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:

   

4. Select a blog to comment on.(Some bloggers require you to be there friend before you can comment). If necessary, become the blogger’s friend by sending a friend request.Once they have accepted your friend request, you can begin to comment on their blog.
5. Be sure and compose a constructive comment that is useful to the blogger and its readers. Under your comment be sure and include a link to your site. (This step is VERY important, as it would be a waste of time if you do not drive traffic back to you).

This is a great method for pointing one way links towards your site and can drive a large number of visitors to your site. Additionally, it has the potential to increase your site’s SERP. This process should be done regularly as it keeps you involved in your niches community. It may be faster and simpler to have the comments written elsewhere, like on Word, and then simply copy and paste them onto the blog page.

In addition to MySpace and Facebook blogs, you can find places to leave comments in Technorati and Yahoo! Blog Directory, you should also consider checking out the various blogs on http://www.squidoo.com and http://hubpages.com/.

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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.

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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.

The URL for the thank you page and the download page should be some weird combination of numbers and letters.  For example your thank you page could be www.domain.com/thankyoualakajlewjc9393aj9309cj409jcojrrlkcjsli4jje.html . This will keep people from guessing the link.

Then you can use a robot.txt file to block the thank you page and the download page from being indexed into the search engines.  Here is the code for blocking pages from the search engines.

# robots.txt for your site

User-agent: *
Disallow: /thankyoupage.html
Disallow: /downloadpage.html
Disallow: /orthewholefolder/

Ok if you didn’t understand that User-agent: * means every search engine spider/bot. Then you are telling them to not have access to specific pages or folders… It’s really easy. Just upload that into a regular .txt file, name it robot.txt and then upload it into the root of your website.

Okay once the site was all set up I sat down for a couple of hours and I showed the two guys how to do some basic FREE marketing.  We went over yahoo answers, blog marketing, forum marketing, and youtube video ripping.

You can see we have begun to gather visitors to the site. Here are our results for optins from aweber.

So, we’ve begun to get some results.  I’m sure some of those optins come from readers here.  I promise… there isn’t any reason for you to sign up so please don’t if you don’t have to we would like to try and keep these numbers as close to accurate as possible.

We have yet to make a sale, but we are in there working hard to drive traffic to the site. Once we get some more data I will begin to tweak the site to make it convert better.  I’ll also be installing a click map over the site.  This will help me determine what actions I need to take.

That’s it for an update.  I’ll get with these guys tonight and tomorrow.  I’ll make sure to have something for you on Thursday!

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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.

• Make sure your content is readable.  This includes font styles, size, and color.  This data has already been gathered for you by many different sources and marketers.  Don’t try and re-invent the wheel here by creating fancy fonts at different sizes.  Stick with black size 12 Arial as your default font.  Arial is an easy to read especially when you set the color to contrast the background.
• Make your headline stick out.  A few years back John Reese told the world that they should use red Tahoma font in their headers.  Michel Fortin of MichelFortin.com reiterated the use of red Tahoma back in 2006. Read that article to get some more insight on headlines and their ability to help convert readers.  Keep the header font size between 22-28 (That’s my opinion). It works and it converts.
• Choose a color that is going to relax the reader.  Light colors tend to work best.  When I create my pages I choose a light blue or light grey color for the background.  Check out what what thinkquest.org says about colors. When you have a sales letter or really anything you want people to read your best bet it so give them colors that will keep them relaxed.  If people are relaxed while they are reading your content they will take action. After you read that thinkquest.org article take a look at what main colors trusted companies use. You’ll see lots of blue. Figure out how you can get trusted colors onto your pages.
• Use arrows.  Lots of arrows.  Okay… Don’t go overboard or anything but place arrows in places where you want people to look.  The eye follows the arrow.  Even arrows that are integrated into the design.  99% of the time your eye will follow the direction that an arrow is taking you.  When you load up the squeeze page on bestgolfswingsecrets.com where does your eye look? Chances are your eyes will hit the headline and then jump right over to the arrows.  Don’t be afraid to guide people where you want them with arrows.
• Speaking of guiding people.  Make sure you strip your site of useless links. Don’t include navigation or links to other websites.  If people leave they might never come back. If you must include navigation on your sales letter place it at the bottom.  This of course is very different for actual online stores where you want people to look around.  With this method of advertising we want people to only go where we tell them to go. Keep your useless unproductive links out of sight.
• Use images to help convey the message of what they will be receiving.  Images are powerful. They say an image is worth 1000 word. You can absolutely use images on your squeeze page to help fill the gaps.  Remember, this is a squeeze page we are creating.  We don’t want to overwhelm them with words.  We want to get our point across as quickly as possible so that they join our list.  Images should convey a message.
• Use bullet points to address what is going to be taught or given to the individual. What are they getting by joining your list? 5 bullets are plenty to get your point across.  You  don’t want to overwhelm them right now with reading… Once again, the point of the squeeze page is to grab their email.

