This will be the first of my Eight Part ‘Network Online Review’ series on many of the most effective ways you can use to drive traffic to your website.   The simple fact is that to be successful as an affiliate marketer, you must have  a website.  Better yet,  you’ll soon learn that you’ll really need multiple websites to achieve true success.

However,  a website alone is not enough.   You also need ways to drive traffic, or to attract traffic to your website.    Equally, if not more important, your website needs to be constructed in such a way that it will actually convert that traffic to sales.  The bottom line is that without these two essential elements, traffic and conversion, you will never achieve success online.

There are basically two ways to drive traffic to your website.  You can either purchase traffic through paid advertising, or you can create it through other promotional means such as Web 2.0 and other so-called ‘organic search’, or ‘search engine optimization (SEO)  means.

Through this series of eight or more articles.  I will review both ways of driving traffic to your website with focus on the ways I have found to be the most effective to do so with a minimal advertising and promotional budget.  I certainly won’t cover every way, but I will cover those that I think are particularly effective.

You need to understand that if you don’t have a lot of time to attract traffic to your affiliate marketing website through the organic search means, you’ll probably have to buy the traffic.  If on the other hand, if you do have the time and inclination to learn the methodology, you can achieve outstanding success using the ‘organic search’ means alone.  This in fact, is the route that I have selected to drive traffic to virtually all of my websites

This article will review the most used way to ‘buy’ traffic on the internet.

Part 1 -  Advertising With Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Pay per click advertising accounts for roughly one third of Google’s subtsantial and still growing revenue(over $50 billion for Q1, 2009).   You only have to do a Google search to see how PPC works.   All of the ads on the right sidebar are PPC ads, as well as one or two in the highlighted background at the top of the page.

You can place these ads for as low as five cents per click, and they can go for $20 per click or more depending on your competition for the ad space.    You can have an advert up on Google in just five minutes with a potential audience of hundreds of millions.   This is indeed, the fastest possible way to drive traffic to your website, though not inexpensive.  In addition, it is highly likely that whoever clicks on your ad will have high interest in what you are offering.

Hold that in contrast, with literally any other form of advertising, where ads are placed  in various media for thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases with no guarantee that anyone will even bother to respond in any way.  In PPC, you only pay when people read your ad and do click through to your website or sales page to get further information.  This is an ingenious concept that has only come about with the advent of the Internet.  In addition, you can put ads on other networks than Google to include Yahoo, MSN, and others.

How does it work?

Basically, this advertising form is so targeted because the ads only show on a webpage or search engine result that a person visits because they are looking for something inn response to a search engine query.  When someone types a keyword into Google search, for example, a number of potential information sources relevant to the keyword entered are shown.   The same is true for the pay per click ads that are presented at the top of and in the sidebar of the search results. They are also relevant to the entered search phrase.

When you choose to advertise using PPC, you determine appropriate keywords for your offering, include the key ones in your brief ad copy.You then bid on those and a number of other related keywords to get your ads placed and to achieve  a high level of the ad ranking when those keywords are searched.

Let’s say for example that you choose to bid $.50 on the keyword network marketing.  Because network marketing is such a popular and well searched term, you’re unlikely to get a very high ad placement on a search network because such a popular term might require a bid of $10 or more just to get on the first page of ads for that particular search result, let alone be the first ad on the page.

Now Let’s Look at a Bit More Detail

PPC advertising campaigns are offered by many search engines, but let’s start with the three major PPC search engines.  They are Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  The largest search engine by far these days is Google and this is where you can probably get the most bang for your buck in PPC.  Google gives excellent training on how to use PPC, and once you master the basics, it may be appropriate to branch out onto Yahoo and MSN as well for a bit of additional traffic. You might be able to get better traffic at lower cost on the alternatives once you’ve optimised your ads and keyword terms.

There was a time in the beginning when the PPC marketing was extraordinarily effective at very low cost.  However, as do most good marketing strategies, this particular methodology has become highly competitive.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, who use PPC has a major element of their marketing campaigns.

Because it is so competitive, it is very important that you know what you’re doing in order to operate cost effective PPC campaigns with a reasonable ROI.  If you’re going to be successful, you simply have to be better at it than your competition.

The Search Network versus the Content Network

When you mount a PPC campaign, you can elect to have your ad show up in one or both of two different ways.  The first is called the “search network”, wherein your ads will show up on the sidebar of a search results page.

The other is called a “content network”, wherein your ads will show up in the actual content of webpages on the websites of those who choose to have PPC ads appear on their website, from which they can earn earn a small fee from the advertiser.  When someone clicks on the ad.  You will see ads by Google on many webpages these days.  In fact, so online marketers earn a substantial portion of their income from clickthroughs on the many ads the have allowed to be place on their webpages.

Advantages and Disadvantages

It is believed that when your ad shows up on a search network, you’ll generally get much higher quantity of click throughs on your ads, but the cost may be extraordinarily high to achieve high enough ad placement to achieve the click throughs.  In general, search network ads are much more targeted to the keywords that are being searched for, but the cost to achieve satisfactory placement may be high.

Content ad placement is based on algorithms developed by the search engine companies that attempt  to determine the particular relevancy of an ad to the content of a specific webpage, or blog post.  While you may in fact get more exposure using this methodology, the targeting is likely will likely be much less precise.  Often times when perusing a website with the ads by Google, you’ll sometimes note that the ads that show up on page do not seem to be particularly related to page page content.  The algorithms  For ad placement are not perfect.

To summarize, ads placed in the content network are generally less targeted, but higher volumes of people are likely to see them.  Search network ads will likely produce higher-quality click throughs because the placement of the ads is more relevant to specific keywords being searched.

I’ve tried both and my experience has been that I generally get more effective results in the content network.  When competing in high competition niches like network marketing, the bid prices are so high  to achieve first page or first-place ranking in search network campaigns,  that return on investment is often negative  Basically, by bidding low prices, you may get virtually no clicks on search network ads, but you can still generate a reasonable amount of click through in the content network at that price.

You can get a whole lot more detail on the technical aspects and strategies for PPC marketing by studying the free adwords training that Google provides in their Google Adwords Learning Center.  Click here to go to that free resource.

Now let’s move on to our next post for review for a review of the second sort major source of traffic , which is search engine optimization (SEO) for organic search