If you haven’t noticed yet… A lot of this Internet Marketing business is about research. This is one of the most critical steps in selecting a site to use for a Media Buy. Remember, a media buy is buying advertising space on someone elses website. Whether it be a blog, forum, or general information filled website.

The blog post at Convert2Media that talks about finding the right site to advertise on with Alexa has brought in some excellent points. We want to find sites with high traffic so that we know our banner impressions will not be put to waste. At the same time. We need to be careful on the sites that we prospect out to so that we don’t find someone that wants $5000 for a month long banner ad placement.

Jump on over to the Alexa Category pages and find yourself a nice little niche to hit up. Three of the top earners online are Health, Wealth, and Relationships. If you can find something to advertise in one of those three niches you are sure to make some money.

I’ve jumped into the “Health” category. From here I browse for an even more specific section or health related niche. Eventually I’ll be lead to a list of websites that I can begin to research even more.

Alexa is just one way to find websites. You can also search through DMOZ, Google, Yahoo, and even MSN. Just type in a keyword and there you will have a huge list of websites HAHA.

When I first heard the words “Media Buy” I thought it referred to buying TV commercials, Magazine ads, or Radio spots.  While in the real world this is true… in the online world a Media Buy just refers to buying an advertising spot on someones website.  Websites are like… virtual magazines… so I guess the term “Media Buy” would be correct.

Ruck has made an excellent post a couple of weeks back on the Convert2Media blog titled “Easy Media Buying Using Alexa“.  Ruck talks about using Alexa to find websites that you can advertise with. Go read his post if your interested in Media Buying.

When we do a Media Buy we pay an upfront fee for advertising on someones website.  This can be a scary thought because we don’t know how the specific advertisement will perform.  Because of this, it is important that we do our research as carefully as we can when we want to do a Media Buy.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to walk you through making a Media Buy.  I’ll also through in other posts for those of you not interested in Media Buying.

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When you are running your ad campaigns there are certain keywords and domains that you want to blacklist… or put in the negative keyword section.

The domains that you want to black list will almost always be difficult to find until you start running your campaigns. You can find the domains to block by checking out where your traffic is coming from. This can be done in the report section of your PPC account. One of the first domains that you will want to block is Myspace.com. This domain will almost always pop-up for you. The traffic from myspace is GARBAGE. Myspace is full of a bunch of 14 year old girls and dirty old men. So … You might want to save yourself the high cost and just block it from the start. When I started out in this I wanted to see how Myspace would be for placement targeting… I burned through 10 times more money than I set aside for that day because adwords couldn’t shut the impressions off fast enough. BOO FOR LOOSING MONEY!

Now when you are going over your keyword list to ban you want to be careful what words you cut. Obviously if you are advertising for leather wallets you can be sure to not use the keyword ferrari. Now… You may want to use the word leather. However, take a look at what that one little word can bring you… Leather seat covers, leather couch, leather shoes, leather purse, leather jacket, leather pants, leather face, etc. So… I wouldn’t bid on the keyword leather unless my ad copy was good enough that people would know that they are being taken to a leather wallet related site… If that isn’t clear please post here so I can try and clarify more.

Starting out in this business can be a scary thought Here are some quick tips for you to remember as your start out. And for you experienced marketers… Here are some things you want to make sure you are doing… or not doing…

DO

Invest in a domain name and hosting. You can’t run your offers if you have no place to host them! If this is your first domain name get a general name. Don’t get too specific. Pick something like… VoteToday.com, TakeMyPoll.com, CastYourVote.com. Don’t pick something like… iPhonePolls.com, WinAGiftCard.com. You get my point. Invest in something that you can expand on.

DON’T

Don’t waste your money on get rich quick ebooks. That is not to say that every ebook out there is bad. Some are very good and unique. I wrote an ebook a while back and I know for a fact that it’s one of a kind. However, these ebooks that you can find online about “HOW TO GET RICH ONLINE” are all the same… Don’t waste your money.

DO

Learn all you can about this business. Join forums like the CashTactics Forum. Many online communities can be full of information. Read up and learn all you can. But remember… Don’t get caught up in the information. In other words… Don’t read forums and blogs for hours on end. You will only end up …. in the same spot… That is not making any money. Set a time limit and stick too it.

DON’T

Don’t be afraid… People message me everyday and ask me questions about this business. 99% of the time they struggle because they are afraid to invest the money. Yes this does take money. You are starting a business and unfortunately that does take money. There are certain things that don’t have to take money to start. In fact I made my first $700 online with ZERO investment… But you cannot be afraid to make the jump in putting your money into a campaign.