Okay that’s the basics on a decent squeeze page.  Again, take a look at what I have put together at http://www.bestgolfswingsecret.com. We are going to continue knocking out these designs in the next few days.  I’m hoping we can have this done in a few days.

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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.

Once they opt-in they will be directed to the actual product page.  Then there is a series of upsells and downsells until we finally reach the download page.  However, before they can download we need them to opt-in to another list.  This will remove them from the freebie list and over to a buyers list.  These are our golden boys.  They have purchased once from us and chances are we can get them to purchase something again.

That’s the overall flow of the site. Next week I’ll be in Vegas for Affiliate Summit West 2010.  I’ll try my hardest to get a post out on Tuesday but if it doesn’t get out I’ll get one to you on Thursday for sure. In the mean time, I am going to start to upload the site.  As I begin uploading pages I’ll post the links here so that you can see what exactly I have been working on.  Here is the domain: bestgolfswingsecret.com

I already have the PLR product thanks to PLRNicheClub.com. And I already have an Aweber account. And hosting is going on my dedicated server.

Until next time… If you haven’t joined the series already you can sign up by clicking here!

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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.

Here are some basic things that we will need with this project of ours.

1. A domain name with the main keyword in the url. I use namecheap for the free whois guard. ($9.96)
2. A hosting package.  I use a company called webhostforseo.com. Don’t mind the look of the site… I use them because I can get my IPs cheap and each IP I receive comes to me from a different C-Class.  I’ll cover good hosting in another post. When we get into solid SEO for this series you’ll want one of the servers they have.  But for now you can use a basic hostgator account ($4.95/month)
3. An auto responder account ( I use aweber) ($19.95/month)
4. A good PLR product that we can dissect and part out.  Most PLR products come with websites and other goodies.  I’m a member of a PLR Club so I have access to HUNDREDS of PLR articles, websites, software, etc.  ($47/month) or ($15 one PLR article/site)

That’s all we are going to need to start out.  Our total month to month cost is very cheap.  Below $50.  If you can’t swing that then get out of here. I’ll dive more into each of those 4 things we need to get this rolling as we move along.

———EDIT: I have been in contact with the owner of PLRNicheClub to offer you 30 days at $9.95 and then after 30 days for $22/month.  When you join PLRNicheClub you automatically receive access into PLReBookClub for free! This product is normally $47 so the only way I could work this deal is if I gave up my commissions.  Why do I need my commissions?… Err… I don’t… http://plrnicheclub.com/cashtacticspecial.html

Until next time… If you haven’t joined the series already you can sign up here by clicking here!

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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.

If you haven’t read the first post in the series make sure read it and join our list!

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Landing Page Rotator Script from Prosper202

Free PPC Mentoring from CashTactics

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Ok people, sorry for the lack of posts the last week or so, things have been busy busy. The private and Free PPC Mentoring section of the forum is alive and well and I will be posting some hot stuff in there this week! I’ve already answered tons of questions that would have taken a lot of trial and error to figure out, so if you haven’t joined our Free PPC Mentoring yet, better hurry. I’ve already talked about finding your targeted demographics and designing your landing pages accordingly. And in part 2 we identified key components in a landing page. In this post I want to cover some basic optimization tips and things you need to continually focus on to improve your landing pages. So let’s begin!

