Strategic Marketing At Warp Speed

Instead of repeating myself a bunch of times over a bunch of variations and things related to the Google Quality Score, I have decided to just take questions of it. I dont know it all, but I will do my best to answer your questions and try to provide some background and even my own experiences. So let’s here it! Just comment here and I will answer after we get a few going.

Pay Per Click Marketers vary on each of their methods. I dont think there really is a truly *right* way to start your adgroups and keywords in a pay per click campaign. Everyone has their own methods so let me share mine. When I initially start a PPC campaign I am not actually looking for *converting keywords*. What? Dont get me wrong, that is the overall goal (to establish a campaign on almost if not all keywords that convert to conversions). However, doing this takes a boatload of preparation, time and setup. My goal at the very start is to get an idea of what keywords are getting clicked on.

Most people either believe or have been told that you should track EVERY keyword to determine profitability. This comes later. This does not come at the start. Unless you have a small set of keywords that would not take much time, but come on, lets face it. He who gets the most keywords will most likely profit more.

There are two things that I have read since day one of wanting to get involved with pay per click that I truly believe.

1. Almost 40% of keyword searches done online are new
2. MAYBE 15-20% of my total keyword list will reveal keywords that bring me profits.

You see, I know and realize this. This is exactly why I dont start tracking keywords (unless its a truly small campaign). This is a huge time waster for me. Yes I would determine profitability right from the start. Yet, I have to actually look at the time it would take me to do that. My time could be better spent letting this campaign run for 1-2 days while I blast out 5-10 more. If you got a weak stomach, small budget and suffer from impatience then this is not going to work for you.

After 30+ comments and now dozen of emails over CPA Offers, Keyword Research and Landing Page Setup I thought I would take a crack and try to trim down the amount of incoming questions here in one shot. Let’s jump into looking exclusively at an email or zip submit offer from a CPA Network. We are not even going to worry about keywords right now but instead let’s focus entirely at looking at the offer before we even switch tabs or windows and start our market research. Chances are that if it does not somewhat appeal to you, you may not have success with it. This can spell D O O M from the get go.

After going thru TONS of offers you will come to find out that quite simply, some are a lot easier to profit from than others. This is really my main area of focus. While I COULD work on the offer and TRY to make it MORE profitable, I usually dont. I really dont have the time. So there are some things we can apply to ourselves and towards the offer before we ever start researching it.

Go to your account and choose and offer. Run your link in the browser and look at the landing page and what the offer is giving away. Now what I am about to say may seem downright cold-hearted. Chances are that if your not just the least bit *dirty* in your thinking then you will probably just earn peanuts in this type of business (if anything at all).

Lesson #1 - Who is this offer going to appeal to?

One of the best ways to get cheap but targeted traffic is to scoop up every domain variation and add it to your pay per click arsenal. This technique is nothing mind blowing but I thought I would go over it anyway and maybe spark some new ideas. I will use the ecards example from previous in correlation to relating to this material. You will still want to develop a keyword list and depending how exhaustive you want your options this can go on forever.

First let’s look at a keyword set:

ecards, birthday ecards, animated ecards

Now first off, let’s transform these into singular and plural -> ecard, ecards, birthday ecard, birthday ecards, animated ecard, animated ecards.

Right on, now we can move into domain sniping. This is sometimes a shot in the wind. However, you should not overlook this technique. You can do this manually (not suggested) or you can use a tool to greatly save time. I am not even going to throw an affiliate link at you. I believe in this tool so highly that I hope you will have a look at it. The tool is called SpeedPPCand it works wonders. For the technique I am about to write on, I am not aware of any other alternative to get domain variations at the SpeedPPC will return them.

