Category Archives: Guides, Tips & Tutorials

Testing Offers 101: From Red to Green

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One of the toughest ongoing questions for affiliate marketers is, “How do I know when I’ve spent enough money testing an offer?”  Everybody has a different approach. There are a couple of truths that we need to look at.

  1. It is very rare to find a campaign that is profitable right out of the gate. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it is very rare. In most cases you will need to test, optimize, test, optimize, then test some more before you really get it dialed in and profiting enough to make it worthwhile.
  2. Some campaigns will not work no matter how much testing and optimizing you do. There is nothing more frustrating than beating a dead horse.

Sound like a Catch 22? It all boils down to your tolerance for pain, or your willingness to lose (or I like to say “invest”) money in a campaign before it sees a profit. How do you test properly without blowing too much money, and still avoid dropping potentially profitable campaigns too early? Here’s what I like to do…

First of all, when you setup a campaign, you want to spend about 2x to 3x the payout of the offer for the initial test. If the offer payout is $5, then you want to spend approximately $10 – $15 on the initial test phase. This is the “gathering data” phase.

Stats

Green is good

Once you have done this, you will have some data to work with (assuming you’ve been tracking everything, with Tracking202 or a similar program). Here’s the type of questions you want to ask in order to evaluate your data:

Did it get any conversions at all? If so, what keywords / urls / referrers / ad copies / banners were they from? Did you make a profit? Would it be profitable if you bid on less keywords? Would it be profitable if you bid on more keywords for a cheaper price? The list goes on, but these questions should give you a start.

For me personally, after the initial testing phase, if I haven’t received any conversions at all, I usually dump the campaign. That’s -100% ROI, and that’s going to be hard to overcome without a drastically different strategy, and it’s probably not worth it. If you are anywhere from -50% ROI to 0% ROI, then you might be able to profit with optimization. Try using a landing page or direct linking (whichever you didn’t do the first time), try different ad copies, pictures, headlines, calls to action, etc. Use the data from the test to see what is working and what is not working.

However you got those conversions in the testing phase, focus on that precise set of circumstances and recreate them in greater volume. Once you understand how and why you got some conversions, you are well on your way to having an optimized and profitable campaign.

Now go make some money!

Breaking Down Your PPV Campaign

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So you’ve scraped several hundred urls, you have launched the campaign on at least one PPV network, and you have traffic coming in.  What now?  Well, chances are you are not going to be profitable right off the bat.  If you are then, great!  But there is still optimization that can be done.  If you are just under the line, even about -50% ROI, you can probably pull it up into the black with a little adjustment.

A lot of times you will find that out of those several hundred urls that you scraped, only one or two will give you the majority of the traffic right off the bat.  If it’s a site like google.com or facebook.com that slipped in there by accident, then you should just pause those.  But if it’s a site that is related to your niche that gets a ton of traffic, then it is time to break down your PPV campaign.

Breaking down the wall

Here’s what I mean by that: take out that #1 url, the one that is getting the most traffic, and make a new campaign just for that url.  Then, you want to create a landing page that is specifically targeted towards users of that page.  You want to match the style of it and the colors as well as you can, so that it feels like a natural extension of the site they are visiting instead of an intrusive popup.

If you can achieve this, you are bound to see a large increase in your click-throughs and hopefully conversions as well.  There are still no guarantees, but this method is one of the best ways to optimize your campaign and either get it profitable or squeeze even more profit out of it.

Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!

60% of the Time, It Works Every Time

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There’s no such thing as a surefire winner in Affiliate Marketing. That hot campaign that you have making $1,000 a day right now? It won’t last. The vertical that you have been tearing up for the last two years? It won’t last. Markets change. Audiences get wiser. Traffic sources dry up. There are about a million things that could go wrong at any point in time in this industry, and if you don’t have your income diversified, you will get stung sooner or later.

Are You Diversified?

If this is your business strategy, you are in trouble.

Diversification is something that you hear a lot about in the Investing world. Your broker will tell you, “You don’t want to put all of your money in stocks, or in bonds, or in cash alone. You want to have an even mix so you are both protected against loss and also maximizing your gain.”  Truer words were never said for Affiliate Marketing as well.

The absolute worst position to be in is one successful campaign on one traffic source.  That is an empty bank account waiting to happen.  Most affiliates know well enough that they shouldn’t just sit back and be lazy with one campaign, but I know at least some don’t. Avoid this at all costs.

Another thing you need to watch is when you are running multiple campaigns, but they are all on the same traffic source.  At least you are safe if one of your campaigns goes down. But what if the traffic source dries up?  Then you are back to square one.  Many affiliates were really slammed when Facebook tightened up their restrictions, you can learn from that.  Don’t put all your eggs in the Facebook basket, the Google basket, or even the PPV basket.  What if your network suddenly tells you that they aren’t going to accept any PPV traffic anymore on any campaigns?  These are tough questions that you need to be asking yourself on a regular basis if you want to survive in Affiliate Marketing.

