Today I wanted to share with my readers a super-simple strategy to earn money online.

It’s called “direct linking via PPC“.

What does this mean? Let me explain with a simple example:

Let’s say there is a company called “Papazon” (I already check, it does not exist) that sells, among other things, laptops. For example, they sell the model “Cherry Air” at their website at papazon.com/cherryair

So when people go to a Search Engine (for ex google) and search for “Cherry Air laptop”, at the very top is your ad, linking to papazon.com/cherryair BUT with your affiliate link. So if the customer purchases, you get a commission, and you didn’t even need to build a website or send an e-mail.

Everything you did was:

• Grab your affiliate link
• Bid on that search engine (Google, Bing…) with very specific keywords
• Create your ad (with your affiliate link as destination URL)

And that’s all 🙂

Obviously, you have to pay for every single click, so you are expecting to make more money than you are paying.

This works much better for digital products, since they usually offer higher commissions (as opposed to physical products where the commission is much lower).

Now wait a minute, you say. This sounds too good/easy/simple to be true.

Of course, it has some caveats:

• Many brands do not allow you to bid on certain keywords (most of the times trademarks)
• Many companies do not allow direct linking at all. Amazon did in the past (before 2009), and many affiliates were making a killing.
• Most search engines do not like this (although there is nothing wrong per se)
• You are paying for every click, regardless of whether it makes you any money or not
• This is not a sustainable, long-term strategy. You are not building any assets (the merchant might be building a list, but not you). If you get banned from the merchant (or the search engine), there is no business any more.
• As stated above, your account/s might get banned. Back in 2010 I got my Adwords account banned for doing this (in all honesty, I was promoting a product that was built to cheat Google; I should have seen it coming, but I was doing between $1000-$2000 a month with literally 10 minutes of work – total time, not monthly)

The upsides are:

• Simple & Easy
• If you bid on the specific keywords, many people are in buying mode, meaning they are likely to buy
• Traffic from Search Engines (especially the top ones) is usually pretty good and reliable

So, you ask, have I done anything like that in the past? Mmmm, I already said too much 😉

As I said, this is not a sustainable business, but it can be a great way to make some extra side money.

A simple strategy could be as follows:

Go to Clickbank and find a product that is selling properly (for ex, anything with gravity over 10). For the sake of example, let’s say the product is called “The Spanish Miracle” and their website is http://thespanishmiracle.com (with that name it would probably be a spanish course)

Then you would go to either Adwords or Bing Ads and create a new ad.

The ad text would be something you come up with (be creative and compelling)

The display url would be thespanishmiracle.com

The destination url would be your Clickbank affiliate link.

Then you could bid on the following terms:

• the spanish miracle
• spanish miracle
• spanishmiracle
  • (and other misspellings you can think of)
• http://www.thespanishmiracle.com
• http://thespanishmiracle.com
• www.thespanishmiracle.com
• thespanishmiracle.com
  • (and any other url variations)

So people searching for anything of the above would see your ad and (hopefully) click on it.

Google Adwords has a much higher traffic, but on the downside they are a bit more strict and expensive than Bing Ads.

Optimizing is a bit harder. Some keywords will convert, others not that much, so you would need to know which keywords are bringing you the money, so you can wipe out the non performers. To do this, you would need a tracking system (like prosper202), which will keep track of that, but we’ll leave that for another time.

What do you think of this system? Have you ever tried it?