Archive for the ‘PPV Targeting’ Category

Slice Your Way To PPV Profit… Ninja Style

I’m going to start by apologizing for false affbuzztizing. There are no ninjas in this post. The closest to a ninja you’re going to get is the knowledge that I’m wearing nothing but an all black towel as I write this. Yeah, I’m pretty much wet and soapy.

I’ve been meaning to post about some PPV techniques for a while now, because there’s only so much rhetorical bullshit I can rehash as “lifestyle advice” before people start to call me out on a mysterious lack of…actual content.

There are two problems with PPV.

1. Everybody is doing it.
2. You’re probably not very good at it.

PPV promotion – or any kind of advertising where you’re springing pop-ups on the user – is a method of interruption marketing that has to be approached differently to your normal social campaigns. And god forbid, get back to the drawing board if you’re trying to port your Search campaigns directly to PPV.

I’ve already posted about laser targeting PPV campaigns, and shocking users in to clicking your ads. I’ve had people emailing me quoting mixed results. Some have found a lot of success using the techniques, while others…not so much. *cough* NATURAL SELECTION *cough*

Instead of replying to a thousand different scenarios with a thousand possible reasons for why they didn’t work, I thought I’d explain the thought process that goes in to my own campaigns. And of course, many of these fail too.

The way I see it, profiting from PPV is all about brainstorming and developing enough ideas to attack a campaign from different angles. So many concepts out there are beaten and battered in to a state that you’d have to be Vince Offer on crack to make the product sound original. I don’t like joining the swarming masses, and I prefer to develop campaigns that leverage a very specific appeal to a relevant audience.

That’s great, right? Nobody cares, you just want practical examples.

Let’s say you’re going to promote a dating site, what are the obvious choices for targeting your ads? What are some keywords you might use?

Singles in [...]
Online dating in [...]
Get a girlfriend
Chat to girls online
Meet new people
Dating advice

You’re not going to win any gold medals for envelope-pushing creativity with this kind of targeting. That’s not to say it won’t work, but you’re battling with the masses.

Many marketers fail to understand why their campaigns are failing when they’re reaching such a targeted group of users.

“If Jo Bloggs is searching for a girlfriend, why won’t he use my link? Wah wah wahhh. It’s right there! Wah wah wahhh”

These users are clearly interested in online dating so why aren’t they snapping up your bait and whacking in their credit card details? A lot of the time it’s because they’re too well trained in the market you’re trying to promote. Just because you’re pumping a pop-up with “COME FLIRT NOW” in his face, doesn’t mean he hasn’t seen the message a thousand times before and already grown sick of it.

It’s not banner blindness, but you’re targeting a type of user who clearly knows what he’s looking for. And these users are sometimes the most likely to hammer the little x on your pop-ups. Why? Because they’re already reading similar ads in the Google search listings and don’t need your crap popping up!

It’s like old school porn surfing (oh god Finch). You reach a site with that really niche midget porn you’ve been looking for. Then some motherfucker springs a pop-up over your hard work which is less targeted and frankly a pain in the arse after the seven sites you clicked through to find what you were looking for. I don’t watch midget porn.

Pro tip: If you’re going to target obvious keywords, make damn sure that your pop-up is more relevant than the actual page that the user is loading!

With my own campaigns, I like to come up with targeting strategies where the user shits himself at how close to his current state of mind my advert is striking home. If dating is your niche, you should be looking to brainstorm a little deeper. Understand the reasons WHY these people might be suitable for an online dating site.

Don’t worry about the dude searching for “chat to girls online”. Worry about finding him before he reaches breaking point and realizes that this is what he wants to do. To manage this, you need to become receptive to human psychology and use your ears. Yes, use your ears.

Clues for targeting your campaigns are all around you. I find myself phasing out in the middle of conversations with friends when my brain is latching on to things that they’ve said. I will be damned if there’s a better way of brainstorming campaign ideas for a dating offer than by spending half an hour talking to single friends. You begin to understand their psychology and thinking.

My favourite line of questioning is to ask them why they THINK they’re single.

