Review sites are a great technique for promoting CPA offers. The goal is to “review” various products/services from the same niche and recommend which is the best. When punters come to your review sites, they are seeking an authority figure to provide them with information about the product/service to assist in their buy decision. A person looking for a product/service review is in buying mode and just needs a trigger to push the button.

A successful review site is one that keeps the landing page design very basic and simple. I would ensure that the all the offers on the page has a rating, like the yellow stars used by Amazon, and a brief commentary about why it deserved that star rating. It is my opinion that there shouldn’t be more than 5 offers on a review site to ensure that all the offers can be displayed on the page with very little scrolling (i.e. keep all reviews above the fold). At the same time, I would not have fewer than 3 offers on a review site either.

Also, the review site needs to rank the offers, showing which one is the best and worst in the niche. Ideally, you want the offer with the best conversion rate or the highest payout to be the one ranked as the best.

Sometimes, you may find an offer in a niche that does not have any competing CPA offers. In this situation, just find any competitor (non CPA) and showcase them on your review site. Just ensure that they are not the most recommended offer on your review site and the punter will never click on it. You need to have multiple offers for this review site technique to work. A review site with only one product is a testimonial and requires a different marketing strategy.

The last thing I would like to add is do not sound like a salesman when writing your review. Keep the review genuine and honest. Finally, ensure that you mix and match your ratings. Don’t give every offer 5 stars! Make it look realistic.

For more landing page ideas, please visit: http://ppcbully.com/blog/?p=431

Another great technique I picked up from Wicked Fire is that you can use quizzes to promote CPA offers. In my previous post, I talked about using polls and the reason why polls work to promote your CPA offers is because the punter is not just given the offer, but had to work for it by voting on a poll. With a quiz, the punter is even more involved and has to answer a series of questions before receiving the offer.

There are two approaches of using quizzes to promote a CPA offer:

1. As a reward: In this technique, you let the punter go through the process of performing the quiz and then reward them with “a chance to win” something from your CPA offer.
2. As a reality check: In this technique, the quiz is used to ask the punter how much he or she knows about a particular topic. After completing the quiz, you tell them that they should buy/purchase your product so that their life can benefit from it.

Let me try to explain with an example for each of the techniques above.

Reward Quizzes

In this technique, you provide a quiz to test the punter’s knowledge about a popular topic such as Britney Spears. You have to create 5-10 questions about Britney Spears and ask the punter to do the quiz to see how worthy of a fan the punter is. You would want to make the questions really obvious so that the punter will get most of the questions correct and then you can reward the punter with some Britney Spears ringtones or a chance to win something for answering all questions correctly.

Reality Check Quizzes

Say you want to promote debt relief CPA offers. Instead of jumping up and down asking the punter to visit your website and sign up for debt relief, you are better off creating a quiz whereby you ask the punter to answer a set of questions to determine if the punter is in control of his finances or if he/she needs assistance with debt relief. After providing responses to the quiz, your landing page would then tell the punter that he/she needs assistance with debt consolidation and then show your CPA offer explaining how your offer can benefit the punter and assist him with his financial problems.

The reason why reality check quizzes are effective is because the outcome of the quiz stirs and emotion close to home that something is wrong in the person’s life and that he needs to find a solution. Coincidentally, you offered a solution at the end of the quiz.

This is as far as I’m going to explain the quiz technique. There are many types of quizzes to implement and many different offers you can promote with quizzes. The possibilities are endless and it is up to you to think-outside-the-box and create some interesting quizzes for your CPA offers.  Give quizzes a try and if you are successful at using this technique to promote CPA offers, please report back and let us know of your experiences. Unfortunately, PPC Coach does not promote this technique, so you won’t be able to receive coaching for quizzes. However, I am sure you will find users there that have tried this technique and are able to give you some advice and direction.

