—This post was originally removed as we worked on some things with an advertiser. It is now being re-posted for your learning pleasure. —
Over the past couple week I have had some opportunity to work closely with EliteClicksMedia.com. ECM provided me with a Pay-Per-Call offer that paid out $10 per phone call no matter the length. So… naturally I jumped on the opportunity to run traffic to the offer.

In the past I have marketed on mobile networks such as Admob, Inmobi, and Mojiva.  I knew for a fact that Admob offered a “click-to-call” function for their mobile advertisers (so does Inmobi, don’t know about Mojiva) so I chose to try out their traffic.  Basically what happens is when someone clicks on your advertisement they are shown a message that states “Are you sure you want to call XXXXXXXXXX” Then the person clicks call or cancel.  Now, the theory behind this is that if someone clicks the call button then they genuinely want to call your company.  At least that was my thought on this process.

Here was the first banner creative

This was the first creative that was used.  This was a text version of an Admob ad.  Originally the ad just said “Free Debt Elimination Kit – Call Now!”.  However, we noticed a terrible CTR for the offer.  Because we were sending traffic after business hours we assumed that people just weren’t clicking.  Most people know that if you call after business hours you will have to deal with an automated system instead of an actual phone operator. So to combat the issue we put on Call 24/7 to the ad to help ease people’s minds. 21k impressions, 130 clicks, 6 confirmed calls, $48.xx spend, average $0.30 a click. Not the best… so we moved to a banner ad approach so we could add more info to the creative.

Hey guys, I will be sharing with you some free traffic sources that are simple and effective over the next few weeks. Today we will be focusing on Blog-Commenting.

The simplest way of doing this is using Facebook and Myspace.

MySpace is a great medium because it is full of younger adults who are eager to become an adult; whereas, Facebook is full of adults who are employed and generally have a college education. You should know your demographic and choose accordingly.

The first step of joining either of these communities is to create an account. The process is simple and takes less than 2 minutes. Once you have created your account, you can access the creation page, where you can begin to promote yourself and your business on your profile.

For now, let’s skip right to searching for other people’s blogs and commenting on those blogs. I will give you a breakdown on how to do this.

The first step is to search for the different blogs about your business. We will use “surfing” as our example topic.

1. Start by going to http://blog.myspace.com. You should see the following page:

   

   MySpace’s blog search page. From here, you can locate all MySpace blogs through searches.

2. Search for your niche topic. In the case of my example, I have entered the word “surfing” and then searched for it. MySpace’s engine returned 13,400 results:

   

   A sample of some of the profiles that contain surfing blogs.

3. Move from blog-to-blog until you find one that both receives traffic and is relevant to your particular niche, as well as your goals. In my case, I found a surfing blog that may be worth commenting on occasionally:

   

Hey everyone. Here is an update on the series.  I know it has been a while.  I’ve had a lot going on.  The two guys that were supposed to be driving for this haven’t really done too much so I am going to be stepping in a little more.

There has been very little traffic to the site other than what has come in from Cashtactics.net.  This is because nothing has been done by these guys that I was trying to help.  So… I’m going to put my personal assistant Randy on the free traffic patrol for this project.  Everyday he is going to spend about 2 hours working on free traffic for the site.

I am also going to put him on blogging duty for a bit.  He will be jumping on here and giving some free traffic secrets for those that want to learn.

Here is an image of the traffic stats from Google Analytics.

NOW… I know it is showing decent traffic… 50% is coming from cashtactics.net and about 45% is coming from some douche that copied the site.  They never switched out the google analytics code…

Anyways, Randy will have a post to you tomorrow morning or tonight.  He will also be loading up several posts in there ahead of time and I’m going to make sure you get at least two new free traffic sources a week until he is done.

Hey Cashtactics.net readers! I just wanted to give you an update as to what is going on with the series. I know I haven’t written anything in a while but that’s because there really isn’t anything to write about at this point in time.  But I do apologize for not keeping you in the loop sooner.  I’ve been in the process for the last week or so moving into a new office building as well as moving in one of my employees and a business partner.

So here is your update to the series.

First thing I did a couple of weeks ago is I put the site together. Not just a bunch of random pages like it was before, but now the site is hooked up and working. The first page you hit is the squeeze page.  We used aweber for the autoresponder.  After they sign up for aweber they get pushed off to a secret tip.  This secret tip should be good enough to keep them coming back for more. At the bottom of the secret tip they are presented with a link to the sales letter.

For this product we used paypal as the payment gateway.  If you don’t know how to set that up you can ask in the members forum.  I’ll be more than happy to jump in there and help you out. Anyways, after they purchase the product paypal will push them off to a thank you page.  This thank you page should only have a little thank you message and another autoresponder form.  This form will be for a different mailing list.  Not the original list we had people sign up to before.  This is how we separate our buyers from the rest of the group. Once they sign up they get pushed on to a page so that they can download their product.

