If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Finding winning PPC affiliate marketing campaigns can be tough. It is especially difficult when you spend a lot of time researching a market, setting up a landing page or website, and creating a nice PPC campaign only to find out that, for one reason or another, the promotion isn’t a success.

There are so many variables when promoting products and services through PPC search engines that it is very difficult to consistently choose markets and develop them into profitable campaigns. Among other things, the market could be full of tire kickers, the competition could be too fierce for you to handle, or the merchant you are promoting just doesn’t convert.

Because of all these potential problems, many people either fail to take action or they quit once they fail after a few tries. The best way that I have found to combat this, and take all potential problems out of your mind, is to use a brute force method of testing affiliate programs.

The concept is very simple: spend as little time as possible setting up as many PPC campaigns as possible to sift through all the clutter and find profits.

Start by searching through affiliate networks (CJ, ClickBank, AzoogleAds, etc) for programs that look intriguing, programs you think might be a success. Develop a list of all the affiliate programs and products you are going to test, try to find at least ten unique merchants before continuing.

Don’t just stick to your favorite markets when choosing affiliate programs to promote. Diversify yourself. Choose markets that you know nothing about, choose them at random. Try to test out as many different markets and as many different products as possible. The idea is to throw a bunch of crap at the wall and see what sticks.

Once you have a list of affiliate programs that you want to test out, open up your PPC account (preferably AdWords for the volume) and your keyword gathering software (I use WordTracker). Now, create a single campaign for all of the merchants and start filling it with your test ad groups. You should be creating a handful of ad groups for each merchant and should only be paying a maximum of about 21 cents per click (I like to set them all at 11 cents).

Don’t worry about the QualityScore or competing with other advertisers with the same URL, just take your chances that you will get some clicks. Also, make sure that you have tracking set up at least at the ad group level so that you know which are converting.

Next, just leave those ad groups to accumulate clicks over time (it could be months). When you notice some sales, investigate further and see if you can develop that program into a real affiliate campaign to extract more profits out of it. As long as you are getting sales, you can usually optimize it to turn a profit. If, however, you send a couple hundred clicks to a merchant and they convert very poorly, simply delete the ad group and move on.

It is reasonable to expect that at least 1/10 of your test merchants will produce some sales. Therefore, if you dedicate 10 hours a week to test out 40 different affiliate programs, you should have a minimum of 4 (or more) potentially profitable campaigns per week. Some may only make a couple sales a week while others could make you a few hundred dollars a day. I know because I have found them ;-)

Test this method out for a week or two and set up a good amount of PPC campaigns. I guarantee you will be surprised at the profitable merchants that you find. If you truly did cast a wide net and chose merchants at random, you will have found affiliate programs that no one else cares about, but that make you some really good money.