One technique I learned a long time ago to promote CPA offers, namely e-mail submits, is by using polls. The way it works is you setup a poll about a topic of high interest and then you reward the punter with “chance” to win a prize. All they have to do is enter their e-mail address and you cash in on the offer. Sounds simple doesn’t it?

I learnt this technique from Wicked Fire forums where a member had heard about a topic on the radio and setup a poll topic based on that. The key to a successful poll is to catch the internet wave on a hot topic before the rest of the internet catches up and blogs/posts about it everywhere. You want to be first up to the plate with a site about the topic. The more emotion you create out of the topic, the better your chances of having the punter vote and enter their e-mail.

There are numerous sources for poll topics including radio and TV news coverage. But my favorite is using Yahoo! Buzz and Google Insights to see what keywords internet users are actually looking for.

There are too many tips, tricks, and techniques for using the polls method that I cannot possibly cover them all in this post. If you are interested in working with the poll technique, signup for PPC Coach and use their coaching program to walk you through this technique. You can share your poll setup with members and they will coach you through the entire setup to ensure that you have an effective campaign running.

To help you get started, here is an example of a poll site that you should be setting up. I used my own custom built poll site/script, but you can purchase commercially available poll software just for doing CPA offers. Poll Control and Poll Factory are two of the biggest ones out there. Hope this is enough information to get you started. As mentioned above, PPC Coach is your best bet if you need help running through the details of this technique.

In March, I had a horrible PPC run. In fact, I lost $70 in all my poll PPC campaigns and have come to the conclusion that polls are a very difficult strategy for PPC and they are no longer effective due to the high amount of scrubbing that happens. So for April, I’m going to keep it simple and just do plain old-fashioned direct linking. Since the most important part of a direct linking campaign is the adcopy, it reduces the number of variables that influence my success or failure of affiliate marketing. I will report back at the end of the month on my results.

Despite my PPC failures in March, I had an incredible return on my eBay affiliate sites. I cashed in $110.89 from just two sites generating traffic purely through SEO. My sites are simple blogs with links to eBay auction listings. Here is a cool graphic showing my clicks to earnings ratio. I know that my numbers are very low and that there is so much more potential to develop these sites, but I am happy with where they are sitting at the moment.

I have done this time and time again in every project I have taken from software development, to graphic design, to advertising, and now internet marketing. My biggest weakness is getting over the mental roadblock. The best analogy I have is to think of internet marketing like advertising. If you are trying to create an ad for a diet cola, would you copy the competitor’s ad for diet colas? Would your ad talk the lack of calories in your diet cola? Well, you could, but you wouldn’t want to. Consumers are buying diet cola because of its diet/low calorie qualities. They already know that and they are not stupid.

Instead, you want the diet cola ad to show what life is like if they drank the diet cola. You want to show how their life is improved (or how somebody else’s life is improved). You don’t market the drink directly, but you market the benefits of the drink. There are a million ways to illustrate this. Just turn on the TV and watch the ads displayed. This is called out-of-the-box thinking.

In internet marketing, out-of-the-box thinking is vital to the success of your affiliate marketing business. Do not copy what your competitor is doing, though it may work on the short-term. Do not setup an ad campaign that showcases obvious facts of the product to the consumer. You need to sell the benefits of the product or illustrate how the product will improve the consumer’s life. There are a million ways to illustrate the benefits of a product. As an internet marketer, if you can brainstorm some these out-of-the-box ideas on how a consumer’s life would benefit from your product, then you are in the game.

In my experience, the biggest mistake a beginner makes when doing affiliate marketing is trying to sell the product itself. It is the differentiator between a successful campaign and a losing one. If you are having trouble coming up with novel ideas to promote your product, I suggest signing up for PPC-Coach because they coach you with some examples. You can follow their directions to the letter, but remember what I said above, you need to expand on the directions given and think like an internet marketer to be truly successful in this game.

So the next time you setup your ad campaign, ask yourself whether you are showing the benefits of the product, as opposed to selling to the features of the product. Let me know how it goes.