Category Archives: Guides, Tips & Tutorials

PPV Network Review: DirectCPV

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If you’ve read my other posts on PPV, you know I’m a fan of Media Traffic and their PPV network.  This is the place that 90% of the people I talk to start out with PPV.  That being said, there are other options out there.  A newer network that I heard about recently is DirectCPV.  Since I had a few people asking me about it, I decided to give it a test run to see how it stacks up to the other guys.

First of all, the interface may look familiar to you when you log in and setup a campaign.  This is due to the fact that DirectCPV is white labeling the CPView platform.  This does not mean that DirectCPV is the same thing as CPView, they have a different user base with the adware installed so it is a completely different network.

It is relatively simple to get a campaign set up with the interface, you put in your Landing Page url (affiliate link), give it a name, and then you add in at least one type of targeting (URL, keyword, or category).  I put in about 20 URLs from a quick Google search and decided to try out a couple keywords as well.  One thing to note here is that DirectCPV does not have anywhere near the number of adware users that some of the bigger networks have, so you might be a bit safer testing out new keywords here (keywords on the big networks can mean your whole budget gone in the blink of an eye).

I let it run for a few days and when I came back to check my stats (using Prosper202) I was pleasantly surprised that my campaign was profitable right off the bat.  It wasn’t a home run, but it did make money.  I decided to make a couple of minor tweaks at that point.  The first thing was checkout my Prosper202 to see what URLs were converting.  As is often the case, all the conversions were coming from one URL.  I noticed that some of them were coming from the Keyword that I had put in instead of the direct URL.  The problem with that is that the bid price for the Keyword was 0.08 (8 cents) and the bid for the direct URL was 0.01 (1 cent).  Simple fix there, I paused the Keyword and added the URL to my targeting.  After that the profits were decent.

The main gripe I have about the DirectCPV interface is that you have to click “Check Bid” on each URL individually to see if you are in 1st position.  Other networks have done this better, but you can take some of the hassle out of it by setting the bid mode to Auto and then setting it at 1st position.  This will automatically increase your bid if somebody is above you.  Also if you want to Geo Target your campaign, you have to do it after the campaign is setup, you can’t do it during the campaign creation.  This stumped me the first time.

Final word?  I like DirectCPV.  I think it’s worth a shot especially if you have a profitable campaign on another network that you are looking to expand.  It can also be good for testing out a new campaign to if it converts without blowing your budget since there is a smaller installed user base, there is less competition, and the bid prices start at 1 penny (at MT it is 1.5).  It doesn’t have as much traffic as the bigger guys, but from what I saw it can definitely be a good source to add to your repertoire.

If you signup through my affiliate link here you can get a $25 credit by using the promo code “BR25”.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

SiteSnatcher Has Landed

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If there’s one thing that Internet and Affiliate Marketers can’t get enough of, it is tools & shortcuts.  Every process that can be automated gives us more time to focus on being creative and the next big idea.  A good friend of mine launched his own set of tools this week, and it is called SiteSnatcher.  I immediately signed up and gave it a test run, so I thought I would share my first impressions.

The first tool I tried was the Blog Commentor.  When you are trying to get a new site indexed and get some link juice to it, one of the easiest ways to do that is to comment on related blogs using your URL to link back to your site.  The Blog Commentor will take any keyword that you choose, such as “golf”, and come up with a bunch of direct links to the posts that you can comment on.  It also has a built in iFrame so that you can just load the blog inside of SiteSnatcher, submit your comment, then hit “Next” and it loads the next blog into the window.  This makes the blog commenting process a breeze, you can knock out 100 comments in short order.

Next I tried out the Site Targeting Tool.  This is designed for PPC guys that are looking for specific sites to target for the Content Network in their niche.  One of the best ways to make the Content Network profitable is to site target instead of just letting Google do it for you.  This can be a tedious process of searching for sites in your niche that are running AdSense so that you can target them.  This tool does it all for you.  Simply put in your keyword, hit go, and it will grab anywhere from several hundred to 1,000 sites in your niche that AdSense on the page.  This can also work as a URL scraper for finding sites to target with PPV.

One thing I will mention is that you need to wait a little bit for the results to come in.  These tools are doing real-time scrapes of lots of data, so when you hit go it can take anywhere from 10-15 minutes to see the full results.  It is all designed to run in the background, so you can set a couple different tools to run, or just work on something else and come back later.

The pricing is based on how much you want to use it.  On the basic package, you get 50 “credits” per day.  As you see in the screenshot above, the Site Targeting Tool take 25 credits to run.  You can run it (or any other tool for 25 credits) twice per day on the basic package.  I think it’s a cool way to test it out without spending a ton of cash.  If you start using it a bunch on a daily basis, then you can get a bigger package with more credits.

