Archive for the ‘PPC Advertising’ Category

The Facebook Ads Apocalypse, It Ain’t Over Yet

Game, set, match.

A little birdie told me affiliate marketing just died a sudden and cold death with the unveiling of a new policy change on Facebook Ads. As far as I’m concerned, the only way to kill affiliate marketing on Facebook would be to shut down the advertising platform altogether. I’m not going to rehash the same guidelines. Most of you, I’m sure, will have scoured through them by now.

The overwhelming feeling, as far as I can tell, is one of defeatist resentment. How dare they mess with my traffic source! Or you used to be so good to me baby, why you gotta go changing like that? While most affiliates have been busy launching their toys out of the pram, I’d like to point out that Facebook marketing isn’t dead. Your last great idea is dead.

The goal posts have been shifted, the interns have been fed new cram sheets, and life just got a little tougher for all of us. Maybe Facebook just shut down your one profitable campaign. I can hear you wondering out loud how it’ll ever be the same again. The answer is it won’t. You can continue moping, scamper away with the masses, and abandon one of the most lucrative traffic sources in the world. Or you can bide your time, let everybody else bitch and moan, while making the effort to adjust your marketing approach.

As far as I’m concerned, advertising on Facebook just became slightly more appealing. I’ve made no secret of my distaste for the way that the guidelines are so freely interpreted from intern to intern. The latest policy changes have tightened the noose. Or have they? Maybe they’ve tightened the noose around the most uncreative minds.

I honestly believe that Facebook users have become savvy to the techniques that we as affiliate marketers have rushed to employ. Banner blindness isn’t just a problem that confronts the dude with a campaign pushing in to it’s second month. It’s an issue that arises from the simple reality that every affiliate marketer and his god damn dog has had an investment in the marketplace.

As an affiliate who generally sticks to the more “white hat” Facebook campaigns, I favour any policy change that deflates the balls of 75% of my competition. Especially if it’s enough to make them piss off to brighter pastures unknown. I hate to be the one to break it to the world, but not all CPA has to end with a sour taste in the user’s mouth. There are genuine reputable offers.

I’ll be the first to admit, when I look over these new policy changes…it looks like some Facebook monster did off in to the night with the Affiliate Marketer’s A-Z Handbook of Tricks That Get Clicks. Yes, he came back and banned them all. So what are you going to do about it? Let your business die with yesterday’s old news? Or maybe you should shrug, accept that there’s a new system in town, and start working on those next tricks.

If there’s one thing I’ve had to preach over and over again, it’s that the key to your long term success is your ability to innovate and stay one step ahead. A lot of the time that involves seeing opportunity where other marketers see only a bunch of pixels. And their own broke reflection in the monitor.

We can only assume that many affiliate marketers will be driven out of town by these latest rounds of changes. Because all they’re willing to deal with is the knowledge they already have. The campaigns that worked from Day One, the concepts they’ve read about, the vague and uninspiring “How To” guides jacked from a thousand Internet Marketing blogs. God forbid anybody took the initiative to develop their own mailing list, their own product, their own hook…any kind of disguise to continue operations as an affiliate marketer in a market that just became infinitely less polluted by other affiliates.

I will agree with every blogger or journalist out there who has a bone to pick with Facebook persistently dicking on their affiliates. Considering the money we invest in to the platform, you would expect perhaps a little more courtesy and understanding of how such changes could completely alter the face of so many small businesses. But ultimately, do you really blame Facebook for implementing these changes? I find it hard to knock the intentions of a company that’s setting out to prevent users from being exposed to badly coded toolbars, notoriously misleading subscription plans and a bunch of other zip submits that have about as much truth in them as myself after seven pints.

If you still want to promote those offers, maybe you need to change your game plan. As I said in the last post:

“If there’s one success story you should be listening to, it’s not that some dude is banking five figures a day on dating ads in April 2010. It’s that the guy who did it FIRST…had the easiest ride.”

Well, now’s your big chance.

Facebook has moved the goalposts and everybody is in the same position. Be the one to find a concept that makes money and satisfies the new guidelines, and be the one that thousands of other affiliates are still ripping two years from now.

Back To Basics With Facebook Ads

I haven’t posted about Facebook Ads for a good few months now. You probably figure my masterplan of finding, falling in love with, and marrying a sweet Facebook intern was a raging success. Actually, it wasn’t. I still suffer, like most of the affiliate world, from mindboggling approval guidelines and acts of rejection logic that put my world in a spin. I’d complain if I thought it’d make a difference.

More recently I’ve been doing some consultancy work and helping other individuals, mainly those involved with small business, to gain some mainstream exposure with a little help from my intern friends. Advertising on Facebook is valuable and often profitable, which is why so many of us choose to gut it out and submit endless rounds of ads until something sticks.

What really strikes me, as an affiliate, is the scope for expanding my own business by working with small local start-ups. Particularly those without a marketing team. If you’re a successful Facebook affiliate, whether you know it or not, you are a hot commodity. There are businesses out there who will pay good money for your expertise, and with good reason.

Anyway, I’m going to break down the key components behind any successful Facebook campaign. This is quite basic for some of you, so I’ll try to throw in some extra tips.

Before you even think about creating your ad, you need to make a decision. Are you going to bid CPM or CPC? Why is it such a key decision, you might wonder. The answer is because the model you choose will have a critical impact on the wording and message you will need to be sending with your ad text.

I wrote an entire post dedicated to the CPC vs. CPM question. I’d suggest you check it out if you want a comprehensive look at the matter. But the basic gist of the story is this. By bidding CPM, you can afford yourself the luxury of sending a much vaguer message with your ad text. Just as long as your landing page does a good job of twisting that message in to a sales pitch that actually works. You can be as cryptic or dare I say it – misleading – as you want.

If you’re producing a high volume of clicks and a good CTR, you can manipulate your campaign in to something that backs out on the right side of the red. I’ll take a dating ad as an example.

