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.

Wow … I have been very absent from this blog for a while, but I’m back so here are some updates.

Back from Vegas

I spent all of last week in Vegas on a business trip, not related to affiliate marketing. There was no chance to do affiliate marketing while on the road, but I had many opportunities to see how advertising is done in a different region. Since this was my first Vegas experience, it was interesting to see that sex sells and this is flaunted all over the main strip in Vegas. The city definitely does not sleep. Here are some pics I took with my old Pentax dSLR and let’s get to the real updates.

Affiliate Marketing Status

I setup 5 more campaigns before leaving for Vegas and although I got the clicks really cheap on the Google content network, I could not for the life of me get any conversions. This was my first Canadian offer that I tried that can be found in MaxBounty. I have had no luck getting any leads with MaxBounty, despite sending hundreds of traffic to the offers on their network. At the moment, I am not blaming MaxBounty or the advertiser. The quality of my traffic may have been poor and weren’t the kind punters to go submitting lead offers. I have not tried launched any more campaigns since because I got a nice little surprise from my old campaigns.

eBay Affiliate Makes a Comeback

So get this, I log into eBay Partner Network (EPN) and I see >$130.00 sitting there. To my surprise two of my older EPN websites generated decent traffic in the first 2 weeks of March and also resulted in some pretty big conversions. One site was a BANS (Build a Niche Store) site and the other was a Wordpress site running PHPBayPro. So I spent the all my time after I returned tweaking those sites and giving it a bit more SEO to see if I can keep the momentum going. I am really stoked about my Wordpress EPN site because it was my first blog-based site. All my EPN sites had an EPC of $70 or higher. Now that is pretty insane for little to no advertising cost; all organic Google traffic only.

The great thing about EPN sites are that they are great for long-term income. They don’t generate much profit if you don’t do much work pushing and promoting it. It is pretty much setup once and forget it forever.

What? How can it be a bust, yet successful at the same time?

When I started my first few PPC campaigns with Google, I could not get any impressions for the life of me. I think it was because it took about 5 business days for my new Adwords account to get approved with Google. There were definitely some frustrating times waiting for this to occur. So in the mean time, I was taking all my keywords and advertising to Microsoft’s adCenter for my polls. The results were less than stellar. On adCenter, I received no greater than 2000 impressions and zero clicks. Obviously I needed to get my impressions into the 6-digit range to be truly have an impact. And then Google pulls through.

When Google finally approved my account and my campaign, I was on a mad dash with the only account I had active there. Within 12 hours, my stats were as follows:

• Impressions: 270,524
• Clicks: 93
• CTR: 0.03%
• Total Cost: $18.96
• Total Revenue: $1.70
• Total Loss/Gain: $(-17.26)

So while I was happy that I finally got impressions with Google, in no less than 12 hours, I had quicky burnt through $18.96 of my hard earned money. The campaign has since been paused while I fix some issues with my landing page and tracking software. These were the mistakes I made during setup that must be resolved before resuming my campaigns again:

1. Offer was not mentioned on the landing page.
2. Topic was not emotionally catchy enough.
3. My tracking sucked big time.
   1. Could not tell which clicks were sent to the offer page.
   2. Could not tell which offer was being presented at the time.

My biggest beef about my setup was my tracking software. I really couldn’t tell from the overview page which clicks made it through to the offer page versus which ones bounced right away. And the only way for me to see if I received a lead was to log into each affiliate network to check my stats for the day. I really fucked up setting up Tracking202 and the software itself was not designed to support this kind of campaigning to boot. I have now found a workaround in Tracking202 that will show me clicks, click through, and leads.

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.

My Pick

For my first campaign, I am using Facebook to advertise. Facebook has advantages over Google, Yahoo, and MSN for a person starting out in affiliate marketing.

1. Facebook uses demographic targeting alllowing me to restrict my scope of advertising to a smaller subset of audiences. This is especially useful when trying to test the offer and the ads. Once the sandbox proves to be profitable, then it can be expanded to a greater audience and should (in theory) scale the profits just as equally.
2. New Facebook advertisers are given free money to evaluate before committing your own money. So if I was going to lose money with a weak ad campaign, I would rather lose somebody else’s money than my own.
3. Facebook has been receiving a bit of a bad reputation lately for unprecedented ad rejections. There is a group of individuals that review ads that are placed on Facebook and even if the ads fall perfectly within the guidelines, they may be rejected without reason. This has caused many advertisers to leave Facebook, but that also means a lower saturation of advertisers. This is an ideal test bed for me.

So during the course of this week, I will be evaluating the ideal demographic for my offering and designate a few keywords to target for my ads. I will also try to keep the potential traffic to a minimum to see what the CTR looks like and the conversion rate. I can spend a lot less money this way before exhausting $1000 on a full-blown ad campaign with Facebook.