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.

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.

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.