Archive for the ‘Media Buys’ Category

How To Make Money On Somebody Else’s Forum (Part 2/2)

This is the second of a two part post showing how to make some good money by marketing on forums. If you haven’t read the first part, you should probably go and do that right about now.

Hopefully you managed to muster a couple of vaguely promising ideas. But it’s gotta be said. There’s a learning curve for marketing on forums. You might not think so, but there is. You need to appreciate that marketing on somebody else’s site, somebody else’s forum, it’s the sort of activity that requires respect. Respect for other peoples’ business.

How many people read the last post and shot off to find some weight loss forum where they could cheaply sling some berries? I assumed this was what many would do. But realize before you learn the hard way – a badly thought out forum campaign will bring you more hate mail than conversions. Not least from the owner of the site you’ve just manipulated.

If you’re promoting a rebill using forum marketing, you’re walking one hell of a thin line. What do forum communities like to do like no other? They like to talk shit. Nothing’s gonna get Off Topic buzzing like a member filing a complaint over some shitty rebill he purchased through the forum’s recommendation. What I’m trying to say here is that although a forum owner may be all too happy to accept your Paypal, that’s no reason to get sloppy with your marketing.

If you’re heart set on promoting a rebill to a forum community, don’t do it directly. Use a squeeze page and build a mailing list. Transfer their email to your own list and then do your thing. Think long term. If the forum owner discovers that you’re bombarding his memberlist with direct endorsements for one of the scammiest online purchases of 2010, he’s gonna shut you down and shut you out. I don’t blame him.

That’s not to say that you can’t leverage forum memberlists for a rebill offer. You just need to shift that email in to your own database before you do it. The alternative is one profitable mailshot, one extremely unhappy community, one pissed off owner and Baby Jesus drowning in a cradle of tears.

Right, that said. What is the best way to make money on a forum? I know people love being spoonfed how-to guides and top ten tips, but I’m gonna cut the crap and list you some of your options.

Sign up, put a link in your sig and post like you’re the expert on fucking everything.

Otherwise known as The Warrior Forum Technique, this tactic can generate vast sums of income approaching $2.77 p/hour before tax. If you really want to live with the best, you should pick up an avatar from wherever the pedobears are uploading their vacation photos these days. Better yet, offer members of said forum an outrageous 70% discount coupon so they only feel 30% as ripped off when they cave in to your drivel.

Yes, this technique is followed by the masses. The masses are not rich. While I don’t doubt for a second that a little viral buzz can go a long way, you wouldn’t be reading an affiliate marketing blog if you actually had something worthwhile to sell. You can probably use a sig link to cash in a few sales – but what a joyous life to look forward to. Forum monkey. Tell the grandkids.

Blitz members with a whirlwind of Private Messages.

You know the drill. Sign up using your sister’s email, write out one massively impersonal advertising plea and then send it to everybody online. As you sit back and press the Send button on that last PM, you realize that you’ve accidentally messaged a moderator – who’s banned you, removed all your PM history and swiftly rendered the last half hour utterly meaningless. This method is another top hit at Digital Point. The worrying thing I’ve learnt from marketing is that people wouldn’t be doing this shit if they didn’t at least make some kind of return on their investment.

Buy banner space for a flat rate monthly fee.

This is more like it. Forum members are used to refreshing the same old index page and seeing the same old usernames in the same old threads. A fresh new sparkling banner WILL draw their attention – for a very short time.

I like banner campaigns on forums. But to make them work, you absolutely have to be shooting at a large forum where the number of unique visitors is high. Banner blindness will set in after the first few pageloads and you’ll see a rapid decline in CTR if you don’t have the benefit of fresh traffic.

When you’re negotiating a price with a forum owner, if he’s smart, he’ll try to catch you with the “page views per month” trick. Don’t buy in to that. A forum has an artificially inflated number of page loads in its traffic logs.

1. The same users are loyal and like to click back and forth.
2. Topics are divided in to numerous pages. Although you might receive 50 impressions, it ain’t much good if they’re all from the same old dog cruising through jailbait archives since 1995.
3. Page loads never meant shit anyway.

If you’re going to buy banner space, find out how many unique hits you’ll be getting for your buck and then DO YOUR RESEARCH. Also beware of rotating banner spaces – start dividing traffic stats if you’re placed on a rotation. Find out the exact demographics of the forum. Is it worthwhile renting out a banner space that promotes an American product when the majority of the forum’s visitors are scattered around the world?

