Guilty By AffiliationAffiliate Marketing Documentation

In part 1 I gave a few examples of affiliates doing this successfully, now I will show you how to get started.

Picking Your Offer

First thing you’ll need to do is find an offer in Incentaclick, MarketLeverage or whatever network you use. Login and browse around. Keep in mind that for almost every offer in there’s a website out there that will be perfect for you to advertise on. To start, it’ll be good to pick a $8 to $12 payout offer because these are usually a little easier to convert. Also remember to make sure it’s not an Email Only campaign. Aight, I’m going to pick a random one because the goal here is to just show you guys how to get your ad running. I picked “BEST CHANCE AUTO WARRANTY - SHORT FILL … (3412)” on MarketLeverage. Something to do with extending your cars warranty? That’ll work for now.

Choosing or Making Your Ad

Now you’ll pick or make your ad creative. To use one that your affiliate network has already made for their affiliates, simply go to the campaign’s/offer’s page and browse the banners below, there’s usually a few pages of them. 120×600 and 468×60 are both common banner sizes that most sites you will be advertising on will have placements for. If you can create your own banners or have someone who can make them for you, you will have a big advantage in my opinion. Check out places like http://www.20dollarbanners.com/portfolio.php to either get inspiration for creating your own or to buy a unique banner. Having your own banners/image ads makes you stand out from the other affiliates. Just Google “banner design”

Once you got your banner(s) (you can have more than one, just like regular text ads) save them to your computer and log in to google adwords. Here’s mine from marketleverage

woo!

Targeted Site Placement, The Basics

All right! So start a new PLACEMENT TARGETED campaign. Go through the steps of naming your campaign. Next you will see the normal Text Ad creation fields, so click “Image Ad” find your image on your computer  and put your affiliate URL and display URL. So you should be here…

Hit continue, here you can upload a 2nd or 3rd ad if you have one. You can always go back to this. OK onto site targeting. This is the most fun part and where the affiliate marketer juices start flowing. So many options and angles. In part 4 I will go over how I find gold-mine sites to place my ad on, but for now I’ll show you how to do some basic filtering.

The 2 options I use most are Define Topics and List URLs. I’m going to use define topics for this auto warranty offer and I’ll put “Cars” heh. Now you have a nice list of websites in your niche that allow image-ads. The next important step is to filter the results for your ad format.  This way you’re only looking at websites that have a spot for the image-ad size/dimensions that you chose.

My ad is 468×60 so I select that on this popup and now I got my list. You can click the URLs and they will pop up in another window. Check out which sites you like and Add them.  Click continue.

The next page is where you select CPC instead of CPM. Select CPC, hit continue. Enter your Daily Spending amount and Max CPC. I start my Max CPC at about 15cents. I know a couple folks who never pay more than 3cents, so this is some good cheap traffic. If I am not getting any impressions I will go through the sites individually  and see which ones I’d be happy to pay more per click on. I’ll bump those bids until I am getting a steady flow of impressions and clicks. From there it’s just about doing your normal testing and tracking. Tweak and test your ads and your landing pages, weed out some websites, add some websites, and a whole bunch of other things that we will cover in part 3 and 4!

Thanks for reading part 2 of my PPC Banner Advertising On The Content Network Series on GuiltyByAffiliation.com! Stay tuned for part 3 where I will cover how to create successful ads that catch the users attention. You’ll be surprised at the ads that people actually click.

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.