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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However, I found a second school of thought that amuses me that’s the soft sell.  Basically speaking it says that you should build an informative website about something, and feature product reviews and information and drive traffic there, without selling anything.  If you like video games, talk about your favorite games that you rent weekly at blockbuster (and religiously rent a game every week and review it), etc.

 Now the interesting thing about the soft sell is that requires a lot of time to build, and it’s return on investment certainly does not come overnight, nor does it immediately start raining $100 bills, but it can create a little niche income.  The real catch here is that you have to have fun building your site, and enjoy the time you spend putting it together, otherwise, it’s not believable and doesn’t draw traffic.

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?

 Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All
Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content
Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank
Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank
Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings
Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content
..and.. 
MYTH #7: THE BIGGEST MYTH: Ranking In Google Is Hard!

So, Go check him out. The SEO report is at SearchEngineMythsExposed.com