As usual, whenever I give away examples like this, people will go ahead and rip it image for image, word for word. Good luck. Why do you think I’m using it as an example?

Anyway, which ad do you think is more suitable for CPC? The creative which is designed to generate as many curious clicks as possible, or the creative that outlines the steps the user needs to take?

This is going to save you a lot of money. If you’re thinking of bidding CPC on Facebook, you better take that user’s hand and practically drag them through the necessary steps to fire your conversion. It’s no good being cryptic like I have with the first “secret admirer” creative.

By bidding CPC, you need to get the maximum bang for your buck. You want everybody who clicks that ad to be fully prepared for the steps that await them. I can imagine if I set the first example to CPC, I’d probably wipe out in spectacular style and be left with cornflakes for dinner. There’s only one thing worse than a CPC ad that doesn’t convert. And that’s a CPC ad with a ballbreakingly high clickthrough rate that still doesn’t convert.

In contrast, if I were to bid CPM with the cryptic dating ad, I’m now faced with two issues.

How can I get the clickthrough rate high enough to minimize the cost of my clicks?

The answer?

Test the living crap out of it until I find some numbers that fit in with my EPCs. Change the headlines, split test different age demographics and work out which time in the day is most productive for drawing the clicks. Ahem, after 6pm, use your fucking brain. You ever fancied shagging strangers over breakfast? Well there you go then.

The second and most important aspect to a successful CPM campaign is twisting that original cryptic message in to something that delivers high quality leads to the offer. You probably don’t give a monkey’s arse about the quality of your leads, but you should. When an advertiser knocks you off an offer, it’s a spanner in the works to the groundwork you’ve put in before.

Many affiliates will simply direct link with the high CTR ad and hope that by the law of numbers, all will be profitable in the end.

I don’t like doing things this way. In fact, I rarely ever direct link my offers.

My goal with the cryptic ad would be to develop a small landing page, possibly flogging it up with some dude explaining how he never knew he had so many admirers – until he added Zoosk – and now he can’t stop getting bombarded with messages from girls who want to know more about him. Have I tried that method before? No, because I want to keep my Facebook account. But you should be getting the idea that it’s important to deliver SOMETHING on your initial message. Otherwise you’re going to drive a lot of clicks and still be eating a lot of cornflakes for dinner. Comprende?

I’ve used dating and Facebook as examples here, but the methods are exportable to all traffic sources. You need to plug in your brain and start asking yourself not just “how can I get the most clicks to my offer?”, but “how can I get people clicking through with the right intentions?”. A conversion rate is significantly more important than a clickthrough rate. It highlights the importance of tracking and not interpreting your stats at face value.

I’ve seen affiliates turn off ads with the lowest CTR without even stopping to check which ads had been delivering the conversions. I mean, really, that is the act of somebody who wants to believe he’s tracking his campaigns but is probably just shooting himself in the balls over and over again. As long as you feel like you’re being productive, that’s all that matters – right?

There’s a few more Facebook themed posts lined up for the coming weeks so check back soon if this is your thing.

Qualifying Your Traffic Will Save You Money, Fool

One of the biggest mistakes I see from newbie affiliates is the desire to run before they can walk. The difference between success and failure is rarely a stroke of luck. It normally has much more to do with understanding your market and reaching it effectively. So today I was hoping to chat some shit about qualifying traffic for the offers you’re promoting. It’s rarely as simple as it sounds.

By qualifying traffic, I’m talking about getting the most out of your paid advertisements. In your head you know the type of people who you want to direct to your page, right? But are you getting your message to them without massively overspending?

The difference between breaking even and 100% ROI can often be as simple as cutting out the crap. Just like the difference between slim and fat can often be cutting down on the calories you shovel down your cakehole every evening. And instead of going out to buy some berries, you should probably first look in the mirror and ask what you could be doing more effectively. Same concept for scaling a PPC campaign (err…I think…somewhere in there). If you want to increase your profit margins, you should weed out the bad traffic before you go hunting for more.

If you don’t qualify your traffic, you are quite literally engaging in the very unsophisticated art of throwing shit at a wall and hoping something – anything – sticks.

Too many affiliates think of sailing the ocean before they’ve explored the depths of their own ponds. They cast the net wide and try to capture every last stream of traffic. Presumably because this is what the “super affiliates” are doing to harness big volume and big earnings. Well fuck what the super affiliates are doing. You should start worrying about your profitability before you start dreaming of your palaces.

Right from the very first planning stages of any affiliate marketing campaign, you should be considering these key points:

1. How can I drive targeted, relevant and interested traffic to this offer?

2. How can I make sure that I’m not paying for clicks, page views and impressions that are never going to convert?

3. How can I ensure that the CTR from advertisement-to-LP is just as healthy as the CTR from LP-to-offer?

You wouldn’t believe how many campaigns I’ve created that have failed under the scrutiny of that third point. It’s very easy to get a strong CTR to a landing page. You can make up any old bullshit if you know the demographics that you’re targeting. But if your creative is mustering a stench of false promise, you’re going to see a huge drop-off in clicks through to the offer.

Successful affiliates know how to create a sales funnel. They know how to grab an innocent Googler by the wrist, drag him kicking and screaming through a text ad, appeal to his needs with a relevant LP, and then finally seal the deal by convincing him that he genuinely needs Product X.

The art of this process is understanding your traffic. You need to understand where those clicks are coming from, why the user has decided to click your ad, and what you can do to stop them from nailing the Back button.

If you are one of the many newbie idiots who moves in to a new niche, downloads a 15mb database of keywords, imports to Adwords and sets a default bid to $0.50 across the board – you are walking in to a complete unknown. You don’t truly know why your users are clicking your ads. How could you?

If you don’t know what your users are searching for, you can’t possibly design a landing page that slaps them in the face and says “it’s your lucky day, bitch, come on in”. No, you’re an Eric Generic affiliate – and considering most ordinary affiliates despise the sheer thought of losing money, this is a great way to create 1000 campaigns, lose money on all of them, and etch yourself the certainty that affiliate marketing doesn’t work.

