Impressions/Clicks/CTR/CPC

1. The first few hours of a new ad will pretty much determine the performance of
your ad going forward. If you have a low click through rate, your ads will start to see
less and less impressions until they stop receiving impressions all together. If your
ad has less than 0.01% click through rate, you really need to work on creating a
better ad.
2. Your click through rate is one of the most important factors for the entire
campaign. The higher your CTR, the cheaper your cost per click will be. The image
and title have the biggest impact on your CTR so as you begin to test, focus MOSTLY
only those two items.
3. So you don’t blow a ton of money, start your facebook ads with a low daily budget
and using the CPC (cost per click) price model. Only after you have a successful ad
campaign do you switch to CPM bidding… at least when you’re first starting out.
4. Split up your ads into groups based on who you want to target (age ranges,
male/female etc.). This means smaller volume but the ability to target better. By
having more specific targets, you will be able to find specific demographics that
make more profit (and you can bid more on) and certain demographics that make
less money.
5. Once you find an ad that works well, make sure to try to find another variation.
(Read more about the WHY you need multiple ads in the section called Banner
Blindness below)
Bidding:
Facebook allows you to do both CPC (cost per click) and CPM (cost per 1000
impressions) advertising. The major difference here is obviously the CPM model does
not guarantee that your ad gets any clicks and yet you still have to pay. The upside
to the CPM model is that you can get clicks for cheaper if you have an ad with a good
click through rate.
A good way to get a starting place for your bids (specially if you are direct linking) is
to ask your affiliate manager or affiliate contact what the EPC of an offer is. This EPC
(earnings per click) is the estimated revenue you make for each visitor to the page.
If an offer has an EPC of 45 cents, you might start your cost per click bids at 20
cents or so.
Important: Facebook really doesn’t like you to lower your ad bids. In fact most of
the time that you lower bids you end up getting 0 impressions on that ad. Therefore
you should always start your ad bids low and move up.
Scaling Your Facebook Ad Campaigns To The 6 Figure Per Month Mark:
Here are some really helpful tips on scaling your Facebook campaigns up to the six
figure per month mark like I have:
1. More Ads – Making more ads with little changes can have a big impact. With
Facebook, you can run literally hundreds of very similar ads at the same time,
going to the same offer. This can really help to get more traffic to successful
campaigns.
2. Targeting – Targeting on Facebook is where you need to be creative. In fact,
if you’ve found a small profiting campaign, chances are, your targeting is
actually pretty broad.
In my experience, most newbies target very little. So, target more specific
things.
Remember, people in one place in life might convert differently than another.
People at one workplace might convert differently than another. Test them
all… ages, geographical location, sexual preference, etc. People at x might
convert different than Y.
Most people group them all into one large lump of demographic targeting. If
the ad is not profitable, you kill entire sub-sections, which might have been
profitable.
This might take time, but it’s worth the effort. You can put a small budget on
each test to maximize your testing efforts. (See the tool below for making
these ads more efficiently)
3. Images – Images are well known as the main factor in producing a
maximum click through rate. The higher your click through rate, (usually) the
more frequent your ads get shown.
It’s simple enough to know that you should be testing multiple images. If you
find a new image that has a much higher click through rate, you’ve instantly
scaled your campaign.
Test as many images as you can afford. Some images are so odd but work
amazingly well. Some images you think would work great, yet perform poorly.
I find images that look like a “facebook friend” would have taken perform
well. Professional photos generally perform not as well.
4. CPM bidding –Think about it… Facebook is trying to maximize revenue. If
they can get an advertiser to promise to pay a set amount regardless of clicks
for 1000 impressions, they have just reduced a lot of risk on their part.
Therefore, if you have a good ad, switching to CPM based models really can
help you increase your traffic flow. Facebook favors the lower risk ads.
Daily Budgets:
Your account will start with a small daily limit (around $50). If you are constantly
hitting your daily budget, facebook will raise your allowed spend up to $1000 per day
automatically in increments of $250 or so.
This is only a maximum spend limit, so don’t worry that you’ll have to spend $1000
per day every day to keep a good limit.
If you need more than $1000 per day in spend, this can be raised after a little
history and an email to affiliates@facebook.com. Building history to your facebook
account is important so you might not be able to get a big raise in daily budget until
you have a bit of history with the company.
With a good account history, you can have an extremely high limit per day. My limit,
for example, is $50,000 per day.
My Secret Weapon To Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads Manager Tool
I’m always looking for ways to make the most of my time. Whenever a process can
be sped up or automated, I’m all for it.
Facebook’s ad system can be very tedious, and to resolve that problem, I have been
using a tool called Facebook Ads Manger extension for Firefox. You can view my
review of this tool here. (http://www.jonathanvolk.com/facebook-ads/facebook-adsmanager-
tool-review.html)
I’ve used this tool over the past year or so and it has literally redefined how I look at
facebook as an advertising platform and has helped me to make hundreds of
thousands of dollars.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to automate much of the tedious ad submission
process saving you an innumerable amount of time. You can setup the toolbar to
make 1000’s of ads and leave it running all night. Come back in the morning and
you’re set!
To find out more about this ads manager tool please go to my blog post about the
tool. Or you can check it out on the Facebook Ads Manager website.
(http://bit.ly/cOmk9J)

What is Banner Blindness?