Invariably I get answers along the lines of…

• Target 1. “Because I don’t have the confidence to go and talk to girls”
• Target 2. “Because there aren’t many girls that like the same things as me”
• Target 3. “Because I’m still torn up over my ex”
• Target 4. “Because I’m too busy to be bothered with a relationship”
• Target 5. “Because I just haven’t found anyone at the moment”

This information is gold to me. My mind then turns to how I can translate these feelings in to PPV campaigns that don’t just target the right demographics, but hit them with stinging headlines that make them scream “YES” to the service I’m offering.

Let’s take target 3. For all we know, that guy who was searching for “chat to girls online” could have been the same guy who’s just suffered a horrible broken down marriage. We could target him with “chat to girls online”, yes, but it’s a LOT more powerful if we hit him before he’s reached Google. If we can reach out to him as an individual and be the solution to what bothers him most – we’ve got much more chance of nailing the conversion.

So where else could you target this guy?

How about on divorce websites? Marriage breakup Facebook groups? The thousands of articles on the web offering advice for dealing with a broken down relationship?

Not only can we catch the same target, but we can adapt a PPV campaign that is MUCH more effective than the standard dating LP you got from Justin Dupre’s Freebie Friday. Get creative with your headlines and imagery.

“You Think Your Ex Isn’t Searching Online? Get Back In The Dating Game Tonight”

This is what I would call slicing through the market and grabbing leads where you can resonate with them most. By segmenting markets and producing creatives that deal with genuine human emotions, you can be the answerer of those needs. It’s a lot easier than trying to grab your conversions from the huge pool of users searching generic dating terms.

I’ve got a couple more posts to come on PPV so check back soon if this is your thing.

Any questions, drop me a comment. I’m off to find some clothes.

Too Many Fish In The Sea With PPV

Once upon a time, PPV was the new craze for affiliate marketers. Less guidelines to stick to, less slaps to run from…but now unfortunately, a whole lot more competition to bid against. Over the last six months, I’ve highlighted two different approaches to profiting from PPV:

Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns
Shock Marketing Tactics For PPV Profits

Another tactic I’ve read about on other blogs and forums involves “brand bidding”.

Brand bidding? The art of matching a branded CPA offer to a branded web page and hoping against hope that the margins stack up in your favour. The problem, as I’m sure most of you will have realized by now, is that they rarely do.

When I first got in to PPV, I saw zip and email submits as my gateway to riches and infinite private ball massages. A life of luxury by pushing offers that pay out, what, $1.30? The problem with matching PPV to these type of offers is that you don’t have as much margin to play with as you think you do. Throw in an element of scrubbing and people quite frankly not giving enough of a shit to wait for your pop-up to load from it’s shared hosting – you’re almost back to square one.

Brand bidding can actually be quite effective, but let me give you an example that probably isn’t going to out anybody who’s making more than 47 cents a day.

Here is your stereotypical iPhone email submit:

For a PPV virgin, it’s easy to get carried away and assume that a free iPhone offer is going to attract the interest of just about anybody browsing a domain with apple.com in the query string. And maybe it will. But if you’re going to master the art of brand bidding, you ultimately need to filter the crap first.

Direct brand bidding will swamp you with a large amount of traffic. From my experience, the profitability of bidding on a full domain just isn’t going to be sustainable 95% of the time. And even if it is, you’re using such a primal form of marketing that the next retard is waiting in the wings to bid $0.01 higher.

To take this iPhone example, the possibilities are endless for brand bidding – particularly if you ignore the temptation to bid on the actual Apple brand. I’ve always advocated “laser targeting”, particularly if you’re working with a low payout. A good method of brand bidding, less likely to attract tramp traffic, would be to dig out some links over on the o2 website. That’s a phone network for you yanks.

Take a URL target like this: http://shop.o2.co.uk/promo/iphoneindex/Pay_Monthly/3G_S/White

It’s a step forward in the sense that contrary to targeting apple.com, we know a few things about the visitors to this page:

• They’re thinking of buying an iPhone.
• They’re already in “comparing mode”, weighing up the pros and cons of the various deals.
• o2 is a possible point of purchase that they trust.