I know there are many affiliates out there who can afford to unleash a new campaign, lose a thousand dollars, optimize and eventually see a profit. But most new affiliates are too piss poor from their day jobs to afford such luxuries. That’s why you’re following the dream, right?

So start small.

Let’s take colon cleansing as an example, if only because I’ve got it on my mind after the chilli I had for dinner.

So you’ve designed your beautiful flog to scam the living christ out of every last poor American with a weight problem. You sit there staring at your masterpiece and thinking “Damn, how could anybody NOT want their colon cleansed?” I mean, just look at the before and after pics, right?

The newbie affiliate will then assume that his hard work is done. The hard sell is there. He just needs to get people on the page, right?

So he’ll load up Adwords, create maybe 4 ad groups, empty entire categories of suggested keywords in to each and hit the Activate button. At this point he probably minimizes his window, posts some advice on the Warrior Forum, and waits for the clicks to roll in. Which they do.

He checks his stats (probably every 7 minutes), and notices – firstly – that not many of those visitors are clicking through to his Pure Cleanse Kit V909.

Secondly he notices that those who are clicking through to the offer…aren’t actually signing up their free trial. How inconsiderate of them, I know.

A few hours pass and Google Adwords swallows the equivalent of this poor mope’s subscription to PPC Coach. He pauses the campaign and moves on to the next niche.

Of course, if you were to look through his stats, you’d probably find active keywords like this:

“cleanse my colon”
“clean my car”
“free colon kit none of that rebill shit”
“professional colon treatment in texas”
“lose weight with colon”
“put on weight with colon”

I’m exaggerating, but the point I’m trying to make is that each of those keywords expresses a different need. A different want. A different desire.

It doesn’t matter how well suited your landing page is to your target market…if you’re not finding that target market. What is actually a very easy problem to correct for the experienced affiliate becomes a campaign breaker for Average Joe. He assumes that because he’s tried every last keyword in the colon niche, there can’t possibly be any profit there for him.

If you’re new and inexperienced, I can’t even begin to stress the importance of testing with the lowest number of factors to consider. Troubleshooting is a lot easier when you have less data to work with.

Start with small ad groups that are direct matches for the content of your landing page. Worry about scaling in to general and broad terms when you’re making profit. I know a lot of guys will say that their best success has come when they tested a few thousand keywords and filtered out the crap. Well…nice. But I’m speaking to the affiliate mindset that’s still paralyzed with fear over the idea of losing money. And it’s all a learning process. If you scale upwards slowly, research your niche well, and target separate content to separate audiences, you’ll find that you lose a lot less money on clicks that were never going to convert in a million years.

Another classic example of qualifying your traffic comes from working with CPS offers. If you’re promoting something that requires the target to part with his credit card and pay a hefty sum – you damn sure better mention it in your ad text.

Your CTR will naturally take a nosedive if you start mentioning that Product X costs $74.95 plus shipping. That’s because most people surfing the Internet are not in a buying mindset. You can decide not to mention the price, have them click your ad, and smile at your lack of conversions. But that’s pretty stupid, don’t you think?

The CTR from LP-to-offer is just as important. There is absolutely no gain in having somebody click your ad on Google if they never even had $75 in their bank account to begin with. Bust out your most appealing ad text but do yourself a favour and mention the catch. If you’re paying by the click, you don’t want to waste a windfall on unqualified traffic.

To advertise something like dating with PPC, particularly if you’ve chosen an offer where your payout is only confirmed for a specific market (say 30-40 males) – it goes without saying that you should be dressing your ad text with incentives for that audience.

“Aged 30-40? Want A Girlfriend?”
“We’re Offering A Free Pass This Weekend”
“Chat To A Girl Near You Tonight…”
“DatingSite.com/30sTo40s-Only”

You’ve qualified your traffic in several ways. You’ve narrowed down the field to only 30 to 40 year olds. And you’ve mentioned the search for a girlfriend. In theory you should be attracting males in the right age plan. You shouldn’t be wasting too much money on clicks that can’t bring you conversions. Either that or you’ll attract a bunch of keen bean lesbians. And if that’s the case, opt them in to an email list and forward that shit to me.

At the same time, it’s very easy to play some neat mindfuck tricks on your target audience to get them to click ad texts that they otherwise would have ignored. I’m a believer that if you can get the user to say “yes” to several questions, they’re more likely to say yes when it matters.

There are many other examples. You really should be making use of negative targeting to filter out the crap traffic that isn’t suitable for your offer. I normally make sure that any search query with “free” doesn’t get the slightest sniff of my sponsored ads. The same could be said for “torrent”, “download” and a few others. Your negative terms will vary according to the offer.

I’ve been talking a lot about PPC here. The truth is, it doesn’t matter what form of advertising you’re currently using. There are many ways to qualify traffic and avoid wasting money. The super affiliates might be happy to burn through their wallets for quick success. But you have to earn the right to enjoy that freedom. So you better start from the ground up and get to know your target markets.

If you’re wondering why you always fail, it’s probably because your sales funnel is trying to please too many people. Make everybody who visits your landing page feel as if it’s been designed just for them and you will start to see a lot more success.

Laser Targeting Small Markets On Facebook

There are a number of ways to skin the cat on Facebook.

As tempting as bribing an intern can be – after the 91st rejected ad notification – you should keep faith that eventually some stupid son of a bitch is going to risk detention and hit the big red “approve” button. As an entire office of Under 22 whores Zuckerberg would love to shag gasp with horror, it’s possible to make some pretty good bank. That’s if you’re willing to persevere. Facebook is a love hate relationship for many. But when I love you, Facebook, I really fucking love you.

The thing that really gets on my tits about Facebook is the effect it has on my working day. I’ll plow through a giant list of dating ads, only to have to do it all again at 10pm when an intern decides my hussy is showing too much skin. I mean, seriously, do yourself a favour, Facebook. Wake up and smell the bacon. Guys are more likely to click on a chick who’s making no effort to keep her modesty outside of the 110×80.

