This post could also be titled “which is better, chocolate, vanilla, or Neapolitan?”

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??

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