Advertising networks allow you to partner with affiliate marketers to increase sales and traffic to a website. The affiliate marketer will place ads, text, and product links on their website and market your ad through e-mail and search marketing campaigns. As an advertiser, you pay a commission for click-through, lead or sale. This dramatically increases your sales force, and you only pay for performance.

Performance Marketing Categories

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

When an affiliate marketer refers a consumer through your advertisement to your website, you pay a small fee. This is a less common incentive program with affiliate advertising, because Google is currently the most used search engine and they offer a click-through incentive program called AdSense, you’ve probably seen AdSense on almost every website you’ve visited. In order to appear in the the AdSense program you need to

Pay-Per-Lead

With a pay-per-lead incentive program, every time an affiliate marketer refers a consumer to your website and they perform a predefined action, you pay the marketer a fee. Depending on the provider, you can break an action into a work flow.

Pay-Per-Sale

With a pay-per-sale program, every time an affiliate marketer sends someone to your website, and that visitor is converted into a sale, you pay the affiliate marketer a commission.

Popular Networks

• Commission Junction
• LinkShare is an e-commerce business solution for over 3.5 million online relationships.
• Clickbank, digital products with up to 75% in commission per sale

Search engine advertising is a form of pay-per-click advertising. With search engine advertising, you pay a price per click for popular search terms used on a search engine. When your keyword is used, the advertisement appears around the organic search listings as a sponsored listing.

Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay a small fee to the search engine. The price you pay depends on the search engine, the popularity of the keywords, the competition for the keyword, the quality of your advertisement and its relevancy to your website content. You can pay anywhere from $0.01 and up.

In order to use search engine advertising effectively you need to perform keyword research. A good portion of your time should be spent on your research; your goal is to find a keyword that has a high search volume, and low competition. You want a high search volume, because you want to get as many clicks as possible. You want low competition in order to increase the chances of your ad being on the first page, preferably in the top 4 ad slots. The more money you are willing to pay for a click, the higher you are going to appear in the ad slots, but there are quality factors that also affect the price and consequently the position of your advertisement.

It is important to first optimize the quality of your advertisement, and then optimize the quality of your website using search engine optimization techniques. By optimizing these two things, you can improve your ad quality, lowering your minimum price per click bid, and get closer to the number one ad spot. You will pay less per click for the number one spot compared to an advertisement that has not been optimized for the keywords.

Search Engine Advertising programs you can join

• With Google you can
• Yahoo displays ads on Yahoo, AltaVista and CNN. You can sign up and get a $25 credit.
• With Microsoft you can Sign up with AdCenter.