For those of you following my Twitter, you’ll have heard my CTR-raising trick. It’s basically to find girls sucking lollipops. This seems to draw immediate attention and bag the clicks. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because more guys are interested in blowjobs than dating.

I feel myself drifting off with another aimless tangent, so I’ll cut to the chase. The most success I’ve had making money on Facebook has been by laser targeting very small markets. To do this, you’re going to need a greater investment of time – and probably patience – considering you’re going to be submitting many more ads.

To take dating for an example, I know there are a lot of affiliates who direct link and manage to stay profitable. If that’s working for you, great. I don’t think I’ve ever direct linked on a dating campaign and gotten the margins of profit that would make it worthwhile for me to keep running. Instead I prefer a little market segmentation.

If you’re running dating ads, you should probably be using the CPM system. Paying by the click is notoriously expensive for this vertical and your ability to have success will pretty much hinge on what CTR you can muster. I drop any ads that aren’t getting at least 0.09% as a general CTR rule. Not only do I drop the ads, but I also banish the girls from my hard drive forevermore. You can forget HotorNot.com. The real beauty contest is whether I can use your face to get a bunch of 25 year old American guys to sign up for some lonely hearts piss-parade. Anything less than 0.1% CTR and I’m sorry girl, but it’s over.

The best way to raise a CTR with dating ads, from my experience, is to drill down and target by the city or state. I like to change my ad texts to something that is relevant and local. Better yet, I like to make it sound like the target is the hot commodity. Check this shit out but don’t go copy and pasting it or I will track you down and break your fucking balls.

You can probably change the colour of the lollipop and do some pretty advanced split testing. Maybe even the tint the lipstick. I’ll leave it to you. What I’m trying to say here is that you’re sending a message to the single guys in London that they’re wanted.

The next part of the puzzle is to build a landing page that delivers on the geographical promise. If you haven’t tracked down a PHP script for geo-targeting the user’s current location, you’re about 5 years behind the porn industry and you should probably get up to scratch right about now.

I was stumbling across a porn site the other day (research purposes fyi), and I noticed the targeting had advanced to such an extent that it was almost asking me if I’d like to fuck my nextdoor neighbour. The porn industry has been geo-targeting for so long now and it’s taken the rest of the marketplace a good couple of years to catch up. If you’re ever sitting there looking for some inspiration, looking to take your creatives to the next level…I shit you not. Go and find some porn. You’ll see marketing tactics employed that are a few light years ahead of the rest of us. Why? Because the competition encourages innovation.

Well, as far as geolocating goes, I like to jack that particular innovation and shove it straight in to my dating landing pages. If you can get the average simpleton Joe thinking that there’s a shag around the nearest block, he’s gonna be salivating all the way to that shiny Mate 1 confirmation email.

I have a custom built CMS that makes it possible for me to add a couple of location specific images, change my region settings, and spit out a fully functional landing page for any dating market in the world. This works like a wet dream for setting up new Facebook campaigns. The only problem, as you can probably imagine, is getting the intern to play ball and approve the damn thing.

The real challenge with any small-scale Facebook campaign is something that a surprising number of affiliates fail to understand: retaining your CTR.

See, not only do you have to worry about getting an initial CTR of above 0.09%, you also have to keep it stable. Many affiliates watch with confusion as their super targeted campaign starts with a surge of success – only to fade to shit by the weekend. Well, you need to conquer the banner blindness syndrome.

If you’re targeting a group size containing less than 100,000 Facebook users, you really need to be actively switching out your banners and testing new ad texts.

It doesn’t take long to rack up 100,000 impressions. Let’s say by some statistical miracle occurrence those 100,000 impressions are distributed evenly with 1 impression per user. After every user has seen the ad and decided not to click on it, you’re going to have great difficulty changing their mind when it next pops up on their screen. Banner blindness kicks in surprisingly quickly. Users begin to ignore your best worded ad texts. Your CTR fades day-by-day until your profit margins are bust or your volume of clicks is a trickle.

To beat the banner blindness, you need to create many different ad variations and KEEP THEM RUNNING. Even when one ad significantly outperforms it. I’ve felt the temptation, believe me. You see one ad raking in a CTR almost double that of another, and you remove it – what happens? The CTR of the best performing ad will invariably drop.

A lot of the time this is because the top performing ad starts to receive all of the impressions. Banner blindness quickly sets in. There’s no alternate text or image to keep the message fresh and shit begins to go wrong.

Some small scale campaigns are destined to never make it beyond a short lifespan. This is reality. You can’t milk a cow forever. But if you want to get the most out of an ultra targeted campaign, you really need to be mixing up your creatives and keeping your message fresh in the user’s mind.

One of the best examples I’ve seen on Facebook is the current campaign for Mafia Wars. I’m not going to out any creatives, but every time I refresh the page, it seems like they’ve changed the ad text or the image or something else to drag my eye back to their message. Take note and remember not to let your own profitable campaigns slip away through neglect. Keep it fresh and you’ll keep on banking.

EDIT: Just last week, this blog was voted in as one of the newest additions to the 9rules network. 9rules is a highly respected members-only community for the best content from the independent web. Naturally, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing there. But thanks for reading.

The Paid Advertising Syndrome On Digital Point

I decided last week to spend some time on the Digital Point forums. I wouldn’t normally do this. I consider visits to both Digital Point and The Warrior Forum to be the equivalent of self-harm for affiliates. If you were to spend all day learning on them, you’d have gone ass backwards. If you’re not selling something, there’s no reason to be there.

One of my new initiatives out of the soul searching I did a little while ago was that I wanted to make an effort to help people and not just rip the shit out of them. So while on Digital Point, I was looking specifically for why so many of these marketers are spending their days spinning in circles and getting nowhere. What stood out was the giant canyon between free and paid advertising.

