To play the arbitrage game, you definitely need a source of cheap traffic. Further condition is that the traffic must convert - clicking on ads is the easiest conversion you can ask for, but still, there are dozens of dirt-cheap PPC engines, which are nothing more but scam. You will get zero or very low CTR from the traffic they send. Or you will get no traffic at all, which is almost equally bad.
Using AdWords to play the arbitrage game would be very tricky, because (a) AdWords has relatively high bids, which means that the spread between what you pay and what you get would very thin (or most likely - negative), (b) it has many systems in place to monitor the quality of your landing pages, ads, etc. - if you do not deliver on your promises, they will lock your keywords and demand ridiculously high bids to unlock them.
There seems to be a common belief that, currently, 7search.com is THE PPC network that most arbitragers use. The traffic may not convert too well for anything else, but it seems to be a good fit for our purposes. It means that you will have to open a new account with them, if you don't already have one.
Here's a short report on my experience with opening a new account.
1) The registration form was short and simple. You do not have to provide URLs of any sites that you will be promoting.
2) After completing registration, you are asked to pay the initial deposit - the minimum amount is $25. You can decide to either add funds to your account automatically when you reach a certain level or to add them manually. I selected the manual option, just to be on the safe side during my testing.
3) In order to fully activate your account, a representative of 7search must call you to validate your data. Before validation, you are allowed to spend only $5 on advertising.
Contrary to what some people reported, I had no problem with the validation part whatsoever. I logged in to my account, clicked on the chat button and was able to talk to a representative in a matter of seconds. I asked them to call me and explained that I live in a very different time zone (Europe). They promised to call me back in 5 minutes, which they did. It took like 1 minute to complete the validation and my account was instantly activated.
It means that I have now a fully functioning PPC account, which I will be using to conduct our test!
Stay tuned for more.
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