Banner blindness is when an ad is ignored or rendered ineffective due to the fact that
it has been seen many times by the same demographic.
Ads that once worked really well can lose their effectiveness all together. Click
through rate drops, CPC prices increase, etc.
Banner blindness can set in rather fast on Facebook. I’ve seen ads move from
profitable to unprofitable in a single day by not implementing the correct protocols
(featured below). This happens especially fast when targeting smaller numbers of
people.
Overcoming Banner Blindness
Overcoming this banner blindness is a huge struggle as a facebook advertiser.
To overcome banner blindness, my team has tried numerous techniques. Here are a
couple techniques that can help you to overcome this banner blindness and increase
your facebook ads profitability.
1. Put a border around the image ad – In Photoshop you can easily add a red
border around your currently high converting image to create a bit more
attention to an ad losing it’s effectiveness.
2. Try changing the headline to something 100% different. Often,
changing the headline to something completely different can have a good
effect on your ad conversions.
3. Always run more than one ad variation. If you run more variations of ads,
your ads lose effectiveness slower. Even if one ad is less profitable, it’s worth
running to keep your higher profiting ad running for longer. This is one of the
best techniques – highly recommended.
4. Of course, switch out the image. Easiest and simplest trick in the book,
but it works.
By using some of these techniques, you should be able to overcome banner
blindness to some extent.
Facebook Representative
After you start spending more money in Facebook, you will eventually be assigned
an ad representative that will be able to help you with ad approvals, etc.
The great thing about Facebook is that no matter how much you spend, you can
always email affiliates@Facebook.com and get relatively similar responses.
Facebook Ads Conclusion
So now you have a huge head start with using Facebook ads and should be able to
make a successful campaign if you follow these guidelines and keep pressing through
the failures!
Facebook is a big traffic source that can be difficult at first but once you have it
down, you can make huge money. So get going already!
Blog Posts on Facebook:
I’ve done quite a few posts on Facebook at my blog and on other blogs. These posts
are worth checking out to do some more research:
http://www.jonathanvolk.com/facebook-ads
MySpace Ads – How To
Really, if you read the above, many of the techniques, research, etc applies to
myspace. The thing that I have experienced with myspace is that the quality of
traffic is usually lower.
The good thing about that however is that the traffic is generally a bit cheaper
making up for the lower quality.
All that being said, I highly recommend trying out myspace myads. They are a bit
more lenient than Facebook for some things and this can result in good profits.

Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing Guide

Pay Per View Marketing
Pay per view marketing (also known as CPV Marketing) is becoming more and more
common in the affiliate marketing world. PPV Marketing is essentially advertising via
popups.
These popups are triggered by adware (not to be confused with spyware) on a users
computer. These users allow the adware on their computer in exchange for things
such as games, premium content, etc.
You can trigger the popup when a user is on a specific website or by keyword. So
let’s say a user is on plentyoffish.com, a popular dating site. You could set a target
to popup to an affiliate offer such as eharmony.com. When they visit the website
plentyoffish.com, eharmony would popup over the website where the user could
either fill out the eHarmony offer or close it and continue on with the
plentyoffish.com website.
PPV is a great way to start in the affiliate marketing world! The reason why it’s great
to start in is because it takes no landing page (no website) and is still fairly untapped
in a lot of the smaller niches meaning big potential for profit!
Compared to PPC and other major mediums, PPV is not as competitive.
Before you read the how to, please make sure you read the “Know Your
Demographics” section in the previous chapter. Knowing your demographics is key
before starting your PPV campaigns. This is because when you know who you are
targeting will help you to understand where (websites and keywords) to target. Know
the who before the where is the simple rule here. Your ads need to be very targeted
to your demographics in order for you to be able to make things work.
Also, before you start, I recommend you read the section from the chapter before
that discusses how to setup a domain and hosting and setup prosper202.com or
tracking202.com. Tracking your PPV campaigns is a bit more technical and requires
more than a simple PHP redirect. Although you might be able to make PPV work
without tracking, you won’t be able to have it last too long.

Featured PPV Networks:
DirectCPV
(http://bit.ly/c8PF19) –
DirectCPV is the best place
to start your PPV
Campaigns. The reason for
this is because they have a low barrier to get in (just $100 deposit) and the traffic
quality is good! If you are just starting with PPV, this is the network I recommend
you use. For the readers of this guide, I have a special $25 in free advertising
dollars when you deposit $100 or more! Enter the code SMI25 when signing up!
With DirectCPV, you can direct link and do email capture methods and the results are
pretty good with both (although I recommend email capture for best results).
Adon Network (http://bit.ly/9MCZBR) –
Adon is a little bit smaller of a PPV ad
network that gets their traffic from people
who have installed the My Geek shopping
toolbar.
Make campaigns with a lot of targets to make up for the lack of traffic and you
should be set.
Although you can’t make tens of thousands of dollars per day on a network of this
size, you can make a couple hundred, which is great because many of the big guys
just don’t go after the “couple hundred a day” type of campaigns. For newbie’s, this
might be a good way to start a consistent income!
Check out Adon Network Now! (http://bit.ly/9MCZBR)

MediaTraffic (http://bit.ly/dnekyw) – Media Traffic is a great
place to start as well because they have a low initial deposit
($200) and there is a medium amount of competition.
With Media Traffic you want to run highly targeted campaigns. Don’t do the broad
targeted or RON campaigns unless you have a profitable offer you want to scale
(even then, it’s better to scale just by adding more targets).
With Media Traffic offers that work can be targeted to a bit of an older demographic.
You can use both direct linking lead generation offers as well as email capture
methods.
Check out Media Traffic Now! (http://bit.ly/dnekyw)
Traffic
Traffic Vance
(http://bit.ly/bSALA6) – TrafficVance is a referral only, higher entry PPV network.
You can get into trafficvance only if you are referred in by someone who is actively
spending money on trafficvance.
They also have a minimum $1000 deposit to start and refills are $500 minimum. This
means that there are less advertisers than other PPV networks but the quality at
trafficvance is rated among the highest quality of any PPV networks.
Although I have a trafficvance account, I have been told that I have to be able to
vouch for anyone I refer. If you need a referral and are actively spending in another
CPV network, hit me up and I’ll try to help you.
Check out TrafficVance Now! (http://bit.ly/bSALA6)

Need A Landing Page?

