In case you haven’t seen all the posts lately (like this one and this one) about Bevo Media, it is now publicly launched and ready for action. It is a tracking platform for paid traffic, along the lines of Prosper202. It does have a lot of nifty features that 202 doesn’t have, and they are putting some serious marketing muscle behind this release to make it a major player in the PPC / PPV / Media Buy tracking & analytics field.
I just got back and all caught up from the trip to New York, so now it’s time for the obligatory wrap-up post. For those of you that were not able to make it, you should definitely put it on your calendar for next year. For pure value, contacts gained, and networking, this was the best show of the year for me so far. Ad-Tech in November would have to be pretty spectacular to beat it.
If you are reading this right now and you are a PPV marketer, we need to come to an agreement on something. I know when it’s late and you are about to go to bed, it can be tempting to log on to TrafficVance and hit that shiny “Make My Bid Highest” button just to make sure that you are getting all of the traffic. Too bad.
Click Here to Read More of Josh Todd’s Article at Inside Affiliate
As an affiliate marketer myself I know how difficult it can be to work from home when you have kids. I think it’s safe to say that around 99% of affiliate marketers work directly from home. Yes, it is very convenient to get up in the morning, walk into the kitchen with just a pair of boxers on, grab a cup of coffee, and get to work. After about 5 minutes of getting into the groove your kids come running downstairs asking you to make them breakfast, get dressed, etc. So you handle your business and sit back down to get in the groove. A few minutes go by and bam, your kids are back at it again, “Dad, I’m bored. What are we going to do today.” Before you know it you’re ready to pull your hair out because you just can’t get anything done. It’s the weekend, or summer vacation, and you’re simply going to have to entertain your children. If you fail to plan in this situation, then you should certainly plan to fail.
Here are The 5 Most Effective Ways To Manage Your Kids While Working On Campaigns:
1. Marry A Good Woman: If you’ve yet to find the right match then seek it. Having a wife that will understand your career as an affiliate marketer and respect the fact that while you’re at home working she needs to treat it as if you’re away at the office, is rare. The most successful affiliate marketers have an understanding wife behind them.
2. NetFlix Movies: Set your kids up with 2 NetFlix movies that are at least 72 minutes in length. In between movies prepare a snack for them. Avoid shows unless you want to live the life of a yo-yo affiliate – constantly getting up to turn on new show every 22 minutes.
3. Summer Activites: Get your kids involved in summer camps. My daughter attends a cheerleader and gymnastics camp. Work out a car-pool arrangement with other parents.
4. Sleeping Schedules: You’ll need to put your kids on a pretty strict schedule. 9pm means 9pm. That way you can effectively plan your working schedule. Several affiliate marketers get most of their work done after hours. The kids are asleep and there’s no distractions.
5. Pandora: Put Pandora on and plug in the headphone sets. When you’re kids are home playing and you know they’re safe, tune out to some good tunes. Put the volume all the way up and ride out.
Almost every active affiliate now knows about the Google Slap: if Google finds or determines that the page that potential customers visit when they click on the ad is not related, is poor in quality, or even loads too slowly, they may take punitive action in the form of a Google Slap. Basically, the Google Slap accomplishes several things at once. First, it drives up the price of your pay per click amount, sometimes asking as much as $10USD per click, which most small vendors cannot afford to pay. Second, they may reduce your page ranking (PR), which will automatically mean you have to pay more to have your ads featured through AdWords. Or worst off, they’ll completely deny your page from listing, just ask Logan Thompson.
There was a lot of affiliate embitterment toward Google after their arbitrary slap, which is naturally justified given the cold and capricious manner in which Google shut down accounts. So, for awhile now most affiliates left google in totality and focused on other traffic sources. This was an important move because it’s not good to put all of your eggs in one basket. At the end of the day this is a temporary move since Google does in fact own 65.1% of all internet traffic, with Yahoo at a distant #2 at 13.5%.
Here is our suggestions to create acceptable affiliate landing pages for Google that will convert:
1. Build Quality Sites: The days of single page landing sites on Google are over. Focus on giving the customer a quality experience on your site. Give them what the merchant doesn’t give them. Create unique content that isn’t there just to take up space, but to satisfy your potential customer. IE, HomeWhiteningCare.org, which incidentally is ranked #1 in the search engines. This is a content rich site that adds value to consumers. By adding value to consumers through helpful information, consumers in return trust the messages of the website.
2. Create Highly Targeted Campaigns: Focus on certain keywords and build your entire campaign around them. If you are selling a teeth whitener, build out a page with “Teeth Whitener” in the domain name.
3. Content Is King: Write original content. If you’re not an expert on the subject, pay professionals in the industry to draft up articles, do not pay content writers. IE if you have a teeth whitener site, pay a dentist to do an article on your blog. Consumers will see this and trust your recommendations to buy even more. Also, make sure that there are articles included that are not related to the product that you’re trying to sell, otherwise risk getting caught by the ultimate spam blocker – human beings.
Once you get your new landing page approved we suggest you checkout the Google content network. Right now there are several HC publishers pushing a hundred+ leads a day from there. Google is and will always be one of the best traffic sources for affiliate marketers. The key is that we’ll have to adjust to change.
Another way to look at PPV marketing is interruption marketing. That’s essentially what you are doing is interrupting them in the middle of their web surfing session and popping an ad in front of them. What you have to say had better get your point across, and do it quickly. Let me introduce you to the Golden Rule of PPV Marketing…
If you are running PPV, you are most likely scraping URLs. If you are scraping URLs, then you have probably wasted money on bad targets. I certainly have. Here’s a money-saving tip that will keep you from blowing through your testing budget bidding on google.com or answers.yahoo.com:
Go through your scraped URLs before you launch the campaign!
One of the toughest ongoing questions for affiliate marketers is, “How do I know when I’ve spent enough money testing an offer?” Everybody has a different approach. There are a couple of truths that we need to look at.
There’s no such thing as a surefire winner in Affiliate Marketing. That hot campaign that you have making $1,000 a day right now? It won’t last. The vertical that you have been tearing up for the last two years? It won’t last. Markets change. Audiences get wiser. Traffic sources dry up. There are about a million things that could go wrong at any point in time in this industry, and if you don’t have your income diversified, you will get stung sooner or later.
If this is your business strategy, you are in trouble.
So if you’ve been following this little series of posts on marketing CPA offers with PPV, then hopefully you have setup a few campaigns, tested some things out, and perhaps even found a winning campaign or two. I consider it a winner when it is profitable at all. It might be making $100 a day or $10 a day, but you are in the black. So what’s the next step? Today we are going to talk about scaling your campaigns with PPV.