So where does brand bidding come in to the equation? There’s no sign of o2 on our direct linked landing page.

The next step would to create a landing page that bridges the gap between the URL target and the shoddy email submit we’re about to hit them with. I would suggest a landing page with a header along the lines of “Can o2.co.uk Match Our Outrageous iPhone Giveaway?”

I would not want to be creating separate landing pages for every last phone network on the web so the “o2.co.uk” would have to be dynamically inserted.

The header is designed to portray relevance. It’s almost a “brand extension”, particularly if you design your landing page using the same colour scheme and font selection. It also exploits the fact that we know the user is already in comparing mode. You can use this to your advantage by listing some existing deals on your landing page, and then dumping your free iPhone at the top of the list in fancy flashing lights.

Of course, the problem with these type of campaigns is that you’ll never find the same volume that you would in spreading the net far and wide.

Another way to play with brand bidding is the classic bait and switch. A few months ago I had a very profitable campaign targeting just one single page on the Plenty Of Fish website. The concept was to deliver leads to a free dating website (Zoosk and Mate 1). What better way to target fans of free dating websites than by hitting them where they already congregate?

Of course, you could pitch a dirty great pop-up for Zoosk on the front page of POF. But you’re going to run in to several problems.

The sheer volume of users accessing the root domain “plentyoffish.com” every day will be too great. By targeting the top domain, your pop-up will show not only when somebody goes to sign in, but when they reply to a message, when they browse a profile, when they see who’s viewed them. You’re simply catching too many fish to ever be profitable.

The second problem was a lack of targeting. POF has a relatively balanced mix between males and females. How can I spring a pop-up that appeals to both genders? With a dating offer, it’s essential to break down your demographics. You also need an offer that accepts traffic from the 18+ crowd.

So instead I targeted just a single page – the “Who Viewed Me” section.

The concept was again pretty simple. I had a landing page and a header reading “Getting Viewed But Not Getting Messaged?”

I plugged the image of a depressed singleton, a screenshot of an empty inbox and then the complete opposite under the brand logo I wanted to promote – “…Why not try a dating site where our sexy members aren’t afraid to say hello?” You can probably piece the rest of the idea together in your head. I’m not going to spell it out. Needless to say, my version was a lot more provocative.

Much to my surprise, this simple PPV campaign – with just one target – produced a nice ROI in the first few weeks. I soon realized though that my pitch was getting lost somewhat. Most women on POF are already getting messaged at every waking hour, so it wasn’t as effective considering a large percentage of my page loads were falling on female eyes. You can probably guess what I done. I used the same concept to target niche websites where gender wasn’t a factor. Examples aside, this kind of laser targeting is my preferred method of making money with PPV.

Brand bidding has it’s merits and can be used to good effect with the right offer. You will undoubtedly get conversions. But the challenge is to get those conversions while weeding out as much other traffic as you can to make it profitable.

There’s a huge misconception that PPV traffic is the cheapest on the market. I think that’s pretty much bullshit. It may be the cheapest in terms of what you’re paying for a “visitor”, but that doesn’t always equal good value. A good CPM campaign can drive the cost of a click down to as little as a few cents. And when a user has clicked, you know you’ve grabbed their attention. Yet with PPV, you’re paying around $0.02 for the loading of a pop-up. Most people hate pop-ups. Some won’t even wait for them to load. You do the maths.

If you’re promoting zip and email submits, it’s quite likely that the best tactic is good old fashioned CPM bidding on the content network. That’s a post for another day though. There’s a bandwagon rolling past claiming that PPV is the future for affiliate marketers. If you’re going to jump on, don’t be turning your back on the other opportunities that surround you.

Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns

Christ, I almost forgot about this place. About two weeks ago, I had a fetching list of topics to post about. So what happened?

Amsterdam happened.

An extended break in Holland has helped to relax my senses. Unfortunately to the point where I can’t remember much of what I wanted to say. Whenever I tell people that I’ve been to Amsterdam, I always feel the need to make it perfectly clear that “No, I didn’t.”

