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.

Ad copywriting is extremely important for making your ad standout and grabbing the attention of web surfers. On most websites (where your ads are most likely to be displayed), making your ads standout in a sea of crowded garbage and over stimulization is not easy. This chore is made harder by ad blindness, where the surfer has blocked out certain areas of a webpage due to clutter and ad saturation.

Ad Copywriting Guidelines

There are obviously many examples of ad copywriting out there. The easiest way to see examples is to review the top 10 ads that appear on Google when you search for the keyword. Those ads are there because somebody (or some ad agency) has meticulously crafted those ads, split tested them, and pushed the ones that convert to the top. But for polls, ads don’t appear on Google’s search engine result pages (SERP). They appear within the content of a website. Therefore, it is not as easy to find samples of ads, but not impossible.

Since we are talking about ad copywriting for polls here, keep in mind, the goal here is to get the punters to vote on your poll and then enter their information on the next page “for a chance at a prize.” Here are some basic rules to follow for poll ads that have been suggested:

1. Try mentioning the prize in the ad. The punter may vote on the poll because they are interested on the prize and is guaranteed to click all the way through to the offer page. Or they may not even click on your ad because they are not interested in the prize, thus saving you the cost of one click.
2. Try fitting in a call-to-action (CTA) into the ad text so that users know what they need to do when they click on your ad. Same principle as above applies so that punters who are interested will click, and those who aren’t won’t and save you some click costs.
3. Enter the keywords into the headline. Sometimes I enter just the keyword by itself and sometimes I enhance it with a few more words. See my examples below.
4. Try putting “Yes or No” in the headline. You can try putting your poll buttons in the headline or a variation of that to see if it makes a difference.
5. Try stating “1-Minute Poll” in the body of the ad. You can also combine this with the “Yes or No” in the body to basically reveal what your poll is about. For example, “1-Minute Poll: YES or NO”.
6. Try adding ellipses (…) to your ad body. Adding ellipses to the very last line of your ad body seems to trigger a bit of curiosity for the punters and will make them click through to find out more about the ad. This can be a good thing or a bad thing.
7. Do you know the “secret”? It has been said that incorporating the word “secret” in your ad has the same effect as ellipses and will trigger the curiosity in the cat. Try and see if this works for you.

Ad Format

This is just a guideline for the look and feel of your ad. Use the above copywriting guidelines to determine what goes on each line. Because these are just guidelines, it is not necessary to follow strictly as my examples below show.

1. Keep the headline short. 1 or 2 words maximum.
2. Tell them it is a poll on the first line.
3. Ask them the question on the second line.
4. Capitalize the words in your url.

Ad Copywriting Examples

Halo Wars: Yes or No?
1-Minute Poll-Win A Great Prize
Is Halo Wars Overrated?
PollSite.com/Halo

Halo Wars vs. Killzone 2
60-Second Poll
Which game will reign supreme?
PollSite.com/Halo

Barack Obama Is A Liar
Is He Lying To You Too?
3 Second Poll – YES or NO
PollSite.com/Obama

Is Payton Manning Gay?
They Are Saying He Is
Vote YES Right Now
PollSite.com/Payton

Are You Ready for A Black President?
We Need To Know….
30 Second Poll – YES or NO
PollSite.com/Black-President

Will Smith House Arrest
Does Will Deserve House Arrest?
Vote for a Free Ipod Touch
PollSite.com/WSmith

Ah, the question about max bid is always asked by beginners starting PPC. In most cases, setting a value and forgetting doesn’t work because you are not maximizing your CPC. It is also important to have good tracking on your campaigns so that you know where to tweak and optimize your bids.

So let’s get started.
Is it better to bid a maximum of $0.10 at the start, or is it better to bid higher (e.g. $0.30) and then gradually lower it over time?

Starting Low
If the keywords you are bidding on are very competitive, then starting at $0.10 will get you nowhere. Now what if you slowly bump up by $0.05 increments until you get impressions? I have heard of people trying this technique and still never getting impressions. You may have ruined your campaign forever.

Starting High
The alternative is to start high (e.g. $0.30) to lock in your traffic, and then gradually lower your bids to a sustainable level. Yes, it is very difficult to make money bidding over $0.20 on a typical e-mail or ZIP submit campaign, but if you know that you are getting good conversion rates, then you can rest assured that lowering your CPC will eventually keep you afloat. In this stage, you will lose some money to research what adgroups are getting traffic and are converting. If you are not getting decent traffic from certain adgroups, you can prune them to improve your CTR with Google. This is a small sacrifice to learn what works and what doesn’t.

The general rule of thumb for me is to bid $0.25 right off the bat. If impressions and conversions are decent, gradually reduce by $0.02 per day. At around $0.15-$0.19, you should slowly lower it by $0.01 per day until you hit your maximum ROI. Don’t expect all adgroups to give you the same ROI. Certain adgroups can only go as low as $0.14 and earn you 25% ROI. While other adgroups can go lower to $0.10 and give you 100% ROI.

The general theme on bidding is to divide and conquer until you have found a happy medium.

