For those of you who don’t already know, Content network can be a GOLDMINE, if you’re not testing it you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Here’s why you may have tested the content network and not had any significant success yet : to succeed big at the content network you absolutely must structure your content network campaigns DIFFERENTLY than search.

Why?

The content network is a fundamentally different beast than search. For search it’s best to have any where from 1 to 30 (MAX) unique keywords per adgroup. And all the keywords in your adgroup should be very tightly related phrase variations.

For content you actually want MORE keywords per adgroup, anywhere from 30-200, and they should NOT be all tightly related phrases, but rather you want a broader array of keywords all related to one theme.

“So Amit are you telling me I need to create seperate campaigns for search and content, and also group my keywords differently?!?”

YES!

Here’s what you need to understand…

To determine which content sites to show your content network ads on Google looks at the overall all theme of the keywords in your adgroup. If you only have one keyword per adgroup (or a very small tightly related group of keywords) for your content adgroups then you’re giving Google a very narrow theme to work with and as a result you’ll get much less traffic, and from my experience, pay more per click.

Properly structuring your content campaigns will result in a HUGE increase in traffic vs just copying your search campaign and running your content traffic through there. I’m not talking about a 5 or 10 percent jump here. More like 3X to 5X!

“But Amit, to group everything separately for search and content like that, that’s a LOT of work!”

Better get busy than, that is if you want to become a super affiliate.

Btw, this is JUST one of many ultra advanced strategies I’ll be revealing (in much more depth than above) in the course I’m releasing with Anik Singal next month. Stuff I’ve never before disclosed on my blog.

So stay tuned!

In light of banks going under left and right AND in light of my last post, I let me ask you this question :

Is your income dependent on Google Adwords?

Because if it is, you need to start thinking about how you can diversify your income ASAP.

In general, it’s dangerous to have your income all coming from ONE source. If that one source is Google, you’re flat out playing with fire.

If you’re just doing ppc affiliate marketing then the best way to diversify is to transfer your campaigns to Yahoo and MSN ASAP. If you’ve been waiting for the right time, well, the right time is NOW.

I spend a LOT of money on Yahoo and MSN. Only trouble is that Google still has most of the traffic, so without Google you would still take a big hit, but you’d be okay. I know super affiliates who do well over a million a year in revenue just from Yahoo and MSN.

No doubt in the short running, I believe ppc affiliate marketing is the BEST way to make money.

In the long run, however, you want to think about how you can create a more solid stable income that is NOT dependent on the whims of a merciless mega corporation like Google.

In this post I discuss a bunch of long term strategies.

Now if you’re just a newbie, just focus on building a full time income with ppc and affiliate marketing. But if you’re a full time affiliate it’s time to start thinking long term.

For those of you who are wondering, YES, my Google account is active. However, I’m now using completely seperate accounts for my new affiliate campaign that I’m launching - just to be on the safe side. Of course, I’ll have to rebuild my account history, but that’s a small price to pay for piece of mind.

Have any of you received a message like this ever from Google:

“It has come to our attention that despite multiple disapprovals, you have repeatedly submitted ads that violate our Editorial Guidelines and content policies.

Please consider this notice a final warning. If you submit these ads again or continue to run ads that violate our policies, we will be unable to run any of your AdWords ads in the future.”

I received this message after I recently uploaded a new campaign. Now this campaign was promoting a legitimate (big) company with a 100% legal service. Someone at Google got confused and by mistake took my ads as promoting something illegal. So ALL of my ads where dissapproved and I received the above scary message!

When I contact Google about this they basically gave me the middle finger in their reply. They basically said yeah you’re not promoting anything illegal BUT you have a bridge page so screw you anyways (I was actually testing the market with this page before I built out a full blown site).

So now I’m working with my affiliate managers to try to get my site whitelisted. My team is going to beef up our site with content and hopefully it will pass muster with Google.