Landing Page Testing and Optimization

Here is a very important tip when you are first about to launch a campaign. You want to create atleast 3-4 different landing page designs. And when I say different, I mean completely different. Each one should have their different colors, header, layout, HEADLINE (the attention grabbing one), different approaches, so instead of saying “Check out these Reviews”, a secondary test would be “The Most Trusted Products are” or whatever creativity you want to put into your market. Try with a picture of your product, try without, try with a video, try without, test it all.

So the Basic Steps Are:

1. Create atleast 3-4 completely different LP designs, with different approaches, colors, looks and headline. (Most of the time you can keep the same body content but it wouldn’t hurt to test different body copy too.)

2. When you launch the campaign you should immediately be split testing 2 LPs, run them until each LP has received at least 70 clicks from the LP to the offer and a minimum of 3 conversions. Take the LP with the best CTR and CR and test the LP #3 with the winner of round one, the find the best of those two and repeat the same process with LP #4. After you have chosen the best design/layout concept of atleast 3-4 different LPs, you can now begin the next step.

3. Split testing the same LP and changing one variable at a time. So now you’ve identified the best layout/design concept for your LP, so you duplicate it. Now you have an Original LP (the winner of all your designs) and the Test LP (which is the exact same LP as the original except we are going to test one change at a time on it.). The first thing you want to test is the headline. On the Original LP you never touch a thing, on the Test LP, you want to change the headline to something completely different and test it against the original LP. Take the best performing LP of the two and repeat that a couple of times. (By the way, after each test you run, the best performing LP then becomes your Original LP and you duplicate that LP and test a new change.) Then work on testing your call to action that is above the fold. Then maybe add or test different images if you have some on your page. Try adding a video to your LP if it would be relevant. Test different color schemes, test the location of the call to action, maybe add an arrow pointing to it. Test absolutely every single thing but do it one at a time and NO more than ONE at a time.

4. Test different offers. If you are running a single offer landing page, if you are aware of similar offers in your niche, test each offer to see which one converts the best. If you are doing a review style landing page, test the positions of the offers you are running. You might have the best performing offer in position #3 when it could be the only thing keeping you from being profitable, if you had it in position #1, you could very well be banking!

5. Use tools like CrazyEgg, Clickheat and Clicktale to help you better understand what type of interaction is going on with your landing page. Exactly where are they clicking, what they are doing, what attracts them the most. That is priceless data.

6. And be creative, try split testing your normal top converting LP against the same LP but with an exit pop that auto redirects to the offer, might be able to gain a few more conversions that way. Or make the exit pop ask them leaving visitor for their email address and name, so that you can inform them of special offers or related information to what they are searching for. Then you can do email marketing on them later. And email marketing is highly effective!

7. Final Point – TEST EVERYTHING ONE AT A TIME! And don’t give up so easily!

Landing Page Optimizing for Great Quality Score

Some people make the biggest deal about getting a high Google quality score. I can honestly say I’ve rarely had a problem with my QS. The reason is, I’ve fed the hungry beast of an engine, GOOGLE, and they are always satisfied with my cooking. And believe me, you’d probably have already found your first successful campaign if you would focus on your landing pages and quality score and do it right. There are many point of views about how to get a good QS with Google, I’m merely going to list the things that I do to get a good QS. This mostly applies to Google’s terms because Yahoo and MSN QS is VERY simple to please.

1. I almost always build my websites/affiliate sites from a Wordpress foundation. I’m not an extremely great designer/web programmer so I tend to take the easy route. I put a Wordpress CMS (Content Management System) in place, which essentially means I make my wordpress blog look like an actual website even though it is powered by Wordpress. I make static pages, remove the blog posts from the front page and relocate them to another page typically names ‘Articles’. Wordpress is superb when it comes to being SEO friendly, which helps it get indexed quicker, more likable by Google, tons of nifty plugins to manipulate things however I want. Both SEO and non-SEO. Another reason why I use wordpress as my foundation is because its so easy to update. I can teach literally anyone to update new content or whatever else that needs to be done.