Caveat
Aha, there’s always the damn fucking caveat at the footer of all documents.

1. If you have a good history with Google, you can actually start your bids off right where you want it to. Initially, you may have to start at $0.25, but with good standing with Google, you can start at a lower bid price.
2. Even bidding $0.50, if you have a new Adwords account, it may take 5-7 business days to get impressions. So please be patient and don’t setup 30 campaigns in frustration. When it kicks in, you’re going to lost a lot of money quick.

When it comes to promoting e-mail and zip submit offers, you need to know when to keep an offer and when to toss an offer. I am sure that every affiliate marketer has their own strategy that works for them. Each strategy’s validity will also depend on many factors including promotion technique and target demographics. Today, I will show you two methods that are commonly used.

Method 1 – One offer at a time.
In this method, you would push only one offer in your campaign and use certain hard rules to keep or toss the offer. This method minimizes financial loss and will give you some ideas on whether the offer is working for your campaign. Its disadvantage is that it takes a bit more time to find the best offer and you are more prone to scrubbing by the advertiser.

The hard rules for swapping out an offer for another are as follows:

• Toss if after 30 clicks, there are zero leads.
• Toss if after 50 clicks, there are fewer than 2 leads.
• Toss if you have lost $15. This last rule is a catch-all accounting for your starting bid price and irregardless of click/lead ratio.
• Toss if after 10 offers tried, you still don’t get a lead.

Once you’ve found an offer that is giving you a positive ROI, you can either stay there, or you can continue testing other offers until you’ve tested all your offers and had a chance to evaluate which one was the best performing.

Method 2 – Rotate-rotate-rotate.
Anybody who’s read topics on PPC surely have heard about rotating multiple offers. Rotating will give you a feel (possibly early on) about which offers are converting well. You might even find the good converting ones in your first 30 clicks to your landing page. But in most cases, you will go through about 100-300 clicks before you know which one is a winner. This is more expensive obviously, but you may have some early indicators on which offers are converting. Another benefit is you minimize potential scrubbing and spread your eggs around in case an offer disappears.

In this approach, if you are receiving lower than 10% click/lead conversion, it is probably time to toss the entire campaign due to lack of interest. It may also be that your ad copywriting has mislead the visitor or that the landing page itself is flawed. Now remember that this 10% conversion rate is not written in stone because it is highly dependent on the CPA as well (i.e. payout $$$). But you really want to be in the 25% or higher range to be truly effective.

After launching 3 campaigns on the content networks (Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter), I learned that sub-300 keywords per campaign will get you little to no traffic at all. On my Adwords campaign, I have provided just shy of 400 keywords and received ZERO impressions over the last 5 days. On adCenter, my smallest campaign contains 72 keywords and is receiving about 100 impressions per day.

A bit of asking around and doing some investigation, I learned that 2000-3000 keywords is what I should be aiming for. Also, there is no need to be diligent and prune irrelevant keywords on the content network. With the polls that I am running, you want curious people generally interested in the topic to hop onto your landing page and submit their vote.

My next goal is to launch 3 more campaigns with 2000+ keywords in each campaign to generate more impressions. The one good thing about getting low impressions in my first 3 campaigns was that I did not have to pay for clicks, because I received none.  So I consider this a free lesson in PPC advertising. You don’t get very many things for free in this industry.

One last thing I’d like to add is that if you have a new Google Adwords account, it may take several business days for staff to perform a manual review of your account and campaign. If you want to start quicker, setup an account and setup a quick campaign for a pre-existing website (does not have to be yours). This will get your account approved so that when it is time to setup a real ad, your account will be ready and your ad will be online within a few hours instead of days. Total cost of this effort doesn’t need to be more than $5.

Lesson Learned

1. Ensure at least 2000+ keywords on the content network.
2. Don’t worry too much about keyword quality.
3. Setup and get your Google Adwords account approved early.

Today, I wrapped up my first Facebook campaign. I can tell you right now that it was an e-mail submit offer from Neverblue that pays $1.60 for a visitor to upload their baby photo to The Great American Photo Contest. I was able to get 4 days of impressions from Facebook before it completely crapped out. The problem with this offer is that you need to upload a photo of your baby. That means the user has to go hunt down that baby picture. I found that most of my users were clicking on my ad during the day time, perhaps when they were at work, using the work computer. It was unlikely for them to have their baby photo on their work computer. Hence the weakness in the Facebook system for not allowing ads to run on certain time slots only. I have since dismantled this campaign and moved on to others. But I came out making $16, which I am quite proud about. Remember, that I started out with FREE money from Facebook.

January 2009 Stats

So what is next for me? I am going to try out some offers with MaxBounty on Facebook to see if they can convert a little better. My goal is to minimize input that is required to convert. No hunting for photos to upload. Just enter your e-mail address or ZIP code and that’s it. Let that be a lesson for others. Keep user input to a minimum for conversion.

If you read yesterday’s post, notice that I had a -58% ROI. My first campaign with Facebook was quickly going down the shitter as my EPC < CPC.