Take the lower converting International offer, not the hot-shit-US-only product that does the business for you with search. You don’t have as much control over your targeting on a forum. If you’re going to get country-specific, make sure you have a geolocating script ready to ping your clickers to where they need to be.

Oh and don’t make the classic amateur mistake of direct linking to your offer without cloaking. If the offer gets pulled from a network, you’re the fool who should have stayed at the grocery counter.

As a rule of thumb, I prefer to target banner spaces that appear in slightly unusual areas of a forum. I like to drill down and target just one particular subforum, where the category is relevant, and then get my banner placed directly below the first post in each thread. You’ll draw on a lot of search engine eyeballs. Remember that people often ignore advertising spots instinctively. The 468×60 slot at the top of the page might look pretty, but how many people turn a blind eye to ads when they’re expecting to see ads?

Purchase a sticky thread.

This generally works a lot better on smaller forums. Or just big forums with broke ass owners. If you can provide the text for your advertisement, the topic title and the forum that you need it to go in – the admin only has to copy and paste. He’s made instant profit.

If you really want to draw some attention, pay for one of those nice global announcements and disguise your offer as an engaging “forum contest”. The prospect of a prize should get them opening the message, then it’s down to you to prove your worth with some gentle persuasion. Christ knows, I can think of at least a dozen offers that would be viable for promoting in this way. Get hold of an offer that’s pro-incentive and go nuts.

Send out a paid email to the entire forum.

I discussed this in Part 1 of the post, so go back and read that for a reminder.

One last point though – think before you email the forum owner. Back when I was getting started with forum marketing, I made the mistake time and time again of rushing my proposal. I’d be so excited at the moneymaking potential of MY side of the deal that I’d forget to sell HIS side of the deal.

Don’t portray yourself as some scratching-for-riches affiliate marketer who needs a break and wants your forum to be the launch pad. You’ve gotta put yourself across as knowledgeable and polite. But most importantly you have to sell the ease at which the owner can accept your offer.

He probably won’t want to help you come up with a good email text, so have it prepared beforehand. His job should be as simple as copy and pasting your shit in to vBulletin, pressing send, and accepting the Paypal funds on the way out. If you don’t simplify the process, you won’t get a reply. I believe Ruck had a great post about this which you should be able to dig out somewhere on the Convert2Media forum. I can’t remember what he said. But whatever it was, I bet it was shit hot.

I’m not gonna waste anymore time preaching about the money to be had using this kind of marketing so if you’ve got a question, reach me on my email.

How To Make Money On Somebody Else’s Forum (Part 1/2)

One of the toughest tasks in affiliate marketing is finding targeted traffic that doesn’t break the bank. No doubt about it. It’s tougher than installing a flog, tougher than researching ‘o chosen keywords of the fat, and a whole lot tougher than scouring Affbuzz.

I see a lot of people exploring PPC platforms as if they’re the center of the CPA universe. You’ve got another bunch of guys who will spend Monday to Friday resubmitting disapproved ads on Facebook. But what’s the end goal? Surely it’s to find targeted traffic, right? To find traffic that backs out. Well, if you step away from those popular marketing hubs, you can find a lot of untapped traffic sources where the costs are still low.

Forum marketing, for me, is one of the most cost effective methods of reaching a targeted audience. The clue is in the name itself. It’s a forum of people who have already registered on a site because they’re passionate or interested in the subject matter.

Qualifying traffic is so important. If you find the right niche forum, you’ve already qualified that traffic. You’ve simply gotta find an offer that catches the imagination of the crowd at hand.

I hate to mention his name again. I really need to branch out, I know. But for this post, I’m gonna need to go back to my favourite CPA niche of the last 3 months.

So I was on this Michael Jackson forum…

And this was about a month after his death. It was a booming community with I can’t even remember how many active members. Something like 20,000.

It got me thinking. Every single email in that forum database has a relation. Nobody’s going to sign up at a Michael Jackson forum, when he’s still alive, without having some genuine affection for the plastic fantastic himself.

That’s 20,000 targeted emails. You know what else I like about Michael Jackson’s fans? The fact that they’ll bend over backwards and take one for the team if you tell them that filling in your unrelated zip submit will bring his black ass back to life.

