Even better news is that this downloadable app is for both Mac and PC. 

For those on the go – not connected moments, or to get more power from your adwords, try Google Adwords Editor.

I’ve found a lot of people looking for a true answer to the question of which is better natural search or ppc for affiliate marketing. I think the answer lies in the model that you take. Here’s some food for thought. For those of you who haven’t learned to recognize a mega-affiliate site when you see it yet – upromise.com is a huge affiliate site. Good for this company. So is fatwallet.com, and cybermonday.com. In fact, Wachovia recently invited me to join their special “shopping site” to earn extra rewards points. Guess what – it was an affiliate site. These sites are all making big – and I mean have more than 2-3 employees – type money. This shouldn’t be a surprise to you considering that even the New York Times has some kind of adsense type advertising on its front page.

My point is that these sites aren’t squeeze pages running ppc. These are mega sites getting mega traffic to one location, much of which is through advertisement and natural search. Ok, ok, so, maybe the people who run these sites have big huge degrees from big huge schools. I recently remember reading that one of the Harry Potter fan sites was making a boat load of cash for the high school kids that started it when the first book came out. There’s definitely an argument for a mega site that ranks well naturally to make good money.

So, why even go the ppc route. Well, lets examine the natural search route. 1st you need a big site on something popular. Then, you need to maintain it. I once created this movie website, and it was great, and got a nice little niche stream of traffic, except that no one clicked on anything or bought anything. So much for natural search….

Ok, on to the pros and cons of PPC. On the one hand, you can control your traffic stream and quality. Say you want to offer a ps3 rental program. You can rank for “rent ps3 games” – you don’t need to worry about the people showing up at your site looking for “ps2 games” or “ps3 cheats” or any of that stuff that sometimes happens when you leave your fate up to natural search. Second, you can only pay for traffic during peak shopping hours, and you can set your price. These two things allow you to bring in as little or as much traffic as you can farm via keywords that match your specified parameters. No need to worry about your site being a member of the “video game of the month” web ring to get extra links. The down side, though is that you need to do some testing and some fine tuning to get the payment right. Here the traffic doesn’t wander in for free, so you’ll need to make sure that for every 10 cent click that you buy, you can convert 1 in 10 if you earn $1.00 per lead.

Personally, I like to mix PPC with natural search. I find that natural search gets better with age (ie – as a site gets older, it attracts more traffic, while I only have to periodically check on it), while PPC programs need constant monitoring to make sure that i’m still making a profit. However, since I make a bigger profit through my PPC campaigns, I think it’s important not to turn a blind eye.

Let me know what you think? PPC or Natural Search??

Adsense is used on sites that find the consumer either in browse mode or purchase mode. The problem for most PPC bidders is that it’s hard to determine which websites are which. While showing ads on a directory or shopping comparison site may be just as effective as a search engine, showing ads on a blog or fan site is not likely to yield a high, if any conversion.

Google is taking steps to weigh producing sites, by adjusting payouts on the adsense side of the scale, however, even at a few pennies a click, is it worth playing the content match game?

If you’re looking for brand exposure in relevant markets, you’ll gain a large percent of traffic and exposure to your URL by appearing in content match. However, at what price, and will the conversions bring sales to the bottom line?

More and more advertisers are hesitant to give up the rights for publishers to run PPC campaigns on their brand terms. While it may aggravate the publishers, the reasoning is sometimes sound. For the advertiser, small in-house paid search campaign is sometimes more cost effective than paying commissions, depending on the bid prices and the competition in the market place. A smaller business may pay only $100 per month to cover ppc fees to get some paid search coverage, but find affiliate commissions ranging in the $1,000 range for the same volume of sales. 

There’s also a large concern among advertisers over ad content. If a publisher forgets to turn off an ad for coupon or promotion that’s expired, the company’s customer support phone line may experience a huge volume of calls from customers looking for their “discount”.  At this point, the advertiser is almost always responsible for honoring those discounts, or stuck doing extra work to resolve the issue.

So, the question is, if brand names are off limits, is it possible to run a pay per click campaign successfully without having the brand name as a keyword? The answer is a resounding… it depends. I think maybe the best example of PPC without Brand is ClickBank. Here, hundreds of products get sold without any real previous brand exposure, just on their merits alone through sell pages. And the price points vary from $10 to $100′s.  But I’m not sure the example holds true for every product out there in affiliate land. Insider Tip: Bidding policies may not be fixed in stone.  Contact your advertiser if you have questions about their ppc policy and its restrictions.