,
you talk about using TID’s with Efficient PPC… so is this a manual process? Or is there some tool that will do this
I’m doing really well with clickbank, and I must say you that direct linking was some of my worst experiences.
I haven’t made any sales until I started building landing pages.
FYI
Hi Amit,
The only thing I can not understand here is, how would you create an individual TID for each keyword? If you have 10K keywords, this would mean you would have to manually create 10K TID’s in clickbank. Or is there something I am missing here?
Using Adwords is definitely the easiest way to start. And the fact that Adwords is finally enforcing the url policy means a lot less affiliates skating around the rules. A level playing field.
Wait, so is it fair game to link directly to click bank affiliate links? I’m really new at this and trying to learn.
Follow this post and get royally fcuked by Google in no time. I would be really interested in watching his case-study fiasco.
If you don’t know HTML, webserver basics, hosting websites etc. you should not be in this business.
Direct linking is a good strategy to learn the ropes for PPC, and Clickbank a perfect fit.
Google will not allow direct linking from April 1st. So if some of you want to take advantage to it right away.
Vijay
For all you skeptic out there, I know lots of people have success with direct linking. I personally don’t recommended it as a long term strategy, however, it’s the best was to learn Adwords and ppc affiliate marketing.
Yes, for some products you will get Google slapped if you direct link, but NOT all. That’s all apart of going through the numbers.
It takes 5 minutes to setup a direct link campaign, you can start 10 in one day and see which one flies.
Also, just to reiterate what Doug said, Google display URL policy change on April 1st will NOT effect direct linking campaigns.
So I tried this last night and lost $20.00 in about an hour haha. the product’s payout was only $20, so I stopped it. Looking forward to watching your case study Amit, id like to see your approach.
hey Amit,
any ideas on my question:
“The only thing I can not understand here is, how would you create an individual TID for each keyword? If you have 10K keywords, this would mean you would have to manually create 10K TID’s in clickbank. Or is there something I am missing here?”
Yeah, I’ve tried this approach and it feels like gambling. I guess it really depends on the niche and offer.
I’m going to try it again tho!
-
Can’t wait to see your case study.
Looking forward to read about the case study Amit.
Thanks for share.
Matias
Rec said you can find out more info in Andrew Wee’s and Amit’s package. Amit do you have a course for sale?
I’m also looking forward to that case study.
Not to freak people out, what Amit explained in his post will work but it will not work for absolute beginners. Why? Because to do what Amit explained you need prior experience with affiliate marketing and ppc marketing. If you’re losing money, don’t give up. Stop and read on ppc marketing more. There is lto fo information you need to know before you start your first campaign. You got to KNOW what you’re doing, otherwise you will have tough time making even one sale.
John,
My mistake, that program is closed now. Sorry about that.
I should have checked first.
I don’t see why people think this approach is more dangerous or difficult than sending PPC traffic to your own site.
If you have conversion and/or TID tracking, at that level, it’s really not that different. Yes, things like Google’s one URL per search policy will impact you. But again, Amit is not talking about a long-term strategy here. His point is that this is the easiest way to learn keyword research and PPC optimizing. Pretty important skills to learn, wouldn’t you agree?
As far as needing “prior experience”. Sure, that’s ALWAYS a benefit. But everyone starts at zero and has to learn somewhere.
I signed up for keywordspy (gold version) and never got a password. It’s only been a few hours but you’d think this would be automated. There isn’t even a password recovery feature.
Anyone with experience with keywordspy?
Ditto Doug.
The point here is to stop reading and start doing.
Doing a little keyword research and direct linking to test a product or market accomplishes the most important factor…
You gained some insight into a market AND experience with PPC.
Wow i’m glad i found this blog. I’m currently experimenting with direct linking. Not for long term purposes but i want to weed out the not so profitable campaigns before i create my landing pages. Now i’ll following your experiment closely.
.
As of now i have about 5+ campaigns wich all have a keyword quality score of “Great”
I’m curious about your case study let’s see how it turns out!
Thomas, you are right man! Actions speak louder than words.
What Amit shared is a simple strategy with direct linking for newbies.