It’s been about a week since I last wrote and I do apologize for that. This was also the last week that my wife and I had family in town. We’ve kept pretty busy with six flags, the zoo, several museums, and other various activities. I did however get online several times to check my email and see who else was wandering around online.

This week I was posed this question several times… “What is the best thing I can do to help me make money online?” or “What can I do to make money the quickest?”

My answer is simple. Set a goal. Then break that goal down to several smaller goals. Break those smaller goals down even more until you have an easily obtainable goal.

Goal setting is important. If you don’t know where your going or if you don’t have direction in this business you will waste a lot of time and a lot of money. Also, if you set unobtainable goals you will get easily discouraged. Don’t jump in and say “My goal is to make $1000 as fast as possible.” Most people will start… realize this takes work… and quit. However, if you set a more obtainable goal like $5 a day for 1 week straight. WOW… That’s an obtainable goal. That’s something you can work with. Then you break that down.

What can I do to make $5 a day? I need traffic… What can I do to get traffic? Everyday I will build “x” amount of PPC campaigns, rip “x” amounts of vids, make “x” amount of yahoo answer posts, make “x” amounts of posts in forums… whatever it takes. By breaking down your main goal to smaller goals this job doesn’t seem too difficult.

Okay, it’s taken me a bit to get this too you. I do apologize. I still have family in town and we have kept pretty busy doing the site seeing thing.

Anyways, as I promised… Here is an example of a clean looking landing page for a dating site. The offer that I designed this after can be found Convert2Media. The offer is the “Over 30 Dating”.

Here is the page that I created to show you: Landing Page Example
Remember, that is JUST an example that I made this evening. I didn’t add the title or the meta tags to that, but you would want to for real offers you want to run. This will help with your QS and it will help in getting you ranked in the search engines.

You can jump over to the Free Reports section to download that template. Just click on “Landing Page Template” under Misc. Files.

I hope that example give you a better idea of what your plain landing pages for CPA offers should look like. Remember they should be clean looking and direct. If you notice on the page I have 3 images. Each can be clicked to direct people to the offer. I didn’t get the animated gif. But you should use an animated button to draw attention.

Your written sections can be gathered from some PLR content or from an article that you find. Try and change it up so that you don’t sound like everyone else.

I normally suggest adding your own bullet points. But in this case the image I used had the bullet points for me.

A landing page or squeeze page is where visitors get sent to for clicking on your ads or your search engine results. Because this is your front lineman it is important that this page looks good. When you have a nice looking landing page your chances of getting the visitor to take the action you want will increase.

Take a look at these two sites:
doolittlespetproducts.com and petstreetmall.com
Which site would you buy from if you wanted pet supplies? Now I’m not trying to be mean to the owner of Doo Little’s Pet Products… But if I was surfing the net for pet products that is probably one of the last places I would shop.

Let’s take a look and compare the two sites.

The Look
Your site needs to have a professional look and feel. You need to be an “authority” online. The better your site looks the more people are going to trust you. Color, layout, authority badges, images, and wording all play an important factor in this.

The Feel
How does your site feel. I mean… when you goto the site do you want to puke or purchase. I’ve seen websites online that look good and were professionally done, but they just make me feel sick to my stomach to browse through them. Some sites are cluttered and that doesn’t feel good surfing through a cluttered mess. Your site should have a good clean flow. Your wording on the front page shouldn’t be to much, your images shouldn’t be too many, your navigation tabs shouldn’t overpower the content or be more than the content. You get what I’m trying to say… I hope… Your website should be clean and inviting.

SEO is hands down… The best thing you can do for your website! There are so many different factors that come into play with SEO… Its un-real!

Don’t forget to incorporate SEO into your landing pages. Even if you use the iFramer/Rotator that I have given you, USE SEO! You can’t afford to have your CPA offers NOT be in the search engines. I’m posting about this because I recently started getting a few conversions off of one of my CPA offers. The only thing I can think of is that it is coming in via the Search Engines.

Now, I haven’t looked into the keywords that the site is indexed for. BUT you can bet I will look into it. Chances are, the keyword will be long tailed. I know it won’t be a one word deal (unless it’s a miss spelling), and the way this specific site is designed it shouldn’t be a two or three word phrase.

You can guide your site to be in a specific keyword or phrase depending on how you create the page. If I’m creating a poll from scratch and not using a template like Poll Factory or ppc-coaches tool then I will ALWAYS create a title tag, meta tags (keyword and description), H1, h2 and Bold tags to include the keyword I want to target. I ‘ll place all these tags within the bulk content of the page itself.

Now you may think that your H1 tag is going to be the poll question… But it doesn’t have to be. You can create your polls question with the H3 tag, You will need to change the CSS so that it looks as if it is the H1 tag. This will help you “Manipulate” the Search Engines later on.