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.

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.

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.

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.

Google Adwords

Today I launched my first Adwords campaign on Google’s content network. I am driving traffic to an Obama related site, but without using the word “Obama” in any of my keywords. I targetted the topics in the news that are related to Obama. This indirect reference allowed me to set my CPC very low due to longer tail keywords. I am hoping for a 30% conversion rate at my current CPC amount so I am not expecting to make a profit. If I hit my 30% conversion rate, I will profit about $5 for every 100 clicks to my landing page.

The goal of this campaign is to learn about setting up a proper campaign and verifying that links are sending users to the appropriate offer pages and that Tracking202 is doing its job of tracking CTRs and effecitve keywords.

What I learned

• Google’s Adwords page was a pain in the ass. The wizard setup mode was nice for setting up the ads. But I quickly abandoned this in favor of the offline editor.
• Google’s Offline Adwords Editor software was a pain in the ass, but an awesome tool. It is incredibly powerful for offline adwords management, but has a somewhat steep learning curve.
• Setting up my campaigns for proper tracking is a pain in the ass. There were many Tracking202 links to manage each offer on my rotation.
• It’s a pain in the ass to do everything properly. As I launch more campaigns, the process will get easier and I will find more efficient ways to launch them.

Summary of Campaign

• 340 Obama-related keywords.
• CPC set at $0.25USD.
• $10.00USD max daily budget.
• Rotating 5 offers from 3 affiliate networks.
• Offer lead range $1.10 – $1.40.