2. Absolute must have pages: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Privacy Policy, Disclaimer, Terms and Conditions, Resource Links and Articles.

3. You need to have at least 5 (preferably 10) unique article pages on the site as well. It helps if they are written were they sound factual and professional with external reference points. As you begin to optimize your campaign and realize that it has profitable potential, you need to continually add more articles to it. Two articles a week is a good number (ex:1 on Monday, 1 on Friday.)

4. On your landing page, at the very bottom, you want to link to the following pages: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Privacy, Disclaimer, Terms and Conditions, Resource Links and Articles and 3 additional links to high authority external sources, like Wikipedia, CNN, FOX, .edu’s, etc.

5. Perhaps put A, as in 1, one, numero uno, Adsense box, that blends extremely well with your website and is nowhere near the call to actions so they wouldn’t effect it and only place the Adsense on your CMS section, not the landing pages. My theory behind it is if Google sees you are also trying to monetize by Adsense, you are continually adding new content, getting organic traffic, you are looking to be around a while and not just throw up a page and a campaign for a one night stand.

Those tips right there are some important steps that will put you way ahead of the game and competition. Feel free to ask whatever questions you have about this tutorial series in the comments below and I will answer them on my next part in the serious, which will include some rather fun stuff, so stay tuned!

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Styles of Landing Pages

1. Review Style – Shows and reviews mutliple products in the same niche.

2. Comparison Style – Similar to review style except you go more into detail on the pros and cons of each product and do a cross product comparison.

3. Single Offer Style – Focused on promoting a single offer or product.

4. Multi-Offer Style – Pitching mutliple offers such as a main offer and a complimentary offer, in an attempt to increase EPCs.

5. Testimonial Style – Usually involves a personal testimony (most of the time its a fictional story) but be careful with fake testimonials, the BBB can come and bite you on the butt.

6. Email Opt-in Style – The main purpose is to develop a list of emails that are related to a certain niche or theme for later email distributions that you will send offers to.

Key Elements of Landing Pages

There are a few very important elements to consider when designing a landing page.

1. Color Scheme – Be sure to use coloring that best fits your demographics of people. For example, if you are targeting elderly people, ages 50+ don’t use a lot of colors that blend really easy together. Instead choose more bold colors with better contrast. We all know that with age comes the deterioration of eyesight.  Make your landing page easy to read and easy on the eyes for your demographics.

2. Above the Fold – For those of you who may not know what ‘above the fold’ means, it refers to the portion of your landing page that shows when a visitor first visits your landing page, without scrolling down. Be sure to consider the various screen resolutions that will be used, 800 x 600 will show differently than 1280 x 800, etc. Design with that in mind. Review the two screenshots below. These are the portions of the landing pages that show up on my 14″ Dell laptop with a 1280 x 800 resolution.

Acai Berry Detox – Convert2Media

AcaiPure – Convert2Media

Want to know the 2 big factors as to why these two offers are the absolute best Acai offers to run and the reason they out perform all other similar offers? Reason 1: They both list easy to read benefits with a strong call-to-action arrow pointing (this is important) to the free trial sign-up box. Reason 2: They don’t list how much shipping and handling charges are on the front page, so more people sign up and don’t completely realize they have to pay a couple bucks for shipping until page #2 or #3. That’s a little tricker method to achieve leads but those two reasons are huge factors as to why those offers are HOT! Check out the MONSTER payouts on Convert2Media.

3. Qualifying / Attention Grabbing Statement – If you noticed, both of the offers above are using the statement, “Flush pounds from your system with the power of Acai!” That is a pretty solid attention grabber. You want to qualify the visitor and at the same time keep their attention. Here is why, the purpose of qualifying the visitor is to ensure that they indeed are taken to a page that relates to what your Ad copy suggested. That way they find what they are looking for and don’t just click the back button immediately or close out. Why you want to keep their attention is pretty obvious, you want them to read the rest of your ’sales pitch’. And yes, your landing page is a sales pitch of sorts in whatever fashion you are using it in. You want to encourage them to continue reading and take action with a belief of trust and confidence with your offer.

