Anybody who has dabbled in web marketing knows that a prime source of revenue for web marketers is selling "affiliate" products. If you don't have your own product — and many of us do not — then all you have to do is get your web visitors to click thru to "gurus" like Jim Daniels, Cory Rudl, or Ken Evoy, and they will gladly give you anywhere from 25% to 60% of retail price just for click thru.

Everybody in business seems to think this is a wonderful system. What could be better? You build traffic to your site and gradually gain credibility as a reliable source of marketing information. And you leave product development to guys who really know what they're doing.

You send them prospects. They send you checks. Cha-ching.

Just another "marketing expert"

Unfortunately only products worth selling are "info-products" that pay large commissions. Companies that sell "real" products like golf balls, computers, and books pay such a small commission it is hardly worth your while sticking their link on your site.

So this means that in order to make money as an affiliate, you have to become another of thousands of Mini Marketing Gurus out there. And because there are so many of us, your chances of actually making any money are pretty slim.

Mini Gurus are just lemmings

Even worse, while you build your business and (maybe) develop your own products and services, you must prostitute yourself to gurus who already have products.

Because as far as I can tell "affiliate" relationship turns us into lemmings.

It encourages newly created Mini Gurus to latch onto affiliate products in an absolutely uncritical way. Many of these products are nothing more than glorified "how to" manuals, but intense hype by experienced marketers turns them into "super products". And a bevy of willing affiliates cannot offer objective information about them because they think their livelihood depends on selling them.

What are AdWords? Can you picture small rectangular boxes that appear next to Google search results? If you cannot, goto Google now and make a search to find out related advertisements to that particular search in small boxes next to search results. These are called AdWords. Goto http://adwords.google.com to get an idea about this, before you read rest of this article.

What is ClickBank? It's one of major eBook and Software companies in market today and known to pay very high commission rates to its affiliates. With their huge catalog, it's not difficult to search a product to suit any target market, and average profit you can make per item sold is around $10 mark. They pay you bi-weekly with a minimum payout of $10, to any country in world. Which simply means, if you can search and recommend a product to some of your friends by email with a special link ClickBank gives you, and if only one person buys, you can get a paycheck addressed to your home. If you don't have an account with them, get one for free and browse site to get an idea. Goto http://zzz.clickbank.net/r/?hfahadh

Why ClickBank and AdWords? ClickBank products are easily sellable and AdWords gives you chance to meet a target market. Whats difference between targeted and untargeted markets? If there are 100 click throughs to a motor parts website and if visitors are sent in from a Humor site, sales ratio would be much lesser compared to a visiotor stream from a Vehicle site. More related product to visitor is, a better sales ratio you can expect. Highly targeted market means there is a very close relationship between user's interests and product.

Google AdWords can give you a very cost effective way to reach highly targeted markets. Your ads have a great exposure, as they will also be shown on Google partner search engines and in many websites, while making sure that ad will only be shown to targeted visitors. You will only pay for clicks, not impressions - you don't pay for showing your ad. As an example, if you pay $0.20 per visitor and if it takes 20 visitors per sale (since it's highly targeted traffic), and if you average profit is $10 per item, you spend 20 * $0.20 = $4 dollars per sale to make a $10 profit. A very good return on investment.

The results can be so much better or can be worst, depending on how you manage campaigns. If you have a great knowledge on how google AdWords works, optimizing techniques, how to manage your budget and how to keep costs low while maintaining a good click through ratio (thus in turn sales ratio).