About 10 years ago, a new type of search engine surfaced on the Internet scene.  It was a way that you could buy yourself into the top of the search engine rankings in a bidding fashion.  This came to be known as pay per click marketing and it wasn’t long before all of the search engines adopted this style of advertising.  When many people think about this type of advertising, they think about the Google Adwords system.  The fact of the matter is, Google is only one of the ways that you can receive traffic in this fashion.  If you use it effectively, however, they can send you more traffic than anyone else.

It was such an easy thing to find some keywords with low competition, throw up a page that pointed to an affiliate program and buy an ad through the pay per click marketing systems.  Not all that long ago, however, something happened that dramatically changed the scene of this kind of advertising.  It is usually known as the Google slap, a time in which people saw their rankings in pay per click marketing drop dramatically overnight.  Not only did they drop quickly, they continued to drop consistently for a long period of time.  Why is this?

Google began to institute a new policy that was known as the quality score.  Although they had used the quality score before this time, they really began to put it into effect and that is what caused the Google slap to occur.  As it turns out, Google didn’t want a lot of affiliate programs cluttering up their advertising space.  Their claim is to be interested in quality content and this also included their ads.  If the advertisement or the keyword did not fit in well with the webpage to which it was pointing, you either lost your ranking power or your minimum bid was raised to such a high level that you could never afford it.  It seemed that this was the death of affiliate marketing using pay per click advertising.  Is that really the case?

Actually, it is easier now to make money with pay per click marketing and affiliate advertising than it was before.  Not that it takes less work, but there is much less competition to worry about.  All that is really necessary is for you to put up a page that is relevant to what you are trying to offer.  You can do so in the way of a review article for the product that you are associated with.  Simply point your Google ad to this page and you should rank well while only paying out a minimum bid.

The two things that you are going to need whenever you do this kind of advertising are patience and a desire to stick to it.  Not every ad campaign that you’re going to run will be a success.  Enough of them will work, however, to make it well worth your while.

As far as sending you website traffic, Google is definitely king.  That doesn’t mean, however, that you should ignore all of the other search engines.  As a matter of fact, being listed well in the minor search engines can also send you a lot of traffic that will work well towards making your business profitable.  Some of the search engines may actually be able to send you better qualified traffic than even Google can.  It all really depends on the demographics of those that end up on your website.  Let’s take a look at the other search engines and see what they can do for you.

A long time before Google ever even came onto the scene there was Yahoo.  This was more of a directory that a search engine whenever they first started out.  Even after they began to use Inktomi to run their search engine results, they still were struggling to offer quality to those that were actually searching for something on their website.  Throughout all of this time, their main thrust was toward their directory which was a human edited.  Eventually, Google came onto the scene and they had a fairly decent index as far as search engines are concerned.  For quite some time, they also were the search engine that drove the results which Yahoo displayed.  Eventually, Yahoo stopped using Google for their search engine results and switch back to something that was similar to Inktomi

Even though Yahoo is placing a distant second to Google’s traffic, they can still drive quite a lot of people to your website if you are positioned well.  The problem with this is it can be very difficult to rise in Yahoo’s rankings rather quickly.  They seem to have slowed down after everybody was doing the blog and ping scenario to death.  You can still get decent rankings in Yahoo, however, simply by getting plenty of decent links into your website.  You may also be able to rank better if you pay for a listing in their directory.

MSN comes in a distant third as far as search engine traffic is concerned.  Still, you are able to get some very qualified visitors from the search engine if you can rank well for competitive keyword phrases.  It seems that those who come from MSN are more likely to buy or take some other action than those that are visiting from Google or Yahoo.  The reason why this may be the case is because those that are coming from the larger search engines tend to be a little bit more technically savvy than those coming from MSN.

The next time that you are stressing over your Google rankings, take a look at how well you’re doing on the other search engines.  Put a little bit of work into it and you will begin to reap the rewards of good listings outside of the Google empire.