4. Call-to-Action – Don’t overlook this, one thing I learned when working for Dell computers, always ask for the ’sale’ (lead or sale in this case). Provide quality and accurate information and then don’t be afraid to ask for the sale, ask them to sign up, ask them to try it out, tell them how much they will benefit from it. The point is you basically want to TELL THEM WHAT TO DO! Customers/visitors are usually influenced by the recommendations you make based upon the ‘trust’ factor you’ve built with them and what YOUR opinion is. So if you have a review style page listing 3 different offers and you title offer #1 as “Voted #1″ or “Top Ratings”, etc. Chances are, more people will choose that offer just because you recommended it. And have a call to action more than just once. You might have a main call to action like the Acai offers above use the arrows and point to the sign up box. You want to hyperlink text within your pre-sell content, ALL of your images should link to the offer and then you still want 2-3 main call-to-action places (depending upon the type of offer).

5. Professional or Realistic Design – Without a doubt you want a professional or realistic design. It can’t look like my grandmother built the landing page. And believe me, my grandmother probably has more landing page design abilities than alot of you. Some of these landing pages floating around are just horrible. Doesn’t have to be professional as in Gucci catalog website. But make it believable. Simple. Clean. No clutter. Only the information you want the visitor to know about. Good LP Design and Bad LP Design . Notice the difference? See the simpleness of both but the difference of functionality and the less confusion the Good LP has over the Bad LP? There is a clear decision to be made and you are pointed to what needs to be done in the Good LP, were as the Bad LP, its just their main website and tons of other links that you can click on. So without a doubt they get less leads for their business.

6. Content and Pre-Selling – I kinda hit some tips when it comes to pre-selling but copywriting and LP content is a whole tutorial on its own. It boils down to this: list the most important benefits or advantages, have accurate information, show facts, studies, reports, statistics, true testimonials, videos, pictures and call to actions. Thats a brief overview of what you need. I can’t write the content for you word for word. Once you find a LP design that works, you want to continually test your LP copy, starting with the attention grabbing statement. Just look at each of the items above and consider them when doing your copywriting.

I can’t hold your hand and guide you through step-by-step when designing your landing pages. Basically it comes down to you either, learning how to use Photoshop CS and Dreamweaver (or Fireworks, Frontpage, Expressions Web, etc) so you can design your own landing pages to gain experience or secondly, you search for a LP designer until you find a good one. The best place I know of to learn how and to get familiar with Photoshop and the rest is at Lynda.com. Its not free but its by far the fastest route to learning those programs. Also, there are a ton of photoshop tutorials online that are completely free. That show you step by step what to do and how to create specific things, just Google them. Don’t complain about having to challenge yourself. Affiliate marketing is nothing compared to going to school to be a doctor or lawyer, and it even has equal to or better compensation opportunities. To hire an LP designer, just look on places like Elance, GetAFreelancer, ODesk, 99Designs, etc. Its costly though. Best to get an understanding of how to use those programs yourself and as you grow, start outsourcing or hire a full time designer.

Questions & Answers

Allen

a) So say you were trying to target this demographic and offer in Facebook… how would you focus in on race such as African-American? The female part would be easy but I’m very curious to know if it’s possible to do so for race.

b) In the landing page series, can you tackle the issue of fake blog-style landers… if/where do you think affiliates should draw the lines in terms of deceptive testimonial/results, comments, etc.

A. As I’m not too experienced on facebook marketing, I asked my friend Neil from NeilsWeb.com this question. He said there isn’t a way to specifically target groups by race but you can target groups of people according to their interests. For example, if you are using keyword targeting on facebook, targeting keywords that you know the african american population would have a strong interest in would be a way to capture a portion of that type of traffic. Using words like “Lil Wayne”, etc.

