Pay per click is one of the most powerful methods around for affiliate marketing. In fact, many of the world’s top “super affiliates” make their money through pay per click.

Pay per click has many benefits over other styles of affiliate marketing. For one, the feedback is instant. You know if your campaign is profitable in days, sometimes hours, instead of having to wait weeks for traffic to trickle in with other methods.

It’s also highly scalable, meaning once you find a method that works you can often take that method and multiply it many fold.

Here are a few tips for success in PPC affiliate marketing.

=> Choose One Platform and Stick to It

There are many platforms you can choose from to do affiliate marketing. Some of these include:

* Google AdWords
* Google Content Network
* Yahoo! Search Marketing
* Bing
* Pay Per View: Zango, MediaTraffic, Trafficvance
* Banner-ad style PPC: magnify360 and others
* Facebook PPC
* MySpace PPC, Plenty of Fish PPC, etc.

People who succeed in PPC affiliate marketing are people who learn one system and learn it well, rather than people who dabble in many different systems. Pick one platform and stick to it. Get to know how it works and become an expert in that one system.

=> Network and Stay on Top of the Industry

Every PPC network changes, sometimes quickly. At the time of this writing, Yahoo is being purchased by Bing, which will completely change its algorithm. Google's content network is also strictly cutting back in direct linking affiliates.

To be successful as an affiliate, you need to stay on top of industry news and know what's going on with the specific platform you chose.

The best way to do this is to find affiliates who are successful and follow their blogs. Subscribe to their RSS feeds and stay on top of the industry. When the rules and best practices change, you need to know.

=> Test, Test, Test, Test, Test

PPC is all about testing. As a rule of thumb, about one out of eight campaigns will be successful. In other words, you may spend $100 on seven campaigns that all turn out to be a failure before you find that one campaign that makes $2,000 a month.

Test as many different ideas as you can, as quickly as you can.

Track everything. Track what keywords each sale came from. Track what they actually typed in as well as the keyword that triggered the impression, which are often two different keywords. Track which landing page they came from, the time of day the purchase was made and the country they're from.

If your campaign is making at least 60% of your initial investment, that usually means you can get it to profitability by tweaking. In other words, if you spend $100 and get $60 back, that probably means that if you tweaked the campaign enough you'd be able to turn that into a profitable campaign.

The bottom line is this: Pick a platform. Get to know that platform like the back of your hand. Read everything you can about that platform and stay on top of all the changes and current events relating to that platform. Then test, test, test and test campaigns until you find the ones that work for you.