Develop a keyword list and then take your most popular keywords (ones with lost of searches..most likely more competition) into a domain keyword list to target. It’s fairly easy and goes something like this:

ecards

• http://ecards.com
• http://www.ecards.com
• ecards.com
• ecards com
• ecardscom
• www.ecards.com
• wwwecards.com
• www.ecards com

One of the biggest factors in succeeding or failing in affiliate marketing comes from the offers you choose to promote. Now your probably asking yourself "how do I know a successful offer when I see one". Well, I wont lie to you. After you have been doing it for a few years you sort of develop a sense for it. With that said their are still all kinds of little hiccups along the way that we could face such as:

• A poor converting landing page
• Merchant just sucks
• The market is just not profitable

As you fail and succeed in promotions you will start to develop almost a 6th sense for good ideas of what is *likely* to be a better offer. Even then this can fail you but hey, "it’s not all peaches and cream". I test at least 25 offers a week and usually come away with 1 that’s good and maybe 2-4 offers that I can *work on*. So there’s work involved but it’s so rewarding when you get one on autopilot.

Your probably asking yourself "can you show me an example"? So for this post let’s do an exercise together and do a walk thru on how we choose an offer and start promoting it.

Warning: The following material I am about to share with you is in a brutally competitive market and the payouts for the offers are quite low. I have gone another route of promotion for this landing page but I can tell you that if you copy this and go to Adwords with it, just be careful. It’s not going to take very long for you to lose money. Within hours I would say. You’ve been warned. Dont come crying to me.

Bidvertiser is one of those 2nd tier search engines that you can advertise on a little bit cheaper than Adwords, Yahoo and MSN. Right now you can get a free $20 in clicks by signing up for a new account with them. I thought since I spoke recently on Google Placement Targeting this might be a great chance for you to get your feet wet WITHOUT spending ANY money.

Bidvertiser is a little bit different than most PPC Engines. As a matter of fact you as an advertiser have ALOT more control as to where you want your ads to appear. They obviously know about SEO Optimization as well because they have been in the top 5 Search Results for the term "make money online" for as long as I can remember. Bidvertiser also has an extremely six step process to get up and running with them in no time.

1. Browse our categorized directory of websites
2. Select the appropriate sites for your business
3. Set your desired geographic targeting
4. Create your text-ad
5. Set budget and capping
6. Your ad is up and running

My personal experiences with Bidvertiser have only been with Arbitrage. Yea, I made money but it wasn’t that much and I stopped before I even got completely rolling with it. When I switched to CPA and PPC on the Big 3 Engines I pretty much left the arbitrage world. However, I know that some of the readers here may find this helpful as it is indeed $20 worth of clicks just to try it out.

One of the biggest keys to making a huge payday (or month) is gearing up for the holidays. November was actually better for me (PPC wise) than December. I got hammered with other projects in December and paused a lot of campaigns that were running just so I didn’t have to monitor them. As far as gearing up for the holidays, I ran only 1 offer.

Valentine’s day is coming up in a little over a month. That is about when I start gearing up for these paydays. If you want a great example of what can happen when you research, plan and execute properly then I would suggest taking a look at CDF Networks post Breaking The $1,000 Per Hour Barrier. This is a prime example of major preparation before the holidays.

So here’s some tips on how to prepare yourself:

1. Start utilizing Google Hot Trends and Yahoo Buzz and start looking for keywords that will start to climb. Of course right now you may be watching for yet another couple of weeks before you start seeing consistent keywords popping up but this will be a good exercise for you to start monitoring markets and keywords. If you don’t know how to do it properly then starting here is a great way for you to get this method down now so that you can apply it later on to Easter, Mother’s Day, Independence Day and etc.

2. Grab yourself a complimentary copy of Benjamin Maker’s GTrends Made Easy. This is a completely free tool provided by Benjamin (who reads this blog and is a member of my Discussion Forum). The tool is super easy to use and will be a great asset for both search campaigns and optimizing blogs. Yes, this tool will retrieve the pages in Google for every keyword. You could start in just a few minutes gearing up a Valentine’s blog with a ton of keywords that have hardly any competition in the SERP’s.