Some affiliates seem to have this mindset that if it ain’t free, it loses you money. A pay per click campaign is a prime example. I hear guys and girls complaining that they’d love the traffic from Google, but they can’t afford to spend money on paid ads. Let’s get it clear. It only costs you money if you suck at it. If you spend $100 to make $120 back – the paid advertising cost you less than the free advertising that took half your day and only made you 5 bucks. Free advertising comes at a price. That price is usually the investment of your time – unless you have a bunch of willing disciples pushing your shit for $0.47/hour.

Paid advertising doesn’t mean that you’re going to be left out of pocket. It simply means that you need to find a way to balance the right spend with your current cashflow situation. The most successful affiliates are getting paid weekly. This means their PPC budget is whatever they feel comfortable shedding from their account over the course of the 7 days that it takes to get reimbursed for the investment.

If you have money sitting in your bank, you have no excuse for avoiding paid advertising. The only excuse is that you’re worried you’ll suck at it and not make your money back + profit. Well, if that’s your mindset, why are you even dabbling in affiliate marketing? You belong sat at a desk on a fixed salary.

I’m not going to pretend that scaling to paid advertising isn’t an issue. There are ways to do it well. I thought I’d share a few of the concerns I had at the start of my switch to paid advertising, and how I managed to get over them.

First of all, you need to understand that most mainstream affiliate networks are not going to move you on to weekly payments overnight. Similarly, many networks will require that you cash a cheque before they switch you on to wired payments. This is to prevent the thousands of fraudsters out there from performing mass hit-and-run jobs on various offers. Considering each network will have significantly greater risk attached to their relationship with the advertisers that are paying them – it makes sense that you prove your worth to the network before they open up all payment options.

So you’re probably going to find yourself faced with the issue of “how I can afford to pay for my advertising when I’m not getting the money back ’til next month?”. The way I dealt with the problem was by having a little patience and sending only a small amount of traffic in my first month with each network.

Take a look at the minimum payment threshold to receive a cheque. It’ll probably be something like $100. So send $100 worth of traffic, wait for the cheque, cash it and then speak to your affiliate manager about payment terms. Tell him you’re ready to ramp up the traffic if he can guarantee you a weekly wire after xxx days. You’ll have more luck doing this than by strutting up to him on Day One and asking for the big shot treatment. Like your clicks are laced in gold or your berry traffic is fatter than the rest.

To be honest, you could just copy what I’ve done here. Create a blog, talk enough shit, and let the networks come to you.

The safest way to try paid advertising is unquestionably to haggle your way in to making it free advertising. One of my favourite methods was to steal PPC coupons from local bookshops. And yes, if you’re wondering, that’s about as classy as this blog is going to get.

Back when I was still working for my old web agency, it used to be a bit of a running joke on the web team that every time I disappeared for lunch, I’d come back with more £30 Adwords vouchers. I realized that .Net magazine was giving away a voucher with every edition. I’d simply roll in to WHSmiths and grab the loose inserts.

While many experts would love to have you believe there’s a magic ebook with the formula for success waiting to be read – it isn’t like that. It isn’t like that at all. The only way I ever got myself earning significant money was by grabbing the free Adwords coupons and experimenting until I found a campaign that was secure enough to pour my own money in to. Once you know a campaign is profitable, you would be an absolute retard for rejecting the instavolume that comes with PPC advertising.

Of course, there’s more to affiliate marketing than PPC advertising. If you’re operating on a limited budget, you can still chase down small media buys. People complain that media buys are a waste of money, too risky, too expensive and blah blah blah who gives a shit. So take the risk out of them!

There are literally thousands of websites out there with rarely clicked “advertising” links. If I’m going to buy exposure on somebody else’s site, I like to target the webmasters who aren’t entirely tuned in with what I do as a business. Go hunt down a website that has more than one advertising space available and ready to buy. What does this tell you? It tells you the webmaster is losing money by simply leaving the ad space unfilled. It tells you he probably might be interested in letting you run, say, a 24 hour test campaign to decide before you buy…right? These are the kind of opportunities that you have to jump on while your budget is still limited. And even if you’re an experienced marketer, it never hurts to be a cautious buyer.

Remember, the intention is never to claim a freebie. But rather to use trial opportunities to test a campaign and make a sensible decision about whether it’s going to be profitable to run. I remember what it was like when every dollar I had needed to be smartly invested. It probably brought out the best in my abilities.

But you need to have the right attitude. I’m willing to bet that most of these Digital Point members would see a £30 Adwords coupon and think to themselves, “How can I use that to get a £15 sale?”.

In reality, one of the quickest ways to get smart at affiliate marketing is to put your money where your mouth is. Remember that it might only take 1 day of a successful campaign to pay for an entire month’s worth of failed campaigns. But you’ll never appreciate this if you spend 8 hours a day submitting drivel to PR0 article directories.

The Shit I’ve Learnt Not To Do On Facebook

One of the first blogs I read before moving in to affiliate marketing was a Facebook piece over on Nicky Cakes. It explained how and why I was such a retard for failing to make money with Facebook.

I realize now, about two years too late, that Facebook Advertising was the genuine shit back in the day. Right before the guidelines started warping in to something resembling an affiliate hate list. You could put in a half day’s work and see an enormous mountain of cheap clicks. Clicks that produced conversions. One thing Facebook hasn’t lost over time is the quality of it’s traffic.

It’s a shame we can’t go back to 2007 and jump on the gravy train as if we’d seen it coming. I’d have jumped on some acai berries while I was there. But the reality? It’s 2009 and advertising on Facebook requires some actual marketing knowledge. You can go and read over Nicky Cakes’ Facebook tutorials, but as relevant as they may have been at the time, this industry swallows up profitable tactics fast.

Anyway, if you want expert advice on how to get rich using Facebook – don’t be looking at me. It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve managed to troubleshoot my way out of the red and get some profitable campaigns on the burn. I’m currently in the process of scaling my campaigns and I’m quite happy to see them doubling my money.

But having thrown a festival sized tank of shit at the wall in the hope that a marketing strategy would stick, I can hopefully offer some advice for what NOT to do. This could be a long one.

