Affiliate marketers are keen at finding ways to get merchants in front of potential customers. There's article marketing, building niche websites, forum marketing, social network marketing, and pay-per-click, to name a few.

Each of these marketing strategies varies widely in the amount of time and money invested to capture targeted traffic to merchant goods and services. For instance, forum marketing and social network marketing require very little time or money. Article marketing requires no investment of capital, but can take a great deal of time depending on how efficient you are as a writer. Building niche websites is even more time-consuming, plus you have to shell out funds to purchase a domain name and cover hosting fees. All of these methods are great ways to earn income by driving targeted traffic to merchants who pay a commission on each sale you generate for them.

But there is another highly lucrative business model that you might want to consider. Now be warned, perfecting this method is not easy. Simple mistakes in your execution could cost you hundreds of dollars. But if you can decipher the formula, pay-per-click advertising, or can pay off handsomely.

More specifically, we're talking about the pay-per-click to cost-per-acquisition business model, also known as PPC to CPA or traffic brokering. If you have been in the internet marketing arena for any length of time, you have at least a general idea about the marketing methods discussed above, but very little is talked about or even known about using PPC to drive laser-targeted traffic to lead offers. Now generally, CPA offers pay less than a few dollars for each lead generated, but if you know the formula for capturing pay-per-click traffic that converts, there is the potential to make hundreds and even thousands of dollars a day.

The method behind using PPC to drive traffic to high-converting CPA offers is to get your pay-per-click ad in front of as many qualified visitors as possible. There are many different underground techniques to do this (they are ?underground? because a very large majority of PPC marketers do not use or even know about these strategies). Now, you shouldn't be buying ads targeting general keywords and phrases, that would be silly. Not only will you get tons of untargeted traffic, your ad costs would be astronomical. What you want to do is target some of the lesser-known search terms ? terms that even the most savvy PPC marketer wouldn't think of bidding on. You essentially want to cast a wide net which targets as much traffic as possible, while keeping your costs as low as possible. This is the key to creating the perfect pay-per-click formula.

There is very little information on the Internet about PPC to CPA marketing. Maybe it's because this method is so new and smart PPC marketers are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn't. Or maybe it's so obtuse that there is no one right way to do it. The most likely reason is this ? the guys making the big bucks have secretly discovered the ideal pay-per-click formula and are keeping it all to themselves.