And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t remember, okay? Perhaps my single most striking memory of The Dam was being perched in a toilet, space caked out of my face, wondering what would happen if you whipped a pigeon. I swear to God, it seemed philosophical at the time.

Anyway, I believe the last post was about shock marketing tactics and how you could stun somebody in to clicking a creative if you pressed the right buttons.

This post swings to the other end of the scale. I want to look at how you could go about laser targeting – a favourite term of mine – with a traffic source as anonymous and faceless as PPV. It’s incredibly easy, but to do so, you will invariably need to sacrifice the one thing that keeps a super affiliate’s bed wet at night…volume.

Since I decided to start rambling about PPV again, I’ve been bombarded by contextual marketing virgins who would like to get a piece of the pie but just don’t know where to start. So I will say that this road is generally much easier and much cheaper than the methods outlined in my last post.

The best way to take a vice like grip over your PPV targeting is to only actually target one site. In some cases, even one page.

While providing a visual shock like the car crash scenario is often good for general targeting, you may find more success by designing your PPV creatives to be a working extension of the site that you’re targeting. You can’t go ripping the brand name and providing false endorsements, but you can use the user’s web location to your advantage.

One option may be to target the sport section of a national newspaper to crowbar in a PPV campaign along the lines of…

“Hey [Newspaper Title] Readers,

We’re offering online readers of [...] an EXCLUSIVE free ticket to [Whatever sports event]. Just click here and enter your zipcode to continue…

…And don’t forget to buy tomorrow’s edition of [...]“

Yes, it sounds pretty much identical to the recent banned Facebook ads citing the user’s age as a barrier to entry. And that’s true. But the secret is to make the reader feel as if they’ve stumbled across a mystery freebie while carefully avoiding any suggestion that you’re the actual owner of the target site. Sound a little shady? Yep, so is a large segment of the shit that actually works for affiliates in the CPA space.

Another favourite tactic of mine is to hijack the inferiority complex to make the user click-through to where I want them to be.

I’ll use Runescape as an example. Here is a game where you can register a character and engage with thousands of other users in a sprawling virtual world. I’m no market research wizard, but what can I say for sure about a lot of Runescape players? They’re a bunch of pansy dicks who don’t like to be made to feel inferior.

That said, I thought it’d be a good idea to design a PPV creative that would be specifically catered for Runescape users persuading them to register on the closest matching gaming offer I could find.

The general gist of the headline was…

“There’s A Reason The Top Runescape Players Are Flocking To [My Offer Name Here]”

…But I can’t tell you until you click through and see it for yourself”

I was hoping to spark an immediate reaction where firstly, the player doesn’t like being left in the dark or having it implied that he’s not good at Runescape. And secondly, there’s the inquisitive nature of wanting to know more about a new game that ranks well with the same crowd.

Given that so many of the Runescape crowd are young, retarded, and living in cloud cuckoo land, you can have a field day with your creatives until you’re driving a decent amount of clicks and conversions.

I’m using Runescape and the gaming niche as a convenient example – because I know it won’t make you much money if you rip it like several people did with the last post. But the real trick is to start thinking outside the box. Look at how you could apply the same logic to offers with higher payouts and higher traffic.

If you’re new to PPV, I would strongly recommend you learn to walk before you try to run. Just choose one target site. Maybe even one page within it.

Search for a suitable offer that can be wedged on to the back of your target for maximum relevancy. Nothing grabs the user’s attention like a creative that asks them whether they really want to do what they’re about to do, but maybe that’s a method for a whole new post…

As I’ve said all along, when you’re advertising with PPV, you need to understand the way that interruption marketing works. While the last post detailed a method of interrupting the user with something visually extravagant and attention catching, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Sometimes you can exploit interruption marketing by making sure the user doesn’t even know that there’s been an interruption. Blend in with your target source and produce creatives that sit well with the user’s natural navigation through the target site. I’m not going to go in to specifics, but when I’m planning my PPV campaigns, I like to ask myself three questions about the targets I’m adding.