All in all I think that this is definitely going to turn some heads.  I don’t recommend products or services very often on this blog, so take it from me, this is a solid service that is only going to get better.   If you do PPC on the Content Network, or PPV, or if you do any type of SEO including the EPN / McJiffy / BANS method, then SiteSnatcher is a tool you will want to check out.

P.S. If you click one of the SiteSnatcher links above, you will go through my affiliate link.  If you don’t want to use my affiliate link, just go to http://sitesnatcher.com.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Real Money On Twitter?

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I was able to sit in on a few of the panel discussions at the first Affiliate Convention in Denver this week, and one of the things that came up over and over again was the power of Twitter.  By now, pretty much everyone in the Internet Marketing world has a Twitter account, but how many people are really making money off of it?

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker was quite adamant that there is an “imbalance” right now in the realm of monetizing Twitter.  Similar to Facebook and some other new ad platforms when they opened up, he feels like there is a lot of inventory to be had for cheap that can be arbitraged very effectively.  That being said, action needs to be taken now because this won”t last forever!

One of the tools that has come to my attention this week (and was mentioned at the conference) is RevTwt.  One of my friends is a prolific Twitter-holic, and he has played around with putting some RevTwt ads in his feed to make some extra money.  They pay out on a CPC basis, similar to Google AdSense.  This is all well and good, but I think that the real potential to make money with Twitter is in doing the advertising, not the publishing.

You can sign up for an advertiser account at RevTwt and their clicks start extremely cheap, as low as 8 cents.  Any marketer worth his salt should be able to arbitrage that into something that makes much more money.  Maybe some of those campaigns that you have paused because clicks got too expensive on Google?  A campaign that makes you an average of 60 cents per click is a loser if you are paying a dollar a click, but if you are paying 8 cents then it becomes profitable again very quickly!

The thing I like about RevTwt, or just ads in general on Twitter, is that there is a possibility for implicit trust built in for the end users.  If their friends are the ones that are tweeting, they are much more likely to click on the ad because they feel that it is something that was personally recommended.  Couple this with those oh-so-popular Flog landing pages, and you”ve got a potential goldmine.

So there you have it, the time is now, I would love to see more people get out there and experiment with advertising on RevTwt and Twitter!

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network – Part 2

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By now hopefully you have had a chance to get your website up and running, and if you are lucky your EPN account might have even been approved.  Now there is only one step left to do: get out there and market your new niche website!  You are going to be marketing this website through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), not PPC.  It is the best way to get free traffic to your website and keep it going for months and years to come.

It’s really not too tough, because the search engines are going to do all of the heavy lifting, you just need to make sure that your site is in the best position to get indexed.  The first thing that you want to do is make sure that you have a keyword list that you are targeting.  You probably came up with a decent list when you were researching what niche you wanted to create your website in, but if not, now is the time to create it.  You just need 20-30 keywords that are centered on your main keyword and slight variations of it.  For example, if you were selling Nike Running Shoes, your list could include Nike Basketball Shoes,  Buy Nike Shoes,  Best Nike Cross Trainers, Nike Air Jordans, Nike Socks, Nike Sports Shoes, etc.

Once you have your keyword list, you are going to put those keywords in your Meta tags.  You also want to make sure you write a good two to three sentence Description of your site to go in the Meta tags.  This will be the text that appears in the search engines under the link to your website.  You want to write something that gets people to click on it, such as “Get the cheapest prices on Nike Running Shoes on the planet.  Our list is updated daily, check it out today!”

The next step is to get some inbound links going to your website.  The easiest method is going to be to submit your website to free directories and social bookmarking websites.  The higher the Page Rank of the site, the more juice it passes on to your website.  Adding these links can be a little time consuming, but we are going to stretch it out.  You do not want to go out there and submit 100 social bookmarking links the day after you create your website, this will almost certainly get you penalized or “sandboxed” by Google.  I prefer to let the domain sit for a week or two and then start adding the social bookmarking links in groups of 3-5 per day, just like a site would grow through word-of-mouth or natural backlinks.  If you don’t want to do this grunt work yourself, you can hire someone to do it for a fair price.  This is definitely the way to go if you are cranking these sites out.

The next step is possibly the hardest one: wait.  It takes some time to get these sites indexed and ranking, but if you’ve done your research properly it should not take very long at all to get on to the first or second page of Google for your main keyword term.  Once that happens, the clicks will start coming in to your EPN account and with those, come commissions.  You are not going to become a millionaire with this method, but I have personally followed these exact same steps and made anywhere from $50 to $300 per month from a single one of these sites.  Once you have the first one done, crank out another one!  The key is volume.  $300 x 10 websites = $3,000 for month, and you are 100% profitable because there are no PPC costs.

Now go make some money.