B. To tackle the the fake blog style landing pages is something more of a personal moral conviction. To say I’ve never done it would be lying. However, I do not support or promote that method of landing pages publicly and there can be severe consequences to those who in the past/present/future use those style of landing pages. I think each affiliate should try their best to provide truthful, adequate testimonials, comments and statistics.

TipJar

I haven’t got a clue on how to create one. I’m decent at graphic design so I tried creating one in Photoshop, slicing it, and then coding it in Dreamweaver. But I realized I had no clue what I was doing (especially when trying to add text with divs and css). I could outsource this task, but I don’t have the money, and would like to be able to create my campaign from the ground up (demographic-keywords-landing page). Once I know what I am doing I can always outsource it later.

Not to mention the fact that I’m not sure how to do DKI (dynamic keyword insertion), split testing, or PHP. Do you have any recommendations as to where I could learn how to design these myself?

Refer to my suggestions about Lynda.com, that is going to be one of the best ways to learn how to better design landing pages. You just need to better understand how DIVs, CSS and the other coding aspects work. Join a few design/graphic forums and you will learn alot. Also, don’t forget to Google the questions you have and you will be amazed to find how many different tutorial there are out there. Then over a little bit of time you have gained all of the skills necessary.

As far as DKI, split testing and PHP. Those are things that you will learn more about in the future, once you completely understand the basics. In the near future I will cover DKI and Split Testing.

I is Celebrities

Hey Andrew, love your case study series. A quick question, do you test the offer first before building a landing page, or do you already know for sure that it’s a good offer without first testing it? Thanks

Most of the time the offers that I chose to run, I start with landing pages. I rarely do direct linking because its not a solid business model. I don’t build out the website until I see that it converts well enough to make profitable. But I almost always use a landing page.

Thomas

That’s a great article. Even though Facebook has great targeting options I always had a really low CTR. I guess you almost have to have multiple offers/ads going on the network to make it really worthwhile.

I had a question though. When creating landing pages/sites for offers how much time do you initially spend on any one offer? With more content I know you have a better QS but if it takes you 2-3 days it’s hard to test multiple offers at the same time. Any ideas? Thanks Tom

With facebook, if you are running one offer, you want to test a bunch of ads and really narrow groups of demographics. Find the best version of your ad and focus exclusively on the best demographic with the best ad. For a better reference, again refer to this video interview of my friend Neil, Video Interview.

Not sure if I totally understand your question, however, to answer it to the best of my interpretation. It typically takes me 1 day to prep an offer for lauching and I launch it on day 2. That is for a test. If you are new, I would focus on testing one offer at a time. And if you want a shortcut start with Yahoo as their quality score requirements are much much easier than Google.

Joe Schleswig-Holstein

Very good post, I ll come back to your blog. Thank you also, i just discovered quantcast, whichis a very good tool!
I wish you showed a concrete example how you reach your audience, after having done such a research on that target audience.

I do not understand what your question is about the audience? If you can explain in more detail I will try to answer it.

That will be all for tonight. I will continue this series later this week.

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More experienced internet marketers understand the importance of landing page testing and optimizing, however many newcomers fail to grasp how big of a factor landing pages play in determining how profitable or unprofitable a campaign will be. One of the biggest mistakes I tend to find amongst marketers, when they are talking to me about their unprofitable campaign, is they fail to test multiple designs on their landing pages. No matter how many blogs, websites, ebooks they read or experts they talk to, some people just never seem to listen. If you want to find a profitable campaign do two things. First, watch all of the ppc case study videos and follow it word for word, if you have any questions about it you can ask them in the forum. Secondly, follow this landing page tutorial. That’s pretty simple to do right? WRONG! Most of you will read this, you won’t interact with this tutorial by making a comment below, you’ll just read and not take action. However you’ll continue your daily lives working for some job that you are totally disgusted with, making rude comments about your boss and job all day. The other half who isn’t complaining about their job are at  home complaining because they have no job! (I’m sure this doesn’t apply to some of you but MOST of you it does.) Why don’t you just leave the perfectly polished and dust-free TV remote alone for a while and challenge yourself to improve your life and what you get out of it.

