While searching for ways to reduce the cost of your pay per click advertising, you may have come across the terms “advertising arbitrage.” There are quite a few products based on this concept, including one called “Get Google Ads Free!” which was quite popular about two years ago. Many other products tout that it is possible to get your pay per click ads for “free” by simply “inserting a few lines of code” in your page. But the question remains: is this really possible?

I will get right to the point with the answer: technically, yes. But these methods will not be suitable for most affiliate marketers or even those who have their own products to sell. Why? Aren’t the ads supposed to be free?

Well, they aren’t. You will still be required to pay for your traffic just like anyone else. The whole idea behind the “advertising arbitrage” concept is that you hope to make up the cost of your pay per click campaigns by selling ad space on your website. Claiming that your pay per click ads will be “free” in this case would be the equivalent of saying that you can get a free 8 bedroom house by renting out 7 of the rooms in order to cover your mortgage payment.

This will simply not work if you are actively selling something on your site, whether it’s a product of your own or affiliate offers that you are pushing. The first problem is that by selling ad space on your landing page you will be potentially leaking traffic away to your competition. Advertisers typically buy ad space only on relevant sites. So the only people interested in buying space on yours would usually be those in the same niche. Have you seen an ad banner for Pepsi on the Coca Cola website? What about an ad for Ford on the Honda site? I don’t think so.

To further add to the problem, it will be very hard to sell ad space on your site if it is a relatively new one with limited traffic. If your only source of traffic is pay per click ads, it will also be extremely difficult to sell enough ads to cover your costs.

Now, can this method of “traffic arbitrage” actually work for some people? Yes, it can, but only if the goal of your site is not primarily to sell something. Let’s say you own a discussion forum, a free image host or a free web hosting service. You could sell some ad space on your site (one of the main ways of getting revenue from these kinds of sites) and then buy pay per click traffic in the hopes of getting more members and thus drumming up more recurring visitors to your site. This is, to my knowledge, the only way to make traffic arbitrage work. The only true way to get free pay per click traffic is if you find a promotional offer or get a voucher for X amount of dollars of free ads somewhere.

Google Adsense is one of the most overlooked areas of monetization of projects in internet marketing sometimes. A lot of bloggers and content creators know about Adsense, but many affiliate marketers and straight internet marketers over look it for other more lucrative offers.

The thing is, however, is that Adsense can be used alongside other offers of CPA, Affiliate links, and more. Adsense doesn’t get in the way of those offers and the bright shiny pictures of your affiliate links will overshadow the text based Adsense stuff, and that is a good thing. Adsense can be a compliment and not the major source of income, but can be a great supplemental offering.

The process to market for ad revenue from Google is fairly simple. Of course the ads which are served on your websites will have two ways of being shown on your website when using AdSense:

1. Ads served will be based off of keywords searched through Google to bring viewers to your site.
2. Ads will derive from relevant content on your site when they arrive from links or direct URL input.

So it is necessary to build up the content on the site to where the ads that appear are relevant to what you will want to be paid for. To look up the value of keywords you will be getting paid for, you can use the keyword tool from Google AdWords (under previous interface) to see the average cost per click of keywords and their synonyms.

Composing content for the website will then need to pull from these keywords that you want to rank for on Google and other major search engines. The content, once created with the appropriate keywords will then be posted to the site and will be indexed by Google over time. When traffic makes its way to the site and the ads are served for the content you provide, it will be more likely that the ads are targeted appropriately.

One of the important things to take note of is to never try to rank for keywords with too much competition. Although the payouts in cost per click on these ad keywords is higher, you will more than likely not rank high enough for those keywords to actually receive ads for those keywords. The best strategy is to try and rank for a range of keywords with average or little competition so that people who do see the site when they search will more likely to click ads when they arrive.

Choosing a niche to go into can be a lot of work and extremely stressful for new internet marketers and future affiliate marketers. It doesn’t have to be that difficult though, and I will give you 4 tips below to help you choose your affiliate niche and product.

Something That Interests You
One of the most overlooked things about being an affiliate is picking a niche that you like. It helps prevent burnout and fatigue with work and will allow you to continue to push harder when times get rough if you are passionate about a subject. For example, I don’t care about forex, heck, I don’t even know what it means. Why would I spend time and effort on a product promoting a forex tool that I know nothing about, or care nothing about? Sure I can learn, but my heart won’t be there and it won’t show in my results. If you are passionate about a niche, promote a product within it — your excitement and knowledge will show through to the potential customers.

Something With Profit Potential
Of course, even if you like something doesn’t mean there is a profit potential. I suggest trying a few niches on topics you think you might like then seeing what works after a few months. If you have 10 sales on one item and no sales on another, then you should probably pick the one that has made you some money, right? This one is pretty simple, but see how successful and tight the competition is and go from there.

Reputable Offer (Not a Scam)
Make sure you check the offer out before you start promoting it. Read through every fine line of text on the sales/copywriting page. Make sure the offer sounds legitimate to you, not scammy. If it sounds like a scam to you, it will sound like a scam to your potential customer. Make sure the sales page is good, all the information is there and that the offer is valid (purchase it before hand, maybe?) and make sure you are promoting something worthwhile.

Good Commission
Finally, make sure your work is going to yield you a good commission. The percentage doesn’t really matter, but the amount does. If you can sell 10 copies of something at $50 or 10 copies of something else at $30, which will you choose?