Google’s Adsense program has been around since the early part of this decade. In that time, Adsense has generated millions in revenue for advertisers and much, much more for Google. Adsense gave Google both money and branding. Every time a web publisher hosts an Adsense ad, Google shows the sign, “Ads by Google” and gets paid by the advertiser per click or impression. The publisher also gets paid so it’s a win-win situation.

But just how much of a win has it been for the publisher? As an advertiser, I have an accounting of how much I pay Google per click or per impression on their content network. It used to be that you could advertise on Google’s content network for a little as a penny per click. Now a days, those penny clicks are all but gone — much like the penny arcades. Expect to pay 50 cents to several dollars per click now in order to get impressions on their content network.

So if I pay Google $1 per click, how much do they pay their publishers for hosting that ad? Up until a few days ago, nobody knew this information outside of Google. It was one of those Adsense secrets along with a great many other secrets that Google held closely like how they do their search algorithm.

I tried to guess the Adsense payout percentage. I have a size-able network of websites with Adsense Ads. Evey time someone clicks on the ads, I noted the payout amount in my Adsense account. The numbers varied according to the competition for that keyword at that moment in time. The numbers that I saw swung widely, even on the same website. For example, a click may pay 3 cents one day, and $3 per click on another day.

I tried to compare what I paid on Google Adwords for similar keywords, but without having access to Google’s data, my guesstimate was that they paid about 50% per click to me as the publisher. Alas, in the spirit of greater “transparency” according to the big G, I now know the answer to one of Google’s Adsense secrets … They pay 68% to the publisher.

Wow. That number is much higher than my guesstimate of 50%. I’m not complaining. I’m just surprised.

So should we all rush to build more Adsense sites? Not so fast. It’s curious that Google would choose to share this information right after they updated their ranking algorithm. The new algorithm would no longer rank “thin” websites optimized for long tail keywords so highly. If you know anything about another Adsense secret, it was to try and rank for the long tail. Hmmm…

If you are an Adsense publisher, let me know your thoughts on why Google would reveal one of their Adsense secrets at this time.

Cost per action advertising is getting a lot of attention from online marketers lately. Despite the economic downturn, this form of advertising seems to be holding steady. As a brief background, cost per action or CPA is a way for advertisers to get leads.

Let’s say your company sells perfumes online. You open an ecommerce store and hope that the traffic will come. Since hoping doesn’t work, you try writing articles and building links to your website. You get some traffic, but not the avalanche of visitors that you had hoped for. You then try advertising on paid search sites like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You get visitors but the clicks are costing you a lot of money. Sometimes you break even. Eventually, you figure out what your conversion rates are and your earnings per click and cost per click. Now you have metrics.

At this point, you can scale your traffic acquisition by inserting your product offer into cost per action networks like Hydra or Affiliate.com or Neverblue Ads or many others. The “complete” list of CPA networks is available for free at http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising.

Using cost per action advertising, your offer is available for affiliate marketers to promote. If you have a landing page with high conversions, you will get plenty of “free” traffic from affiliates.

Now let’s look at CPA marketing from the affiliate point of view. Many online marketers start their business by promoting other people’s products. This makes sense because there is no product creation cycle, no customer support hassles, no inventory … just drive traffic to a converting offer and get paid a commission. It’s that easy … or is it?

I’ve been doing CPA marketing for about 2 years following the methods that I learned from Gauher Chaudhry using his Pay-Per-Click-Formula v1.0. The “formula” worked as long as I was diligent in launching and tracking my CPA campaigns. I reached $100 a day in profits within 3 months of trial and error. Yes, you still have to do trial and error in this business. The trick is to fail fast and learn from your mistakes.

Today, much of what Gauher taught in PPCF v1.0 is available for free in his 89 page report, titled, “The Insider’s Guide to CPA Marketing Profits.” Even though I have the original course, which I paid several hundred dollars for, I went through the 89 page report to see if I could pick up some new information. After reading through the report, much of it I already learned. However, there was a method that I tried again that netted me $500 in profit.

