Make Money Tips

Game & Work

How To Do Online Campaign Research?

by Leave a Comment

These days, 90% of my work is research/analytics related. It takes me minutes to set up a campaign, but days to do the research it takes to launch that affiliate marketing campaign. Sure, throwing shit at the fan and hoping it spits out a little poo-poo that sticks to the wall is fun and all, but 90% of the time it just comes back and hits you in the face. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like getting poo-poo on my pretty face. Decreased profits, increased spending, and lower ROI are results of this poo-throwing… Enough about poo.

I like research. I do a lot of it. What does this mean for me? It means I’m launching a lot less campaigns, but the campaigns I do launch normally profit with very little optimization after all the research is brought together and launched. It requires patience and a lot of discipline. I keep saying this, and I’m going to keep saying this… We don’t live in 2017 any more. You can’t just throw some boobies up on Facebook and expect to profit. Google wants you to stop selling and give pure information on your websites. And we’ve got 10 times the competition we used to. Becoming a smart Internet marketer starts with thorough research.

In aid for you guys, I’ll be leaving this post with a short list of great resources for demographic and psychographic research. Learn how to use them to your advantage that will give you an edge over all those other marketers stuck with poo on their faces.

  • Alexa
  • Google Keyword Research & Strategy with Keyword Planner
  • Google Trends
  • Reddit
  • Facebook
  • Twitter and Trending Topics
  • Media/Press Kits/Releases
  • Magazines/Newspapers (Check out those ads!)

Tips When Waiting For Ad Network Campaign Approval

by Leave a Comment

Here’s a common question, and its got a simple explanation. Should you target broad or target niche? There are a couple different things that will effect this, but in the end, it shouldn’t be hard to come to an answer on your own.

When looking into how you build your campaigns, whether broad or niche, there are a couple things you’ll need to look at first. That is traffic source and offer niche. These two will determine your traffic generating potential, your ability to target smaller demographics if going niche, and how targeting broad or targeting smaller angles will effect your overall campaign performance. We’ll also consider your budget.

Let’s look at mobile for example. Most mobile traffic isn’t very targetable. You’ve got some demographic targeting options here or there, categorical targeting, and you can run search campaigns, but outside that, mobile advertising platforms are what I consider broad targeting platforms, almost exclusively. Basically, to get traction on mobile you need something that can appeal to a broad spectrum of people.

Facebook and PoF are two of my favorite networks for nitpicking small angles and generating massive ROIs. On Facebook you’ve got interest, city, school, and other great targeting options, all of which you can build small targeted campaigns around. However, if you were to build an international campaign, due to language borders and knowledge you’ll need to find targeted keywords for other language interests, it might be better to just save yourself the hassle and go broad.

The biggest difference between broad targeting and niche/tight targeting is the amount of traffic, revenue and ROI you will receive from either setup. With broad targeting you have a potential for greater traffic and revenue, but your ROI could suffer. On a tightly targeted campaign, you are much more likely to make a greater profit percentage, but that comes at the cost of having to build more campaigns due to lowered revenue and traffic generating capabilities.

Let’s go back to PoF. PoF has most of its traffic in the US, CA and UK. Outside of that you won’t be getting much traffic. These are very competitive countries and PoF is a very competitive market. Instead of trying to target broad here, I would almost suggest going after niches. You can target red head, smokers with no car that are abusive alcoholics and come out of it with money in your pocket. That’s just some of the crazy targeting that I’ve seen work on PoF before.

Now, lets also take a look at your budget. Are you going at this with $500 in the bank or $50000? Broad targeting introduces greater risk due to the lower ROIs they generally receive. If you are a low budget affiliate marketer, definitely go niche. You’ll be hampering your ability to get anywhere if you try and blow it all on one broad campaign. Instead, slow it down and test out multiple small niches until you find one that cracks. Take what you learn from that campaign and expand!

Do Webmasters Expire or Renew Their Domain Names?

by Leave a Comment

I now have a domain portfolio of 100+ domains. I’ve probably developed less than 25% of them. I also have scores of affiliate sites that I developed for paid search campaigns that are no longer active.

Most of my domains (and even a lot of live sites) just sit around and collect digital dust. Every once in a while I’ll go through my portfolio and disable auto-renew for some of my domains.