There are tons of things to take into consideration when you are developing a landing page. Firstly is the Thought Process and APPROACH that you will take. You need to create a road map for yourself. Read the items below to get a better understanding of what I mean.

Thought Process and Approach

What does this mean? Understand and do your research on your target audience. Find out who they are, what they like, how they like it and you will be better equipped when you start putting together your landing pages. The example offer we will use for this tutorial will be from Convert2Media, called Course Advisor (offer #702). To begin our research lets start off with using Quantcast, view the results for the offer’s main website: Results Click HERE!

Quancast Data Below

Although this data may not be entirely accurate, it will atleast give you an idea and you can compare it to other similar scholarship finding websites to get an avg result. According to this data, about 56% of all visitors are female, the age range with the highest vistor rate are ages 18-34 at about 27% of overall traffic, roughly 63% are causasion, 61% have no kids, 28% make between $30-60k/year and 44% have NO college background. That is alot of valuable insights into this niche. Can you see the two-fold purpose of this? Obviously not or you’d be making money, so drink a red bull if you are tired and reread this section again. But for those who still can’t understand what is hidden between the lines, here it is plain and simple. ATTENTION all FACEBOOK and MYSPACE Marketers – This info helps for not only landing page creation/design but also helps you better understand where and how to target your traffic. If you want to maximize your chances of success, don’t target 50 yr olds for scholarships, start out with the 18-35 ranges, so you are testing the age ranges with the highest chance of a possible conversion. If you really want to do specifics, check out this data, College Enrollment Statistics (Simply found by doing 3 minutes of research. Google is useful for somethings.). Find out exactly what age, race and gender are in college or are the most likely to be in college. That is what you want to focus on. The more qualified your traffic is, the higher your chances of conversions, the more probability of profiting (you also want to take qualifying your visitors through your Ads and LP presell content into consideration). Then test the smaller chance areas later as an expansion strategy, after your making money.

Ok now that you have an idea of how to identify your target markets and research the demographics. Start to think just like them, if you plan to use adwords to promote this campaign (btw.. the content network would be good for this, consider placement targeting. Maybe use the domain targeting idea Ruck talked about HERE ) start getting some ideas of what your competitors are using for landing pages and analyze the process behind their particular design. Whether this offer works from direct linking, which it probably could, we are merely using this offer as an example to demonstrate landing pages. I just randomly picked an offer, no thought process went into choosing this offer for the tutorial.

Some of the things we will be going indepth on next week are:

- Styles of Landing Pages

- Key Elements When Designing Landing Pages

- Importance of Presell content/copywriting

- Split Testing Designs to Improve CTR and CR

- Understanding How Visitors Interact on Your Landing Pages

- Advanced Optimization Strategies and Tips

Feel free to throw in some of your questions along the way, I am more than happy to answer them. I plan to go indepth as I can, so if there are things you would like me to cover, please list them in the comments below. And break out of your shell, I’m sure many of you reading this have never even made a comment on this blog or maybe any blog. Take a step towards improvement and say something! I don’t bite, most of the time.

Take this information given above and begin to get familiar with it. If you want to see what other great offers Convert2Media has, simply sign up here: Convert2Media. Stay Tuned for More!!!!!!

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Here are the answers to the questions that have been asked concerning specifics of the case study and other various questions. If you have more questions, please feel free to ask.

If you would like to get the Free PPC Bully report, simply sign up by clicking here: > PPC Bully <. Then email Kris so he has your name and email address to verify that you signed up, then he will email you the special report. Believe me, it’s worth it.

Congrats to all those who are having success and good luck in the contest!

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Make sure you guys sign up to those sites via the link here NOT by the banners(unless its Convert2Media or PPC Bully).