Here is what I did. I read page 65 in the report and tried it on a new government regulation regarding analog to digital TV broadcasting conversion. I found a CPA offer that paid $7 per lead from the network on page 86 in the free guide. Then I ran a PPC campaign using a 3rd tier network called Looksmart. I also ran the ad on Ask.com.

I bid around 7 cents per click. Try bidding that low of an amount on Google these days and your ad won’t be shown. I got traffic almost instantly. I ran the ad for 10 days and made about $100 a day gross or about $50 a day net. After 10 days, the cost per action advertiser decided to pull the offer. This was too bad because I was making around $50 a day on autopilot. But these things do happen when you play in the PPC to CPA game.

PPCF v1.0 has been off the market for many, many months. On March 31st, Gauher will launch PPCF v2.0. I suspect that the new course will have many updated and new techniques. It will also not be cheap. However, you can grab his 89 page free CPA guide and get started today. That way you can find out for yourself if this method of making money online suits your fancy.

Here is where you can grab your guide:

http://alextran.com/cpaadvertising

DONOTCHANGE

What is affiliate marketing?… It is simply the use of freelance sales representatives to sell a merchants product and/or service for a percentage of the product’s sales price. For the merchant, it is a relatively “safe” sales channel where they only pay a commission if the product is sold by the affiliate. For the affiliate marketer, the benefit is that they can make money online without having their own product and its associated support issues.

If you want to give affiliate marketing a try, how would you go about it so that you can maximize your chances of success?

Here are some key tips to consider:

* Choose your niche online carefully

One of the most important factors to consider when marketing as an affiliate is choosing the best products to market to the right audience. It can make or break your net earnings. If you have a certain field of interest, I would start there. This typically makes the process of deciding what affiliate program to join easier. Start by making a list of your interests and see what affiliate programs come up when you Google it.

Here is a sample –> muay thai kickboxing affiliate programs.

* Create a website as your marketing and tracking platform

One of the best ways to do affiliate marketing is to create a website that reviews the product that you are promoting. Make sure the landing page on your website has no “leaks” and directs the visitor straight down the page with minimal distractions. This will increase your chances for conversion. Choose several headlines and split-test them. Provide relevant content and finish it up with a clear call to action. Content can be a mixture of text, images, videos, and/or audio.

Try split-testing directing the visitor directly to the merchant’s sales page and one where you capture the lead first into your system before sending to the merchant’s site.

* Use the power of freebies

If you want people to give you something online like their name and email address, you must first offer them something. Use free reports with content that is relevant to what they are searching for when they land on your page. You can either write the free report yourself with all original content or use content that you gather from online article directories like ezinearticles.com or ideamarketers.com.

* Test different methods of getting targeted traffic to your website

No matter how good your website and landing page is, it is useless without traffic. More specifically, you want targeted traffic. Avoid the temptation to buy “10,000 free visitors for $99″ type offers. That would be untargeted or junk traffic. Rather, look for the type of demographic that would match the product offering. Do basic on page SEO to start with but avoid heavy SEO work until after you have tested to see which keywords actually attract your desired demographic. Use PPC to test.

Other forms of traffic can come from being active and social at Web 2.0 sites.

Does all the above sound like a lot of work? It is if you try to do it all at once. Start small, test, adjust, then grow from there.

In most countries, taxi drivers are not too high up on the socio-economic food chain. In other words, taxi drivers don’t typically get paid very much for what they do.

When people want to get from point A to point B, they usually want to do it for as cheaply as possible. So they haggle with the taxi drivers over the cab fare. This puts further pressure on how much the driver ultimately gets paid. Overall, it’s not a good situation being a taxi driver.

So what’s an aspiring taxi driver to do if he wants to move up the economic ladder? The most obvious answer may be for him to save his money to buy his own cab. That way, he can keep more of what he earns. But how long would that take?

Well, let’s see… I am currently in Thailand writing this article so let’s use taxi drivers in Thailand as an example. Most taxis here are Toyota Corollas. A Corolla in Thailand costs roughly $25,000 US Dollars. That’s a big sum of money by most world standards. It’s a princely sum in Thailand, where the per capita income is considerably lower than the USA and other first world countries.

