Recently spoke to someone that got the two confused, for a basic business website you can do a few things for affiliate marketing and the same for PPC Marketing, I will explain them both briefly.
Affiliate Marketing describes the relationship between businesses (websites) when one business rewards another for each visitor or more commonly each sale it supplies or brings or provides via a link, example would be an Amazon product for sale on one site that when clicked on goes to the Amazon site and if a purchase occurs the originating website gets financially rewarded.
PPC Advertising In Google this is referred to as ‘Adsense’ and occurs when one website agrees to ‘rent’ out some screen space to an advertising agency (like Google) so it can run ‘related’ ads on the page. Once these adverts are ‘clicked on’ then that is enough to generate a commission payment from the advertising network / agency (Google) to the originating website.
Here is some thoughts I gave to a SEO workshop recently about someone that talked about having a way to earn money from their site, we were acting as an expert witness to attempt to rectify a situation so excuse the detailed semi-official text:
[Delicious] You stated that you initially wanted affiliate marketing and ppc adverts on your site and the website design company explained that a site has to have a huge amount of traffic to even generate a small income from PPC and Affiliate Marketing. They gave an example of a website that has nearly 7000 visitors a month and that is using PPC adverting and only produces £13 to £20 per month in income from PPC adverts, despite this you requested that your website company put adverts on the site after they explained that Google adverts would be the best way forward for you giving the most targeted adverts with the most commission.
The website design company requested your adsense codes to put on the website for your PPC adverts, you replied with a Google account login details and they attempted to create these codes only to find that you hadn’t created an adsense account, they tried to do this for you but then discovered that Google will not allow you to create an account for your website as there are not enough ‘relevant and unique’ pages they found that sites with 300 pages are approved within a few days but as your site has no unique content it wont be approved.
You also suggested your SEO / Website Design company look at affiliate website to ‘get a link’, which they did and investigated their Affiliated page for you and stated that this is their affilate network where you can join, which entails having code embedded in your site inviting users to visit their site and sign-up and pay for expert advice, but the links they were showing were for two companies and you were informed that they are there above the other 4000 affiliate member websites due to being the most visited sites (thats was an educated guess).
The SEO / Website Designers, by your own admission, spent a lot of time talking to you and attempting to put PPC code on your site and they stated through this process that their opinion has not changed in that affiliate code and PPC Adverting is the last thing your brand new website needs at the moment as it will earn you nothing for at least 2 years, will take people away from your site and the site is totally lacking relevant text and ‘real’ members.
The above dialogue demonstrates a website owner that likes the idea of earning money from a website but has no real idea how this is achieved. In general new business websites should be created to attract new clients / members with valuable content or valuable services then in the ‘unlikely’ event of having a popular website then you can consider the ways to ‘monetise’ it via PPC advertising and Affiliate marketing. These are nice decisions to make but not before you even have one bit of unique text on your site.
