This week I began my first venture into purchasing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on search engines. I am monetizing the traffic via a variety of affiliate networks. This traffic has been the first large chunk of traffic that I have sent to Hydra Media, and I have to say that I have been quite impressed with the performance of their offers.
My first few learnings from my first week of PPC advertising are:

• Make sure you sign up for PPC advertising with special offers. Using coupons from the digitalpoint forums, I was able to get $50 free advertising on MSN and $75 free advertising on Yahoo. The free advertising has allowed me to bet with the house’s money while I am optimizing my campaigns and getting the hang of the systems.
• Typos are your friends. When I created my initial keyword lists, I entered a few typos keywords by hand. Then I started using typo generators to come up with all sorts of permutations for my keywords. In aggregate, typos can bring a good volume of traffic and very low keyword prices.
• Read, Read, Read. The wickedfire and digitalpoint forums provided some great background. I also found some interesting posts on the MindValley Labs blog related to techniques and statistics related to optimizing PPC ads.

From what I have been reading, it appears that many of the big search engines have or are starting to crack down on affiliate marketing via PPC. I will continue my experimenting in the area because it is an interesting space, and it is something that I do not know much about yet. As always, I will continue to post more of my learnings.