I used the following method to earn my first few bucks with affiliate marketing not all that long ago. I continue to use it today. However, the exact method I’ll explaining I no longer use because it got saturated, and the ads may not even be TV or radio on anymore. Whatever it was, I stopped making money with it and moved on.

The Concept

The basic stradegy is to bid on keywords that people may be searching for after they see or hear an ad on radio or TV. By doing so you can get extremely cheap clicks, with very little competition. In this example I was taking advantage of the TVFreeXbox.com commercials. It was some young guy talking about how you could get a free Xbox 360 for just signing up.

What they didn’t tell you in the commercial was that you had to complete X number of offers before you got it. It was essentially the exact same thing as the free gadget email/zip submits you see on almost every affiliate network. The only difference is that these are promoted on TV/radio, and they probably won’t go so far out of their way to keep you from getting your reward.

So I was bidding on keywords such as tvfreexbox.com, “tv free xbox”, etc. (Make sure on keyphrases you do exact or phrase match or you will be paying for a bunch of keyphrases that won’t convert.

This is an easy mini-niche to earn some extra cash with for two reasons. The clicks are cheap, and there isn’t much competition, as mentioned earlier. The second reason is that people that are searching for such things are usually not too bright to begin with, are happy to enter their zip/email, and they may even think you are the company advertising on TV which adds to your percieved reliability.

Tips and Expansion

• The closer you can get to the advertised domain, the better. But be careful not to copy it too closely. I was running a campaign with theirdomain.info instead of the .com that they were using. It wasn’t long before my affiliate manager contacted me to tell me the company was threatening legal action. On Yahoo, I even made the mistake of using their domain as my display URL. Conversions went up, but I’m pretty sure thats what got me in trouble.
• Don’t direct link. People that find your ad have probably searched around for other free offers. They’ve probably seen your landing page before if you are direct linking, and your bounce rate will be higher than if you used a landing page.
• Go the scam route. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m sure you’ve seen those “MLM Program Exposed” ads on Google, or something similar. I have a feeling this would work. Especially for sites that have the SERPS littered with forum/ripoffreport threads.
• It’s also a good idea to explore outside of the “free stuff” niche. I know it has been discussed on Wickedfire before, how you can bid on late night MLM urls and such.

I hope this was informative, and gave some of you guys new to AM some ideas. This definitely won’t make you rich, but it can make you at least $50 a week depending on how many advertisements are running for the sites you are piggybacking off of.

If you are looking for some email submits to try this method with, check out Copeac (aff). If you signed up under my link, and are looking for some help, feel free to ask.