When it comes to making money online, two very popular methods are through affiliate marketing and pay per click ads. When it comes to marketing PPC ads I almost always consider this MFA (Made For Adsense). If you are driving traffic to a useless site with the intent of driving higher click rates then you are running a MFA site. MFA is borderline “black-hat” marketing and is not technically allowed by Google.

As for affiliate marketing, this is something entirely different. Affiliate marketing companies such as Commission Junction or Azoogle allow you to promote CPA (Cost Per Action) ads to your users. With CPA ads you are only paid if a click on your ad results in an action such as a purchase, a signup, a lead, etc. One popular affiliate program I am a publisher for is eBay. With eBay I receive a percentage of eBay’s profit at the end of a sale if the winning bidder was referred to eBay through one of my ads. There are also other ways to make money with that program but that is the basic payment structure. CPA and affiliate based advertising setups are quickly becoming a popular alternative for PPC. Advertisers are sick of having their money wasted on click fraud and other forms of PPC abuse including false keyword targeting, MFA pages, etc.

When marketing either an MFA or affiliate based advertising program the process is quite similar. Most people who work in these industries will buy keywords through AdWords and other contextual advertising networks that relate to their website. The hope is that the price of the keywords will be less than the returned value that they earn from their ads. Like I mentioned, MFA sites are against Google’s TOS, but affiliate based publishing networks generally do not mind the practice of converting paid search and keyword traffic.

If you pay Google 10 cents when somebody clicks on your ad for a free PlayStation 3 and that person does not end up completing the necessary offers required to earn the free PS3, it is you (the publisher) who loses 10 cents. However, if another person clicks your paid advertisement in Google search results and ends up completing the free PS3 offer you stand to make a nice commission. Certainly making your 10 cents well spent. The name of the game is profit vs. expense. You have to learn which offers convert well for you and which ones do not. If you are just getting into affiliate marketing I highly suggest starting out with a low budget. You want to learn the tricks of the trade but you don’t want to lose your shirt in the process. As you learn what works and what doesn’t you can increase your campaign spending. When you increase your budget you can either bid higher on better keywords or raise your overall budget on the same cheaper search terms you were already using. By sticking with the terms you know are already working you can continue to bring in traffic, just at higher levels. The more money you put into it the more you stand to make back. It’s a numbers game and it’s not necessarily always the easiest way to make money online, but, it’s definitely a legitimate and highly praised method that has been working for many people for years.