Convert2Media
Hydra
Market Leverage
PPC Bully

Ok, so I forgot to talk about a very important piece that I wanted to talk about. It’s been a crazy week/weekend. I wanted to talk about how to know when to get rid of keywords that aren’t being profitable. The answer is pretty simple, when a keyword has cost twice as much as the offer payout and hasn’t converted, that’s when its time to remove that keyword as a non converting keyword. Example: On a $10 payout, and keyword 1 has cost $21 and no conversions, its time for that keyword to be paused or deleted. That will give you a foundation of knowing when to remove keywords. So the process of keyword, landing page and campaign optimizing is simply:

1. Split test ads and landing pages at all times.

2. After a sufficient amount of data has accumulated, remove not performing keywords or keywords that do not produce conversions at double the offer payout or less. So remove keywords that spend 2x(Offer Payout) = No Conversion or Only 1 conversion. As long as your cost/conv is less that 2x the payout, the keyword most probably can become profitable after optimizing. As you continue to weed out not performing keywords, keep testing new keywords. So start with a few hundred keywords, run them for a while and then make changed and repeat the process. Expand on your profitable keywords and the ones that are making conversions. You are able to identify all keywords performance by using the google pixel and Tracking202.

3. Repeat the process. Continue split testing ads and landing pages, continue tracking keywords, remove bad, replace with more to test. That’s how you build up a campaign of profitable keywords is by that process.

4. Don’t give up so easy. If over the course of a month you’ve spent $1000 and only made back $300, unless you continue to see great improvements, it’s probably best to move to onto another campaign. If you spend $1000 and make back $500 or more, you should be able to get that campaign profitable, so keep at it. Patience and Persistence are both hard to accept but it comes down to failure or success. If you can control your emotions and be persistence you will succeed, if not you will fail.

Before I get asked this question I’m going to answer it. Why did I start out a campaign with 700 keywords and only a $100 budget? Because a $100 is only the beginning, I plan to continue this campaign and build it up. It’s no doubt that the big markets have big money in them, you just have to find a creative and unique approach. Don’t follow the same steps as everyone else or you will fall into the ditch just like them.

I hope that helps. Below is the few items I spoke about:

1. PPC Bully

2. Convert2Media, Hydra, Market Leverage

3. Amit Mehta’s Bid and Ad Optimizing strategy – http://www.superaffiliatemindset.com/super-affiliate-bidding-strategies-part-ii/

Please sign up to the Forum to ask any questions of the last video that will be a Q&A video. Also, don’t forget to sign up for PPC Bully and the other Affiliate Networks if You w cant to see the strategy I am using on PPC Bully.

Have a great weekend!

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A Top Secret Keyword Tool that will Crush Your Competitors!

PPC Bully

What I Didn’t Tell you in the Video

Something I decided to tell you after I produced the video. I put in some keywords of a campaign that ‘i know’ is profitable from a different niche, to double check and see what results PPC Bully produced. I was basically doubting that this tool worked. Well, after about a week of data, literally all of the keywords that I put in showed which ads were profitable and which were not. PPC Bully revealed absolutely ALL of the keywords that I had put in and their ads for a campaign that is profitable.  So you see, this tool is very new and not too many people know about it or have started using it yet. That leaves an opportunity for you.

Kick start your profitable campaign by signing up for PPC Bully.

If you have any questions please direct them to the FORUM – Thanks.

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First off ladies and gents, don’t take me wrong by my blunt and slightly brutal tone on some of the topics. My only intentions are to motivate you and to have an impact on your success. To be completely honest, I haven’t been receiving as many questions as I expected that I’d get. Most places charge a lot of money for what I am showing you how to do. Just surprised more of you aren’t taking advantage of it.

By the way, I wasn’t directly speaking to anyone in particular when I mentioned talked about people just asking ‘newb questions’. I was saying in general, there is so much information on the internet that is free, you shouldn’t have to spend much money on learning materials and the basic questions have answered provided all over. Trust me, there isn’t a completely 100% fail proof guide that holds your hand through each step of the process until you’ve built a profitable business. If there were, you wouldn’t learn anything at all because someone else did it for you. So take my advice and make a change in your life and your family’s.

Next video will be posted next Monday afternoon/evening.

Have a great weekend!

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