In some cases, it’s a no-brainer. In other instances the decision is a little more complicated (thin site + mediocre domain + zero traffic).

This Saturday one of my domains quietly expired. At some point I decided the domain wasn’t worth the $12 renewal fee, so I let it lapse. When a domain expires the registrar will typically hold it for another 30 days just in case you change your mind.

As I’m going through my stats today, I see that the domain I once thought was worthless, generated $40 in commissions over the last couple of days (with no effort). I quickly logged into my Godaddy account and hit the renew button.

I have no idea where these sales came from, but I can see that I’m getting some organic traffic from my logs. This site doesn’t have a lot of rich content, and was never optimized for natural search, but seems to be getting a trickle of traffic now.

Many SEO’s say that domain age is an important ranking factor in natural search. Anybody who has spent time in the Google sandbox would probably agree.

The first thing you should do when you register a domain is setup a quick page with a little related content. It doesn’t have to be quality content – just something other than the registrar’s default parking page. Even if you don’t have an instant monetization plan for the domain, it will start earning a little age rank. When you’re ready to develop your domain you’ll have a running start and avoid some of the problems younger domains encounter.

Hanging on to a lot of old domains can be expensive, but letting them go too early could cost you even more.

How To identify Hot Products

by Leave a Comment

One of the best ways to stay in front of your competition is by discovering products and services before they do. For example, when iPhone came out many mobile phone manufactures updated their product line up with new models. These new models and their associated keywords had little or no competition before and after iphone launch, allowing smart affiliates to take advantage of low click costs and prime ad placement.

Here are some tips to help you discover hot products and services – before your competitors do 😉

1. Subscribe to Magazines and Newsletters for Your Product Niche – Stay a step ahead of your competition by getting information about upcoming product releases before everyone else does. I subscribe to dozens of trade publications, newsletters, and magazines in the product categories I promote. Often times I’ll be the only person bidding on a new product keyword, which allows me to build a good click-through history before the product becomes mainstream.

2. Become a Customer – If you want to get the latest coupons, promotions and product releases become a customer of the merchant’s you’re promoting. I also recommend that you subscribe to their customer newsletter, and read their press releases and corporate blog.

3. Use Google Alerts – Google has a keyword alert service that will send you an automated message anytime there is news or information about your selected keyword(s). I use this service to keep current on industries I work in and news about competitors.

5. Participate in Investor Calls – If you want to get the inside scoop on a company listen-in on the quarterly investor calls. During these calls company executives will often talk about top selling products and the outlook for specific product and service categories. To get a list of times for investor calls I recommend Yahoo Finance.

Effort and Focus

by Leave a Comment

A lack of effort and focus. This is the main quality of any failed affiliate marketer. The chances you are going to drop a couple ads you stole off a Facebook spy, take the exact images and ad copy and make $100 bucks, these days, is slim to zero.

The mindset that affiliate marketing is “easy” is a problem a lot of people are stuck with. Bloated affiliate network newsletters that provide very little details other than “This offer is generating huge EPCs for our affiliates across all traffic networks with an xyz style landing page” and lame informational products filled with misinformation, developed by those that don’t actually know jack$hit, don’t help with AM being perceived as “easy”. This is what I tell my clients when they ask that previous question:

“Sure, but it involves flipping burgers and dropping buckets of fries all day long.”

I imagine all of my affiliate marketing work as a large part of my business. Like almost any other business, it doesn’t just launch and blow up overnight. I’ve got research to do. I have to know what my target market wants and how they want it. I need to know how to deliver it before they get it. And then even when I know all that, I still need to test it and other similar variations to get in the black. There is no “easy” way to get around that. Even if someone hands a campaign to you on a silver platter, if you aren’t analyzing why it works and how you can improve it, you’ll always fail and end up back in square one.

You do need to focus, and put effort into building campaigns up, 1 at a time. Test 10 landing pages instead of 2. Test 100 images, rather than 10. Try 5 very different headlines, then test adjectives on your best performing ones. This extra effort and focus is what has made some of my clients $500 campaigns after 1 week of coaching, and I believe it is one of the redeeming qualities that has made me the marketer I am today.