1. Why is the user on this page?
2. Where is the user most likely to click next?
3. Where did the user come from?

If you can begin to paint a picture of the user’s browsing habits, you can design a creative that captures their attention so much more readily. Headline phrases like “Before you…” and “Now that you’ve…” play a key role in my PPV creatives and if you plug your brain in, you can probably put two and two together to see why. Happy hunting.

Shock Marketing Tactics For PPV Profits

Now, I jacked this graph from a Google image search, and it’s satire rather than actual data. But it’s pretty much true, right? People find it hard not to pay attention to scenes that jump out of their mundane lives and slap them in the face.

Since moving in to PPV advertising, I’ve tried several different approaches to varying degrees of success. I’ve tried informational adverts, humour to capture attention, and the subject of this post – shock marketing. While it’s not suitable for all offers, shock marketing is something that naturally integrates very well with PPV. When you’re dealing with interruption marketing, or springing pop-ups on a user who is otherwise engaged, you really need to have an ace up your sleeve to tear them away from whatever they’re expecting to see on the page they’ve clicked through to.

Many people fail to drive a sufficient CTR with their PPV creatives simply because they try to be too cute. They’ve been raised with conventional marketing wisdom that says that if you explain the right benefits to the right user, you’ll enjoy eventual success. While that’s true to an extent, the nature of pop-up and pop-under display adverts is intrusive.

You could be slinging Vodka to an alcoholic and there’s still a good chance that he’ll give you the cold shoulder. Maybe ten years ago you’d enjoy an easier ride. Unfortunately people are naturally inclined to turn a blind eye to advertisements these days. That’s unless they see something so outrageous or so targeted to their needs that they can find the reason to put aside whatever they were doing before.

When I approach my PPV campaigns, I always do so with the same mindset: “How can I make the user stop and stare?”

Research shows, from a number of sources I truly can’t be bothered to dig out, that you have a matter of split seconds to grab the user’s attention. Miss the boat and you’ve paid to be forgotten.

Picture your target audience. Can you honestly see these users pissing themselves in excitement at the thought of what the next 750×550 might bring?

Well, the way I see it, if you want people to catch a message on a highway billboard, you’re going to have more luck if a car has just been trashed in to the support beams. People will stop and stare.

One of the offers I wanted to test out was an auto insurance quote form. There are some great insurance lead gen opportunities, and PPV is a brilliant way of making your living with them.

The problems with auto insurance offers are pretty well documented. Most affiliates are priced out of the PPC space due to advertisers with budgets the size of Texas. The cost efficient platforms to market these offers are PPV and social media networks like Facebook. But it’s not easy to get the average floating surfer to pay attention to an auto insurance offer.

Unless you’re extremely targeted or extremely relevant, it’s going to be hard to interest people with a subject like insurance. I would personally enjoy crunching my balls against my desk more than I would being distracted from my Facebook photo creeping by a loose promise of cheaper car insurance. That’s just me.

I decided to use PPV to target several Chevrolet related websites. I was looking for users who were actively looking to buy a new or used Chevrolet. I can’t remember why I chose this brand. It was something to do with it being the most crashed vehicle in a certain state for three years running. I can’t remember.

As most PPV experts will tell you, you’re going to enjoy a lot more success if you target your traffic source and then try to match it to an offer that fits the demographics. By settling on this Chevrolet crowd, I already had an excellent idea of what my target audience was hoping to see.

It would be very easy to put together a basic creative with a few bullet points and a strapline like “Best Insurance Offer For Your New Chevrolet” or whatever. This will often be successful, but it wasn’t shocking enough – in my eyes – to draw the number of clicks that would be necessary to keep the campaign profitable.

Instead I ventured back to Google Image Search and retrieved a pretty horrific image of a crushed Chevrolet, the result of a high speed car crash. When you have eye-catching provocative imagery, it becomes so much easier to pull the user’s attention off the page. I split tested several different titles and while I’m not going to out my own techniques for driving an image like this home, it goes without saying that bolder is better.

If the aim of your campaign translates in to shocking the user, there are no shortage of directions you can take to get the job done.