One of my favorite cheap ways to launch a PPC campaign is using wordpress.
Wordpress is a free (very SEO friendly) platform that can make launching a content
rich site easy and quick.
Although there are a lot of free templates for wordpress, most will take a bit of
tweaking to make just right for your affiliate campaign.
I also recommend you check out Affiliate theme (http://bit.ly/bXwrDR). Affiliate
theme is an amazing theme set based on wordpress. Affiliate theme is designed for
affiliate marketers that can not code but want a custom looking website with the
power of wordpress.
Another great place to check out is this Landing page designer website
(http://bit.ly/cV5AbM). This is an amazing website where you can buy a pack of 16
templates for $20!
Each month there is a new set of landing pages released and it’s well worth the
money for the caliber of landing pages.
Need Help With PPC Campaigns?
If you need help with your PPC Campaigns, I highly recommend you check out PPC
Coach (http://bit.ly/bwM0DX). PPC Coach is a great service that gives you direct
access to an entire community of people who are willing to help you with every detail
of your campaign.
It also includes 3-4 direct lessons which include sample campaigns that you can run
each month.

Starting out with PPV Campaigns

Before you start trying to build your PPV Campaign, you should know that there are
certain offers and promotion methods that seem to work better than others for PPV.
Here are two really popular ways to promote offers via PPV:
1. Sending traffic to a short, easy to fill out lead generation form. No landing page
required, just directly linking to the offer.
2. Capturing email leads and then emailing the leads products and services. (Drip
method)
I would say that method 1 is probably the most popular, but I will be going over both
methods.
Direct Linking With PPV:
When you are direct linking with PPV, make sure the campaign is a lead generation
short form. Dating, insurance leads, education, etc. These are all huge campaigns
that just require a lead to make money.
When you direct link in PPV, the idea is to make sure the offer page is very eye
catching and simple. If it’s overly complicated, your profits will start to go down.
Email Capture Method With PPV:
Capturing emails is one sure fire method to make money off customers over and
over. In the section before this one, I explain email marketing a bit. I highly
recommend you use Aweber (http://bit.ly/c8w9gj) for all your email marketing
campaigns.
With email capturing on PPV, you use a simple page and a captivating headline to
draw people into giving their name and email.
Enticing them with free stuff, like an ebook, works wonders. If you’re aiming for a
younger crowd (20-something and below), try something besides an ebook… be
creative.
Once you have their email, you can set them up (using Aweber) on an automated
course of emails. Just think… you could send them multiple related offers each week.
Although you won’t see profits as instantly as you will with directly linking, this
method can result in some great long term profits.
Just think… having a slow day? Email your list… You paid for them already, so why
not?
Building Your PPV Campaign:
When you begin to build your PPV campaign, I recommend you start just with URL
bidding. URL bidding is a lot more precise than using keywords and makes it a bit
easier to earn a profit.
To find URLs you can use many methods.
You can Google search a topic such as “auto insurance” and then get the top 50-100
results and copy the URL into your campaign. This can be a highly effective method.
As people begin to search for auto insurance, each time they click a result, they will
also see your page. This can lead to some great results.
Other methods for getting URLs to bid on include using sites such as Quantcast,
Alexa, and Google Ad Planner to find websites that have the demographics you are
looking for.
How Many Targets Should You Start With?
I recommend you start with at the very least 20 – 100 for most campaigns and
expand from there.
Optimizing Your PPV Campaigns:
The best way to optimize your PPV campaigns is to use Prosper202 (self-hosted) or
Tracking202 (web hosted version – simpler).
You can optimize your PPV campaigns using the 202 software fairly easily but first
you will need to either install prosper202 or setup a free tracking202.com account.
There is a lot of documentation about installing and setting up the 202 software, so I
won’t be covering it in this guide. If you have questions, you can visit the 202
software forum: http://prosper.tracking202.com/forum/
Bidding For PPV:
When you bid on PPV keywords / urls, a very common strategy is to shoot for
position 1 by outbidding the top place by the minimum amount allowed. So let’s say
the top bid is $0.011. You should bid $0.012.
Having your tracking setup, you can then track and see if being in the top spot for
that domain or keyword is worth it. Adjust down based on conversions and go from
there.
PPV Landing Pages
When you try using a landing page on PPV networks, there are a few methods you
can use.
The first is to buy or make a landing page that is simple. Essentially everything on
the website should be focused on getting the user to click through to the affiliate
offer or enter their email.
If you make your landing page, try making the landing page look exactly like the
merchants page. Doing so will get the user clicking and not even notice that they are
going from one site to another (your landing page to the affiliate offer).
If you’re looking to buy a landing page, a great place to check out is the LPDesigner
(http://bit.ly/cV5AbM) website. This is an amazing website where you can buy a
pack of 16 templates for $20!
Each month there is a new set of landing pages released and it’s well worth the
money for the caliber of landing pages. Many of these landing pages are perfect for
email capturing and other popular PPV landing page methods!
Need Help With PPV Campaigns?
If you need help with PPV, I highly recommend you check out PPV Playbook’s
Coaching Forums (http://bit.ly/9nGxXs).
The coaching forums are a monthly subscription service where you get access to an
unbelievable amount of content. I am a part of this forum and I love it. There are
many step-by-step guides on how to set up specific campaigns. If you’re looking to
get into PPV, this forum is a MUST.
Also, by joining the PPV Playbook coaching forums, you will gain access to the tools I
talk about below, called AffPortal, for FREE ($37/dollar month value!). That alone is
well worth the value!
Check it out now. (http://bit.ly/9nGxXs)
PPV Tools To Automate Gathering URL Targets:
The more you do PPV, the more you’ll realize how tedious is can be to pull together a
list of URLs or keywords.
I highly recommend that you use a toolset called AffPortal. AffPortal is a set of PPV
tools that will help you to reduce the time it takes to build out your PPV campaigns
down to half the time it would normally take.
Take a look at some of the awesome features you get in this toolset:
· SMART Scraper – the PPV game changer that cuts campaign build time by
50%. Submit your offer root url and get back kw & URLs instantly.
· URL Scraper – mines as deep as 50 pages in the search engine results and
optimizes the URL results to maximize your keyword traffic with filter.
· Site Extractor – pull all indexed pages from a specific website in two seconds
flat.
· URL Shrink – retrieve a list of root URLs from a long list of webpages.
· Alexa & Quantcast database – quickly compile lists from the top million
websites listed on Alexa and Quantcast.
· Social Media URL Scraper – new tool that is UNIQUE to AffPortal.com to
datamine social based websites.
· URL Chopper – slices your url list into mistyped lists in two seconds flat.
· Monster Keyword Permutator – keyword mashups & US census data.
· DEEP & WIDE Keywords – comprehensive keyword list generator with search
data included. Builds list in both directions very quickly.
· Adwords Sniper – Pulls top Adsense sites with ease.
· AOL Bootleg Database – over 22 million AOL user search queries.
· English Brainstorming Database – an additional keyword database with over
44 Million english keywords to expand your list.
· Tutorials and Videos – ever expanding library of video, audio and pdfs.
Check out AffPortal (http://bit.ly/bu5XlU) now. If you plan to get affportal, I highly
recommend you check out the coaching forums I talk about above. For just a little
bit more you get access to both the coaching forum and affportal! Awesome!
If you’re interested in the two combined, check it out here. (http://bit.ly/9nGxXs)