Easy Money with eBay Partner Network

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There is no free lunch.  However, there is something I like to call, “A little bit of effort for a lot of return.”  eBay Partner Network is one of those opportunities.  You might have heard about the glory days of getting $25-$50 for free account signups back when eBay had their affiliate program on Commission Junction.  Make no mistake, those days are gone.  However, this does not mean that there is no money to be made with EPN.  On the contrary, it can be quite a nice little extra stream of income.  Let’s look at how it’s done.

Before we go any further, if you don’t have an EPN account, go here and sign up for one right now.  It takes them a little while to get around to approving you.  You can do the setup without your account and API key, you just need to have it before you go live with your site.

First of all, you are going to pick a niche.  There are many eBooks and blogs written just about picking a niche, but let’s not overcomplicate things.  All you are looking for is a small niche, something that gets around 20,000+ searches on Google every month, and it has less than 500,000 resulting pages when you search for it on Google.  To get yourself kick-started, I like to check out eBay Pulse.  The various Top 10 lists they have there for different categories are a great place to start.  If you can’t find anything small enough, then laser target even more.  Too much competition for baseball bats?  Zero in on one specific brand of baseball bats, a smaller brand even.  The more targeted the better, as long as there are searches for it every month.

Once you have picked your niche, the next step will be choosing the platform for building your website.  The most popular options here are phpBay and BANS, but these both come at a cost.  They are worth the money, but if you are looking to just start out with your first EPN niche site, I would recommend McJiffy.  It is a completely free open-source script, and I’ve used it for profitable sites myself.  The rest of this guide will assume that you are using McJiffy.  Once you have got your platform squared away, it’s time to set up your website.

You will want to buy a domain name with your relevant niche keywords in the domain itself.  You also want to have some type of value-based keyword in your domain.  Examples: CheapHuffyBikes.com, PaylessNintendoGames.com, etc.  I would recommend sticking with a .COM or .NET, stay away from .BIZ or .INFO, they look cheap and spammy.  We are going to be promoting our EPN site through SEO, so it needs to be relevant and easy to remember.

Finally, the last piece of the puzzle will be hosting.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, I’ve used Hostgator shared hosting for this, just make sure you get the Baby package with unlimited addon domains.  This way you can use the one hosting account to host all your niche sites.  Quantity is the name of the game with this tactic.

Now that you’ve got all the components, it’s time to put them together and build your first EPN site!  Unzip your McJiffy script, and upload it to your hosting account on the root of the domain that you purchased.  There’s just a couple of modifications that need to be made to the McJiffy site to maximize profit.  First of all, use Google Images to find a relevant header image for your website.  You can just leave the green default header in there if you want, but the image will make it look much better.  Second, you will want to write a description of your product and/or website.  Something like, “About Huffy Bikes”.  This doesn’t have to be 100% original, you can grab content from Wikipedia or even the company’s official website and bio, just make sure you re-write it in your own words so that Google won’t penalize you for duplicate content.  Try to keep this description/bio to around 300-500 words.  If you suck at writing, you can hire an article writer to do this for you for very cheap.  Just check around on the various forums.

All of these steps should take you several hours if you are quick, and a few days if you are taking it easy.  We’re going to take a break at this point to let you get started on your website, and pick up next week on Part 2: Marketing Your EPN Site.

Now go get to work!

Google AdWords Bidding Explained – Finally!

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There has always been an element of mystery to bidding for keywords on Google AdWords.  Finally, Hal Varian from the mighty Google speaks out on our behalf with this clear and concise video to explain exactly what happens when you bid on a keyword and how the ads are ranked.  If you haven’t seen this video yet, you need to take the 9 minutes and 12 seconds it takes to watch it.  If you spend any money on Google AdWords at all, it will be worth it.

See, I told you so!  Now go make some money.

Can Ringtones Still Make Money On Google?

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If you are promoting ringtones offers, then you no doubt have been affected by the recent changes to Google’s AdWords policy regarding mobile offers.  The question is, how big of a hit is this to the Ringtones vertical?  Is it still possible to market Ringtones on Google?

One thing that can be said about affiliate marketers is that they are a creative bunch.  Anytime something like this happens in the industry, there is a few days of moaning and gnashing of teeth, but after that everyone gets back to work and decides that it’s just another obstacle to overcome.  Some of the big guys might even be glad for changes like this because it knocks the newbies out of the running for a while.  It will take some time for the effects to be fully felt, but perhaps the change could even result in lower click costs, due to less competition.

Google AdWords Machine

Grants? Nope. Acai? Nope. Ringtones? Hmm...

When you are thrown a curveball from the big G, it’s time to take a look at the variables and see what can be changed to increase conversions.  The glory days of 2002 are long gone, there will be no more promotion of ringtones on Google AdWords by telling people that it’s free, when it in fact costs money.  Now that you’ve got that ugly “$9.95/month” telling people not to click on your ads, you need to give them some other reason to.  Luckily you still have control over some of the most important aspects of your ads, the Headline and the Display URL.

