Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

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.

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.

I had this HUGE long post on tracking your offers… I didn’t save it at all… Then the power went out… Sorry guys.

Let me tell you the gist of it all.

Tracking your offers is ESSENTIAL. It is the only way you will really become profitable. Remember, we are trying to set up a business. Something long term. If we aren’t tracking our offers then we wont know how to fix them and make them work for us when money is down.

Let me give you a quick example. I had a campaign that was pretty profitable. I was pretty retarded with PPC when I first started so I didn’t track a thing. I didn’t care where people where coming from as long as I was making money. If you think like I did… You need to think again. When I started tracking my campaigns I turned my break even campaigns into winners, my winners into bigger winners. And my losers… Well I just dropped those.

It is not too late to start. Infact, if you don’t have any tracking set up right now, I urge you to at least go into your Adwords account… create a report from the “create report” link, make sure you create a “Placement / Keyword Performance” report.

When I finally did this to first profitable campaign… I realized I was receiving traffic from countries I had blocked… Traffic from sites related to cars when my campaign was about something on the opposite end of the spectrum. I realized I was also receiving traffic from Myspace… Thats a killer right there. Most of Myspace traffic is crap because those are little kids just looking for Myspace layouts.

When you are using this rotator and you have found a profitable campaign you can’t let people get away without gathering their information for yourself. When I find a profitable campaign… something that is generating money everyday… I throw in my personal squeeze page into the rotator.

That means that I can gather their name and email address for my aweber account. Having your own mailing list is invaluable. For every four times the offer pops up I like to have my squeeze page pop up once. Now we should know the conversion rate for our actual offer. Placing our own page on there is obviously going to change the conversion rate, however, if we are creating our squeeze page to mimic the offer page then who really cares if our conversions on the offer go down. We now have conversions to our own aweber account!

Often times an offer will get paused or will stop on the advertisers end. That’s okay, we can continue running with our landing page until we find offers to test. I like to find 3-5 new offers to run through the rotator all at once just as if we were starting from scratch. The good thing though, is the fact that we already have our keywords that are getting us traffic. The only thing we need to do is find an offer that converts to the traffic.

Once we find that converting offer we can create a landing page to mimic the offer or we can throw up that old landing page that we used for the previous offer. Either works. The best thing to do is to split test the two pages against eachother… Place both into the rotator by themself for a couple of days to see which converts better, then take out the non-converting aweber landing page, and throw the offer back into the mix.

Then you want to read this post! If your not new to PPC scroll down to the bold writing that says UBERCAMP.

Everyday I get asked the question over AIM and MSN Messenger “Can you help me with my campaign?” While for the most part I don’t mind… I do want to recommend 2 websites to check out.

PPC-Coach.com

The first site I want to recommend is PPC-Coach.com. If you have an extra $50 a month then you NEED to make the investment. I promise you that you will not be disappointed. If you have liked the whole PPC series on this blog then you will LOVE what Coach has to say.

Not only will you get some excellent training in PPC-CPA you will also be able to ask more in-depth questions that can better be answered by a full time, PPC-CPA marketer. But what is really cool about PPC-Coach is the fact that there are SEVERAL success stories inside that will simply blow you away. One guy turned his first profit on January 12th, 2008 and has since turned a profit of over $35,000 ALL from the PPC-Coach training.

I like the coaches system because it really is a learning ground for people. It is a training center where each month you get more and more information to help you turn a profit online. If I was given the opportunity to start with this program when I started online I would have.

PPC-Coach even gives you over 10 PPC related tools for you to use. My 3 favorite tools that he has are the Landing Page Generator, Big 3 Campaign Generator and the Keyword Tracking System. These three tools alone justify the $50/month payment.

Okay, sorry it has been a week or so since writing about the iframer. I’ve been pretty busy with my personal marketing, and I now have a house full of Italians. My wife’s sisters are visiting for a month so this should be interesting.

I have uploaded a new version of the iframer/rotator thanks to Yebot. He has included a section to add for your tracking and a section for dynamic keywords. So you can either jump over to the Free Ruck Reports or you can click here to download the new iframer/rotator.

The tracking feature is pretty easy to use. Around line 65 you will find a comment about inserting your tracking script. Just place it between the two comments and you will be good to go.

The dynamic keyword tracking will be a little different. The script can now pass a keyword to your CPA network via the URL. In order for this to work your URLs will need to look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?kw=yourkeyword
If you are adding the script to a folder then your URL will look like this http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/index.php?kw=yourkeyword
It is not necessary to use the keyword passing function, but if you wanted to, it is there for the taking.

The tricky part of this will be gathering the correct URL from the CPA network. Because this is PPC, you will want to use the Search Creative URL that they give you. However sometimes they don’t always give you this URL yet they say it is for search. For example on Convert2Media I have chosen the “Debt Avenger - Lead Gen (46)”. It says that it is promotable by Search, however, no search creative can be found. So I will be using the text ad creative at the bottom.

So a few comments and emails have been made in regards to the iframe/rotator script and quality score. To be honest with you, you don’t get a good quality score for an iframe. The reason for this is because the site inside of the frame is not actually on your page. It displays on your page, but it isn’t your page. Your QS comes from the information that is contained in your source code.

Enter URL to Spider

If you don’t believe me, give it a shot. Just enter the URL you want to test. If you enter a page that is just an iframe no data will appear. If you enter an actual webpage, you will see plenty of information.So, how do you combat this little problem? Add the meta tags. In the script you will see the following:

// CONFIG OPTIONS
// TITLE TAG <title>...</title>
$pgtitle = "";
// META KEYWORDS (comma-separated) - optional
$metakeywords = "";
// META DESCRIPTION - optional
$metadescription = "";

Where you see $pgtitle =” “ you need to insert the title of the page. What I like to do is find the title of one of the CPA offers that I am running that will work with all three sites. Sometimes an adjustment to the name of the title needs to be made. This isn’t a problem. I also like to include the domain name. For example: YourDomain.com - Top quality car insurance at an affordable price.

My title tag would then look like this: $pgtitle =” YourDomain.com - Top quality car insurance at an affordable price”

You’ll then want to do the same thing with the meta keywords and meta description tags.