Arbitrage, or using PPC (pay-per-click) to drive traffic to your website in an effort to get people to click on your ads, is a tricky, but potentially very profitable tactic for making money online. When using Adwords to drive traffic to Adsense pages, there are a few things to keep in mind. You must find the right balance of content, relevance, and ads to keep Google happy, or else you’ll find your Adsense account banned and your website ignored by Google’s crawler. Worse yet, you may blow loads of money in PPC to find only a fraction of your costs returned in ads. Let’s look at some important factors in finding the right balance for your arbitrage campaigns.
Probably the single most important factor in pulling off a successful arbitrage campaign is relevant content. If the page you send clicks to via Adwords (or another PPC engine) contains relevant content, you are clear. Google doesn’t have a problem with arbitrage itself. Google hates the horrible, nonsensical Adsense scrub sites that clog the internet with gibberish and deliver nothing of value to the users. And who can argue? When was the last time you searched for something important, only to find several sites full of gibberish and ads?
Give the user content, whether a few short paragraphs or something longer, but whichever way you choose to go, keep it relevant. If your page has relevant content, you will probably never hear a peep out of Google.
The next important point is that you find keywords to focus your content around such that your ads deliver the highest per-click payout possible. If you are paying 10 cents per click to bring a user to your site, and the most you get if they click on an ad is 3 cents, you can’t hope to profit. The best you can hope for is that maybe they click two ads before they go and you only lose 4 cents. What’s the point?
There are many excellent tools to assist you in finding high-priced keywords. Google’s keyword analyzer itself is one of the better ones. Setting up an ad campaign and testing keywords through the campaign-creation is another sneaky but useful trick. Aim for keywords that pay at least $4 or $5. Make sure your content page title contains that keyword, and maybe drop that exact keyword once or twice more, while using several related keywords only once each. Google has very clever algorithms, and it’s tough to get this exactly right, but it can be done! Do not oversaturate your page with that one keyword or keyword phrase. Google will ignore you!
Now once you’ve picked your high-price keyword(s) to base your page(s) around, use the same analytical tactics to locate as many keywords and long-tail keywords as possible that cost next to nothing. While less searched than the expensive ones, you can combine a large number of cheaper keywords and come out with plenty of traffic coming into your page. You pay the cheap keyword price for these people, and get paid the high-keyword price when they click on your ads. That’s the name of the arbitrage game.