How about dating? It struck me just how many advertisements choose to depict stunning women and the guarantee that you could date one of them. But what is the shocking opposite? Well let’s just say the search term “unhappy middle aged man with fat ass ugly beach whale” might have taken a Googling last month.

Got a work from home offer? Pick the ugliest face you can physically stand to look at. Paint it with the tagline “This man needed an excuse to work from home…” Maybe you can see what I’m getting at here. Sometimes being all cute with the benefits of the product simply isn’t good enough for distracting a user. Forget your marketing degree – if you’re one of the 0.06% of readers to actually have one – so much PPV success hinges on being calculating, nasty, and very aggressive. Any attention is good attention. The worst thing that can happen is for somebody to ignore your ad.

It’s possible to get away with shock marketing tactics using traffic sources like Facebook too. But everybody knows that a Facebook intern has the kind of threshold to provocative imagery that a baby has to it’s first tooth. You’re not gonna get very far before some bitch is crying about it. I use PPV for my most aggressive marketing campaigns, simply because there’s not much you can’t get away with.

I would recommend taking a look at your offer and working backwards. Often the best way to come up with an ad creative is to take the single biggest lure of the offer and dump it on it’s head.

Want To Meet Hot Single Girls?
Or how about…
Want To Be Scouting For Beach Whales At Fifty? (Well, you better join now then….)

Want Cheaper Life Insurance?
Or how about…
Want Little Baby Jack To Give Up His Dreams Because You Died And Left Him Nothing?

The push is often greater than the pull.

You’re probably beginning to see why I resent the industry I work in, but that’s just the way it goes. You’ve gotta take advantage of fears and dreams. Shock your audience in to taking action and stop being so nice.

Case Study: PPV Marketers vs. Finch In His Boxers

If this doesn’t get me in the top ten Affbuzz posts of the month, then linkbait never really existed and social media experts can go fuck themselves.

I’m not going to swerve you. This is a real life supercase study. A story of one night this December where yours truly stayed up past his bedtime with a mountain of Pringles, some cheesy wotsits, some scratchy bollocks and a burning desire. An ambition to discover what his peers are up to in the PPV marketing landscape.

It’s normally my policy to not post about lines of work that I’m currently involved with. Well, I’m going to break that here. I’m actively involved with PPV advertising. I’m not going to offer you some tips of how to be successful at it. That would be good blogging. Instead I’m going to explain why some marketers are scratching their heads and munching zero columns for breakfast.

Forget your split testing. De-brief your creative designers. The real acid test for PPV advertising is whether you can impress Finch in his hot pants at 1 in the morning with Vomba software disrupting his usual RedTube routine. I decided to take some time to cruise the Internet, aimlessly, for hours on end.

You could argue that this is what most of us do anyway. But instead, I was hoping to get a feel for the most popular and impressive PPV techniques. I did. But I’d like to share the efforts that failed to impress me.

If you haven’t already downloaded the Vomba toolbar, you can find it here.

Before you go downloading it, let me warn you that by installing Vomba, you are injecting your PC with the very same adware that is usually installed by retards who’ve gone goggly eyed over an animated wallpaper. Media Traffic, one of the biggest PPV networks, uses Vomba to spread the software that inevitably pops up ads and serves your landing pages to the web via contextual advertising.

I installed it on my home computer knowing full well that it had the potential to get right on my tits within about 5 minutes of this case study ending. I’m generally too lazy to get rid of software I no longer need. Which is why my Windows Vista runs like a dinosaur on the ice (and why Macs are better, by the way).

Anyway, having trolled just about every niche website on the net, here are the most common examples of PPV advertising gone wrong.

Failure 1 – “I outsourced my landing page for $35 therefore I don’t need to think of a good title.”

PPV advertising springs a pop-up, right? Depending on how well you’ve optimized your landing page, these pop-ups can take a little while to fully load. Add in to the equation that if your target market is dumb enough to install Vomba, they’re probably dumb enough to be carrying like 40 Trojans and 7 rootkits. It’s probably going to take a while for your masterpiece to load.

