Tag Archives: advertising

Google TV: Coming To Your Living Room

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Google is at it again. After dominating the search world, and making a play to dominate the mobile advertising world, now they are inviting themselves into your living room with a new product called Google TV.  It is a joint effort with Sony, and it is supposed to be way better than WebTV (remember that?).

The Big G definitely has their work cut out for them.  It’s been tried before, and it didn’t do too well.  Nowadays there are plenty of Media Center PCs about.  So if consumers want web on their TV, wouldn’t they just get one of those? Only time will tell.

Google TV

The interesting angle here is for marketers.  As with mobile, there will be a big opportunity for people who jump into this fast.  There’s a very strong possibility that if Google is the one behind it, there is going to be advertising involved.  What new types of ads and user engagement will Google TV provide?  Capturing someones attention while they are at home and relaxing could be a good thing for some offers, especially entertainment-based or even dating offers.

I haven’t heard anything yet on how the ads will work, and I’m only guessing at this point that there will even be ads.  Maybe the new device will just display the web we are all used to seeing, and there won’t be any platform specific ads.  Either way, new and different ways to connect with people online are springing up at a rapid rate, and the next ten years looks to be a good decade for the online world…

Are You Serious Facebook?

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I know I’m a few days late in writing about this one, and I was going to let it go. But every time that I read or see a link to that recent letter from Facebook it just burns me up. You know, the one where they say, “CPM ads will continue to get impressions but may receive less clicks.”  Wait, what?!?

Here are my questions to you based on that letter, dear Facebook:

  1. How are you going to make CPM ads get less clicks? Does this mean that you are going to stop people from clicking on my ads somehow? I’d really like to know what you mean by that.
  2. What makes you think that other performance marketers and I are going to sit around and suddenly be okay with paying double the cost for our ads? There are plenty of other places out there to buy traffic, and now more than ever I am going to be moving campaigns over to them.
  3. Do you really compare yourself to Google as a traffic source now that you are the #1 site in the US for monthly visitors? I’ll make it easy for you: don’t. Google can charge $14 a click on top keywords because it’s worth it. People that are searching for a Mesothelioma Lawyer are worth thousands and thousands of dollars. People that are browsing a social media site looking for ways to waste the rest of the hours in their work day are not.

In conclusion, Facebook has made another major play to screw affiliate marketers and anyone that knows how to arbitrage traffic. Sooner or later, they are going to realize that it will hurt them in the long run when they have completely eliminated a massive source of advertising revenue. The real question is, by the time they figure this out, will affiliates have moved on?

This one has.

The Secret To Getting Killer CTR

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Let’s face it: Click Through Rate (CTR) can either make or break your campaign. Whether you are doing PPC, PPV, or especially with CPM & Media Buys, your CTR is often the determining factor in whether you make money or not. Since this is the case, it never ceases to amaze me how many affiliates (myself included) forget to put hard work and thought into the #1 thing that affects your CTR: your ad copy.

Putting together a campaign usually goes something like this:

  • Spend several hours doing niche research
  • Spend a couple of hours finding the best keywords
  • Spend a few more hours creating your landing page
  • Ready to launch!
  • Oh wait, I have to put some ads up here… I’ll just copy & paste what the other guys or doing, or just throw in some text off the top of my head

And then you wonder why nobody is clicking through to see your awesomely designed landing page and your super-targeted offer… Guess what?  Ad copy has a massively huge part to play in your campaign’s success. Coming up with consistently killer ad copy and images is probably the most important skill you can have as a marketer. If you can’t do that, then what can you really do? Copy campaigns? Put tracking together? Load keywords into Google? That’s great, but that could all be outsourced to a monkey.

The real value that affiliates bring to the table is in our creative approach to campaigns and ad copy. You think that the company whose service or product you are promoting hasn’t tried direct-linking their website on the major search engines for their primary keywords? They have. They either have that on lock and therefore have those keywords blacklisted from you, or it doesn’t work and they turned to CPA Networks and Affiliates to think outside the box and get them leads from sources that they don’t know about or don’t understand well enough to do themselves.

Take some time to educate yourself on the basics of sales, marketing and advertising. All of the knowledge you can get from studying the fundamentals will go straight to your ad copy, and your CTR.  Even if some of the principles were created for print advertising, it still applies online. I don’t care if it seems like homework. If you want this to be a serious business for you then you need to treat it like one.  Read some books on marketing & advertising. There are literally thousands of them written. You will not regret the time you put into bettering yourself as a marketer.

Here are a few of my favorites to get you started (not affiliate links):

Read These Books