How Your Facebook Pages Can Dominate

by Leave a Comment

I’ve been doing some experiments lately. A lot of them with Facebook Pages. With the ads becoming more and more expensive, and my phasing out of more short term campaigns instead for more consistent, long term revenue generating projects, Facebook Pages makes sense. They give me a place to engage a very targetted audience, get free publicity on top of my ads through likes and shares, and ad costs are generally decreased (most likely because Facebook likes it when you pay them to send traffic to their own site).

So we’re going to talk a little outside the norm today with some simple Facebook Page techniques you can use to start building your own long term communities.

Page Name
Simple as it may sound this is the first thing that you should consider since the name will be the one that appears in search engines when someone makes a search. Make sure to choose a name that reflects your business or product. If I have a gaming blog I am trying to promote, instead of using some strange name like Kotaku, I’d include the words Video Game somewhere in the Page name as well. If people are search for pages about video games, they’ll find my page without having to search for the exact name in Facebook.

Cover Image
Facebook Timeline is here whether you like it or not. One good thing about this new feature is that you can have a large cover image for your brand to greet your page visitors. Your cover photo should capture the essence of your business and have a size of 851pixels x 315 pixels. Don’t just make any photo your cover photo but instead choose quality images that are well composed and have attention grabbing colors.

Profile Picture
The profile picture should work hand in hand with your cover photo. You should make sure that the transition is seamless and that it blends in perfectly. You are only allowed an image size of 180 pixels x 180 pixels for this so be sure to make it count. Below are some excellent sample Timeline cover designs and their profile pictures from popular brands.

About Section
Pack in as much information as you can in this section regarding your business or product. Some of the important things to include are your website, contact information and a brief history. This way, people who may want to contact you or find out more about your page can find the information in this section. This is also a great place for people to jump to your main site.

Contests and Giveaways
In order for you to grow your fan base you should have an incentive for people to like your page. One way to do this is to hold contests and giveaway prizes. It’s a great marketing strategy and on several occasions has grown my page likes from 13 to 2000+

Update Regularly
Now that you have the basics covered what you have to do is to provide constant updates to your fans. Answer any questions that they may post and try to provide a much more personal experience as possible. Try to make a status update at least once a day.

What Can Advertiser Do With Low ROI

by Leave a Comment

You’ve set up a campaign, had your first initial loss testing traffic sources and keywords, optimized your campaign thoroughly and have finally started seeing a positive return on your investment. The problem is, though, that profit is miniscule, maybe even insignificant. If you can’t find a way to lower click costs and raise EPC, you’re stuck with a campaign that you’ve drained countless hours on and you’ll have to run for days, maybe even weeks to see a return on your investment back. I’ve had this problem happen to me, and I currently run several campaigns that bring in very little profit, ROI-wise. But just because it’s only turning 10% profit a day, doesn’t mean you can’t find other ways to break more rewards off of that. Here are some of the benefits I find from running some of my less profitable campaigns.

Google AdWords is an absolute demon, and aren’t the most friendly with new accounts. If I’ve spent 100 hours running and optimizing 1 campaign for AdWords, and finally roll some profit off of it, especially from AdWords, I’ll generally keep it running if it requires little to no adjustments on a daily basis. By keeping spending up, I age my AdWords account with a high quality score campaign and showing them I’m able to keep paying the big G. AdWords then rewards me with lower click costs and the ability to start up new campaigns with a lot more ease. This might even allow me to increase the profitability of the low ROI campaign, as well as new campaigns.

Building trust between ad networks is essential for any affiliate marketer. By sending leads and sales, you build trust between you, your affiliate manager, as well as the network. If the network loves the traffic you are sending, keep it up. Ask for a payout bump if you can because they love it so much. Many networks also offer rewards for reaching certain amounts of revenue acquired or leads brought in. Use these rewards as a bump to your profit.

Make sure you are spending money with a credit card with rewards or cash back. Several offers I run bring me in about 5-10% ROI. It’s money in my pocket and requires very little upkeep. It also gives me airline miles, which I can in turn use to fly back to America to visit my family whenever I want. For those spending a lot more on a daily basis, use a cash-back credit card. Many companies offer 1-2% cash back. With a 100K ad spend budget, that nails you $2,000 back. If you can spend 1 million, that’s $20,000 back – more than enough for a budget-class car or well deserved vacation anywhere in the world.