What is Search Engine Pay Per Click Marketing?

What is Search Engine Pay Per Click Marketing?

Search engine pay per click marketing is when you advertise on different keywords
in a search engine and pay each time someone clicks on your advertisement. The
price you are willing to pay (along with a few other factors) determine your position
in the sponsored results.
In the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) you can see these ads on the
right hand column when you search. The major search engine advertising platforms
can deliver a huge amount of traffic and result in some major profits.
The downside to these search engine pay per click sites is that it is nearly impossible
to have a campaign work without a landing page. While it is possible, many of the
search engines have banned direct linking for affiliates. Therefore in order for you to
have a long term and successful affiliate marketing campaign on these search
engines, you’re going to need a landing page. We will discuss the landing pages in a
bit. First let’s look at the major search engines that offer pay per click sponsored
ads.
Google Adwords – http://Adwords.Google.com – Google Adwords is by far the biggest
search engine and thus delivers the most traffic through their advertising system.
The upside is the huge traffic. The downside is the difficulty in running an affiliate
marketing campaign. Of all the systems discussed in the manual, this is the most
difficult and is not recommended until you have some success under your belt.
Yahoo Search Marketing – http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com – Yahoo Search
marketing is a great platform that can deliver some traffic. In comparison to
Adwords, the traffic is much less but being able to run a campaign is much easier.
You don’t have as rigorous of a process to get your ads approved to run and because
of that I recommend you start with Yahoo.
MSN Adcenter – http://adcenter.microsoft.com – Microsoft Adcenter is a great
system that delivers high quality traffic. By that, I mean the traffic generally
converts very well in comparison to Yahoo. The downside however is that Adcenter
has a much smaller market share than Yahoo and Google and therefore provides
much less traffic.
Other Pay Per Click Engines:
While the major three are what I use most, there are many other 2nd tier search
engines that have their own pay per click advertising engines. These can be a great
source of cheap traffic and can result in huge profit margins. The traffic from these
PPC engines are almost always lower quality than the major search engines but the
cost can offsets this reduced quality.
Here is a list of places you can advertise:
7Search (http://bit.ly/dwRJRL)
Miva (http://bit.ly/9Opfmj)
SearchFeed (http://bit.ly/cfosFV)
ABCSearch.com (http://bit.ly/dbuZkW)
Ask.com (http://bit.ly/a4gDRJ)
Business.com (http://bit.ly/91edXm)
LookSmart.com (http://bit.ly/cN2v17)
Bidvertiser.com (http://bit.ly/b49IwC)
Media / PPC:
The below PPC engines often fall into the “media buying” category, but really they
are PPC engines. If you decide to look into running on these advertising networks, I
highly recommend you familiarize yourself with media buying as well. I teach about
media buying towards the end of this guide.
Adsonar.com (Huge traffic)
Pulse360.com (Huge traffic)
Adbrite (http://bit.ly/9oOxXw)
Offers To Stay Away From:
Most major search engines have banned the free trial / rebill offers. Putting those
offers into the engines will almost always result in the campaign being slapped or the
entire account being banned.
There are exceptions so you should contact the website individually to make sure
your campaign is compliant if you plan to run free trial offers.
Running Pay Per Click Campaigns
Build A Quality Website:
This is one of the most important parts of running your PPC affiliate marketing
campaign. Years ago, you were allowed to slap together a single page website, put
ads all over it and then put it into all the pay per click engines. Now, it’s different.
Google wants to enhance their user’s experience so the users will come back to use
their services again.
Now website small sites with the sole purpose of directing traffic to an affiliate offer
get a very low quality score. They call these bridge pages. Low quality score means
you will have to pay way more money (almost always unprofitable) for your ads to
show or your ads won’t show at all. In fact, if your page is blatantly a bridge page,
you risk the chance of getting your account suspended.
Therefore, you need to take the time to build a quality website. This is going to take
longer than the other marketing methods, but the rewards can be great since many
people have left the PPC platforms after the changes.
To have the best potential of having a good quality score, you’re going to want some
/ all of the following:
Unique Content:
You should have content that is unique to your website. By this, I don’t mean you
need ground breaking, revolutionizing content. Just content that you either wrote
yourself or paid to have written for you. This unique content adds value to the
visitor’s experience and thus gives you a better score (usually).
This content should not just be a single article you wrote up. You need to have
multiple pages.
(Quick tip: You can get unique content written for you using a freelance site such as
elance.com)
NOTE: Google’s TOS says that you can not have a “bridge page” meaning that the
only purpose of your site is to get users to go to the affiliate offer.
If you don’t have enough unique content, you are not going to be able to run your
campaign for any length of time.
Search Engine Optimization
When you make a website, it is important that you optimize your website to be as
search engine friendly as possible. Now, this is a whole guide in itself so I won’t be
going over the specifics of search engine optimization. By having a search engine
friendly website, your quality score should be better because the pay per click quality
checker will be able to tell what your site is about.
If you need more information on how to SEO a site, the most popular SEO book (and
commonly accepted as THE book on SEO) is called SEO Book (http://bit.ly/aLXJ65)
By Aaron Wall.
Design
If you are looking for an affordable way to make your website, I highly recommend
you check out Affiliate theme (http://bit.ly/bXwrDR). Affiliate theme is an amazing
theme set based on wordpress. WordPress is great because it is very SEO friendly
and when you put affiliate theme on top of that… it’s perfectly designed for affiliate
marketers looking to run campaigns in Google Adwords.
If you are able to tweak things a bit, you can always search for free CSS Templates
on Google or check out LPDesigner (http://bit.ly/cV5AbM).
