By now, we should all know how to run a poll based on recent news. These polls can be profitable. However, they are unfortunately short lived due to new news popping up everyday. I had someone ask me last night on messenger “Why won’t my poll get any hits?” So I jumped in, looked at the guys landing page, and saw that it was about a news event that happened 8 months ago.

Now, setting up a news poll before the topic becomes main stream, and while the topic is main stream is great! However, once the news item goes to the back shelf you’re out of luck. Clicks will die down, and eventually impressions. You’re more than welcome to keep these polls running… However, I promise you conversions will go down as well. It’s just the nature of the beast.

The best way to set up a poll is to… are you ready… this next bit of info is top notch… COMPARE TWO ITEMS… There are 100s of CPA offers for different items. You can compare brands of shoes, brands of lip gloss, types of candies. You can even compare stores. I know for a fact there is a Target gift card and a Wal-Mart gift card floating around there. Compare Wal-Mart vs. Target. When they vote for their specific brand send them to that offer! Your conversion rate will sky rocket.

“Where would you rather shop?”
“What kind of lip gloss do you like”
“Which Candy is Sweeter?”

When people are taken to the “item” that they vote for then they are naturally going to be inclined to opt-in. How cool would it be to get a chance for some Nike shoes after you just said that they were better than Adidas. Or vice versa…

Now this can be a hard thing to judge. In fact, I don’t really measure my clicks vs conversions as a standard. Instead, I measure my cost spent vs. my cost earned. The key is to set a goal and to stick to it.

When I test a campaign I try and set my goal to 100 clicks. If, in 100 clicks I get no conversions I will try switching out the offer. (Ideally the offer would be rotating from the beginning). Sometimes polls will run that are complete duds from the beginning, and sometimes a poll will struggle to get 100 clicks let alone 100 impressions!

If you’re having a hard time getting impressions, check out your ad-groups. Are they tightly grouped? What about the keywords your using… Are they outdated? Many times when we run those popular “recent news” polls the topic gets blown through really fast, therefore, yesterday we might have had great keywords and today… yeah they can suck. There is always new “hot” news everyday.

Now, if you’re getting the getting the impressions but not the clicks… yeah that’s an ad copy problem. We’ll go over ad copy later.

Okay back to the topic at hand.

If I’m getting clicks and one or two conversions then things are still going good for us. We may meet our goal of 100 clicks, spend around $15, and make about $4, then that is okay. This is something that we can work with.

We need to make sure we are getting people from our page to our offer. The first thing you want to do to check this out is to load the report from your CPA network and see if they show any clicks to the offer. Remember… Not all networks have real time tracking. AND some offers have to be uploaded by the advertiser.

Picking a landing page is very important. If you pick something that is cluttered chances of a lead being generated is pretty slim. On the other hand… When the site looks nice and is easy to navigate, then a lead can be pretty easy to gather.

Chad at CDF Networks wrote a quick post about “Good and Bad Landing Pages”. Here are some tips you want to look for when you’re choosing an offer.

Tip #1 – Is the page cluttered?
You need to make sure the page doesn’t have a lot of “fancy smancy” images or patter (words). Take a look at the page and make sure that the user will be able to EASILY see all of the text fields that they will need to fill out.

Tip#2 – Make sure there are no other links.
That’s it… Just browse the page and make sure you can see clearly that there are no links that will take the user away from making you money. The “Bad Landing Page” example clearly has a line of links at the top of the page. All of these links can take the user away from where you want them, which is that little section of text boxes on the lower right… Remember, the least amount of distraction for the user the better.

Tip#3 – The least amount of actions possible
While Short Forms pay out higher then Zip/Email submits, they are also a little harder to convert. ESPECIALLY if your trying to run them as a backend offer to a poll. So, that being said, try and stick with the least amount of fields possible. The least amount of work possible for your users the better! The “Bad Landing Page” has 9 fields (one is lower on the page) and the “Good Landing Page” has only 1. This can help your conversions skyrocket. Often times because of the ease for the user you will get more conversions!

This morning I was thinking about you guys and gals and I thought to myself.  I should give them an example of something they can use.   So this is what I did.  I jumped over to some of those sources I mentioned to you.  Eventually I found this headline… “Birthdays: Can Mr. T still pity the fool at 56?“. Now… I only found this on one site… BUT, I’m foreseeing the future.

You have to think of news articles in terms of a rollercoaster.  Often times you will see a headline in one place BUT in a week or so many places will be sproating similar headlines.  I imagine that in the next couple of days Google Trends will have something related to Mr. T on it.  Now I could  be wrong.  But playing the guessing game is sometimes part of the job. 

Creating a poll around this headline wouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish.  You can even pose the question “Is Mr. “T” Retired?” Do you know the answer?  Ask questions that get people thinking. “Mr. “T” is 56, do YOU pity the fool?” Weird questions can often be thought provoking as well.

Throw out some ideas in a post comment to the headline  “Birthdays: Can Mr. T still pity the fool at 56?“.

What do you think a good backend offer would be?
What do you think a good Poll question would be?

