Polls for affiliate marketing.

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.

CPA Poll Example

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.