In fact, I made over $1.5 million dollars using a FREE template I found on Google. I
made a post about this very thing on Shoemoney’s blog as a guest found here
(http://bit.ly/dBLzzW). The point here being that you don’t need a $10,000 design
for the website to make money.
Keyword Research
Keywords are the words you bid on to trigger your ads to show. If you have
screensaver software you are trying to get people to download, you might bid on
keywords like “screen savers,” for example. Now, the more keywords you bid on, the
more exposure your advertisement gets.
Keyword Research Tools
Keyword research tools can be very effective for helping you to expand your PPC
campaigns and find new ideas. Although these are not required at all, many people
have used these tools very successfully.
There are a ton of tools that are on the market right now but here is a list of
keyword tools I have personally used before and recommend.
The keyword tools I have used and recommend include:
PPC Bully (http://bit.ly/ayfHsJ)
Keyword Spy (http://bit.ly/dbKr37)
iSpionage (http://bit.ly/c857bc)
The main way I generate keywords for my PPC campaigns is by using the seed and
expansion method.
Seed And Expansion Method
The seed and expansion method is pretty simple. You start with a bunch of main
keywords that are broad. These are called the seeds. Let’s take a dating campaign
for example.
Seed keywords could be:
dating
date
singles
…
The above are all very broad keywords that are probably overrun with direct dating
companies that will make it difficult for us affiliates to compete. So instead of trying
to compete with the big companies we add these keywords called expansion
keywords. These expansion keywords are added onto the end of each seed keyword
to create a more specific keyword.
Some expansion keywords could be:
African American
Asian
San Francisco
New York
Online
…
Just from this short list, you can begin to think of numerous keywords that could be
possible just for this campaign.
Once you have the two lists, there are multiple tools that will combine the two lists
together. You’ll end up with a list like:
Dating African American
Dating Asian
Dating San Francisco
… Singles online
Keyword Matching Options
Now that you have your keywords, there are four different variations of these
keywords that you should know about. These are referred to keyword matching
options.
You can read about the keyword matching options on Google’s website
(http://bit.ly/cEwj80)
When you’re first starting out as a newbie to pay per click, using the exact match
keyword type only is a great place to start. It can help you to really focus your
keywords only to highly relevant traffic.
Adgroup
Adgroups are the grouping in your pay per click advertising campaign. The way you
group your advertising campaign is very important. Ideally each adgroup should
have a central theme. Taking the keyword examples from the previous sections, you
could basically make an adgroup around each Seed keyword.
So you would have an adgroup for Dating, an adgroup for date, an adgroup for
singles, etc.
Ad Creatives
Ad’s are one of the other very important factors when it comes to making your PPC
campaign successful. A significant portion of your quality score depends on the click
through rate of your ad versus the other ads that display. This means that the better
your ad is (meaning a lot of people click it), the more your ad is shown and
ultimately, the cheaper your clicks become.
Therefore for each adgroup, I highly recommend you make at least a few ads that
are completely different from each other. Let that run for a little while so you have a
statistically significant sample size.
Once you start to see which ad performs best of the few ads you made, pause the
others. Then create a copy of the best ad and change one aspect of that ad slightly.
This could be changing the title of the ad for example.
Do this a few more times until you have an ad that is performing really well.
Tip: Try changing capitalization. You can capitalize the first letter of each word in the
ad. This Can Have A Good Effect On Click Through Rates.
Ad Copy
Your ad copy should always reflect your adgroup’s main theme. If your adgroup is
about singles, you should try to include singles in your ad.
To get good ideas for your copy, you should search (but don’t click!) for ads that
might be similar to what you are promoting. Again, don’t copy the ad exactly.
Instead use it as a template and make it your own.
Bidding
Bidding on keywords is another very common question I am asked. It’s hard to know
where to start bids for any campaign. As a general rule of thumb, I ask what the EPC
of a campaign is and based on that, I set the bids at around 1/3 or so of the EPC.
The difficult thing is that although the EPC can give a good estimate of where you
should start your bids, your quality score will be a huge factor in determining what
your bids should be.
Search Network Only
When you’re first starting out, I recommend you use search network only. In the
options of the campaign you can go in and disable content network and search
network partners. Doing so gives you the highest possibility of having success
because you’re dealing only with direct search engine ads (which have the best
conversions).
If you later want to try Google content network, I highly recommend (and Google
recommends) that you make an entirely separate campaign for that. At the end of
this section I will talk more about making a content campaign.
Also note that if you plan to get heavily into the Google content network, you should
also read the section on media buying towards the end of this guide.
Optimizing PPC Campaigns
To optimize your PPC Campaigns, I recommend you use one of two methods.
The easiest way to optimize your PPC campaigns is to use the Google Adwords
conversion pixel. You setup the conversion pixel in your Adwords account and then
send the pixel code to your affiliate manager (or email contact). Then the pixel is
placed on the offer page via your affiliate manager. When you get a lead or sale, this
pixel notifies Google Adwords which keyword the person used to get to your affiliate
landing page and ultimately which brought in money.
The great thing about this conversion pixel is that after you get 15 or more
conversions, you can have adwords begin to automatically optimize your adwords
campaign.
This automatic conversion optimization is quite impressive to say the least. It worked
extremely well in the testing I have done on it.
I have a case study about the adwords conversion optimizer where I increased my
campaigns profit margins by over 100% and because of the increase in profit, I was
able to make way more money by bidding to get higher ad positions. You can read
the case study here. (http://www.jonathanvolk.com/internet-marketing/conversionoptimizer-
