TrafficVance Goes International (At Last!)

According to my good friend Grayson Gold, TrafficVance is finally serving international pops as of now! That includes all the major english speaking countries: United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. They have been serving text links in these countries for a while now, but for those of us that are addicted to pops this is a massive announcement. Lead Impact had the edge internationally for a long time, but I guess all those GameVance installs you guys have been promoting have paid off.

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Keep up the good work, and get those international campaigns up!

The Big 5 PPV Networks: A Comparison

A lot of people that are just getting into PPV ask me what PPV network they should use or what’s the difference between the different networks. I decided to put together a handy comparison chart here so you can see which one is the best for your particular situation.

PPV Network Comparison

PPV Network Comparison (Click to enlarge)

Right-Click here and “Save As” to download the chart!

Ads Are Pending, What Now?

There can be a lot of downtime in Affiliate Marketing. All of the social platforms, PPV networks, and many other traffic sources require manual approval of ads. This means that after you submit an ad you can be waiting anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days before you can see if all your hard work paid off. This can be frustrating, so what is a bored marketer to do when his ads are pending? Let’s look at some options…

Clock

Create More Ads

Ah yes, the old standard. We could certainly spend our time creating more ads. The problem with this is it leads to a downward spiral of waiting for ads to be approved. For me, it’s like for every campaign that has a group of ads pending takes up about 10% of my available brain power. So I’ve got five campaigns pending, then I’m seriously impaired. I can’t think of anything except whether or not the ads are approved, has my budget already been blown through, was the CTR any good, etc. So yes, I do create more ads in my downtime, but only up to a certain point.

Go to the Gym

This is a good idea that I had recently. Maybe I could take my downtime and start working off those internet marketer pounds that creep on so easily! I have yet to successfully pull it off, but in theory it works good. Working out relieves stress and takes your mind off of the ads that are pending. Come home, take a shower, have a bite to eat and then log back in and hit F5. I’ll have to try that…

Play Video Games

There is a self-destructive part of my brain that likes to think that after I’ve completed two hours of work for the day, I have earned the right to screw around for the remaining daylight hours. This is not true. This is one of those situations where you have to ask yourself, what would Ryan Eagle do? Love him or hate him, the guy is motivated. He knows what he wants, and he goes out there and gets it.

Write a Blog Post

Now we’re talking. What better thing to do with your downtime then write about your downtime in a blog post? It’s a great way to feel like you are doing something productive, while keeping your mind on the goal at hand. This is going to be my new go-to method for passing time. I made a mid-new-year’s resolution to try and blog every day. It’s harder than it looks.

Ok I think that’s all for now. Time to go check and see if my ads are approved yet.

PPV Network Review: DirectCPV

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

Marketing CPA Offers on PPV

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 VanceLead Impact, DirectCPVMedia 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.