Before I begin this post I want you all to know that I am now taking two individuals through this case study/series.  I will no longer be touching a thing but I will be training these two guys hands on.  I flew out to their location in order to give them a basic lesson in HTML. Believe me when I say these guys have absolutely NO experience online!

If you go to http://www.bestgolfswingsecret.com the main page you first hit will be full of links that you can use to navigate your way around the site as it’s being built.  We will be rotating between two different squeeze pages to find out which converts the best.  After they hit the squeeze they will be taken to a page with the answer (something short yet powerful) and then off to the actual sales letter.

The key to the first page is to entice an individual to sign up to your mailing list.  I’m not going to claim to you that I am some squeeze page guru…  Trust me I’m not.  I like to stick with what works and fortunately for us Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss have tested plenty of squeeze pages for us.  During this case study I will be using one of their squeeze page as my base for a split test. You can check it out by clicking here.

There are several basic elements that have been tried and tested to help boost your squeeze page conversion rates.  Here are a list that I know for a fact work… These have been proven time and time again by marketers and have proven to help your conversion rates.

As we go through this series I want you to realize the importance of having a mailing list. There is a huge amount of money in owning your own leads so that you can email to them over and over again. Our goal is to have two lists by the end of this series. The first list is going to be for free loaders. The second list will be our buyers list. The buyers list will be our money maker. Not only will we have sold them our own product, but chances are we will be able to sell them a product that someone else owns to make an affiliate commission.

Below is an image of our overall site flow.

Here are the steps to our site.

1. Receive an opt-in for a free ebook or a free course.
2. Upsell to a paid course or package – After they optin in they will be redirected to the offer AND the free auto responder series will direct them to the offer.
3. Move them over to a buyers list.  Once the person has completed their purchase through us we can move them over to a buyers list.  This will be a more active list and will be more profitable for us.  Our end goal is to move people over to our buyers.

The free auto responder series will have several emails that cover basic advice for our niche of choice.  At the end of about 7 emails we’ll give one last hard push to buy the product and if they don’t… we’ll then chances are they aren’t going to pick anything up from us.  But they are still good to have on a mailing list so that we can try and market other products to them.

Ok before I begin I went ahead and picked a new niche. “NF” posted this in a comment on the last series post

The Dog training niche has been used extensively by all case studies i have seen and reports, ebooks, etc… It is like the only non-im niche all IM marketers are able to explain.
I think it would be more useful if you chose something else.

This is quite a good point. But let me explain why. It has everything to do with the ease of the market. The dog training niche is what we call an evergreen niche. Meaning you can make money in the niche all year long. Why? Because people don’t stop buying dogs. Golf on the other hand (My new niche choice) is down right now and about to hit an upswing as we get into spring.

That image is the basic graph of all keywords relating to golf. If you notice, at the beginning of the year is the low point. Then throughout the year there is an upswing. This will be good for this case study/series as I start off slow and build the momentum.

About halfway through the year you’ll notice from that graph that there is a sharp decline in searches. I don’t golf so I don’t know what big turn happens around July. I can only make a guess.

I’ve gone ahead and purchased a URL – bestgolfswingsecret.com

You’re more than welcome to follow along in this niche with me. However, it would be nice if you picked your own niche to jump into. I definitely understand. But please respect the fact that I am going to try and make this niche profitable. I only give you the URL so you can see what I am doing with the website as I move along.

Basically over the next few weeks I am going to show you how to build a list and how to make money from the beginning.

We’ll build out a complete site and then begin marketing to free sources. While our money is building up for the free sources we will open the doors to PPC advertising, move over to some banners/media buys, and then PPV advertising. Don’t forget the SEO that we will be receiving as well.

So I guess to start out we will need to pick a niche to jump into. I recommend that you watch the 40 minute video on niche research that I set up a few months back.

For the case of this series I am going to use dog training as the niche of choice. So before I jump into anything serious I need to so some research on the niche. What kind of products are out there and what kind of search volume is this getting?

Unfortunately for us Google has removed the sponsored links search so it might be a little more difficult to see what your competition is doing. You can always use the Google external keyword tool to gauge the competition. Make sure you do a good amount of surfing the web to see what kind of product competition there will be for your niche.

Once you have a good understanding of the competition you can begin your plan of attack. So for now I am going to surf some sites and I’ll get back to you in my next post with where I searched and what I found. Till then why don’t you watch that video on niche research and begin to pick a niche. Remember… You can make any niche profitable… It’s just a matter of how you attack it.