Here’s the thing…

You need to tread softly with Google, they’ve been banning affiliate Adwords accounts left and right recently.

A good friend of mine lost a 6 figure income because Google shut his account down. Google claimed one of his sites had spyware - which was TOTALLY bogus. He was just promoting Clickbank ebooks.

He tried to work with Google to resolve the issue to no avail.

SCARY STUFF!

If Google doesn’t like your sites or what you’re promoting and shuts down your account down you’re screwed.

There’s NOTHING you can do.

Carefully read Google guidelines and try to stay in the straight in narrow as much as possible.

And make sure your landing page has substantial content or links to other pages on your site that have value added content. Google is cracking down on bridge pages like nobody elses business, and yes, I’ve heard of affiliates who have had their accounts shut down over having bridge pages.

Google just recently announced that it’s getting rid of minimum bids on keywords!

No joke.

Of course there’s a catch, they’re going to replace minimum keyword bids with what they call “First Page Bids”, that is, the minimum amount you have to bid on a keyword to show up on the first page.

Now does that mean your ad will show up on page 2+ if your bid below the “First Page Bid”?!?

Honestly, we won’t know until they roll it out.

If that’s not enough, Google has also decide to calculate the quality score on the fly, every time a user searches for a keyword you’re bidding on.

WOW!

The quality score will also be dynamic, meaning that depending on where your ad is showing, which country, which search partner, which website, it will have a DIFFERENT Quality score.

Read it from right from horse’s mouth.

Implications for PPC Affiliates…

It’s hard to say anything at this point.

If the on fly Quality Score calculations also apply to landing page quality score, the results could be disastrous for affiliate who survive by changing their domain name and reuploading their campaign every time they get slapped.

On the other hand, a dynamic quality score could potentially deliver more traffic and reduce the impact of Google slaps.

Cross your fingers, we won’t know the true effect of this Quality Score “Improvement” until we’re hit with it.

I wanted to do a follow up post on recent post I did about the latest Google Slap.

After taking a closer look at my Google account, I noticed I actually had been hit by this most recent Google Slap. For several of my search campaigns I discovered that almost half my min bids had shot up from 0.05-0.20 to 0.50 or more.

Luckily this slap had only effected a few of my campaigns, all for one affiliate offer. This is why I didn’t notice the slap until I took a closer look.

At first I couldn’t understand what had happened, I had everything Google could possibly want:

• Targetted landing pages
• A real site with 100s of pages of unique content and fresh content added every week
• Lots of incoming links and page rank
• Etc, etc…

Finally I took a closer look at the adgroups that had gotten hit, and them it struck me:
ALL of the adgroups that had gotten hit all had ads going to aliased domains!

Here’s the thing: for this niche I have about 30 or so aliased domains. Having aliased domains that contain the keyword you’re bidding on is a great way to dramatically increase your CTR and even your conversion rate.

So if I had an adgroup about green widgets that was getting a lot of traffic, I would buy a domain like : get-green-widgets.com, and use this domain as an alias to my root domain. This way I could use this domain in my display url for my Google ad and get a SUPER high CTR.

It was all working great, until now!

I decided to dump all my aliases for my slapped campaigns. I switched all my ads over to my root domain and BAM, my min bids went back down right away.

I had a great discussion about all of this with Tom, one of my top partners and advisers, here’s what we concluded:

1. Google sees using aliases in your display url as spam, after all would ebay or amazon use an aliased domain? I suspect this is what Google thinks, I don’t agree with it though.
2. Every time Google rolls out a slap (Quality Score Update) they’re raising the bar as to what it considers a quality site. The bottom line is that Google is looking for advertisers that are building a long term business & a real site off of one or a handful of domains. Google does NOT want advertisers that are launching one thin site after another, just to make a quick buck.

Now what would a real site, that you’re building a long term business off of, look like?

Would the site have more than 5 pages?

How about unique content? Think a real site would have a lot of it?