Okay here’s another way to choose your offer. Pick the demographic first… It’s actually fairly easy. There are a lot of different ways to choose your demographic. The most common is to visit buzz.yahoo.com, google.com/trends/. Make sure you select “more hot trends” in Google Trends. Also, surf through the first few pages of Yahoo Buzz. Don’t just look at the “Top Searches” on the left. I’ve often found gems hidden around the 10th page.

Write down a list topics that you see on Google Trends. If those same items can be found in Yahoo Buzz then chances are it’s a pretty hot topic to create a campaign around. Visit the site “hot” site and look at what’s being advertised.

Another thing you can do is visit… news websites. MSN.com, CNN.com, ESPN.com. These news sites will give you topics you can choose from. Click over to a news article. Scroll around the page until you see advertisements. I’m on one right now that has an advertisement for a Hyundai car. Now I doubt I will find a CPA offer for a Hyundai… BUT… I know I can find an offer for car insurance and to make it simpler for you there is zips submits out there for Gas Station gift certificates..

The article I went to is called “Clinton, Obama converge on Florida”. So I ask you… what’s the demographic? Voters! Most likely in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. The people that are advertising on news sites have got money to spend on there. They aren’t going to place an ad that won’t convert so you now know what you can advertise to that demographic.

I hope you’re paying attention. You should also now know what keywords to target, and if you’re setting up a poll… you should know the poll topic.

There has already been a post in regards to choosing your CPA offers. However, I have had several requests to start from the beginning and break everything down a little further.

The most common types off offers you will see are as follows:

• Zip/email submits (One field)
• Short forms (3-4 fields)
• Long forms (More than 4 fields)
• 2 page (2 pages of fields)
• Sales based (Surf the site, make a purchase)
• etc, etc

If you’re starting out and your trying to run a sales based offer, I promise you will be discouraged with PPC-CPA. We often hear about Polls and creating polls for CPA offers. Great! Do it! But don’t run a sales based offer on your backend. A beginner’s key to converting an offer is to allow for the least amount of clicks possible. That means we want to start with zip submits or email submits.

Method 1

Well great… Out of the hundreds of possible offers which should I choose? That depends on you. When your starting out pick an offer that appeals to you. Don’t try and pick an offer that would appeal to a crowd that you don’t know and understand yet.

If you pick something that you know and understand then you have knocked your research down quite a bit. If you’re a fan of fishing choose a fishing offer. If you like video games choose a gaming offer. I promise you, if you start with something you are familiar with you’re way ahead of the game.

Method 2

With the recent release of The Poll Factory I have seen nothing but good things said about it on other marketing blogs and in the discussion forum. For the record, I did not receive any monetary compensation for leaking the launch, nor do I receive any compensation for the advertisement being displayed this month. There are hundreds if not thousands of ways to make money online but it seems the lack of execution in helping others achieve the same status WITHOUT wanting anything in return is at a low.

With that said, I would like to cover what someone else has done and chronicled in becoming a Marketer and making money online. Sometimes it probably gets old listening to me ramble, and to be honest with you, a lot of what I do business wise is not discussed publicly on this blog. This blog is geared towards people wanting to get started online or have started and would like some direction rather than information and processes on successful affiliate program/product takeovers, forming corporations and establishing web development projects. That stuff is a bit more technical and a lot of the aspects of it are not to be shared publically.

So anyway, Eric Mitz starts following the CPA Marketing Series and Category here. Very quickly the guy puts the information into action and starts thinking outside the box. Just like that he bangs out a poll that generates what he says “was probably the easiest $650 I’ve ever made online.” I believe with CPA Polling the number is around $1500-$2000 in total. (If you could clarify this Eric, that would be great). It doesn’t stop here though. Let’s get into a little deeper on the psyche of a successful Entrepreneur. When I say successful, ask Eric where he was a few months ago then ask him where he’s at now. More importantly, (if he will indulge us) ask him where he’s heading. I already know.

This is important. This is vital. Not taking this seriously is the exact same reason why people may gripe about the time it takes getting accepted to programs or not getting accepted at all. Time is money in this business. Treat network applications as if you were applying for another job. Does half-assing your resume increase your chances of banging out that new office with a view? No it dont. The same applies online. Take your business seriously so others will as well.

Personally being a Co-Network owner and not even launching live to public publishers I have deleted over 400 fraudulent applications in the last 24 hours. That’s just one day on a network that is nothing yet. I wonder how people like Market Leverage and Hydra feel? I can only imagine.

The theory that networks only glance at your applications is partly correct. How would you feel looking over 410 applications only to find out that 400 of them were not legitimate? That cuts your production time down and does not allow you to focus more time, energy and dedication to the people who are legitimate.

Here are some tips on getting accepted to Affiliate Networks:

1. Dont have a website, build one. It’s an instant red flag. Another red flag is if you dont have a website then using something like Google or Yahoo will get you denied pretty quick. Fact of the matter is that silly things like that are seen hundreds of times daily. Your best bet is to ALWAYS utilize the comment box located in applications. You better be telling why you dont have a site and what your intentions are.