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

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.

I wanted to quickly add a note today that getting a 1% CTR on the Google content network is very easy. I did not realize that when I added 5 ad copies per adgroup would have the affect of bumping up the clicks on each adgroup. This is because each ad copy  fitted one of the adgroup themes better. So all my adgroups received really good CTRs. My conclusion is that the more ad copies you insert into a campaign, the better chances you have of keeping a higher CTR.

And if you are running several ad copies within the same campaign because you have multiple landing pages, all your landing pages will benefit from this. Remember that each ad copy can point to your specific lander. So you don’t need to send all your users to the same lander. The URL is set in the ad copy, not the adgroup/keyword.

For me, keyword research was the most time consuming part of setting up a new campaign. If you can think of 10 offers to run off the same Adwords campaign, boy you’re cooking. Think of how many variety of offers you can run based on the same keyword set. All of them can be shoved into the same campaign.

In the past when I had over 50 adgroups in my campaign, I found that I was deleting over 50% of my adgroups within a few days. The reason is it was attracting either the wrong traffic or was not getting any traffic. Now instead of wasting those adgroups, you can give it one last chance by sending it to a different offer in the same adgroup theme.

The one downside of this technique is that your clicks are going to be really high … so expect to spend a bit more in your campaign proportional to the number of offers your are promoting.

I am just throwing out ideas here. I got a new book called “How To Get Ideas” and in the book it teaches me how to think like a 6 year-old. Now I got all these novel ideas to share.

In this post, I will show you how to keep your campaign CTR high and keep your campaign costs to a minimum. The techniques I am showing today is based on hard-and-fast rules. Just like good stock market investors, rules give you consistent outcome and keep the emotion side of the game out of the picture. This is really important because it is easy to get too “attached” to your campaign and let your emotions cloud your judgment and decisions.

Setup Your Baseline

Use these values as a starting point for all your campaigns.

1. Ensure you have 1000-2000 broad keywords. It is important to have a large set of broad keywords as you literally are throwing shit against the wall to see which keywords stick. Because Adwords allows 2000 adgroups per campaign, I would place each keyword into its own adgroup.
2. Set your starting bid at $0.18-0.20 (USD). This is the magic number that is enough to get some impressions flowing. If you cannot get impressions, then your market is either too competitive or there is no interest in your keywords (i.e. your niche is not popular).
3. Set your daily budget to $15. This will allow your campaign to stop at $15 for you to inspect your campaign’s success. If by $15, you still have not generated revenue in your campaign, then it is time to abandon the campaign entirely. You can increase this budget as you feel more confident about the campaign.

Monitor Your Campaign

If you thought getting your campaign live on the network was all the hard work, you haven’t seen anything yet. When you first launch your campaign, you need to carefully monitor and babysit your campaign. The goal is to optimize your CTR and lower your bid costs.

1. Start lowering bids after 1000 impressions. Once you know that your campaign can generate traffic, it is time to make your first bid change. Lower your bids by $0.01-0.02 each time and do not exceed more than 3 bid changes per day. Stop lowering bids once you’ve reached around $0.06-0.10.
2. Optimize your CTR by pruning. The purpose of pruning is to discard keywords that are bringing down your overall CTR for the campaign. I believe that Google looks at the overall CTR for “all time”. So you best babysit your campaign at the start to not let your CTR run too low. My advice is to check your campaign and prune every hour using the following rules:
   1. Delete adgroups lower than 0.15% CTR.
   2. Delete adgroups with 500 impressions and 0 clicks.

Note: You campaign should be able to reach 100,000 impressions per day easily. If you are having trouble, it is possible that your niche is too narrow or specialized. Once you start pruning your adgroups, your impressions should drop below 10,000 but your CTR should stay in the 1-5% range. To put this into perspective, this gives you 100-500 clicks to your poll page. That’s pretty reasonable.

Take-Away Points

To lower your bids on Adwords, you need to ensure that your CTR is very high (i.e. >1%). In order to achieve this, you need to prune and drop poor performing adgroups. If you wait too long to do this, you have doomed your campaign by letting the impressions run away with low CTRs. Therefore, do not launch your campaigns and go to bed. Sit there and monitor your campaign every hour to stay ahead of the CTR race.

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

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.

I am giving up Facebook PPC advertising for the time being in favor of PPC for the major search networks. Facebook’s allowable advertising content as per their guidelines essentially alienates all kinds of content. It is not worth the effort to build a good landing page only to find out later that Facebook disapproves something on your content. Time better spent elsewhere.

Google, Yahoo, and MSN is where I am going next. They are the big boys of advertising where dreams are made or broken. I was able to get away with small money on Facebook, but now it is time to sink some big cash cash with the search networks. Instead of a $100 budget, I am now working with $1000 budget for search.

My first campaigns on the search networks will be e-mail/ZIP submits again. Here is my super short tip:

• E-mail/ZIP submits earn $1.50-$2.00.
• To be successful in these offers, I must keep my CPC as low as $0.10.
• To be that low, I need to have a high CTR rate.
• Finally, my site needs to have a good quality score so that Google will give me affordable rates.

That’s how the game is played on the big search networks. Let the games begin.