The last thing you need is a title bar that says:

Test – PPV Landing Page 4

Now, obviously I was actively scrutinizing these pop-ups to see what I liked and disliked about them. As a passive viewer, I’m not going to wait up to 15 seconds for a pop-up to load if the title is as devoid of a headline as this. If you’re working PPV, you’re involved in INTERRUPTION MARKETING. You need to reach out from the screen, slap your viewer in the face, and force them in to paying attention for longer than it takes to aim and fire on the little X.

An eric generic title like the above barely managed to tickle my balls let alone slap me in the face. Which is a shame because it was actually quite a nice landing page.

Failure 2 – “I can’t be bothered to use CSS. I’ll use a giant fucking image instead.”

I’ve seen some PPV landing pages that must have been over 250kb. I can only imagine the creators were so keen to test the sparkling designs that they opted to skip optimization. You know? The part of PPV marketing that stops you crashing your server?

I’ll keep it nice and simple. If you use a giant image – saved at 100% PNG quality in Photoshop – and then add a few thousand URL/keyword targets…you will absolutely destroy your $6.95/month shared hosting.

It will not survive. You will discover that your unlimited bandwidth isn’t so unlimited after all. This realization will dawn in the space of the 20 minutes that it takes Media Traffic to swallow your initial $200 deposit. You will go running to the Warrior Forum for help. At the end of which, you will have mysteriously adopted a paedophillic avatar and an attitude that 2003 is going to be your big year in Internet Marketing.

DON’T DO IT.

Optimize your shit.

Pages will load faster. Bandwidth will drain slower. Because ultimately, let’s be honest – how effective is interruption marketing if the user has 20 seconds to brace for the likely pain in his arse?

Failure 3 – “FinchSells.com is a marketing blog. It’ll work well with my MLM product.”

During my little case study, I visited my own site to see if anybody had plugged it in as a URL target. Sure enough, they had. It was being targeted with a pyramid scheme business opportunity offer.

I pray for the work I’ve done on my brand that an MLM offer would convert like a crack whore at a lemonade stand when pitched at my regular visitors.

Many PPV marketers paint a picture of a niche with broad strokes that capture too many unrelated demographics. If you’re a wizard at optimization then it’s really not a problem because you’ll soon be filtering out the dead wood. But the viability of doing so is determined by how much money you can afford to blow before you see profitability.

I have never chosen to add thousands of URL targets to a new PPV campaign. I prefer to do my research and build small blocks of highly targeted matches. It all comes down to understanding your demographics.

You only need to look at the weight loss niche to see how fragmented the market can be. An Acai Force Max LP is not going to see the same level of success if you’re simply scraping every URL under the sun for weight loss. You will lose money on page views that are never going to lead to conversions. Because some fat bitches don’t want to get ripped, they just want to fit through the front door. See what I mean?

Understand your demographics and filter your URL lists accordingly.

Alternatively, optimize like a badass and forget everything I just said.

Failure 4 – “People care about what I have to say.”

It blows my mind how many PPV marketers serve up small novellas of useless information just to get an email opt-in.

I’ve written several posts about the need to sell product benefits rather than features. The game gets that little bit tougher when you have a method of advertising that is seen as a distraction by the majority of users. Stick to a bold eye catching title, maybe list a few bullet points. Say what needs to be said before the user has time to pull eyeballs from the page. It HAS to be brutally to the point.

Don’t waste the critical top left hand part of the page on a logo or fancy image. One of the key errors of judgment in PPV marketing, in my opinion, is designing for a creative to be digested like any other webpage. Forget whatever architectural layout recommendations you read on Sitepoint. Your page does not have to be flexible. It has to put the right message in the right place. And the right place will nearly always be in the user’s face.

It was hard for me to judge the effectiveness of some landing pages when I was personally scrutinizing them in a way that a regular user wouldn’t. But I can safely say through my own split testing that the majority of Vomba’s user base are not going to stick around in the hope that you might have something to say further down the page.

Law number one of Interruption Marketing: Shut the fuck up and get to the point.

Failure 5 – “My offer only accepts 21-25 year old females lol what’s the worst that could happen?

So your dating link only converts on females between a set age range. You decide to try that shit on a fashion forum anyway. You’re a retard.

The end.