Don’t advertise on Facebook with the Google mindset.

I don’t think enough people talk about the difference between marketing on various search engines, let alone the change in dynamics that comes with marketing on a social media site.

I was traditionally a search guy for a long time. All of my income came from search based PPC. When I decided to shift a campaign across to Facebook for the first time, it tanked embarrassingly.

This is how it goes for most people, whether they’ve got the modesty to admit it or not. Makes sense when you think about it, though. It’s much easier to reach the right demographic of people on Google. Christ, you’re bidding on keywords that consumers are actually hammering in to their browsers. If you can’t find the right audience there, well, maybe you need to go back to the drawing board.

Facebook is entirely different. You’re not bidding on keywords that people are actively searching for – rather you’re serving your ad to a certain demographic and hoping that they bite the bullet. Vague targeting is punished with a high CPC and impressions that have dried up by dawn.

My first mistake was in spreading the net too wide and advertising to as many users as I could filter in to my campaign. This, obviously, ended in tears and a very low clickthrough rate.

Sample size: 800,000
CTR: 0.05
Impressions: Not many without breaking the bank.

If you’re using Google, you get in to the mindset of trying to reach as many people as possible with your relevant keywords. Perfectly fine on Adwords. But if you try to target everybody who *might* match your demographic on Facebook, you’re going to collect a lot of wasted impressions.

I only started achieving success on Facebook when I reduced my ad target sizes to under 50,000. I’ve managed to scale upwards, but even now, I don’t like advertising to groups larger than 100,000. You need close control over the keywords that your profiles are matched to.

Do your research before you start bombarding the damn interns. Head on over to Microsoft Adlabs and put the tools to use. The Demographic Prediction tool is excellent for laying down the first building blocks of any well targeted Facebook campaign.

Enter the URL of the offer landing page (at the advertiser end, not your own), and you’ll be presented some nice starting points for targeting your campaign.

This gives you a rough idea of the demographics that are already visiting the advertiser’s site. Never a good idea to judge success on patterns as flimsy as this but we’ll take it as a starting point.

One of the areas where I see a lot of marketers failing is in taking the bigger percentage. Acai berries as a prime example. How long did it take for some of you to catch on that it wasn’t just women who were searching for acai? I’d be seeing landing pages everywhere with twenty something chicks showing off their new flat stomachs. How many of those banners featured guys? This despite the acai market having a 30/70 guys to girls split according to some networks. You might run with the 70 percent, but the 30 percent is pretty fucking significant when you’re talking about a billion dollar booming industry.

With Facebook, in particular, it’s possible to find a niche within a niche just by targeting the smaller crowd of users that everybody else ignores. A bit like Canada. Why oh why did I spend 4 months scratching around with doomed USA-based Facebook campaigns when I don’t need 13 million fucking conversions to get rich?

Anyway, moral of the story. Get to know your target market. I mean, really well. Take whatever keywords you can relate to your product and plug them in to the filtering system. This leads on to probably my most expensive mistake.

Your message has to be consistent on Facebook.

All pieces of the jigsaw have to come together. You can quite easily drive traffic to your site with a headline like “These Acai Berries Are Free”. But if your landing page headline says “Well, actually they’re not. But now that you’re here…”

This is expensive because it’ll get you a lot of clicks but a distinct lack of conversions in the column that matters. Whatever advert you place on Facebook, you have to realize that people clicking it are CHANCE clickers. They didn’t search for your shit. You threw it in their face with a headline that caught their attention. You’ve gotta make your landing page instantly sell whatever x factor it was that brought your average Facebook junkie to the party in the first place.

Facebook traffic does convert. We all know that it converts because people have built a living and a future on this one single damn platform. But you have to keep your message consistent.

Specific keywords used to filter users.
Ad title.
Ad image.
Landing page content.
Final offer page content.

They all need to have something in common, or you better know your demographic like it’s your best friend.

Facebook is all about trial and error. You’ve probably heard this so many times that it’s lost it’s meaning. And no, it might not be as easy to make instaprofit as it was a couple of years back. But the industry moves on and we all roll with it.

I’ve established some successful campaigns on Facebook over the last few months that have kinda made me reconsider the most profitable ways of marketing online. I might add a few posts of useful tips I’ve picked up along the way. I might not. Just remember that it only takes one successful Facebook campaign to pay for the dollars you’ve lost on the shit that never worked out.

Beating SEO Kids At Their Own Game

Most of us doing affiliate marketing have some kind of tear stained love-hate relationship with SEO. I got my first ever commission after ageing several years, wrinkling over slightly, and finally converting a long tail search term.

When I think of SEO, I think of ballbreaking keyword research and a drawn out link building program that could reduce a grown man to tears (or just a Black Hat manual). But the more money you spend on PPC, the more glaring it becomes that you’re paying to get your shit advertised alongside a bunch of free listings that are spitting out pure profit.

Now I know what everybody says. Link building? Writing articles? That, is the work of slavery, and damn near offensive to many.

Even beyond the attitude that it’s time consuming, boring work, and a waste of market knowledge – some affiliates seem to assume that it simply isn’t possible to catch up with the top rankers. Well, maybe you can’t work as hard as an army of Indian kids spinning out articles for $1 a pop. But you definitely can work smarter.

Through PPC, you can rapidly discover the keywords that produce regular sales. You do this by busting out your Adwords account, setting the crosshairs on a bunch of search terms, and then letting rip with your own money. Sure, you might lose money. But you can’t buy the knowledge that comes with knowing what sells.

Say you’re one of these organic search guys who lays down the foundations of an SEO campaign before a single sale has been banked. A good SEO campaign requires good targeting and good groundwork. You might spend 6 months optimizing a site of 300 pages to reach the top of Google for term “xxxxx”.

What if “xxxxx” doesn’t convert? Those 6 months would have been better spent on Redtube.

Coming from a PPC background, you can test the waters and find exactly which terms are converters. Get yourself 4 or 5 super targeted keywords, spin a domain out of them, and do your own SEO groundwork accordingly.

