Turning a pay per click affiliate program into a money making machine involves getting to know what professional Internet marketers call the metrix. The metrix is simply a term that means ?numbers.? You need to get cozy with your numbers and you have to know how to read them so that you can figure out when they are reflecting a profit and when they are reflecting loss. This is how you figure out your costs versus your profits and whether or not you are getting ahead.

As an affiliate marketer you will also hear the term ROI flung around all the time. This is an acronym for Return on Investment For instance, If you know that your affiliate program pays you $1.00 for sale, you could theoretically bid 0.75 cents per click to bid on a keyword in a pay per click program and still make a quarter with each click. However what many beginning network marketers overlook in the beginning (perhaps it is wishful thinking) is that this is only true if 100% of the people visiting your site actually buy. This means that most of that .75 that you are paying for is going to consumed by someone who logs into your site and is ?just looking.? Never assume that the traffic you are bidding on is going to be the same kind of traffic that is already visiting your website.

If you don't want untargeted, non-buying traffic it is important to do some market research before you launch a pay per click advertising campaign. This means taking the time to find out which words or phrases people most commonly use and input into the search engines when they shop for your product or service. One of the best free online tools for conducting this kind of targeted market research is the Overture (Yahoo) keyword search engine tool.