The old ways are not always the best ways.

The traditional model of making money from affiliate products was simple. Create an interesting website geared to a specific theme, slap up some banners for affiliate products that were related to your theme, and sit back, hoping that some of the audience your website drew would click on those banners, giving you some sales. If you really wanted to get creative you might have done some email campaigns for specific products on the side.

But email campaigns are mostly ineffective (and God-forbid you should spam anyone). And banner advertisements don’t generally work. And websites take a long time to build, and promote. And even longer to get good ranking in the search engines.

So it was a slow steady process. There were no ‘quick routes’ to affiliate gold.

Until now.

Hang on to your hats, ladies & gentlemen, because pay-per-click advertising is here!

Pay-per-click search engines like Google AdWords and Overture offer an exciting way to quickly bring highly-targeted, highly-motivated people who want to buy straight to your affiliate products and services. You don’t even have to have a website.

All you have to do is write a cleverly worded ad describing your affiliate product and put it up. When searchers click on your ad, they are whisked right to the affiliate product, and given the opportunity to purchase. Wham, you’ve just made money. It really is that simple.

To demonstrate how quick and powerful pay-per-click advertising can be, I’ll offer myself

The first month I cleared $1500 in profits, even though I barely knew what I was doing. For every one dollar I spent on pay-per-click, I got three dollars back in profits. And I was a total newbie, a ‘marketing virgin’. I didn’t have a website, I didn’t know how to conduct an email campaign, and I barely knew what a ‘tracking URL’ was. Does that wake anybody up to the power of pay-per-click advertising?

However, don’t think it’s all wine and roses in the pay-per-click field. The fact is, almost everyone who tries it fails, at least initially. I failed myself, by the way. The first two days I netted over $50 in losses. And I still maintain those were the most valuable two days of my entire pay-per-click experience, in terms of how much I learned, and how quickly I adapted to the learning curve.

So don’t go into it with false expectations. Pay-per-click has a learning curve. But if you’re willing to demonstrate a little stick-to-it-ness, pay-per-click can be wildly profitable, and kick-start your affiliate sales business.

Daniel Brough is the founder of AdWord Wizards, a free mentoring program designed to teach anyone how to profit from pay-per-click search engines. Want to start a profitable AdWords campaign in less than 30 minutes? Come to http://www.adwordwizard.com and sign up for this free program.