Category Archives: Guides, Tips & Tutorials

Landing Pages For PPV

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We all know that landing pages are a very important part of PPC marketing, but it is important to realize that they can have a huge effect on your PPV (Contextual) campaigns as well.  It seems like most people that start PPV are just doing it to direct link.  It is quite attractive to forget about all the variables except the offer and the URLs you are targeting, but you might be hurting yourself in the long run by doing this.

For example, I was experimenting with a ringtones campaign on Media Traffic.  I had about 1,000 URLs setup for my targets, and I decided to just start with direct linking by grabbing my Contextual Affiliate Link for the campaign (it was Ringtones.net at affiliate.com).  It started getting traffic immediately after I set it live, and before the day was out I had about 1,000 views (displays) on the offer.  To my dismay, there wasn’t a single lead showing!

What I didn’t realize initially is that Media Traffic only displays a 750 by 550 window for your ad.  Once I tested it, I realized that with the smaller window size a good portion of my ad was being obscured.  No wonder it wasn’t converting very well, they were only looking at half of a landing page!  I asked my account rep, and he confirmed that 750 by 550 is the max for MT as of now.  They are considering going to 800 by 600 (like Zango) sometime in the future.

This was what led me to create my first landing page for a PPV campaign.  The main reason was so that I could control exactly what was being viewed by the user when my ad pops up.  For starters, I made sure that the LP I created was exactly 750 by 550.  There would be nothing obscured this time.  Also, with PPV you don’t have to worry about putting a bunch of arbitrary text on the page, because there is no Quality Score issues or “User Experience” to worry about. The results to my initial LP were very promising.  I put it up on Friday night, and by the end of the day Sunday I had generated a 20% profit.  Not too shabby for the first try.

I quickly realized that one of the other benefits to having an LP is that you can tell how many people are clicking on your ad and determine your click-thru ratio.  If you are just direct linking to the Contextual link then you will lose all your click data, and impressions and leads alone are not enough info to tweak your campaign for the maximum profit.  On my page for example, I found out that I was getting about a 2.3% CTR.  The next step would be to play with the ad copy & images on the landing pages to get a higher CTR.  For PPV, it needs to be something eye-catching so they don’t just immediately close the window when it pops up.  Consider what page they are going to be viewing already when the ad pops up, and consider modeling it after the design of that page.

Whatever you do, testing is the key.  The right ad, displayed to the right people, is what creates a killer campaign.  Now go make some money!

How To Direct Link On Google – Part 2

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My last post has generated a lot of response and questions from people, so I wanted to discuss a couple of other points about the method that I outlined in Part 1.

First of all, there is the question of whether this method could get you banned from Google AdWords.  I would consider this a gray-area technique.  It’s not something that is an instant ban, but if you exploit it to a huge degree, then yes, it could lead to your account being terminated.

The reason that I posted this method is that it can be a great way to test out a campaign, but I can’t stress enough that you should be building landing pages for offers that have proven successful with the direct link method. It is very hard to build a long-term, sustainable business on the internet without creating a website.

Second, some people have questioned the ethics of using another site that doesn’t belong to you as the display URL.  The easiest response there is, if you don’t feel comfortable doing it, then don’t do it.  An alternative to using someone’s website is that you can use a domain that you own as the Display and Destination URL to get your ad approved, then switch the link to your affiliate link with Edit Keyword Settings like I suggested.  This way you don’t have to spend the time to build out a full dedicated landing page, but you are still using your own domain so you won’t get any complaints from other webmasters or feel bad about doing it.

I would also like to stress that the tutorials that I publish on this blog are not meant to be the absolute blueprint to success with affiliate marketing.  There is no such blueprint.  The goal with this blog is to give you, the reader, some good tips & advice to get going with some campaigns and marketing methods, and then you can tweak them and customize them to find what works the best for you.