Do you think fresh content would be added to such a site on a daily or weekly basis?

If it’s a real site, any chance it would have incoming links and a decent PR (overtime)?

If you’re still wonder how to build an affiliate site that won’t get Google slapped, I JUST TOLD YOU.

You may have heard, or hopefully not experienced, the Google Slap this week! Looks like Big-G is planning on quarterly slaps.

I was basically unaffected, as usual-my strategy of building authority sites seems to be working. In some of my campaigns I saw my min bids inch up a little bit, but that’s typical.

In some of my other campaigns I saw my traffic increase and my CPC drop! I know for a fact in those niches that there were a number of affiliates running one page landing pages. I can imagine that all those affiliates got whipped out. Less competition means more traffic and a lower CPC, at least until these affiliates get up and running again.

What I can’t understand is why anyone would run a one page landing page for more than a week or two? If you know your offers is a winner after testing it, INVEST INTO BUILDING A REAL SITE.

Sure you can re-upload your campaigns or change your domain and get things running again. However, you’ll have to do that every 3 months (remember quarterly Google slaps). Every time your campaign gets slapped you lose history and the guy who took the time to build a real site gains on you.

Don’t bet a quick fixes working in the long run either, Google will eventually come up with a way to slap your site so fast it won’t be worth even running a one page site just to test an offer.

Don’t you just love summer time?

It’s the time of the year when traffic and conversions take a hit, and even a big hit depending on the market that you’re in.

If you’re new to the game and have hit the Summer Slowdown for the first time then rest assure that profits will pick back up in the fall.

Here’s some tips on how to best deal with the summer slowdown :

1. Don’t Panic or do anything rash, such as completely pause your campaigns or make drastic changes that you can’t undo. It’s really easy to lose perspective when your profits take a dip. Instead of trying to fight market trends its better to go with the flow.
2. Use the Adwords Ad Scheduling Feature to adjust your bids down by 10%, 20%, or even 30% (across the boards) depending on how much of a slowdown you’re seeing. This will improve your profits and ROI. And what’s cool about Ad Scheduling is that you can easily restore your original bids once the market rebounds in the fall.
3. You may want to consider holding off launching new campaigns during the slowdown period, since it will be much more difficult to make them profitable. Keep researching new markets and offers, setup your landing pages, and your campaigns, but wait until the markets swings backup to launch your campaigns. I’m sure there’s also markets that do well over the summer, you can also consider focusing on those.

If you have solid campaigns running on autopilot like I do here’s what I suggest: drop your bids and take the rest of the summer off!

My wife and I are off to another mini vacation tomorrow, it’s an amazing resort on a tiny island only accessible by boat. I’ll tell you all about it next week!

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE fan of Adwords Editor. It’s the lifeblood of my business because it allows me to managed 57 active campaigns and literally 1000s of adgroups.

However, be wary of the newly released Adwords Editor 6.0. It has ONE major bug I’ve been pulling my hair out over for the last 3 days.

Whenever I try downloading my stats for say one specific campaign or set of campaigns at either the adgroup, ad or keyword level, adwords editor start downloading the stats for MY ENTIRE ACCOUNT! Even deleted campaigns!?!

To make matters worst, after 5 minutes it stops and I get an error message. When I start over I again get an error message after about 5 minutes :

WTF?

At first I thought the error message may have something to do with my lousy internet connection I’m getting down here in Coral Gables, but it turns out that my friend Josh has been having the same problem.

I finally remember that I had an older version of Adwords Editor running on the Windows side of my Mac, so I’ve been using that.

I’m hoping Google will fix this bug asap!

Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

If you’ve been following Part I & Part II at this point you should have :

1. A Keyword list broken into different categories or themes
2. 2 Ads (just the body copy) for each category of keywords
3. Your Google Conversion Tracking code on the thank you page of the affiliate offer

The next step is to use EfficientPPC to quickly setup your campaign.