If you still can’t find a good reason to keep up a low-ROI campaign, maybe you are just looking at it incorectly. If I can spend 1000 dollars on a campaign that brings me 10% back on my investment, I make $100 dollars in 1 day. That seems pretty bad especially on the amount I’m putting into it. However, if I know it is a consistent $100 a day I’ll keep it up. After 10 days, I’ve made $1,000. In a month, I’ve made $3,000. After 12 months (if the campaign survives that long), that is over $30,000 profit! You try putting $300,000 into the bank and making $30,000 interest on it in a year. Good luck with that.

And don’t think it’s not possible to keep such a low ROI profitable over a long time. I currently have one campaign that I’ve ran for the past 6 months making 10-20% ROI consistently taking only 5 minutes of work daily. In fact, the ROI has increased lately, generating over 60% ROI on some days. It might just be the wrong time of the year for your campaign.

How To Write a Dating Ad 101

by Leave a Comment

K.I.S.S.
First thing to keep in mind is that writing a competitive and good dating ad should not be a life-sucking, difficult experience. As you grow your affiliate marketing portfolio and business, you’ll start to notice that some of your best ads have been some of the most simple. Take a look at the following dating ad headlines:

  • Want a Girlfriend?
  • Meet Cute Asian Girls
  • White Girls Love Black Guys

These are all simple ads that I run. Feel free to borrow from them if you’d like. K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid) works for dating, because lets face it – People that use dating sites are simple people. They’re in it to find a match, or a quick fling. You will want to change your message depending on who you’re targeting, but no matter what, a simple ad will always work and can be a great base to build your dating campaigns upon.

Some of my best performing ads and landing pages are simple one liners that follow this key rule.

Engage the User
You’ll notice my first ad above is a question. It’s a simple, yet effective way to engage a user, especially one that can answer the question to your benefit. Targeting plays into this game here, so if you were to use my first example here, make sure you are targeting single men that are interested in meeting women. Facebook makes this simple enough (and requires it), and the same can be said for Plenty of Fish. With other traffic sources, you’ll have to play around with the traffic before you can nail such a broad statement down. Try looking for demographics and psychographic targeting with younger middle-aged men that are stuck in front of their computers more than the average person. The lower their education level, the better! Remember to keep things simple!

Make Use of Variables
This is easy to do with Plenty of Fish. Let the user know you are addressing them as much as possible. With a PPC ad/landing page, welcome the user with whatever search term or site they were originally browsing. Let the user know that because they are xx years old, or because they came from xyz.com, they are getting additional benefits. Here are some examples:

  • Jenny from xyz.com just joined datingsite.com. Meet her now!
  • Women on datingsite.com are looking for 34-year old men from your city. Click Here!
  • Are you a short guy? 1000s of women on datingsite.com love short men!

Now then, if you have any questions on the above, want to drop your own advice, the comments section is below.

Top Nine Tips For Struggling Internet Marketers

by Leave a Comment

If you’ve been affiliate marketing any long than a few days, you probably know that frustration from the industry is nearly almost ever present. You campaigns aren’t converting, your ads don’t get clicks, click costs are too high, and a once great converting campaign gets taken down or starts shaving leads. These are just a few of the problems I deal with on a daily basis. Now if you are struggling to jump off the ground and make a real profit, read through the following tips and put them to use. Remember, I’m not trying to feed you bullshit – these are tips that I’ve put in to practice when necessary, and they help me get back from frustrating days.

1. Slow Down
Now, you might think that taking 20 campaigns and throwing up general campaigns at Facebook or TrafficVance might be the best course of action to find something that converts. Do 10 minutes of keyword and target scraping for each offer and you’re done! Great plan, right? Wrong. If you fail to even get a single conversion with this method, it wouldn’t surprise me. Launch carefully planned, carefully researched campaigns. Look at what others are doing first, why what they are doing works, and “borrow” if you have to. If you are outright stealing campaigns, failing to understand why things convert, you’ll always be relying on others to make money before you. The real big ballers are the innovators.

2. Target Tighter/Smaller
Broad campaigns are what everyone dreams of. Setting up a RON campaign to millions of people and making thousands a day in return. If you are new and struggling, this is most likely going to be cause for frustration and significant losses. Come of with an angle or a very niche offer that requires you to target smaller reaches and less populated URLs and keywords. While you won’t be making thousands with this kind of method, if I was new I would rather see $10 of profit per day rather than $500+ lost a day.