There is a lot of money to be made in this industry, and it’s not always going to be easy.  It’s a lot easier than working 60 hours a week in a job that you hate to bring home just enough to keep the bill collectors at bay though…  Anything with the kind of potential that you have as an affiliate marketer is going to take some time to become successful at, but the rewards are definitely worth the effort that you put in.

That being said, I will continue to offer more strategies and tutorials, and I will do my best to answer your questions & comments to steer you in the right direction.  So keep reading, and keep the feedback coming!

How To Direct Link On Google

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Direct linking on Google is a very popular way to test out affiliate offers to see how they convert before you devote the time to building a landing page.  To get started, you need to login to your Google AdWords account and start a new campaign.  You want to start a New Campaign with Keywords, not Placements.

Google Adwords Screenshot 2

Be sure to choose the proper country for the offer that you are promoting.  Google recently threw a monkey wrench into the works by setting the default countries to “United States and Canada”.  A lot of CPA offers will only accept traffic from one or the other, not both.  So pick your country and move on.

Google Adwords Screenshot 1

Creating your first ad will be the next step.  An ad consists of a Headline, 2 Description lines, a Display URL, and a Destination URL.  Go ahead and create a catchy headline and a descriptive ad containing a call to action, you want to get people to click on your ad now, not next week or next year.

The Display URL is an important step, and this is where we are going to trick Google into thinking that you already have a website built out for your offer.  Just do a normal Google search for your main keyword and pick a URL from one of the sites that appears in the organic (non-sponsored) links.  Make sure that the URL is not also advertised in the Sponsored Links on the right side of the page, because if it is, this trick won’t work.  Copy the URL and paste it into the Display URL box.

Now that you’ve got your Display URL, you want to use the exact same URL for your Destination URL.  I know what you are thinking, “But wait, how will I get paid for sending traffic to a site that isn’t mine?”.  Fear not, we are going to fix that in the next step.  This is just to get Google to approve your ad and hopefully assign you with a decent Quality Score.

So at this point your ad should look something like this:

Google Adwords Screenshot 6

Next you will choose your Keywords and enter your Daily Budget and CPC (Cost Per Click) bids.   Keyword generation and selection is a topic for an entire discussion in  itself, so I will just advise you to do your research before hand and have some keywords to get started with before you setup your campaign.  Google’s Free Keyword Tool is an excellent place to start.

We are almost done.  Go ahead and review everything and hit Save Campaign.  Now we need to do the final step to direct the traffic to your affiliate link instead of the website that you are using for your display URL.  Once you have saved the campaign, you will be taken to the campaign overview screen.  Click on the Keywords tab, and then check the box to select all of your keywords.  Once you have them all selected, click the Edit Keyword Settings button.

Google Adwords Screenshot 5

This will take you to a screen where you can input a new Destination URL for each keyword.  Go ahead and put your affiliate link into the first field, then hit the little down arrow button, this should copy the URL into all of the keywords for you.  So, for example, if your affiliate link is http://login.tracking101.com/ez/aasldkfjd (not a real link), it should look something like this:

Google Adwords Screenshot 7

UPDATE: Make sure that you remove the http:// from your affiliate link when you put it into this Destination URL box, because it will give you an Illegal Characters In URL error if you don’t.  There is a drop-down box to the left of where you put the link in that lets you select http:// or https:// for a secure affiliate link.  It defaults to http:// which is what most networks use.

Then just hit Save Changes, and you are good to go.  Congratulations, now you know how to get a direct-linked campaign approved on Google.

Now go make some money!

Marketing CPA Offers On PPV – Part 2

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Time to get back to work! I hope you all had a Merry Christmas. When we left off in the last post, I had recommended that you sign up with some CPA Networks and the 5 major contextual networks.  Now that we have done that step, we can move on to the juicy stuff.

In PPV traffic, you can target keywords if you want to, similar to PPC.  However, I would not recommend this method unless you have a larger budget and you want to get some fairly general traffic to an offer quickly.  The biggest advantage to PPV, in my opinion, is that you are able to target much more specifically by using URLs.  As you probably know, there are literally billions of different URLs on the internet, the key is going to be finding the ones that will make you money.

