Google Adwords - Online riches without owning a website or product!

By Ian McIntosh
Posted Sunday, September 19, 2004

Did you know that you can make money from Google Adwords without having a product to sell, or even a website?

It's true and there are many people all around the world quietly making lots of money doing it.

So how do you do it?

Quite simple really, you become an affiliate.

An affiliate is somebody who sells other people's products for a share of the profits. There are loads of companies on line who are eager for you to become their affiliate, and will pay you very well for generating sales for them.

Did you know for example that mortgage companies and other financial institutions will pay up to $50 per referral? Normally your prospect doesn't even have to take the mortgage in order for you to pick up the money, you get it for them just filling in the form.

Other big payers are satellite TV companies and casinos. You might disapprove of gambling and not want to deal with casinos, but for those that do there is $50 available just for getting somebody to become a member of the site.

There are loads of other companies in all walks of life that want you as an affiliate, for example do you know that you can make up to 75% when you sell electronically downloadable products?

Sign up with an affiliate program that interests you and that you would be happy and enthusiastic about promoting. If you don't feel anything positive towards what you are trying to promote you will be less likely to commit your energy towards it. When you do sign up for your affiliate program, you will be allocated an affiliate "link", a short piece of text with the company's website and your unique ID in it. Always be sure to use this link in any promotions you do, or you won't get paid!

So how do you get these commissions from your affiliate program? Google Adwords!

If you've been living on Mars for the last couple of years, Adwords are the little boxes on the right hand side of the search results page which show up when you do a search on Google and other search engines. They are paid sponsor's advertisements and your goal is obviously to get as near to the top of the search results page as possible, so that as many people as possible will see your ad.

Now to sell the product that you've become an affiliate for, you simply write a short advertisement with a catchy title and two lines of text and refer the prospect to the sales website. This does not need to be a website that you own, remember when you signed up as an affiliate you already created an affiliate link to the site with your unique ID in it, so that the commission from any sale made goes to you.

There have been millions of words written about what makes good advertising copy, take a bit of time to read some of them. You'll find many great articles and ebooks here and on other sites, study them!

Google has a set of standard guidelines as to what they deem acceptable when it comes to writing your ad. You need to read these and stick to them. The next job is to decide what people searching the internet for your product might type in as a search, for example if you decide to sell mortgages you might use "cheap mortgages" or "best mortgage deals".

These phases are known as keywords, and you bid for the keywords on Google. Your bid is the amount of money you are prepared to pay for each click on your advert, and bidding starts at $0.05. So if you get a keyword for $0.05 and you get 100 clicks on your sales page, it costs you 100 x $0.05 ie $5.00.

Now let's have a look at your potential profits. A good sales page might get a return of 2% - 3%, ie out of every hundred clicks 2 - 3 will be converted into sales or sign-ups. So if you are promoting mortgages, out of the hundred clicks for your $5.00 outlay you could expect two or three sales, ie a return of $100 - $150.

Realistically though you would be doing very well to pay as little as $0.05 per click for a market as crowded as mortgages, you would most likely have to bid up considerably higher. But even at $0.50 per click, you would only be paying $50 for your return of $100 - $150 in the example above, still a very healthy profit margin.

Obviously the more popular the keyword or phrase the higher your bid will need to be to secure it, so you will find that phrases like "cheap mortgages" or "best mortgage deals" will be very expensive but will attract a lot of traffic.

About the Author
This article was written by Ian McIntosh, author of Introduction to Google Adwords. Please feel free to include it in any ezine or website as long as it is published intact. For the whole story on how you can get started making money with Google Adwords, go to (http://www.worldofebooks.com/introduction_to_adwords.htm)