By now, as an Internet Marketer, you should know about Yahoo Answers. If you don’t know about them… It’s a website where people ask you for your affiliate link so that they can make you rich. HAHA Just kidding. But it might as well be. Websites, where people ask a questions on advice or where to find something, are asking to be spammed.

I’m not saying that blatantly spamming is good. But I am saying that you can go into questions and answer type of websites, appear as a guru, and give people your website to visit.

When I first started marketing online I was looking for some quick and easy cash. I stumbled onto Yahoo Answers not really knowing what it was about. I started to browse through questions and I found the section called … “Careers & Employment”. Reading through the questions I got the bright idea to send people through my affiliate link. After trying this all day I quickly realized that I was getting banned after only 3 posts. In the first 2 days I must have created 30+ accounts. All banned within minutes of being on the site.

I couldn’t figure it out… then I realized I needed to send people to a site that didn’t look like spam. So I logged into my Gmail account at the time and created one of their free pages. I added about 10 links to ClickBank products and headed back into Yahoo. This time I was able to go for about 10 posts before I was banned.

While I was still pretty excited about this I wasn’t satisfied. So, I began to become a “real” person. I took on the persona of a girl named Katy. A 27 year old college student that takes surveys from her dorm room for extra spending money. People in Yahoo Answers will literally ask the question “Where can I go for a job to help me work from home?” HAHAHA EASY MONEY BABY!

“Oh Hi, I’m Katy. I had this same problem when I started college. First of all… my boyfriend didn’t like me gone all the time working, and second of all I had to have a flexible schedule for my school work. Anyways… To make a long story short I was searching around online and found this website _____________________. Its basically a list of survey sites that you can use to make a little extra spending money. I’m making about $550 every two weeks. It isn’t the best money. But it works for what I need.

Best of Luck… I hope you find something that works for you. keep us updated!

Katy”

BWAHAHAHAHA Now you may think that taking on a persona like this is bad… However, this is marketing. The Rich Jerk really isn’t a Rich Jerk… “He” in fact is a group of marketers. They have created a persona that people either love or hate. This is what you essentially have to do. Become someone else to market to another crowd.

My first two weeks of marketing online I made $700. All from answering questions on Yahoo Answers. Ruck has a few post about it in this blog. They can be found by clicking here. He also has a nice little report in the Free Ruck Reports section of the blog. Check it out.

Here is also a list of other websites that can be used for answering people’s questions for… MOOLAH

• http://www.answerbag.com/
• http://www.funadvice.com/
• http://www.advicenators.com/
• http://www.dizzay.com/
• http://answers.yahoo.com/

What other Question and Answer websites do you know of?

Those three tactics I mentioned can help you take your online business to a whole new level. I often ponder hiring a full time poster, answerer, and ripper. I know that if I did then they would at least pay for their position if not more.

So… I’m going to start going off on a tangent over this next week on generating free traffic to your CPA offers. This is in answer to the many questions I have received on alternatives to PPC.
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The most important thing that you can do when your building your free traffic is to come off as a professional. People need to trust you. They need to feel as if they can come to you for anything. Build your “brand” to say. When you are marketing to a forum you can’t just go in and start shooting your link to people. We all know what would happen if we did.

Don’t start out asking questions either. You need to go in right away and be the authority. If I was marketing to the dating niche, I would find several forums full of people looking for love. Then I would begin to answer their questions and interact with them on a more personal level. When I say don’t ask questions, I don’t mean not to ask personal questions to the members. Asking people individual questions via the personal message feature is an essential thing that you must do. You can also ask them personal questions in the actual threads. You’ll know the perfect time to do this when you see the opportunity. This will place them on your side when you start recommending products in the future. Don’t EVER ask them for advice though. Say something to them like “Hey I noticed your from _______ I have a cousin that lives there. Is it as boring as she says?”. Get personal and they will LOVE you.

Once you have a few dozen posts under your belt feel free to add your signature. I never add it right away. Some people will know right off the bat that you are a marketer and you will get called out. I like to have 50 posts under my name before I begin to even come close to marketing. For a lot of us this method might take a little too long for our liking. But I promise you that people will appreciate your “wisdom” and when they do… they will eat up anything you say… Even if you tell them “YOU MUST JOIN THIS DATING SITE!”. And shoot them a link

This tactic takes time. But once we build trust in these forums, we can begin to market to them for a long period of time.