It’s really quite simple.  Once you have an offer from your CPA network that you want to promote, you will go to Google (and Yahoo & Bing if you want to be really thorough), and search for each of the key phrases that you want to target.  For example, if you are promoting a Ringtones offer, you could search for Ringtones, top ringtones, Beyonce ringtones, Lil Wayne ringtones, Lady GaGa tones, etc.

When you get the search engine results for each of your terms, there are going to be both natural (also called organic) results, and paid (or sponsored) results.  The sponsored results usually appear to the right of or sometimes above the organic listings.  Open up an Excel spreadsheet or a Notepad, then copy the display URL for the top 10 organic sites and the top 10 sponsored results.  Rinse and repeat for each of your keywords.

Once you have done this with 10-20 keywords/phrases, on each of the 3 major search engines, you will have a decent-sized list of URLs to start with.  If you are using Excel, use the Find Duplicates command to make sure that there aren’t any dupes in your list.

All you have to do now is upload your list of URLs to the PPV network(s).  If you have more than a couple hundred URLs, most of them have some sort of bulk upload template that you can download and fill in, then re-upload to them with the URLs in it.

There you have it, a simple way to get going with PPV marketing with CPA offers, and you don’t have to create landing pages or register domains or any of that mess.

Now go make some money!

Marketing CPA Offers on PPV

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For the uninitiated, PPV (Pay-Per-View) is a type of display advertising.  It allows you to market your website, landing page, or CPA offer by displaying it for users that have downloadable software installed on their computer.  Commonly called Adware, they get this software typically by using free games and services (like screensavers, etc.) from websites like GameVance.

A word about Adware:  it is not Spyware!  Spyware is a parasitic form of software that installs itself on your computer without your permission and can do anything from log your IP info and website history to install viruses on your computer.  Adware is perfectly legal, and it is installed with the permission of the user when they download games & other software from different websites online.  That being said, let’s continue with the overview…

There are five major PPV (also called Contextual) networks currently.  They are Traffic Vance, Lead Impact, DirectCPV, Media Traffic, and AdOn Network.  If you are new to PPV, I would highly recommend starting with just DirectCPV and Lead Impact, or even one of the two.  Eventually, if you decide to get deeper into PPV, it would be advantageous to sign up with all of the networks, because they are all going to have different users with their software installed.  Traffic Vance is a little harder to get started with because they require a $1,000 deposit up front as well as a referral to get ads running with them.  Lead Impact requires $200, and Media Traffic & DirectCPV require $100 (I believe).  AdOn Network requires a much smaller deposit, but they only offer Pop-Under ads instead of Full Page Pop-Up ads, which are much more effective.

You are also going to need to sign up with a few CPA networks, if you haven’t already. I would highly recommend Neverblue.  You need to make sure that you are promoting the correct offer, as not all offers accept contextual / PPV traffic.  They will sometimes have a special link that you have to use for PPV (called the “Contextual Link” on DirectTrack networks, and the DLS [Downloadable Software] Creative on Neverblue).

This should take you a good day or two to sign up for the PPV networks and the CPA networks, if you have already done this, just hang on, I am going to get more in-depth on how to promote offers in Part 2 of this post.

Using YouTube Videos To Promote Your Offer

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It’s official, YouTube has surpassed Yahoo and is now the #2 search engine, right next to Google.  If you are looking for a fast and free way to start getting more traffic to your affiliate offers, you need to add a YouTube strategy to your campaigns.  The concept is simple, you create a video pertaining to your niche and put a link to your website or domain the description on YouTube.  If you want to be really fancy, you can also get software to put a watermark on your video that will display your website on the video itself.  The videos don’t have to be anything fancy, it could be just a few pictures in a slideshow format with some music in the background.  The key is titling the video and tagging it with the right keywords.  A great tool for creating videos for free is at www.animoto.com.  Have fun!