Use the direct link, use it with PPC, article marketing, blog comment posting, and forum marketing. That will get you some quick cash but nay, for long term, it is better to build up your empire of Virtual Real Estate (VRE).
PPC is a beast. I made a few dollars with clickbank, nothing major, but have spent more than I made. I’m getting alot of clicks with Pepperjam, but no sales. I’m starting to think that its not so much skill as it is gambling with this stuff. It all depends on what you market and if the consumer is ready to buy. I’m gonna keep plugging at it here and there but there are other strategies that are less “experimental” than PPC, and you target quality consumers.
I’m gonna keep reading blogs like this, zackjohnson, uberaffiliate, and shoemoney…but seems to me like the super affiliates have a tight relationship with the “big wigs”. That’s another aspect of this business, they get first dibbs on something when it comes out…”It’s not always what you know, but who you know”…
I’ve been doing ppc affiliate marketing for about 2 years now. Once I understood what I was doing, I ONLY had 2-3 days where I lost money, I was profitable every other day.
Nowadays I CONSISTENTLY make $1000s a day in profits, not exactly what I call gambling.
Gamble based completely on chance and luck, affiliate marketing is a science.
Amit, I know this is a bit off topic, but do you generally pick products that have an exact commission (like clickbank)? Or do you also promote products that give you a percentage of the sale?
Out of every 100 people reading this post only 2 to 5 will succeed. Most will just read, forget and rest will give up. With every business, you need to connect with the right people , need the right tools and information. There is too much crap on the net and you can easily get lured into doing things the wrong way. Like someone said, keep plugging away…sooner or later you will stumble upon right information through right people. (which also includes reading blog on regular basis…bookmark it if you haven’t)
worst post ever!
Worth reading for affiliate marketing newbies. But very unlucky, Clickbank is selective, they pulled out our country from the list…
Any alternatives to Clickbank Amit?
Hi Amit
You mentioned in your post that students in your coaching program have had great success direct linking. How do we go about joining your coaching program?
Take it easy on Amit for now – he’s probably still exhausted from the summit.
Also, a case study could fail for anybody. That’s why it’s called a study.
Amit,
I don’t see a contact link on your blog anywhere, how do we inquire about your coaching program? Is this something that’s still available?
Hi Amit,
Is is possible to Direct Link even the CPA offers?
If yes then what is the best method?
Thanks
Hi Amit,
” … but I’m planning a simple direct linking case study where I pick a clickbank niche and show you what I do, step by step, and how to make it profitable. …”
Anything new about those plans?
Did I miss it already?
Thanks for any info!
Regards
Guenter
This is overall bad advice for beginners. I know you are trying to help people with this blog and I think you are amazing for it but I am finding that many posts on this site are making affiliate marketing all the more confusing especially for beginners. At least for me they are.
Crap. I’m trying this now and all my ads went to “Poor” quality score in an hour and they want me to bid 1 to 10 dollars a click. Do I start with broad or exact keywords? I’d say I lost money, but no clicks yet.
Google says:
“This page isn’t highly relevant.
Based on the relevance of the associated keyword and ad text, page content, and page functionality.”
Maybe that’s because I’m going through the hop url from clickbank?
Hi Amit,
you were talking about ” … planning a simple direct linking case study where I pick a clickbank niche and show you what I do, step by step, and how to make it profitable. …”
Did you find the time to do this case study?
Does anybody know about this case study?
Thanks!
Guenter
I have watched your blog for a while. You are truly an expert in PPC and I learn a lot for your site. Thanks for sharing!
Great post Amit! I have been playing around with online marketing for a while, but just recently got serious about it. I have a couple of direct link campaigns, but only one of them has been profitable so far. I know I am not testing enough niches, so I will step my game up and test 2-3 new niches a week now. I usually only bid on exact phrases that don’t cost me more than 0.15 to get a top 3 position. I haven’t lost too much money, because my clicks are cheap however my sales are not very high either. How long do you usually watch a new campaign for to see if it makes sales?
Thank you. I just Stumbled on your site today. I had an idea, but you’ve helped me to crystalize my feelings about advertising on my blog.
http://www.efficientppc.com/ this wesite seems broken, I can not open all the images, seems see nothing.