There’s no point wasting your own time on articles. But Christ, you wouldn’t believe how many affiliate marketers are so tight when it comes to paying a kid in Asia a small fee for getting some work done. If you’re truly enjoying the high life, employ a genuine professional and you’ve already got a competitive advantage over many of these top ranking sites.

Most affiliates build a successful campaign and ask themselves “how can I scale this bigger?”. Not many ask themselves “how can I reduce my costs?”

Reducing your costs will usually make a campaign more profitable than spreading your net and scaling upwards. I realized this after I noticed that I was making more money from a few organic sales than I was from 25 PPC sales in a day.

Fact is though, if you’re going to build long-term sites for your affiliate business – you’ve got one major problem.

How do you build a long term site for a short term product?

When I log in to Convert2Media, I see about 25 different Google offers. It looks a bit like this:

Google Profits
Make Money on Google
Google Money Profits
Profiting on Google
Google Income
Google Money Income

So how do you even think about building a site to rank naturally when the name of the shit you’re slinging is gonna change before you’ve opened the FTP to publish it?

I should say first of all that if you’re actually using the term “Google” when you push bizopp rebills, you’re walking in to a firestorm of legal problems. It’s blatant infringement on the Google brand. Even though the actual advertisers do it, why do you think we have so many Google bizopps in the first place? Rinse, say sorry, and repeat.

If you want to promote any kind of CPA rebill, you’re going to have to build your own brand and focus only on the terms that don’t change over time.

Sure, “acai burn” might be a popular search term today – but there’s no guarantee that it will be tomorrow. “Cure my fat ass” on the other hand, is always going to be a go’er, because let’s face it. America is fat.

For long term success, you need to be targeting the keywords that are here to stay. Ranking takes time and it isn’t really a good fit for the cut throat nature of the CPA industry.

The safest way to build a long term future in affiliate marketing is to target sales instead of leads. You can’t fuck with the quality of a sale. But that doesn’t mean we all have to bend over backwards and become bitches of Commission Junction. There’s still money to be made from long term sites pushing short term offers. That’s if you get it right from the beginning.

I see quite a few guys trying to build review sites for dieting, cleansing and whatever else is pulling a $37 commission. I can only imagine that they’re PPC burners, because it doesn’t make sense as a long term goal otherwise. These CPA offers are getting rebranded practically every day. You need to target the needs of the market, not the product on the shelf.

Yahoo To Crack Down; How Doomed Are You?

Affiliates make Baby Jesus cry, didn’t you know?

Google caught some headlines last month for banning a bunch of affiliates on the back of a rebill offer. Now word has caught the wind that Yahoo is about to drop an axe on the same bruised and battered floggers. It was supposed to be “Black Friday” for affiliates. Well, a few days have passed, and it seems that a whole bunch of guys are scraping by undetected from the alleged editorial clampdown.

Some very reliable sources have stated that the “Yahoo slap” is only a matter of time.

If you’re one of the guys who got dislocated from Google, you’ve probably taken a rapid interest in Yahoo. It’s decent volume at decent value and it’s self-serve.

A lot of affiliates are going to be pissed off to hear it, but the whole self-serve marketing strategy is about to bite the bullet on this one. If you’re really set on selling rebills, you’re gonna have to get used to breaking the budget on CPM based display ads. It’s just inevitable.

Okay, so when Yahoo finally does clamp down on the rebill offers (and they will), you’re gonna have a bunch of affiliates crowding the MSN space. I’ve advertised with MSN for a while now and I can tell you that the volume isn’t all that…and that’s WITHOUT having a massive influx of affiliates looking for homes for their campaigns.

I’ve said this over and over again. If you want to have success slinging a rebill offer, you better get smart about promoting it.

There are legitimate ways of getting these offers not just on Yahoo and MSN, but on Google too. It just requires a little invention and the guise to see beyond the “one shot” conversion. If your marketing expertise boils down to “I bid on this term and show them this page”, you’re going to get royally raped in the next few months – many times over.

You want to know the easiest way to build a long term campaign for a rebill on the big three PPC platforms? It’s simple. You don’t put your fucking rebill on the landing page.

Squeeze pages, opt-ins…whatever you want to call them. This is what you need to be doing – and doing well – to slip through the net and stay kicking in the search game.

It’s time to start collecting emails and taking on real-life business principles.

So you’re a promoting a bizopp which is getting scrubbed out of profitability – what do you do? You retain the lead. You design a business strategy where your only hope of converting that lead isn’t a one-time exposure to a flog.

Forget about your inconsequential clickthrough rate to the offer.

The second you start focusing on collecting emails instead of redirecting clicks to an offer – your clickthrough to the offer page is going to take a nosedive. That’s just the way it is.

But put it this way. If you have 50% of your 100 visitors going through to the offer page, is that really the best you could do? That’s 50 clicks to an offer.

What about if from those 100 visitors you collect 25 emails instead?

That lead is yours. It’s not going to get scrubbed and it’s not forever lost after it decides that your flog is a misleading piece of shit.

If you work your email list right, you could get 5 future clicks to another offer from each of those 25 emails. That’s 125 clicks to an offer. Instead of 50 – from the same original source of traffic. Your chance of converting the traffic no longer hinges on whether the prospect has his credit card in his pocket.

Of course, the real benefit of squeeze pages comes from the fact that your shady rebill isn’t immediately exposed. As soon as a Google intern reviews your flog, it’s gonna get marked with a low quality score. We’re hearing the same story coming out of the Yahoo camp. If you’re not seeing your ads slapped now, that’s no reason not to act now.

Jesus, I stumbled across Wickedfire earlier and I saw a bunch of affiliates shrugging and insisting that their campaigns were still rosy. Well, good for them. But I hope for their sakes that they’re moving fast to avoid the next slap – because it will inevitably come.

Staying one step ahead is what separates the earners from the eternal broke-as-shit learners.

