PPC is something I never could win at.  It’s incredibly easy to understand, you buy some traffic and hope it converts paying more than you paid for the traffic.

However, I would spend and spend and I always ended up earning less than I spent, I was always losing money.

I reckon eventually i would have found some profitable campaigns, however my budget and nerve couldn’t stand losing money to get there.

Finally something is working for me though, here is what it is:

Use natural search data to create your PPC campaigns.

and

Here’s How I Do It

1. Take your affiliate merchants that are converting for you or making you money (through free traffic).

2.  Get your past month’s earnings and how many clicks you sent them.

3.  Divide the earnings by the clicks to get your earnings per click.  Example: If you sent a merchant 4700 clicks last month and earned $460 then divide 460/4700 which equals = .098 or roughly .10 cents per click you earn for every visitor you send that merchant.

4.  Go into your stats program for that website, cpanel or google analytics or whatever, grab all the keywords for the past month. You will use these in your adwords campaign.

5.  Create a google adwords campaign, use your bid amount as Half of what you found in step three.  In step three we found .10 cents per click so our bids will be .05.

6.  Set your keywords to EXACT match and Content Network only.

Notes

1.  If you don’t have thousands of clicks sent to a merchant to get your original data a few hundred will work, but anything less and you should find more data elsewhere.

2.  Clicks may be difficult to come by using exact match plus you are bidding low however when they do come the should make you money ;)

3.  It won’t make you rich but it’s a start.  It  may or may not work for you.  However, even if you can only get a $1 spend per campaign daily and it makes $4 per day in earnings consistently then just keep doing that and not only will you have a handful of successful campaigns you will be making money ;)

It worked for me.  There are a million and one pieces of advice about doing PPC out there, just thought I would share mine to maybe spark some ideas on your end.

Update After an email discussion with Jay Geiger I thought I should add that I send the clicks directly to the merchants product page for they keywords I’m bidding on. If I bid on “purple socks” then I send the visitors to the merchants “purple socks” page.