Oh here’s another thing. When you do get to the point that you are to market to them. Don’t send them directly to the affiliate link. Make sure you send them to an actual URL. And if your thinking right… It will either be a URL with the rotator on it… or a poll.

Next post I’ll go into my tactics for yahoo answers.

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.

Google has a tracking pixel that you can place on your offers. The tracking pixel will track with Google so that in those reports you can see which one of those sites generated a lead for you. If you aren’t using that… You better start… Tracking where your clicks and conversions come from is ESSENTIAL!

Now, when you find a site that is generating a good amount of clicks and conversions for you… you can place a site targeted ad. Do you see the importance of tracking now?

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.

I hope that wasn’t too confusing. If you have questions… just ask.

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.

Why stop at the tools? Coach has even provided videos that show you how to use the tools and how to better your PPC campaigns.

Lastly… The forum. It is absolutely a necessary item. There you have the opportunity to ask whatever question you need answered. I’ll be honest… I’m no guru at PPC-CPA. Even I have asked a question in there to get clarification.

It’s worth a look. And if you are serious about building PPC-CPA as a profitable business… it is a necessity!

Ubercamp.com

Ubercamp is a relatively new site. So far the majority of the content in there is PPC-CPA related. It is seriously one of the best websites I have found for advanced marketers to learn! If you are new to the IM game then I don’t suggest signing up with them. In fact the owner Paul Bourque even states right on the site not to sign up if you aren’t already making money!

Jonathan Volk from Jonathanvolk.com made this statement about Ubercamp, “Ubercamp is more for affiliates who are already a bit established but can’t seem to push past into that next level.” He couldn’t have put that any better. And while I have been marketing online for a while now, I have definitely learned a thing or two inside Ubercamp that I know will help grow my business.

The main difference between ubercamp and PPC-Coach is the simple fact that PPC-Coach is for beginners and Ubercamp is for experienced marketers. Also, while Ubercamp doesn’t have any tools right now, the information available is priceless!

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.

The generic URL for this offer looks like this: http://convert.Convert2Media.com/z/852/CD39/
This URL by itself will not let us pass the keyword through to them. We need to use the subid function for keyword tracking purposes. Some CPA networks only allow for 1 subid, some allow for up to 5. When the network asks you for a subid just put “keyword”. This is going to be a space filler for right now. In the case of the debt avenger offer the URL with subid “keyword” would look like this: http://convert.Convert2Media.com/z/852/CD39/&subid1=keyword
Unfortunately we aren’t done yet. In order for the keyword to properly be passed we need to now delete the word “keyword” from the URL with the subid inserted. This will leave our URL to look like this: http://convert.Convert2Media.com/z/852/CD39/&subid1=
This is the proper format for the URLs that we want to use in the rotator IF we want to pass the keyword to the CPA network. Do you see the difference? The URL has appended &subid1= to the end. This is what the CPA network needs in order to pass a keyword from your site to theirs.

Make sure you copy and paste the proper URL into the script.

Now it’s just a matter of sending visitors to your site via the ?kw=keyword function. Remember, your URL should now look like: http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php?kw=keyword

Pretty kool eh?

Remember, when using this URL you will want to add several offers. I try and rotate between 3 and 5 offers at a time. This helps to ensure quick split testing. If you try and work one offer at a time you will most likely burn through money trying to find a converting offer. Remember, this is not for offers like free iPhones or free iPods. This is for dating offers, insurance offers, and other big ticket items.

If you have any questions about this PLEASE ASK. Remember, no question is a stupid question, and we are all here to learn.

Part 1 participants:

Yebot
skylar
Cash
rgh
skywatcher
dotdriven
tushar dhoot
agraiders

Part 2a and 2b participants:

Yebot
skylar
rgh
skywatcher
agraiders
RD
dotdriven (only 2a)

Part 3 participants:

Yebot (That’s cutting it close…)
skyler
rgh
dotdriven
agraiders
amit
theman

Those that competed all tasks:

agraiders
skylar
yebot
rgh

I have placed these four names in a drawing for the prizes. The outcome is below:

agraiders - $200 AMEX Gift Card
skylar - USB Pen
yebot - Flip video camera
rgh - iPod Nano

Congratulations! Please email me at kris@cashtactics.net with your First/Last name, mailing address, Phone number, or use the contact forum to send me the information.

dotdriven and skywatcher… YOU WERE SO CLOSE. Email me and we will figure something out for you two.

There are just a couple more days left. The contest ends on Wednesday! Thank You and Good luck to those of you who have been participating!