case-study.html)
The bad thing about the adwords pixel (and the Yahoo / MSN pixel) is that they are
not always 100% accurate. In fact, expect the number of conversions to be a bit
lower than what you see in the affiliate network… it’s normal.
Prosper202 / Tracking202
This is free software that is just amazing. Although setting up T202 or P202 can be
time consuming and a bit tricky, the data that it can give you will help you to
optimize your PPC Campaign like crazy.
Tracking202 is hosted on the tracking202 server and is easiest to install. Prosper202
is the same software but hosted on your own server. Although the tracking202 team
does not use or look at your campaign data, some people feel it’s just too much data
for them to have on their servers.
I won’t go over the details of using this software (because it is well documented and
they have a forum – http://prosper202.com/forum/) but I can say that this is
unbelievably good software that will help you to make more money if you put the
time into using it.
Scaling PPC Campaigns To The 6 Figure / Month Mark:
I have a great video interview that I did with Wes from Tracking202.com on scaling
PPC Campaigns to the 6 figure per month mark. It’s a bit of a longer interview but
this is a great interview that I recommend you check out.
http://tv202.com/video/jonathan-volk-interview
Good Keyword Tip:
Some of the highest converting keywords are actually URLs. Some people still search
the url instead of typing it into the address bar. You wouldn’t believe the amount of
traffic that some of the higher traffic sites have typing in the domain into the search
bar instead of the address.
Therefore you can often capitalize on this type of traffic with very little competition.
NOTE: Some search engines do not really allow this much anymore, but some still
do.
Making A Content Network Campaign
Content network is where you advertise directly on websites that have partnered
with Google’s advertising platform Adsense. This allows Google to read the websites
content and show contextually relevant ads to the visitors.
When you bid on the keyword “bikes,” for example, instead of showing up in the
search engine results you show up on websites that are bike related.
Because these are two entirely different types of traffic, you should always split your
search network campaign and content network campaign into two different
campaigns.
Here are some rules to follow when building out your content network campaign:
1. Build a central theme for your campaign. You want your content campaign to
have one main theme that is evident to you. The way you build this central theme is
by having cross referencing keywords and adgroup themes.
Let’s say for example, you are building a campaign for a spyware remover program.
You could have multiple adgroups such as “spyware removal” and have keywords
based around that as well as “adware removal.” Doing so helps to build a central
theme that tells Google exactly where you want to show your ads and to what type
of audience.
2. Only use the BROAD keyword matchtype. Don’t use exact or phrase keyword
matchtypes for content network campaigns.
3. It’s ok to have duplicate keywords. For your content network campaigns, it’s
perfectly ok to have duplicate keywords. In the example above, I would include the
keyword “spyware removal” in both adgroups. This helps tie the two adgroups
together into a central theme.
4. When you are building a content network campaign, you can use image
and flash ads. I highly recommend trying some image and flash ads to see if you
can increase your click through rate. Some websites only allow image ads and
because of this you can gain more exposure for your campaign by uploading image
ads. (Read up on the media buys section for more tips on creating effective image
ads)
Other things to know about content network campaigns:
1. Content network campaigns are always going to have lower click through rates
than search campaigns. Not to worry, Google content network click through rate is
separate and does not affect your search campaign click through rate.
2. Content network campaigns are generally slow in starting out and increase slowly.
Traffic starts very slowly and ramps up over the course of a month or so. It all goes
back to Google figuring out what your central theme is. Once they have the theme
and your campaign has run for a bit, your traffic levels will continue to increase.
Expanding Your Content Network Campaign:
Expanding your content network campaign takes a bit of intelligent research. Here is
how I do it.
1. Look through your referring URLs. You can do this in the adwords report tab
and click on performance report. These are the websites that have your ad on them.
You can now see others who are advertising on the same type of website.
2. With those URL’s look through each one and try to find some competition.
Try to find someone as close to your advertising model as possible…
3. Google search: http://www.sitename.com (Yup, you’re searching for your competition’s
actual domain)
4. Look through CACHED results as well as current results to see where their
ad comes up.
5. Based off Ad copy, try to come up with new adgroup ideas. If some of their
ad copy has some keyword you may have not though of… you’ve just found another
potentially profitable keyword / adgroup that you can use.
6. Build that adgroup and … Profit…
Automating Building Of PPC Campaigns
Building your PPC campaigns can be a bit of a challenge and take some work. Making
the keyword lists, ads, landing page, etc can take a lot of time to do manually.
There is this great program that I use to personally build 90%+ of my campaigns for
search engine PPC called SpeedPPC. (http://bit.ly/96RRNp)
SpeedPPC is a program that is unlike any other in it’s ability to create campaigns for
you in literally minutes and provide amazing quality scores.
Here is how it works…
You enter your seed and expansion list into SpeedPPC. You then select which type of
keyword matchtypes you want (Broad, phrase, and/or exact). After this, you make
ad templates. After you have all these items, you click build and SpeedPPC builds the
campaign for you and outputs files you can then upload to Google, Yahoo, and Msn…
all at once.
In addition to helping you to automate the building of your campaigns, SpeedPPC
helps to increase your quality score. And they PROVE it with a video. The quality
score of a campaign built by hand compared to the quality score of one built with
SpeedPPC is amazing. SpeedPPC’s quality scores were way better.
It might sound too good to be true but check out this video (http://bit.ly/96RRNp)
of them building out a campaign. Of any tool, this is definitely the one to have if
you’re going to be doing any level of PPC affiliate marketing.

