There are literally hundreds of ways you can make money online, so where do you start? In this tutorial I will go over one of the quickest and easiest ways in getting started towards making your first dollar through pay-per-click (also known as PPC) marketing.

Google Adwords

The first thing you need to do is head over to adwords.google.com and sign up for a free Adwords account. This is where you will set up advertising campaigns to market some sort of product. These are the ads that appear through Google’s Adsense scattered about many websites today. When signing up you will come to a page to create your first campaign. Obviously you don’t have a product yet, but don’t worry. Just make something up to fill it out for now. We will be coming back to it later and changing anything you put here. You can also put anything random for the url fields. In the keywords field just enter one word and then set the cost per click (CPC) to $0.05 and the daily budget to $1.00. Congratulations, you have successfully set up Adwords!

Finding a Product to Sell

It’s hard to produce an income by marketing nothing. Now we need to find a product. Good thing affiliate networks are everywhere! People who create products submit them to particular affiliate sites in order to have other people sell it for them. Why? Because it is much easier to have 1000 people selling your product than a single person. More people selling also means broadening your traffic scope. Because of affiliate networks there are thousands of products just waiting to be sold. If you can think of it, there’s probably a product for it. With that being said, head over to ClickBank.com, a major and one of the most popular affilate networking sites. Once there, create an account. This will allow you to create links with your affiliate id in them so that clicks can be track and you get paid! Also note that ClickBank handles everything. You just use the affiliate id and wait to get paid every two weeks. It’s that simple.

Now that you’ve signed up you need to look for a product that you’d like to promote. It’s really up to you what you want to sell. Good things to look for are commission rates (the higher, the more money you make per sale) and gravity. Gravity is basically how well the product is selling for other affiliate marketers. Also look out for products with high return rates. You don’t want to sell something where most people are going to want their money back. It’s probably not a great product and you won’t be making nearly as much money. Once you finally choose a product that suits your liking, get the affiliate link for it. It will probably be an address similar to “affiliate.hoplink.clickbank.net” or something to that effect. All you need to do is change where is says “affiliate” to your own affiliate name (your ClickBank login name). Now copy that link and save it for later.

Keyword Research

So now you have a sweet product and you’re super pumped about advertising it. I know it’s exciting, but there’s still a little bit more work that needs to be done. A little something called keyword research. Even though you have a great product, creating an ad with Adwords won’t just instantly mean you start making money. The problem is that Google rates content based on its relevance. Remember when you had to add a keyword to your campaign? This is one of a few major factors that will decide where and when your ad shows up. What you must do is research what you are trying to market. What keyword searches are most related to your product and how specific are those keywords? You want to come up with between 1 and 3 specific keywords that match your product. If you’re selling a kitty scratching post using a keyword of “kitty” is probably not going to get you much traffic. It is too broad of a term with probably thousands of hits a day and millions of page results. But if we get more specific the competition for that keyword decreases. Searching “kitty” in Google gets 27,000,00 results, however searching “kitty scratching post” only returns 779,000 results. You can get even more specific for more targeted results depending on your product and goals. Please keep in mind that keyword research is a whole topic on its own with many different strategies. This was just a brief overview of it.

Adwords Campaign

Finally, you’ve got a product and have done your research. Now it’s time to setup that ad. Login to your previously created Adwords account and create a new campaign. Setting it up should be just like before, except this time you need to fill in good information. When you create a title, description and link text you want to make sure they grab someone’s attention by making them want to click it. Of course you also want to keep it relevant to what you are trying to sell. The title “Topless Celebrities” may get you some clicks, but it’s definitely not going to get you a sale if you’re selling that super sweet kitty scratching post. In reality, you want to have these 3 content areas contain your keyword you researched. Since people will be searching on that keyword, it only makes sense for it to be in the ad as well, making it the most relevent and targeted ad for that particular keyword. Now in the target url add your ClickBank affiliate link and finally add your keyword(s). Try not to have to many keywords as they will make your overall campaign more broad and thus less targeted which in turn means less conversion (sales through clicks). Finish by setting your prices (also its own topic) and saving. You can also setup an ad group but we’ll get into that at another time. If you want to delete the original “fake” campaign you can, or just edit it to promote another product…or the same one!

Give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve successfully created your first Adwords campaign and it should start being added to the rotation shortly (of course this depends on how quickly Google reviews it and how much you are spending on marketing versus the keyword competitiveness). There are many ways you can track your ad’s statistics and tweak them if need be. More on that later. Happy advertising!