I didn’t go that far, obviously. A man’s gotta have morals.

This is where monetizing a niche forum really excels though. If I asked you to write down three character traits that you’d associate with a Michael Jackson forum owner – what would you put?

Obsessed?
Devoted and black?
Middle aged cuckold fanboy?

…how about CPA marketer?

Yeah, didn’t think so. Most niche forum owners are there for the community factor, it’s as simple as that. Their payment comes in the form of posts, threads, new members and the self-satisfaction that comes from having a bold fucking username.

But what most forum owners don’t realize is that there’s a lot of money to be had in their forum database. And where they don’t realize it themselves, we as affiliate marketers, have an open window to hop in and monetize their database for them.

I know for a fact that if you email a mid-sized forum owner with a simple “Hey, nice board. I was wondering if you could drop your members a sponsored email? Willing to send $300 to your Paypal today.” Most will bite your damn hand off. A typical forum owner won’t stop to consider why it is that you can afford to spend $300 on a long-forgotten function in his vBulletin admin panel. A typical forum owner won’t care. You know why? Server costs! Bandwidth costs! In this case, probably Jacko memorabilia costs!

Straight up money will sway the large majority of forum owners. It beats the slow trickle of Adsense clicks, and it gets them thinking: “What if he wants to send ANOTHER email tomorrow?” “I could make money posting his links on vBulletin!” You know the drill. People like quick cash. Most of you probably making a living on the fantasy.

Forum owners value their sites less than CPA marketers. A forum owner, more often than not, will judge value by active members. How thriving is his community? If he’s got 100,000 registered members, but only 100 of them actually post – he’s likely to think that anybody with business acumen is going to also judge his community on those same factors.

But if I’m looking at a Michael Jackson forum of 20,000 registered members, my eyes are firmly on the emailing possibilities. I could care less how many middle aged Californian housewives are posting their top ten tracks in the Off Topic Room.

If you have a CPA offer paying out at $1.60…and you’re converting a mere 1% of that original memberlist – that’s still $320 revenue. All from jumping on the sack of somebody else’s hard work. Start looking at more realistic conversion percentages and it’s easy to see how an affiliate marketer can afford to pay a nice fee to the forum admin for the privilege.

This should get a few ideas flowing for monetizing niche forums out there. I’m gonna split the post in half and reveal how to actually do it without screwing up like a complete retard next time. Happy hunting.

Pro tip: Don’t try this on Wickedfire.

Life After PPC: Is Media Buying The Way?

I’m sitting here at the moment, scratching my balls, and staring at six or seven open windows. MSN Adcenter, Google Adwords, Yahoo Marketing Solutions…Christ, I’ve even bothered to bust out a dusty Ask PPC dashboard.

I see zero columns galore. You could say my PPC accounts are flatlining. Today’s spend: $0.00.

Truth be told, I’ve been sick of PPC for a while now. I know there are guys out there milking the cow dry on a wave of PPC profit. Even with the latest clampdowns, affiliate bans and account suspensions – marketers are still finding ways to bend the rules and get PPC campaigns profitable. I’m not suggesting every affiliate is a rule breaking fiend, because that’s one of the biggest myths going. Half of the fucking Internet is on a commission these days.

I’ve been working on a few business strategies that stray away from buying by the click. I’ve experienced a lot of success with PPC, but I get the sense that the walls are caving in. It’s getting harder and harder to game the system. Now you might not like it, but a lot of the time that’s what being successful with PPC is about. It has to be when the competition is getting so fierce so fast.

Anyway, I’ve been running my own media buys for a while now. Recently, they’ve become my primary source of income. I’ve gotta admit, for a guy who came in to affiliate marketing with no traditional marketing background, it’s been a baptism of fire.

PPC is two skills combined. The ability to brainstorm 1000 terms in Notepad, and the ability to see which ones are putting you out of pocket.

If you can do that, you can make money. It’s pretty simple in theory.

The second you venture in to media buys, you’re faced with two problems.

1. What sort of demographic is my offer targeted to?
2. How can I reach that demographic without wasting money on a thousand others?

The clickthrough rate, for example. If you’re a PPC guy, it probably means something to you. A quality score here, some extra volume there.

If your clickthrough rate bombs on Adwords, what do you do? You rewrite text and resubmit. Ultimately you don’t pay, because it’s PPC.