The best thing that you can do to protect yourself from a bad situation is to build up an asset that belongs to you completely.  Create a content-based website in a solid niche that’s been around forever, or just that you can get a lot of traffic from a certain demographic and then sell the traffic.  Or you can build an email list.  An email list is an asset that you can take with you and keep promoting to no matter what happens to your offers, your networks, or other traffic sources.

The number one thing to remember here is that when you are buying traffic from someone and then selling it to someone else, you are the most vulnerable link in the chain and you can be replaced or eliminated at any time.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have job security by arbitraging, even for one second.

The Top 5 Prosper202 Hacks & Mods

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Almost every affiliate that I know (who is worth his salt) uses Prosper202 for their tracking. For the uninitiated, it is the open source version of Tracking202. Open source means that everyone is free to poke around in the code and mod or hack it to work better for their specific instance.  Also it means that you keeep all your data on your server and host the installation yourself. Since the release of Prosper202 there have been a few nifty hacks that have been released on various blogs, and they are a pain to track down so I thought I’d compile my favorite 5 mods here.

1. Adding New Traffic Source Icons To Prosper 202

This one comes from the Masterless Samurai himself, Wes. It’s a fairly simple mod, but extremely useful. The original P202 install only has a few Traffic Sources (PPC networks) built in. Now that affiliates are using P202 to track almost every traffic source imaginable, you will want to add the new icons in so you can see at a glance which accounts you are looking at in the Overview report. If there’s no icon, it just appears as a question mark. It’s nice to be able to add newer traffic sources like Plenty Of Fish, etc.

2. Redirect Prosper202 To Any Tab

This is one of two mods on this list by Jasper, aka Nerdy Affiliate. This one is also simple in nature but a big time saver. When you go to check your stats, it takes 3-4 steps for you to get to the information you want. With this mod, you can set it up to go straight to the reporting page that you want when you go to your tracking domain. Very handy.

3. Prosper202 LP Click-Through for Text Ads & Keywords Mod

This one is also from Nerdy Affiliate. It is a pretty deep mod that adds an additional layer of statistics that you can track: the landing page click-through rate on an individual keyword or text ad basis. This is used to compare the effectiveness of each keyword or text ad by seeing which ones generate the highest click-through rate from your landing page to the offer page. Without this mod, you are only able to tell the overall landing page click-through percentage for all keywords combined.

4. Prosper202 Offer Rotation Setup

This one is by AdHustler, and it’s not an actual hack to the software. It is just a different mindset for using the offer rotation feature in P202. This doesn’t take any coding to setup, just simply follow the instructions on the linked post and you will see how effective it can be for split testing offers to make sure you are getting the most money for your traffic.

5. Prosper202 Complete Install Package for Hostgator

Hostgator is one of the most popular web hosting companies our there. Because of this, more than a few people have tried to install Prosper202 on their Hostgator account and run into a nasty error. The guys at BlueLayerMedia have created an all-in-one fix and install package for version 1.3.2 of P202 that will get you up and running on your Hostgator account quicker than you can say “make monies online”.

If you’ve got a sweet hack that I didn’t list here, let me know in the comments and share the wealth! The open source nature of P202 and its users is what makes the software so essential.

MyAds Minimum Bid Price Is Now 1 Penny

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MySpace MyAds has never been as popular as Facebook Ads.  One of the major reasons is that overall, the traffic quality doesn’t seem to be as good as Facebook.  That, coupled with a $0.25 minimum CPC on MyAds, led to Facebook taking the lead early on.  But the times, they are a-changin’…  I personally am sick of getting my ads rejected under Facebook’s stricter policies, and will definitely be giving MyAds another try.

Now that the minimum bid price is only $0.01 on MyAds, with the right targeting and a high CTR, it should be more than possible to get a very positive ROI.  Keep in mind that a lot of MySpace users these days are of a younger age, since most adults have moved on to Facebook. Try promoting offers that would appeal to the youngsters.

Also, don’t use the banners that your affiliate network has available for you on MyAds.  CTR is everything, and 9 times out of 10 those default banners bite the big one.  They aren’t split-tested and optimized, they are just thrown together by some graphic designer making $25 an hour that has no clue how to market things online.

And there you have it!  Let’s make some monies.

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

Google Launches YouTube Video Targeting Ads

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YouTube Video Targeting

Google has just launched a brand new type of ad unit for AdWords that is now in Beta, called the YouTube Video Targeting Tool.  Every time there is a new ad marketplace that opens up, there is a massive displacement that can be taken advantage of by savvy marketers.  The people that jump in early are going to have a definite advantage in this game.