Media Buying Affiliate Marketing Guide

 Media buying (also referred to as display advertising) is simply a fancy word for
purchasing banner ad space on a website, a network of websites, or an ad exchange
network.
Media buying can be as simple as buying banner inventory on a website directly from
the website owner or buying banner ad space through an ad network that provides
you access to very high traffic websites.
These media buys are usually paid for on a CPM basis. CPM means cost per 1000
impressions. An impression is simply one view of the banner on the website.
There are many huge benefits to media buying. First, the amount of traffic you can
get from media buys is phenomenal. Second, many of the restrictions you would see
on larger ad platforms (such as Adwords, Facebook Ads, etc) are not problems on
media buys.
The downside to media buying is that it can be very costly. If you use a large ad
network, you will most likely spend thousands of dollars before you even make a
profit.
Now before you stop reading because you think you wont be able to afford media
buying, let’s talk about the more affordable ways to do media buys.
Starting Out In Media Buying
When you’re first starting out in media buys I recommend you start buying directly
from websites or using ad exchange websites. Buying directly from websites allows
you to spend either a flat rate or generally a smaller amount than the large ad
networks.
Where an ad network would require a $10,000+ commitment, you can find direct
websites that will charge as little as a few bucks per month.
Now, before you go trying to find sites, I recommend you read “Know Your
Demographics” in the previous chapter. With media buying it’s VERY important to
know who your demographics are for a particular offer.
Another thing to know before you start out is offers that pay a low commission ($5
bucks and under for example) will be very difficult to make a profit on. I recommend
the higher paying offers such as lead generation offers or free trial offers.
Research Websites For Your Direct Buys
Ok, so now you have a good offer and you know your demographics. There are a
couple methods you can use to find good sites for media buys.
· Using Google Ad Planner research tool, you can find websites that have the
demographic that you’re looking for. Enter your demographics in the
adplanner and begin researching out the list of websites that ad planner
shows you. Sort the results by comp index. This comp index is the highest
relevance sites based upon the demographics you have inputed. I would
recommend targeting the higher comp index websites.
· On Google, Yahoo, and MSN you can search for keywords that are related to
the offer to find the top 50 websites in Google. Depending on how competitive
the niche is you can find some good websites.
This method can be especially effective if you know of keywords that are
converting for paid search engine traffic. The idea here is you go search for
websites and do your media buys on the natural organically ranking websites
for the keywords that convert well for paid search.
··
Use Quantcast ad planner. (http://www.quantcast.com/planner) Similar to
Google Ad Planner – another source to look through.
·
Things To Look For On The Websites:
I always recommend looking for sites with adsense or some other forms of ads on
the site. This shows that the website owner is looking to monetize and your offer will
generally be well received by them.
When you are looking for a website, if you find a site with banners on it already, I
highly recommend only buying banner space that is above the fold.
Above the fold means the banner is visible without having to scroll down on the
website.
If the banner is below the fold, I would only pay for it if the banner was extremely
cheap and I don’t recommend this for first time buyers.
Contacting the website
You can then contact the owner of the website and ask them to purchase ad space
on their website using the template below.
To get their contact information, you can use the whois (I use http://www.whois.sc to
check) or the regular contact page on the website. Either way, you should be able to
find some sort of email.
———————
To Whom It May Concern:
I’m interested in purchasing banner inventory on your website,
<INSERTWEBSITEHERE>. I am a direct response advertiser based from the US and
based upon my research, I believe your website would be a perfect fit for some of
our latest marketing campaigns.
I would love to begin a direct advertising relationship with you. We are flexible and
are looking to make things mutually beneficial. If you could, please email me back
with your pricing at your earliest convenience.
If you have any questions please feel free to email or call me at XXX-XXX-XXXX
Thank you very much for your time.
<Yourname>
<Company Name>
———————
Not every website is going to reply back to you. In fact, if you get more than 1 or 2
out of 10 people to reply, you’ll be doing great. That’s why it’s important for you to
email a bunch of people.
If they do not reply to your email and the site is valuable to you, try checking the
whois database for their phone number. Try calling them… Maybe they were just too
busy to reply and a phone call will get them to give you the focus you want.
Finally, if they still don’t reply, try Facebooking them. I know it seems a little creepy,
but Facebook is like the new “email” so to speak. People often check Facebook more
frequently than email and this could be a great way for you to reach that webmaster.