Before I talk about the how, I want to talk about the why - which is just as important.

As I mentioned before, here how your campaign structure will look like once we’re done building your campaign with EfficientPPC :

1. One Unique Keyword per Adgroup - broad, phrase, and exact match types of one keyword
2. One Campaign per Keyword Category - with a different landing page for each category
3. 2 Ads per Adgroup - with the keyword in the headline

So why do I structure my campaigns this way? There’s a bunch of reasons :

1. Adwords highly rewards you for relevancy, and by structuring your campaign to have one keyoword PER adgroup and the keyword in the headline, you’re super relevant right off the bat. Just by structuring your campaign this way your quality score will immediately go up vs the alternative of throwing 20-50 keywords per adgroup.
2. By having a seperate landing page for each keyword category you are, again, giving your quality score a big boost. Google’s algo checks to see how relevant your keywords are to the theme of the content on your landing page.
3. Building a seperate campaign for each keyword category allows you to quickly glance at your campaign stats and immediately see which keyword categories are producing the most sales and conversions - so you know where to focus your efforts. This is the 20/80 principle in action. Don’t ignore this step, it’s VERY important.
4. 2 Ads per Adgroup - This will set you up so you can immediately start split testing your ads for maximum CTR. Once you start finding winner, replace the losing ads with another ad and continue to test. NEVER stop testing, this is the KEY to long term success!

BUILDING YOUR CAMPAIGN WITH EFFICIENT PPC

We’re going to use dog training for this example.

The first step is to setup a keyword token list for each keyword category, be sure to appropriately label each list :

As you make and save each keyword list (one for each category) you should see them appear on the sidebar :

Just as a simple example I’ve setup two keyword categories for our example : Dog - General and House Training

The second step is to setup your adgroup structure and bid prices :

Don’t worry about the destination url on this part, that’s only if your want to specify a unique destination url for each keyword.

Also, notice how I set the broad match bid 33% lower than the phrase and exact match bid. I always set my broad match bid 25%-33% lower, since it usually doesn’t convert as well as phrase or exact match.

Third step is to write your ads :

To put your keyword in the headline use : {Result: Default Headline} where ‘Default Headline’ is the headline to use if your keyword is above 25 characters. The capital R in Result will capitalize the first letter of each word in your headline.

I only wrote one ad for this example, be sure to ALWAYS write two!

Next Step is to duplicate this first campaign and just change the name and the keyword list to create the campaign for the second keyword segment, House Training.

The next step is to edit the ads for your second campaign so they correspond to the two unique body copies you made for the second keyword segment (remember? I talked about writing 2 unique body copies for each keyword segment).

The last step is to create your campaign and upload it into Adwords editor!

Yes, it’s REALLY that easy.

Few last points:

1. Set your campaign daily budget to something within your risk tolerance, which could be anywhere between $25-$200. I set my daily budget at $200 when I first launch a campaign. After I let it run a day and am confident that 1) it converts and 2) I won’t get a flood of targeted traffic, I increase the daily budget to $1000 or higher.
2. Turn off the content network, if you want to test the content network make a duplicate campaign using EfficientPPC and add -Content to the campaign name. Set this campaign for content network traffic only. I also recommend lowering the bid on the content campaign by at least 25%.
3. Countries : For offers that work worldwide DO NOT turn on all countries. Outside of the US I would add the following countries ONLY : Canada, UK, New Zealand, and Australia.

By properly setting up your Adwords campaign, you’ve laid a SOLID foundation - which in my opinion is the MOST IMPORTANT PART. You’ve now dramatically increased your chances of success, now all you have to do if find an affiliate offer that consistently converts and optimize it for profitability.

Okay, last time we talked a lot about keywords, that is, how to clean up your list and segment it.

This time I’m going to walk you through how to write your ads, and setup conversion tracking. In the last post I’ll show you how to put it all together and build a killer Adwords campaign with EfficientPPC.