The majority of media buys can be broken down in to either CPM or tenancy based agreements.

CPM, if you don’t already know, is Cost Per Mille. That sounds a bit confusing, but it actually means cost per thousand impressions.

To put things in perspective, I got in touch with Ciao the shopping comparison channel and asked them for a CPM quote for 300×250 ads. They got back to me with £15.

£15 CPM?

1000 impressions for £15.

Marketing Sherpa states an industry average clickthrough rate for the 300×250 ad at 0.37 percent.

After a little notepad action, you can work out that an industry average CTR is going to get you a monumental 3 clicks for that £15 spend.

If I were to go with Ciao and throw up an average banner, I’d be paying the equivalent of £5 CPC. That’s probably about $7.50 to you Americans. You’ve gotta have a pretty smashmouth landing page to catch even a whiff of a profit on those numbers.

Needless to say, I do not recommend Ciao for CPM based advertising.

And here lies the problem with any media buy. You’re out on your own with a pencil and some gut instinct for company.

Not only do you need to hunt down the best advertising deals, reaching the right demographics, but you need to overhaul your creatives accordingly. A landing page optimized for Adwords and almost guilty at the fact that it’s slinging a rebill? Get the fuck out.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I waved goodbye to Adwords. No more distracting SEO efforts. No more pinning my hopes on a contextual link that some intern isn’t supposed to find, but my target audience is.

If you’re going to move in to media buys, make this your first objective. That list of precautionary measures you took to avoid the Google slap? Time to hit the rewind button and scrap every last one of them. You’re not trying to quietly divert unsuspecting Google searchers to an affiliate offer. You’re not trying to offer “valuable content” that doesn’t act solely as a bridge page. You’re trying to sell something, right? A bridge page is what you NEED.

With these impression-based purchases, you’re advertising to a majority of people who don’t give a shit what your offer might do for them. They haven’t searched anything. They haven’t asked for a review or a scam warning of XXX product. So on that rare occasion where you capture the attention of a would-be customer, you’ve gotta have the landing page that gets the job done. None of this Adwords affiliate shame bullshit. Throw your offer in their faces because you’re gonna need to if you plan on making money with CPM.

I spoke to a guy last week who had snapped up banner space for a dieting offer across a massive network. A huge network. He was paying a super high CPM, with no cap, and had managed to blow around £8,000 over the course of a month. His return on that investment? Something like £3,000.

He got me to take a look at one of his many landing page variations and it immediately struck me that he was driving traffic to a site that looked more Wikipedia than Amazon. People are supposed to be buying shit through you? Well, give them something to buy.

When you’re targeting demographics, you have to get to the point and sell what you’re gonna sell. You can’t roll out an Adwords friendly wiki of drivel and hope that some chance-clicker is going to find your affiliate link.

It’s worth getting in to media buys if only to complete a full circle of online marketing. PPC platforms are great for affiliates. They’re self-serve and you can flick the switch on a campaign before you cream a few thousand dollars in to the abyss.

Media buys just ain’t so simple. That’s why it’s so rare that I talk to somebody doing them who’s having success. It’s probably also why the biggest earners I know live by them.

You’ve got to completely change your mindset before you go to market. A campaign has to be rolled out at it’s optimum. If your creative sucks hard, you’ll pay for it before you have chance to correct it. CPM is a bitch for slow starters. Get a designer and have him put together some visually appealing graphics that are gonna catch eyes.

Many affiliate marketers roll out half baked PPC campaigns and only get them profitable after a few weeks of scrapping aside the dead weight. If you want to get good at media buying, you can forget that approach to business.

Do you think a bigtime advertiser throws a commercial on television without researching the target market? Without split testing it’s own sample audience? Without physically doing everything in its power to get that ad ready to have maximum impact from the get go?

You have to wipe the slate clean and do your research. Start thinking demographics. How can you appeal to them? How can you capture their attention?

And that’s what I’m talking about when I mention a full circle in online marketing. Many of us delve in to PPC and start thinking of the costs of a click and a conversion rate as if there’s nothing else attached to making money online.

Media buying requires that same knowledge, but also the ability to match demographics to invisible variables. It’s almost like, you know, real marketing.

So I guess this is an insanely long outburst about nothing in particular. I will actually post some media buying tips in the week. It’s not actually as emotionally crippling as I’ve made it out to be. I think.