It costs me roughly 60 baht or $2 USD to take a cab from the Grand Palace to my hotel on Petchburi Road. Distance wise, it’s not far, about a few kilometers depending on which route you take. But traffic wise, it can take an hour. If you have ever experienced Bangkok traffic, you would understand. So the worst case is that the taxi driver would gross $2 USD per hour. If he works 10 hours per day, he would make $20 gross. Subtract his cost for gas, and he isn’t left with very much. It would take a long, long time to save enough money to buy his own car.

So what is plan B for an enterprising taxi driver? How about affiliate marketing?

Yes you read that right. A taxi driver can sign up to be an affiliate for jewelry stores, clothing stores, souvenir stores, travel agencies, and restaurants. Each store pays a flat fee of $5 per qualified lead. A qualified lead is defined as someone that the taxi driver literally drives to the store and drops off for a “quick look around.” The prospect does not have to buy anything for the taxi driver to get paid.

Does this sound like the Pay-Per-Lead programs that internet marketers see online?

In the real or offline world, traffic is literal. Here is how the numbers would work out for the taxi driver:

Drive tourist to jewelry store –> commission = $5;

Drive tourist to tailor store –> commission = $5;

Drive tourist to souvenir store –> commission = $5;

Drive tourist to travel agency –> commission = $5;

Drive tourist to restaurant –> commission = $5;

Charge tourist “reduced” fare –> $1.

Total amount earned = $26.

Compare this number to the $2 that the driver would normally earn by driving the tourist simply from point A to point B.

So yes, taxi drivers can and do make excellent affiliate marketers.

One final note: most affiliate marketers in Bangkok drive Tuk-Tuk’s. They are a form of motorcycle on three wheels. Tuk-Tuk’s seat two people.

Taxi drivers typically warn tourists to stay away from Tuk-Tuk’s. Go figure.

The most efficient and cost effective sort of advertising known today is called “Affiliate Marketing” – a form of revenue share and online advertising that works very well. Basically, a webmaster is paid by a company to display adverts on his/her site – either by the amount of clicks that advert receives or the amount of actual sales the advert generates. Generally, the latter is the preferred type of affiliate marketing, presenting little to no risk whatsoever for both the company wishing to sell its services/product, and the affiliate.

Affiliate marketing should not be confused with multi-level-marketing (MLM) or network marketing, although many companies do make use of online network marketing techniques. Affiliate marketing works differently, though, in the sense that the webmaster himself (the affiliate) earns an income, and does not sign up or register anyone into the program himself. Both forms can produce a large revenue for both parties, but multi-level marketing is an entirely different subject.

There are some pros and cons to affiliate marketing, but most of the advantages weigh out the disadvantages. The only real disadvantage of the program is that it is not easily scalable, and many bad management techniques have led to adware, false advertising, spam or “spamdexing” – which is a website that consists only of advertising, and no real content. These kinds of sites often just produce pop-ups and link to further types of useless sites. But because of the rise of blogs and the rising intelligence of search engines, these kinds of issues are decreasing.

One of the most tried, trusted, and beneficial ways of increasing online sales through marketing and advertising is affiliate marketing. This is basically a revenue share sort of system, where an affiliate is given a form of commission from a merchant, based on how many sales the affiliate has generated through advertising on his/her site. Affiliate marketing began just four years after the world-wide web was launched, and many successful e-commerce sites owe much to this simple yet effective method.

There are three types of affiliate marketing methods of payment – either pay-per-click (generated by actual clicks or referrals to the merchant from the affiliate’s site), pay-per-action or pay-per-sale (very similar, in that the affiliate receives payment, either a fixed amount or commission, based on the sales or subscriptions that have come through referrals or adverts on the affiliate’s site.) The last two methods of payment are generally preferred by merchants, due to many fraudsters taking advantage of the click system and setting up sites with forced clicks, pop-ups, adware, spam, false advertising and many other “black hat” techniques.

Affiliate marketing is not limited to only display-adverts on an affiliate site, but also comes in the form of email, blogs, rss feeds, content and niche sites, loyalty sites, comparison sites or shopping directories, and other forms. It is an extremely low cost, but highly effective form of marketing and advertising, presenting little to no risk for both the merchant and the affiliate.