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

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.

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.

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.

Today I finished setting up the backbone to my website. I ensured that my website is extremely flexible to allow me to change my landing pages easily and I also wanted good tracking of my campaigns to ensure that I can tweak and refine my ads based on the landing and conversion statistics. It is important to know which ads are working for me and which ads are not so that Darwinism can be applied by survival of the fittest.

Backbone #1: Redirect Page
A redirect page is a very simple PHP script. When the user clicks on my ad, the ad URL points to the redirect page which will then forward me to the appropriate landing page. This is important because I want to route my user through the tracking software before showing the landing page. Also, if I wanted to change what I show to the user, I can easily modify the redirect page without changing the ad URL and resubmitting the ad for approval. The URL that the user clicks will contain a parameter string to track which ad the user saw when it was clicked. The tracking software will then show me for the ads that were clicked, which ad actually led to a sale. It is not only important to see which ads out there people are clicking, but also which of those clicked ads also result in a lead/sale. This is how I will ensure survival of the fittest ad.

The URL that the user would click looks like this with the ad identifier parameter embedded (i.e. ‘ad=1′).

http://www.mysite.com/redirect.php?ad=1

A very basic PHP script for redirect is as follows:

<?php
if ($ad == ‘1′) {
header( ‘Location: http://www.mysite.com/tracking/stats.php?ad=1′ ) ;
}
?>

Backbone #2: Tracking Software
For tracking, I am using Prosper202 which gives me the ability to track which ads users were clicking, how much did those clicks cost me, which ads were resulting in a sale, how much were those sales, and finally how much I earned for on each ad campaign.

This kind of tracking is a must if you want to survive in this industry. You need to know what works and what does not. Advertising is a trial and error process.

1. Some ads will catch on like hot cakes and convert to sale at a high percentage.
2. Some ads have only a short lasting effect and quickly tapers off after the first few days/weeks/etc.
3. Other ads just fail. You can throw money at it, but if the ad is not catchy or misses the demographic, you will not get see any success with it.

Once the successfull ad is found, it is a process of refinement because even good ads can be made better. And after refinement comes scaling, which may include finding other advertising mediums other than Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc.

I am now creating my website for the offer. There is a bit of work to do here:

1. I am designing my landing page (800×600 resolution) in Inkscape first. Graphic design was one of my many prior skills.
2. I stubbed out my landing page and the css (cascading style sheet) I will be using. When I get my landing page designed, I will slice the graphics in.
3. I created a contacts page in PHP. It is waiting to be linked into the landing page.

These are the remaining things on my plate for this weekend.

1. Create a generic Privacy Policy to use for all my offers. Might have to steal the terms and conditions from the offer page. We shall see what that looks like.
2. Create a generic Terms and Conditions page template. I will steal the terms and conditions from the offer.
3. Create a generic About page for what my company does.
4. Create a PHP redirect page that will accept an offer ID and call up the appropriate page for me. This will allow me to do proper split testing of my landing pages.
5. Write the code to add a Last Updated date on my main page.
6. Upload all the pages to my host.

These are the last few steps I can think of before designing keywords and launching my campaigns on Facebook. Oh yeah, I also took a bit of time to write up the caption and description of my ad for Facebook. I was testing some keywords and limited my demographic to women ages 18-30 giving me approximately 268,000 possible hits on Facebook. I am really stretching my marketing skills here and will really need to think outside the sandbox for future offers if I want to be successful at affiliate marketing. I also searched for some images for my ad and saved it on my computer.

Today I registered for two domains. One is going to be used for my affiliate marketing, and the other I snapped up because it was a nice .com domain name that was available (unrelated to affiliate marketing).  If you are new to creating a .com website, here’s how you do it.

1. I went to Register.com to search if my domain name was available first.
2. When I found one, I went to 1&1 to register the domain for myself ($8.99/year).
3. Later, I open up a Linux hosting account with Hostgator.com ($7.95/month).
4. After 24-hours when everything is setup, forward the domain name from 1&1 to Hostgator. Edit the domain settings in 1&1’s control panel and point it to Hostgator’s DNS server (which should have been provided to you in an e-mail during registration).

Some notes about what I mentioned above. I chose 1&1 for my domain registration because they are one of the cheapest for this. I also chose Hostgator because they offer Linux packages with unlimited domains, unlimited disk space, and (most importantly) unlimited databases. If you are going to create many websites, you will want all these features.

Finally, I chose a single domain to serve all my affiliate marketing campaigns. I picked a very generic domain name like affiliatemedia.com so that I can create any campaign on that URL without it feeling out of place. If you are planning on using SEO, then ensure that your domain name contains some of the keywords.

Tomorrow, I will touch on how I’m going to put my web page files there.