Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

So a couple months back I met another PPC marketer here in the DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) area. His name is Andrew. If you see him in any forums he goes by Creatunity.

Andrew started PPC a marketing full time a few months back.  He has been really successful.  He is one of those guys that can get along with anyone.

Anyways, I will let him introduce himself.  Andrew is going to be writing up a case study for us.  Over the next few weeks he is going to show us how he makes money with CPA Networks via PPC.

While he is giving the PPC case study and other PPC information I’ll be free to post about SEO, List Building, Email Marketing, and other related topics.

So keep with us here.  We’ll be giving you some good juice!

Here are some questions I found from Here.org.uk. I often get questions from people that follow along these same lines. Here are the questions from that post with my answers.

1. What is the best affiliate network?

There are several networks that I am apart of. It’s like an addiction. When I see that sign up page I sign up. HAHA. You can check out a list of my favorite networks by clicking here. Most of the networks that I am apart of are apart of the “direct track” networks. Direct Track is the company that puts the direct track script out.
The coolest part of direct track is the fact that offers can be published to other direct track networks. This “CrossPublication” allows for the offers to be placed on hundreds of networks. This means that you can essentially ask an affiliate manager from your favorite network to grab the offer and place it on their network.
My favorite of all the networks are these: Convert2Media, Market Leverage, and Hydra. Yeah I use other networks. But those are on the top of the list for me.

2. What is a good CTR for PPC?

That really depends. Just like the article mentioned above says you can have a CTR of 70% with poor conversions and a CTR of 2% with an excellent conversion rate. So it’s really just an issue of how well your clicks convert that’s important. Although you should expect no less than 2% and to be on a more realistic don’t expect higher than 15%. Not saying higher isn’t possible. Just don’t expect it right off the bat.

3. Should I start on the Search or the Content network?

 Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is a nice little feature that the PPC networks provide.  However, it can also be a huge headache. So how do you get this great little feature to work to your benefit.  Easy… Read this post and then emulate it… For sanities sake we are only going to talk about the Adwords DKI token so as not to confuse anyone.

DKI is basically inserting the searched term into your ad copy and ultimately into your website. This makes your ad copy relevant to your website.  AND it makes it look like you have a lot of dynamic ads on the Internet. The downside to using the DKI with Adwords is that your QS will go down initially.  However, because your CTR will… or should… go up your QS should be fine in the end.

How do you  do this?

Google has a place holder that you can insert anywhere into your ad.  That insert looks like this:  {keyword:default}
Now lets break this down into the individual parts. The word “keyword” can be written several ways in Google. Here is a little chart from Google to help you remember this!

This list was taken from Google.  The link to their DKI page can be found below

Quality Score or QS as we know it can be a HUGE headache. Basically for those dabbling in PPC QS determines a couple of things for you.

1. ad position

2. cost per click

Okay.  That being said, what does Google have to say about it?

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Quality Score for Google and the search network

Quality Score for Google and the search network is a dynamic metric assigned to each of your keywords. It’s calculated using a variety of factors and measures how relevant your keyword is to your ad group and to a user’s search query. The higher a keyword’s Quality Score, the lower its minimum bid and the better its ad position.

The components of Quality Score vary depending on whether it’s calculating minimum bid or ad position:

• Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.
• Quality Score for ad position is determined by a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors.

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Okay Great… Straight from the horses mouth… Our QS effects out minimum bid and our ad position. And its “calculated” using a “variety” of factors.  This is fancy for… “We look at your ad, link, domain root, content on domain, and content on subpages you want to link to… We then figure out how relevant your content is to the keyword… and we grade you on it.”

PPC, as we all should know by now, is pretty profitable… When we can get the ball rolling of course. Many times we set up our PPC campaign with Adwords, we make it profitable, then we ask, “How do I scale this?”

Scaling an offer means bringing in more targeted traffic. Now I say TARGETED traffic for a reason. You may think that just bringing in any old traffic will do. However, as it has been said in this blog before, “Not all Traffic was created equal.” There is a big difference between ordering 10000 visitors from some traffic vendor, and gathering 10000 visitors from your PPC keywords.

Okay so Google is sending you XX amounts of visitors. How do you get XXX amount of targeted visitors?

One way to do this is to refine your ads themselves. However, sometimes that gets old. We have a campaign that is making money… but we want to make MORE money NOW. So this is what I like to do…

Duplicate the campaign on other PPC networks!

Okay that’s easier said then done. Actually… It’s easier done then said. All you have to do is sign up with Yahoo, MSN, and other PPC networks and start bringing in the traffic with them.

So what are some other PPC engines that you can join up with? Here is my list. In no specific order (This list excludes the big guys Google, Yahoo, and MSN):

• AdBrite – When people get banned from Google they go to AdBrite. I have found some of my highest returns from these guys!
• SearchFeed - Strong ROI with a reasonable search volume. Geo-targeting available with 11 countries you can specifically focus on.

Okay guys and gals… here you go! Click Here to be taken to the LP example. Also, don’t forget to check out the other LP example that I posted a couple weeks back. Click Here if you missed that post…

Now. As I said before. I am a fan of clean-templates.com. This LP template was from lpelite.com which is from the same guy that created clean templates. I don’t know why… but I love these templates that he has created. Check them out. Buy them if you don’t know how to design your own pages.

The content I actually took from another site. I did change up some of the wording. But the images I hijacked…

Anyways. Remember these points for a review style page.

1. Clean
2. 3-5 offers to be reviewed
3. Place the reviews first, then the content. (Some people do it the other way around… But I found it best to put the reviews first).
4. Always include a blurp about the site
5. Add multiple links to the offer. (the image is clickable, the visit site is clickable, and the visit link is clickable. Then at the bottom there are the sites again.)
6. Place the offer you want to convert in the #2 spot (again… I found this is the spot most chosen.).

Thats all the points I can think of right now. If I think of more, or if you think of any add them in the posts!

Hey everyone.  This weekend I have been thinking a lot on the simple little concept of landing pages.  I am a HUGE believer in giving people choices over different “brands” of product.  We have all seen the websites that review different items.  Many of these review style landing pages offer a point system for product or service ratings.  These landing pages can command armies of people to buy a specific product!

Why are review style landing pages so powerful?  Because people surfing for things online like two things…

1. They like to be guided to a products to buy AND they like to be told which of those products is best and which is worst.
2. They like to make the choice for themselves which of the products to purchase/choose.

Those two little points are POWERFUL.  1 give them choices.  2 let them make the decision what to do. I always find it funny that when I create a review style landing page, people don’t always choose the offer that I have selected to be the top choice.  Even if that offer is the cheaper choice.

When I am making a review style landing page I like to compare 3-5 different offers.  I rate these offers on a scale of 1-5.  It’s important to not give all of the offers the same score.  And if you have 5 offers, make sure you rate one of them a 1. It’s all a psychological thing.