SendMe Mobile recently sent out an alert to their partners pointing out the effect of changing the position of the carrier name in the Display URL has.  Most of the ads that you see will put the carrier after the slash, as in “URL.com/Verizon”.  SendMe suggests that they have seen an increase in CTR from putting the carrier as a sub-domain at the start of the Display URL as in “verizon.URL.com”.

This makes sense because it appeals to the people looking for a trustworthy source for their ringtones.  Now that the pricing is on all the ads, people are going to want to give their money to someone that seems legit, as opposed to “TonsOfFreeTones.com” ($9.95/month).

Of course there is the other alternative, which I’m sure many of you have thought about, which is to get your traffic from somewhere else.  I’ve heard more than once that Ringtones have been dead on Google for a long time, and while I disagree, this proves that people are not just relying on Google for 100% of their traffic.  It’s time to look at the alternatives, even outside the big 3 search engines.  There is lots of 2nd and 3rd tier search engines to be found, and there’s also PPV, not to mention doing specific Media Buys or direct ad placements on websites.

To answer the original question, yes, I think that Ringtones can still make money on Google, but it might be less and less a part of your overall marketing strategy for these offers.  It’s time to put on the thinking cap, go back to the drawing board, and get creative.

Now go make some money!

Scaling Campaigns With PPV

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So if you’ve been following this little series of posts on marketing CPA offers with PPV, then hopefully you have setup a few campaigns, tested some things out, and perhaps even found a winning campaign or two.  I consider it a winner when it is profitable at all.  It might be making $100 a day or $10 a day, but you are in the black.  So what’s the next step?  Today we are going to talk about scaling your campaigns with PPV.

scale imgThe first step is going to be checking up on your results from the tracking that we have installed.  Before we scale a campaign we want to make sure to “trim the fat” from your initial group of keywords.  Using Prosper202, we have been tracking exactly which keywords / URLs your traffic has been coming from, and most importantly, which ones are converting for you.  My rule of thumb is pretty simple: I like to spend at least the amount of the offer’s payout per keyword / URL before deciding if it is a winner or a loser.  Now this can be adjusted depending on your tolerance for losing money, but if you’ve got an offer that pays $20 per lead, and you kill a keyword at $10 of spend, then you might be losing out because even if you spend $18 to make $20 it’s still a profit.  At times, if you are convinced that the campaign will be profitable but you are still tweaking your Landing Page or something, you can spend 2x the payout if you wish.  It’s up to you, I’m just giving you a good place to start.

Typically, what I find is that the #1 URL (the one getting you the largest amount of traffic) is not going to be profitable.  This is not a rule, it’s just a trend I’ve noticed on my campaigns.  For example, I was running a dating campaign and noticed that over 50% of my ad spend and traffic were coming from Match.com, but I hadn’t received a single conversion for that URL.  Since I had spent more than the payout (which was around $3), I paused Match.com.  The day after that my traffic went down drastically, but my conversions stayed about the same.  Guess what that meant?  That’s right, this campaign went from the red to the black overnight.

Once you have trimmed the fat, you are going to want to find more traffic for your offer.  There are two ways we can scale a PPV campaign.  The first one is obvious, to try to find more URLs.  This definitely works, but it can be more time consuming because the whole process starts all over again.  The easiest way to scale a profitable campaign is to copy it over the the other PPV networks.

Unlike PPC, where you know that if you are on Google you are hitting roughy 70% of the market by advertising there, with PPV each network has a different user base.  Zango, for example, installs their software when someone downloads a free Screensaver program, a toolbar, or some other PC tool.  On the other hand, TrafficVance installs their software when users play games from the GameVance website.  Do you think that those user groups are going to have some different people in them?  Absolutely.  This is why I would recommend unpausing all of your “losing” keywords and starting the trimming the fat process over again with each new PPV network.  Just because a URL didn’t convert on Zango doesn’t mean it won’t convert on TrafficVance, and vice versa.

Since there are five major PPV networks, this is going to give you lots of places to try out your campaigns until you have a good sized profitable campaign going.  Once you have done this, it’s time to start all over again and find a new winner!

Now go make some money.

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

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Edit 12/21/2010: The information in this post is outdated. For an up-to-date and complete guide to setting up your PPV campaigns with Prosper202, download my free eBook, “PPV 101”.

Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT.  Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.

First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202.  Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time.  Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.

The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202.  With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy.  Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.

The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it””s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools.  What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network.  By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202.  When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:

yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=

You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”.   You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.

First, download John Hasson””s JAH Simple PPC tool.  It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:

JAH Simple PPC

It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs.  Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC.  Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations.  Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.

With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form.  Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form.  Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form.  The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name.  Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).

Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go!  If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form.  Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.

Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5