I’ve spoken to several guys who are still reeling from the Google crackdown. I’d say the group is pretty much divided between those who are battering Yahoo and MSN with their old campaigns, and those who are trying to move on to display ads.

If you’re moving in to display ads and media buys, you’ve got one hell of a journey ahead of you. It’s possible to lose money rapidly when you switch from CPC to CPM. You can’t rest your hopes on an awesome landing page compensating for a poor clickthrough. You need top notch creatives, probably a professional designer, and enough moolah in the kitty to see it all go to burn many times over.

I strongly suggest you dip your feet in slowly with “monthly tenancy” offers and CPC banners where you can get them. You’re also about to discover just how much shitty traffic it’s possible to buy when you step away from Google. Be prepared to lose a lot of money before you make any. Be prepared to deal with sneaky asshole webmasters who’ll pull any string to make you believe that their traffic source is more valuable than it really is.

But for those of you who want to gut it out on the big three PPC platforms – I’ll say it one more time. You better get smart about it.

Google Drops The Banhammer On Bizopp Affiliates

I’ve been getting bombarded on MSN so I thought I’d address this with a single post.

If you haven’t already heard, Google has decided to bite back against bizopp affiliates. If you’re one of the guys who received this email over the last couple of days, you’re probably too busy scratching around for new traffic sources to be reading this post. I’ll paste it for everybody else.

It’s come to our attention that you have submitted ads that promote Google Money Tree or ads that promote a misrepresented affiliation with Google. Due to multiple complaints from our users and publishers, we’ve made the decision not to accept these ads.

This is a notification that your account has been suspended due to the submission of these ads and your ads will no longer run on Google. Please note that future accounts you open will also be suspended.

As noted in our Terms and Conditions, Google reserves the right to terminate advertisements for any reason. To view our Terms and Conditions, please visit https://adwords.google.com/select/tsandcsfinder.

We appreciate your cooperation.

Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043

You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdWords product or account.

This has, quite understandably, caused a large number of Adwords-only affiliates to shit uncontrollable bricks over where the next pay cheque’s gonna come from. As I’ve said on a number of forums, you’d be a fool to believe that it’s impossible to get another account up and running on AdWords. But then, you’d be an even bigger fool to actually bother.

Time to face facts. If you’re looking to run ads that promote a Google bizopp on AdWords, you’re living on borrowed time. I’ve heard more than enough reason to believe that the hottest keywords in this niche are now auto-triggering a manual account review. When that review comes, you better have your ass wrapped up in some pretty shit hot cloaking to stand a chance of escaping the ban.

Guys, this isn’t the sort of ban that you get on a forum. You can’t just choose a new email address (and maybe a new IP), and then go re-registering. There’s much debate over how sophisticated Google is when it comes to tracking those who opt to game the system after a ban. I’ve heard opinions ranging from the quick fix of emptying cookies and using a pre-fill credit card. And at the other end of the spectrum, some think nothing less than buying a new PC, shaving your fucking head and going under the knife is going to be enough to dodge the Adwords Suspendo team.

If you’re really such a lovesick puppy dog that you can’t bare to make a dollar away from Adwords, you will definitely need to:

• Get a new credit card.
• Get a new address on the credit card.
• Find a new IP to access your Adwords account from.

Ironically enough, my Adwords account was registered to an old home address. I’ve since been given a new credit card and my new Internet was installed yesterday so I’ve automatically got a new IP. I could go and install a brand new sparkling Adwords account with no back history of bizopp abuse, but you know what? I really can’t be bothered to waste my time with them.

I’m sure many affiliates are actively hunting out new credit cards to get their Adwords accounts back up and running. But why? It really doesn’t matter if you were running a campaign that was making you a five figure sum of profit every day. If you didn’t immediately explore your traffic options after you established that profitable campaign, you’re a fucking retard and you deserve to fail.

I’ve said this to PPC guys and I’ve said it to SEO guys too. If your entire business is built around driving traffic from Google, it’s no more than a castle built on sand. Especially if you’re operating in the shady business of rebills where it’s quite obvious that changes are necessary to regulate the industry.

If you’re one of the affiliates who’s woken up to a suspended account and no other source of traffic, it’s time to consider whether you’re in this game for the short term riches or the long term success.

Adwords can be an incredibly profitable source of traffic. If you can find a way to keep campaigns ticking over by Google’s rule of thumb, you should feel entitled to enjoy those large cheques. But don’t expect anything less than a steep, harsh learning curve when Google changes it’s rulebook and leaves you staring in to the abyss.

Look at all the options available to you. Diversify your traffic, test new waters, and don’t be afraid to stop living as Google’s bitch. The same can be said for every major traffic source. Diversity and flexibility are the keys to establishing successful campaigns that last longer than it takes for an Adwords teaboy to press “Ban”.

Yahoo PPC Scam, By My Favourite Nigerian Kids

It’s all action stations in Lagos.

I’ve been tapped up by my favourite scam artists twice in one day. I thought the second email would be worth mentioning. Simply because there’s inevitably going to be some Digital Point retard who falls for the trap. And then probably some equally inept Warrior Forum “detective” posting a five star thread with pictorial evidence of how he uncovered the scam. Nice work, guys. It’s 2009 by the way.

Anyway, this is scammin’ at it’s most blatant. I’ve been getting quite a few messages through from these guys recently. Behold.

Do as they say and you can look forward to your credit card being charged up the arse with whatever it is that the Nigerian kids are raging over these days.

Always treat emails that ask you to login and update your details with suspicion. Suspicion generally leads to uncovering the scam pretty much instantly. Badly formed English is your first sign. Attention crying caps also spring to mind.

Emails like the one above don’t worry me.

What worries me is somebody who can actually write good English, duplicate a convincing email (the above was 90% image), and catch me at the right drunken moment. I don’t suspect anybody will fall for the slack attempt at fraud above – but keep it in mind. I’ve heard various mentions of scams targeting Yahoo PPC recently.

To spite the criminals, I’m going to leave my appliances on all night and wait for the global warming to kick in.