3. Work With One Traffic Source
Stop jumping around. Just because the first 3 campaigns you tried didn’t work out, doesn’t mean the next 10 will fail. Chances are, if people are talking about 1 traffic source and how they are making money with it, they probably aren’t lying about it. If they can get something to work, so can you.

4. Stop Hopping Around Different Offers
Just because your first ads didn’t profit, doesn’t mean it is a complete loser. This goes hand in hand with the above. If people are talking about an offer, there is most likely money to be made in it. Pick a few different offers, max, and make them work for you!

5. Work with Only a Few Smaller Networks
There are lots of large networks out there that have thousands of affiliates. These guys usually have a fantastic amount of offers, but support can be real hit and miss. When I was struggling to find new offers that worked, I would branch out to smaller affiliate networks and ask them what some of their strongest offers were. They are usually more willing to divulge inside info, as well as having much faster and better attended support. The more loyal you are in sending traffic to these small guys, the better they’ll come to treat you.

6. Get To Know Your AM
Affiliate Managers have access to a lot of data. EPCs, traffic sources, creatives, landing pages, etc. Again, we’re going to hold hands with the above point. The more loyal and talkative with your AM, the better you’ll be treated. Affiliate Managers are paid when we get paid, so if they aren’t helping us, they’re not gettin’ any money from me! Say hi and remind your AM you are around every morning and ask them about any new offers. Make sure they remember who you are!

7. Go Private
If you get to know your AMs a little better, they might be able to let you into the world of private offers. There is so much untapped potential here, because most people think that affiliate networks make all their offers public and requestable to everyone. Larger networks can have 100s of hidden offers that you might not know about until you actually ask to see them. These offers have less competition and shitty traffic squandering them, and you’re 10x more likely to draw a profit from them.

8. Always Track Everything You Can
You can use the free Tracking202, or upgrade to the newer and more frequently updated CPVLAB. Both are excellent and have some features that the other doesn’t. Use these guys to track all the data that you can and analyze it! What time of day did you get the most conversions? When are you getting the highest EPC? When is it the lowest? Which banner ad gets the highest conversion rate? Which keywords are only breaking even and is there something you can do to bump the CVR on those targets?

9. Try Landing Pages Out
I know you want the easy way out with a directly linked campaign, but in 90% of my campaigns, a landing page almost always converts better. That little added presell can help take someone not interested in what you are marketing, into a potential lead, and it helps build trust and flow with those already 100% ready to fill in the offer page’s fields.

5 Ways To Beat Bloggers Block

by Leave a Comment

Research your existing visitors

I brought up the subject of bloggers block in my last article How To Find The Long Tail For Blogging Ideas and the contents of that piece is a good place to start when your mind has gone blank and you are struggling for ideas. As well as researching how your visitors find your site or blog you can also research what they are looking for after they get there Search Meter is a wordpress plugin that gives a whole stack of info about what your visitors are searching for, this enables you to plan the subject of future blog posts.

Read everything about your subject

Research your subject constantly, both online and offline, always be on the lookout for something relevant that may form the basis of a future article, newspapers and magazines are an excellent source of material, cut out anything and everything about your subject and keep them in a file that you can delve in to from time to time when looking for inspiration. Sunday newspapers with their mountain of supplements are a particular favorite of mine.

Use Google Alerts as a research tool

Google Alerts is awesome when you are looking for relevant up to date stories to blog about just type in your keyword take golf as an example and you immediately get a list of all the latest news stories, which can be sorted by relevance or date.

Next it is important to ensure you never miss a newsworthy article with blogging potential so scroll down that page of results on google news and click the News Alerts News Alerts link fill in your details and anytime something about your subject is picked up by google you get an email.

If you get an idea write it down

No matter where you are or what you are doing if a spark of an idea comes into your head write it down, ideas are potential articles and articles are potential income. So if you are in the pub and you see or hear something useful get out your notebook and write it down, although I’ve gone all techy now and simply power up word on my shiny new phone.

Don’t blog if you keep losing your train of thought

Finally (for now) don’t try to blog if you are getting constant interruptions, if the kids keep running in and out take a break, take a walk, get away from the computer, you are doing yourself no favours by struggling on, 30 minutes or an hour off and you will come back as fresh as a daisy and sail through the work.