WRITING YOUR ADS

First I want to give you some basic quick and dirty guidelines for writing an effective ad :

1. Put the keywords in the ad at least once, I almost always put it in the headline. This is the biggest psychological trigger you can put in your ad, when people see exactly what they typed in Google in your ad, they immediately see it as highly relevant.
2. Include the BIGGEST benefit of your offer in the ad. Example : Discover 5 Simple Steps to Stop Dog Biting!
3. Have a strong call to action. Examples : Start Now! Begin Here! Start Your Search Here! Etc…

For a full list of tips and tricks check out Googlelady’s 31 Killer Adwords Ads Tips.

Let’s get down to business…

Now remember how I talked about breaking your keywords into different categories based on theme?

Once you’ve done that it’s time to write 2 ads for each keyword.

It’s not as bad as it sounds! LOL

Here’s how to do it:

1. Write 2 unique body copies (description line 1 & 2) for each keyword category
2. Using EfficientPPC we will dynamically insert the keyword in the headline, making 2 ads for each keywords

Ultimately, here’s how your affiliate campaign structure will look like : a different Adwords campaign for each keyword category, one keywords per adgroups with 2 ads per keyword.
CONVERSION TRACKING

Do NOT launch a campaign unless you’re tracking which keywords are producing sales for you. Here’s the bottom line, if you’re biding on 1000 keywords, you’re going to find only a tiny fraction of those keywords will produce consistent sales for you.

You probably find around 20 keywords out of the 1000 produce consistent sales over the course of a month. If you don’t have conversion tracking in place, you’re dead in the water. How will you know which 20 keywords are producing consistent sales?

A hard reality of affiliate marketing is that most successful campaigns will not be profitable right off the bat, you’ll likely lose money for a while (weeks!) before you’re in the black. Tracking which keywords convert is what’s going to allow you to cut out the non performing keywords and achieve profitability.

So DON’T be stupid, make sure to have tracking in place, whether it’s Google Conversion Tracking, Xtreme Conversions, or another tracking tool that will tell you which keywords are converting to sales.

Getting your code on the thank you page…

I highly recommend Google Conversion Tracking over anything else.

Why?

Simple, first off the conversion data is seamlessly integrated into your Google Account. Plus you can download all the data into Adwords Editor which makes optimizing your campaigns REALLY easy.

There’s only one problem : you’ve got to convince your affiliate manager to place the conversion code on the thank you page for you.

Most savvy affiliate managers either have a backend system in place where you can input your conversion id or add it to the end of your affiliate link (i.e. ?glid=XXXXXXXX) .

In most other cases you can just email your affiliate manager and they’ll put the code on the thank you page for you. For these cases, here’s a scripted email I recommend :

“Hi Joe,

First off, I’d like to say that I’m really impressed with (name of offer). In fact I’ve put a great deal of time and effort into setting up a large Adwords campaign for your offer.

My campaign is ready to upload in Adwords. However, before I do that I would greatly appreciate if you may add my Google Conversion tracking code (that I’ve pasted below) on your thank you page. This code will allow me to track my conversion to the keyword level so I can optimize my campaign and increase my sales and profits.

Here’s my Google Conversion Code :

(paste your code here)

I look forward to working with you.”

Here’s the trick : Don’t actually setup your campaign UNTIL you get a confirmation that your code is on the thank you page.

If they don’t reply, email them again in a couple days, if you still get no response, move on.

You want to start off by picking 5-10 offers that you want to promote and send the affiliate manager of each offer the above email.

Once you get a confirmation from the affiliate manager that your code is on the thank you page, start setting up your campaign for that offer.

Do NOT start setting up a campaign for an affiliate offer or launch an offer until you get confirmation that your Google Conversion code is in place.

Hard part’s done! The last step is setting up your campaign with EfficientPPC. Trust me, that’s easy. I’ll talk about it next time.