Tip: If they have Google adsense on their website and never reply back, you could
always try making a Google adwords “placement targeted” campaign targeting that
domain name. Just make sure you are in compliance (no free trial offers for
example) before you put it in adwords.
Negotiate the Price:
Direct media buys like this can often result in huge profit because you can negotiate
crazy good rates.
Whatever price you are given, no matter how good, I always try to negotiate.
Everything is negotiable and often asking can reduce your cost by 10% or more. A
great way to negotiate price down is by offering more money up front in exchange
for a cheaper rate.
Also, I always recommend starting the smallest buy they will allow you to do. When
you get prices, if it’s too high for you to risk, then you could ask them for a test buy
first and see what they do.
The key to this is that if you are honest with the website owner and say it’s too
expensive for you (rather than trying to act like a big shot), they’ll be willing to work
with you on things more frequently.
Insertion Order:
After you have negotiated the price a bit, you will need an IO (insertion order). An
insertion order is basically a contract going over all the terms of the agreement
(price, time period, etc).
In the insertion order, make sure that you have the following: 24 hours out clause,
even clause, demographic targeting, day parting, and frequency cap.
24 Hours Our Clause:
This is a simple clause that allows you to get out of the media buy within 24 hours if
you are not happy with the results. This gives you a bit of a safety net if the media
buy is just a complete bomb.
This 24 hour fat clause does not mean you get all your money back. Instead you can
get all of it minus the 24 hours cost.
Even Clause:
An even clause is really for larger media buys but basically states that ad delivery
will be distributed evenly each day. This is to prevent you getting all your traffic in
one day.
Let’s say for example that the website you’re buying ad space from has many
banners rotating on the site. Now you decide to get out of the buy via your 24 hour
out clause. What some sites could do is put your banner up a majority of the time so
they spend nearly all of your money in the 24 hours. That way they only have to
refund as little as possible. An even clause would prevent problems like this.
Demographic Targeting:
This part of the IO is simply explaining which demographics if any you want to
target. Most of the times this will be GEO targeting based on IP.
Day Parting:
Day parting is when you want your banner ads to only show during certain hours of
the day. This can really help your profit levels if you find that you generally have
lower profit margins at a certain time of the day or week.
Frequency Capping:
Frequency Capping is the amount of times your banner is shown to the same IP
address in a 24 hour period. The recommended capping rate differs depending on
who you talk to. Somewhere around three times per 24 hours seems to be pretty
standard for bigger buys. For smaller buys, I don’t use frequency capping at all.
Focus on Optimization Of Your Banner:
Ok so now you have your media buy running. If you’re paying a flat rate or CPM
rate, you should be optimizing your banner as much as possible to get the best click
through rate.
The more clicks, the better chance at profit you have. I recommend using at least 5
or 6 banner variations for each size banner you have.
Here are some tips to get a better click through rate on your banner:
Split test 5-6 variations of each banner size.
Increase CTR by changing headlines, use shocking images, use blue underlined links,
use fear and pain, and test with a white bg color.
Try using images of people in the banners.
Try using testimonials in the banners.
Try using an all text banner.
Try to use blinking arrows.
Try to use gradient backgrounds for banners.
Media Buying Through Ad Networks:
Media buying ad networks are generally very large groups of high traffic websites.
The upside about the ad networks is that the potential to make tens of thousands or
even hundreds of thousands per day is there. The downside is that if you are trying
to do a media buy through a large ad network, you’re going to need to spend
thousands of dollars (tens of thousands) before you optimize your campaign to a
profit (most of the time).
You really need to have a significant cash flow before entering into these networks.
And before you get to a profit, expect to lose money…
Relationship:
When you are doing large buys from these networks, it’s important that you develop
a great relationship with your manager. These are the people who will help you to
optimize your campaign. Much of the campaign success relies on this manager
making optimizations for you.
If your manager is not responding right away to your needs, it’s time to request a
new manager. Seriously, it’s that important.
Ad Networks:
TribalFusion.com
Zedo.com
BurstMedia.com
Valueclick.com
Media Buying Questions?
Do you have any Media buying questions that I didn’t answer? Need someone to help
you start out in your first buys more? A good place to check out is Media buys coach.
(http://bit.ly/adoIFx)
Media buys coach is a monthly subscription service where you can take lessons on
Media buying and also ask experts questions directly. It’s well worth getting if you’re
starting in Media buying and want the option to ask about every little detail of your
campaign.
You can read my review on Media buys coach here. (http://bit.ly/adoIFx)