Lets talk about another variant on the pay-per-lead model. This model is called  the pay-per-click affiliate program (PPC). Here the company running the program pays you whenever someone simply clicks on its banner or link from your site.

Although generally a flat rate of “x” dollars (cents is more accurate) is paid for each click, some Companies running PPC affiliate programs weight their payment rates in favor of those affiliates who send the most clicks. The more clicks you send the vendor, the higher rate per click they will pay you.

Some PPC affiliate programs take things even further and adjust your payment rate according to the quality of clicks you send them. That is the percentage of conversions (i.e. sales) realised from the total number of clicks sent. In this scenario you need to be just as confident of the merchant’s ability to sell as with PPS.

In any event, unless you have a lot of traffic in a competitive category, you’re probably looking at a paltry $0.01 to $0.05 per click… don’t spend it all at once!

For these programs to be worthwhile you really need a site with a highly targeted audience. If you then carefully choose products or services closely matched to their interests, from professional vendors (i.e. those that know how to sell) you can earn a reasonable amount. Providing that you have the traffic of course!

For anything other than a small website however, almost all PPC programs tend to require a lot of effort for not much return. Searching for relevant ads, getting the code, and pasting it into your pages all takes time. And many PPC ads don’t have a very long life-span (often because companies use them for special promotions or testing), meaning you have to keep replacing them.

One notable exception is the Google.com Adsense program, which although PPC, employs Google’s sophisticated search technology to automatically display ads that are relevant to your page content.

You no longer have to spend time searching for matching advertisers, or signing up for multiple programs, and one identical snippet of code is all you ever need to add to all your pages. You can literally “set it and forget it” knowing your website will always be showing ads related to the page content.

Automatic relevancy to content drives up click-through rates, not only for the most obvious reasons, but also because search engines and searchers aren’t perfect, meaning visitors often arrive at a web page from a search engine thinking the page contains something other than it actually does. That something else will be something related to the page content, and so it’s very likely that one of the contextually relevant ads will offer what they are seeking. This leads to a click on an ad for something that the webmaster would not have considered advertising.

These higher click-through rates and ease of implementation make contextual advertising the first choice in PPC affiliate programs today. Websites with many pages of content on popular search categories (where ads earn a high cost-per-click) can make a thousands of dollars a month with Adsense alone.

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