I am taking a little breather from some of my other revenue streams, I wanted to talk about affiliate marketing a bit. I am starting to have a little success with it, and while I am investing small amounts and testing campaigns, it is paying off. But I wanted to give the harsh reality about campaigning, and why most people throw in the towel after a short time.

When you start running things like PPC marketing you can take a huge hit to the pocket book if your not careful. Now I am sure that you have heard of guys making $hundreds of thousands of dollars doing this and said no way. Let me just say yes way dude (remembering Bill and Teds Excellent adventure). You can bank huge, but you have to think way out of the box or you will lose your pants real fast.

I will be the first to tell you that Google adwords can be a tough cookie, but thats where all the huge traffic is, so a lot of guys go for the Gusto. Yahoo on the other hand is a lot easier to game. That brings me to another point. When I use the word “game” I mean it. A large portion of the guys that make the most doing affiliate marketing through search, PPC and CPM are gaming the system. Just study up a bit and you can see that they are. Almost every other ad out there that I see is against Google Adwords TOS which makes me sick sometimes, especially when I see how truly sly and shady they are. But it takes some shady tactics to be successful with this.

As I said before, I am just getting in this game, but here are a few things I am learning and want to pass along to you if you should decide to jump in. Apply them and you will succeed if you keep at it and can come up with fresh ideas and study hard.

1. Test, Test, Test - testing helps you to tweak a campaign to cause it from making no money or breaking even to actually profiting many times.
2. Spend money to make money - You can’t expect for your first campaign to succeed and profit. 90% of the campaigns you test may make no money. Wait till you find the right one and then squeeze the living daylight out of its earning potential.
3. Think outside of the box with keywords - Everyone that runs PPC campaigns seems to copy each others keywords. If everyone uses the same ones then who benefits? only the guy at the top of the ads pile. Try to use terms that are related to your product not always the obvious.
4. DON’T give up - People fail because they lose money and don’t keep trying. You are going to lose, thats for sure. Just don’t give up. When you run a campaign and it fails then just try a new one.
5. Try to break even - If you break even on a campaign or come close, then don’t walk away from it. You have hit a gold mine. All you have to do is tweak your ads, tweak your keywords, and you should be profiting in no time. Keep testing until you go in the plus.