Last month before the Holidays I began my Media Buying 101 Series. My first post gave a very basic introduction to promoting affiliate offers by purchasing inventory on websites by the CPM (cost per one-thousand impressions). My second post went on to talk about how to find sites that convert. Over the last few week’s we’ve had some questions/comments come in that I want to address during this installment.

Before you can begin a media buy for a campaign you need to make sure it works on a CPC (cost per click/pay-per-click) platform. If you cannot make money purchasing traffic by the click, there is NO WAY you’re going to make money paying by the impression. Don’t even waste your money on a media buy test if you haven’t successfully mastered your offer on a pay-per-click platform. Paying for traffic by the click is a direct-response marketer’s dream. You’re paying for traffic that has shown an interest in your advertisement and is now making their way to your landing page to further investigate. With media buying you’re only paying for the impression, so even if they don’t click, you are responsible for the traffic. While you can make a lot more money media buying you can also lose a lot if you do not first test paying by the click.

Many affiliate marketers have came to me and asked what CPC platform they should use to test their campaign. They complain that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Pulse 360, and many others have either became too competitive or too strict to get their offers up and running. While this maybe true, these are still not your only option. Those are the ones that are best known but have you tried the following:

* facebook.com
* plentyoffish.com
* abcsearch.com
* 7search.com
* findology.com
* miva.com
* looksmart.com
* searchfeed.com
* marchex.com
* search123.com
* findit-quick.com
* pageseeker.com
* xoole.com
* bigclique.com

I could go on-and-on with more sites. There are hundreds if not thousands of pay-per-click platforms out there, but if you’re not willing to put the grunt work in to find them, you’re going to be left behind. It is also important to note, if you’re paying for traffic by the click on websites, take note of those, as you may have better luck doing a media buy on those sites direct. Once you get your campaign profitable on two or three pay-per-click platforms you are then ready to make your way over to media buying. Media buying can take your affiliate marketing campaigns to the next level, but your first level must be achieve at a PPC level.

In my next installment, I’m going to begin talking about serving your advertisements and how you need to go into a campaign ready to optimize, optimize, optimize! If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our RSS feed as I’m going to share some techniques that will benefit even the most experienced affiliate marketer!