Fast-forward another 24-hours with a lower CPC set at $0.13 and all of a sudden I get a 269% profit? I assumed that by lowering my CPC to $0.13, Facebook would drop my impressions considerably to promote higher paying ads. I guess that theory was also flawed as I was given >40,000 impressions today. Truly a WTF moment.

The reason Facebook kept promoting my ad was because I was maintaining a 0.08% CTR with Facebook. Word around town is CTRs lower than 0.01% will automatically get your ad decommissioned by Facebook. I cannot reasonably explain why with more impressions, I was getting less clicks, but much better conversions. I am tempted to attribute this to the unpredictability (read psychoticness) of human nature.

Another 24 hours. I am letting this ad run for another 24 hours at the same CPC to analyze if I encounter the same results as I did today. If this ad is able to maintain its current earnings, I stand to earn $150 month based on $5/day net earnings. Not bad for a little side-income eh?

P.S. I do not believe that this offer is sustainable over the long term on Facebook. The demograhpics is too small (~100,000) and I cannot keyword-target my audience more specifically for the best results.

My first Facebook campaign didn’t do too well. My ROI was -58% because my cost per click ($0.30) for advertising was lower than my earnings per click ($0.13). So instead of abandoning this campaign, I decided to lower my CPC to match my EPC to get a better feel for this game.

With $0.30 CPC, I was given approximately 31000 impressions by Facebook and a click through rate of 0.13%. With the new $0.13 CPC, I am wondering how much impressions I will get and whether my CTR improves. My budget has been set to $10 so that I can keep this experiment going. I have been using free sign-up money from Facebook, so none of this is coming out of my pocket yet.

However, with just 24 hours of campaigning, it has become pretty obvious how I need to improve my strategy.

• I need an offer with a payout greater than $1.60/lead to give a bigger gap between my CPC and lead payout. Either that or significantly lower my CPC, which I have already done.
• I need to provide enough information so that Facebook users are not unnecessarily clicking on my ads. This is a good thing for me, but bad thing for Facebook revenues. I need to find a good balance to keep me profitable (and Facebook) profitable. The users who click through my ads should be those who are already in the mindset to fulfill the offer.
• I should pick newer offers. With older offers, most Facebook users would have seen the offer landing page already and won’t bother proceeding further. Newer offers will look fresh to them.
• I need to work on my advertising skills and create a sense of urgency for the Facebook audience. My ad text should indicate that the offer is limited, or while quantities last, etc.

So I will see what the next 24 hours will do for my campaign with a lower CPC. I am interested in seeing my impressions, CTR, and conversion rate. I was told by my affiliate manager that the offer I am promoting has a conversion rate of 14%. Today, I managed a measly 7%.

I launched my first Facebook ad today. I ensured that my ad was very simple, one-liner sentences. The ad title and description only had one sentence that was short and sweet. The ad description was very direct as to what the user needed to do if they wanted to participate. Not only does this prevent unnecessary clicks (clicks cost me $0.30/each), but is also quick to read for the user.

However, immediately after launching the ad, I realized that the target URL for my ad would be changing due to the way Tracking202 tracks CPC. Everytime you change an ad CPC, you get a new URL from Tracking202. DOH!!!! Changing a URL in an ad requires re-approval from Facebook. This is going to be a problem because I will need to tweak my CPC to find the optimal value that works for my campaign. I implemented a fix for this and I will illustrate this later today.

This is how I envision the workflow for my campaigns working. Unfortunately, there are 3 hops before the visitor will see the actual offer page, but I consider these hops a necessary evil for adequate tracking of ad campaigns and conversion rates.

Facebook Ad > Landing Page > Tracking202 Site > Offer Page > Trackback (URL

Facebook Ad

This is the ad banner that the Facebook user sees and clicks. The destination URL points to my landing page and is provided by Tracking202.

LandingPage

My landing page will be doing a few things. The main purpose of my landing page is to up-sell my offer before forwarding my user to the actual offer page. But behind the scenes, a JavaScript is fired to my Tracking202 site to count a click. This JavaScript is provided by Tracking202.

I am going to be lazy and have one landing page per ad campaign. It is just easier that way.

Tracking202

If the visitor decides to proceed and sign up for the offer, he/she will click on my large call-to-action button. This button URL points to Tracking202 which tracks that the user clicked through to the offer page. Then Tracking202 will forward my user to the actual offer page. The URL for the call-to-action button is provided by Tracking202.

Offer Page

This is the page that I have no control over. The offer page is hosted by the advertiser and requires the user to perform a certain action (e.g. filling out a form) to complete the offer. Nothing for me to do there other than ensure that my landing page matches in look and feel to the offer page. We do not want to shock the user with something different.

Trackback (URL)

This is a script that is inserted on the advertiser’s page when the visitor successfully completes the offer. This will send a notice back to Tracking202 to record a successful lead. The script is provided by Tracking202.

I am certain that this is not the only way to accomplish ad tracking. In fact, I will not guarantee that this is the most efficient way. However, this is the best strategy I can think off without making it too complicated. In general, most of the magic is happening within the Tracking202 software. If you have not looked at Tracking202 yet, please do so. This little piece of software will do a lot for you.