The days of making a profit on a PPC campaign on the “front end” are over. Just say goodbye. And move on. Stop thinking about it, because it’s over.

You can’t simply drive traffic to a sales page, or a pre-sell page, get cheap clicks, and then expect to turn a profit any longer. It just doesn’t work. And if it does, you’re probably really lucky and it most likely won’t last long, or you won’t be able to repeat your success in another market.

Why do I say that?

Click costs are going up, competition is getting smarter, and so are your potential customers.

You can’t simply rely on converting clicks to sales, and making a profit. And really, you don’t even want to. Because if you’re doing that, then you don’t really have a business, you have a little PPC campaign that is profitable. If anything happens to that campaign, if Google decides to stop running it, or if click costs go up, etc. Then you’re out of business. You have nothing else to rely on, and you don’t even know who your customers are if you’re running an affiliate campaign (because the parent company retains customer info, not you.)

That’s some very shaky ground to build a “business” on, and it’s basically putting all your eggs in one basket that’s riding in the back of a truck, unsecured, and bouncing all over a dusty pot-hole-filled road. Don’t do it.

If you’re going to be doing PPC, hopefully that’s one *part* of the way you drive traffic to your offer and not the only way.

But if you’re doing PPC, you need to be building an email list so you can go back to your prospects/customers at a later date. You need to be able to sell them other related offers, or increase the conversion rate to sales of your current prospects.

An email list creates a much more secure traffic source, and whenever you send an email to your “list” it’s essentially free traffic. And you control when it comes, not Google or some other PPC network.

Also, I recommend you have your own products, and not sell affiliates products on the front end if at all possible. Why? Because you’ll have a higher profit margin, and therefore can afford higher cost per clicks, also, you have a more unique spot in the market.

Here’s a quick convo I had with someone over Skype explaining why even if you’re profitable on a PPC campaign on the front end…. It can be really difficult.

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Here’s the problem with PPC and trying to make a small profit on the front end
(From what I’ve done)
You sell a Clickbank product that sells for $30 commission
you do really well and get your CPC down to .25
you also do well and get a 1% conversion rate (which isn’t always easy)
You spend $25 to make $30
Sounds cool
But here’s the first problem
How much do you want to make a day?
$100 on the low end?
how many times do you have to make a $5 profit to make $100 a day?
20 times
how much do you have to spend to get that $100?
20 sales x $25 = $500
How much a month?
30 days x $500 = $15,000
How much do you make a year on $100?
a day?
$100 x 365 = $36,500
How much do you spend a year on ad costs?
$15,000 a month x 12 = $180,000
First off, do you have that kind of cash flow?
Second, can you even drive enough traffic to make 20 front end sales?
Third, is $36,500 a year enough for you to live on?
Fourth, if *anything* goes wrong with your campaign, that $5 profit can turn into a $5 loss

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I think you *need* a list, so you can sell other products in the future, and/or increase your conversion rate.

If you don’t… It can get really dicey fast.
-Sean