One of the coolest things about the new YouTube Video Targeting Tool is that you can get very specific with your targeting, right down to selecting individual videos.  You can also target by demographics, channels, and some other methods.

You can choose from two different ad units, InVideo Overlay and In-Stream Video.  The InVideo Overlay can be setup as Text Ads or 468×60 image ads.  The In-Stream Videos are a “15/30 second in-stream video + image companion”.  I’m not exactly sure what that boils down to, since I haven’t had the chance to actually put any ads live yet.

People have been marketing via YouTube for quite a while now, especially in the Ringtones space.  The tried-and-true method is to rip the music video of your favorite artist, put a watermark on it with your Domain leading to the Ringtone offer, and try to get as many views as possible through both natural and artificial means.  This method has become less and less effective as YouTube has been getting wise and closing some of the loopholes used to inflate views to videos and game the rankings.  This new Video Targeting marketplace could be a game-changer for people that have been looking for a way to have a sustainable business model on YouTube without worrying about the impending Account Bans and Video Bans that come with the old method.

The only odd thing I noticed when playing with the interface is that when I searched for some of the YouTube mega-hit videos like the “JK Wedding Dance” and the infamous “Leroy Jenkins” video, they didn’t appear in the list.  Also, most of the videos that were in the list seemed to have relatively low view counts.  I’m assuming that this is because the program is in Beta still, and hopefully the big videos will be fair game once the program has the kinks worked out.

So what are you waiting for?  Head over to http://google.com/videotargeting and check it out!

Day Parting & Campaign Caps with Zango

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Have you ever been testing out a new PPV campaign with a budget of $25 a day and found that it’s all used up before 5pm?  This is one area that PPC withGoogle AdWords has spoiled us: you can choose whether you want Standard or Accelerated ad spend, and with Standard it will evenly price out your clicks through out the day.  Most PPV networks do not do this.

Today I noticed that with Zango you can actually do day parting, which is choosing which hours of the day you want your ads to be displayed.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend turning this on right away if you are testing a new campaign, but it certainly is handy if you are blowing through your daily budget without getting any conversions.  In many verticals, it is not until the evening hours that they really start converting.  People are home from work, kids are home from school, people are surfing the net without worrying about the boss looking over their shoulder.  Besides, it’s more likely that the home computer is where the AdWare client is installed anyway.

To do this in Zango, just login to your account, click on the campaign name you want to add day parting to and click Edit Campaign.  Right above the Save Changes button you will see a new link called Advanced Options.  Click this and it will pop up a window with all the different days of the week and hours of the day.  You can also turn specific days of the week off, like if you only wanted to run your ads during the weekend.

Along with day parting, there are also Campaign Caps on this menu.  This will let you set a daily budget for specific days which overrides the Campaign-level daily budget.  This is great if you are finding that certain days provide a large amount of conversions, and you want to crank up the ad spend to take advantage.

It may not seem like much, but little tools like this can really help you optimize your campaigns and squeeze every last bit of ROI out of your PPV traffic.

When Inspiration Strikes

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When inspiration strikes, it comes hard and fast.  You have the idea, everything is clear.  It’s like when you wake up from a dream and everything is so vivid in your mind.  The problem is, much like when the dream starts to fade after a couple of hours of your morning routine, the killer idea can fade as well.  Here’s what I like to do: document every single detail that you can about the idea while it’s fresh! This doesn’t sound like rocket science, and it’s not.  That being said, I can’t tell you how many times I have neglected to do it because I was sure that I wouldn’t forget it and then the next day it’s *poof* gone.

This happened a lot back in my band days.  If I was sitting down at the guitar just jamming away, minding my own business, a lot of times that’s when the next killer hook for a song would show up.  Sometimes it was an accident, sometimes it was playing in a different tuning than I was used to, either way it would happen and then 9 times out of 10 I would tell myself that this hook was so awesome I would never forget it.  Then I put my guitar down, went and had some dinner, went to bed, and the next day at practice time I couldn’t even remember what chord the killer hook started with.  To this day I am convinced that I have written way too many monster songs and then forgotten them all.  What was the solution?  A simple tape recorder.  If I hit record, got that idea on tape, then it was there forever.  Maybe I wouldn’t even come back to it until months later, but it still rocked.

You can do the same thing with your marketing ideas.  Get it on paper somehow.  Maybe you carry a little notepad & pencil with you everywhere (you never know when inspiration will strike), or maybe you type it into your iPhone or Blackberry, or maybe you call your own voicemail and leave a verbal copy of the idea.  Next time you don’t know what to do, go through your killer ideas file, you are almost guaranteed to get fired up about a concept that you forgot and voila!  Time to make some money!

That’s all for today.  I’m out.