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I’ve recently taken on a one-on-one coaching student. He’s doing very well, he has 2 profitable campaigns right off the bat!

There’s something he said that really struck me : One of the reasons that he wanted to work with me on a one on one basis was to avoid getting confused.

What did he mean by that?

Think about all the enormous amount of information about ppc affiliate marketing out there, let alone affiliate marketing in general.

Just to list a few courses/membership sites : adwordmentor.com, googlecash.com, payperclickformula.com, wealthyaffiliate.com, ppc-coach.com, ppcclassroom.com, quityourdayjob.com, etc, etc, etc!?! These are just a few I remember off the top of my head.

All of the above courses (more or less) teach different strategies for doing ppc affiliate marketing. So which one do you follow?

On a related note, I was sharing some of my ppc strategies with Anik Singal and he told me flat out that me and Jeremy Palmer have totally different strategies for doing ppc affiliate marketing. Both Jeremy and I are both very successful affiliates, so who do you follow?

Here’s the deal…

There’s more than one way to slice and dice an onion and there’s also more than one way to do ppc affiliate marketing successfully. The worst thing you can do is buy 5 different courses and try to follow all of them - especially if they have conflicting advice - i.e. bid your add to the top, no keep your bid prices low!?! That’s where confusion kicks in.

Overloading yourself with information and getting confused will paralyze you and your business. Follow ONE system and try your best to make it work before you jump to another system for doing ppc.

Once you find a system that works for you, run with it. In time you’ll develop your own system for doing ppc. In my opinion that’s the mark of a true super affiliate, someone who has reached a level of expertise that they are coming up with their own techniques and strategies.

My wife and I are flying to Paris tomorrow for a well deserved vacation! So you can imagine that I’m super busy today - I’m keeping this post short and sweet.

Here’s the dilemma…

When you’re split testing two ads on Adwords you can either test for CTR or Conversion Rate.

Not only can making a small change in your ad change your CTR significantly, it can also impact the conversion rate of your ad - sometimes significantly.

But here’s the problem, you can’t optimize for both CTR and Conversion rate simultaneously. Having an ad with a higher CTR does NOT mean it has a higher conversion rate.

For example, you can put your product price in your ad and it will most certainly lower your CTR, BUT your conversion rate will almost always go UP.

So what should you optimize your ad for : highest possible CTR or highest possible Conversion Rate?

The advantage of having a higher conversion rate is obvious - you make more sales.

The advantages of having a higher CTR are significant as well :

1. With a higher CTR you get more traffic
2. Google rewards you with a better quality score, which means your ad either moves up while you pay the same CPC or Google lowers your CPC + your min bids can drop as well.

Think about it, if you double your CTR and your ad jumps up several spots you can potentially increase your traffic by 4X, 2X from doubling your CTR and another 2X from your ad moving up. If your quality score gets high enough and you move into the sponsored link section, than you can expect a jump in Conversion Rate as well!

Here’s the bottom line : OPTIMIZE YOUR AD FOR MAX CTR

Why?

There’s several reasons :

1. There’s a 2-fold benefit to improving your CTR : more traffic + a higher quality score. Getting a high quality score is a BIG DEAL.
2. Optimizing for CTR is fast since it’s based on clicks. Optimizing for Conversion Rate takes a LONG TIME, in most cases you need at least 20-30 conversions on each ad to make a statistically valid decision, compared to 20-30 clicks on each ad to make a decision as to which one has a higher CTR. After a month of split testing you can make HUGE gains in CTR, however, if you’re optimizing for Conversion Rate, chances are after a month you won’t have enough data to even make ONE change.
3. By optimizing for Conversion Rate of your Ad you’re neglecting the CTR, and if your CTR suffers it will hurt your quality score at the keyword, campaign, and even the account level - potentially raising your min bids and your CPC costs account wide.

So start split testing your ads, continually and systematically, and blow your competitors out of the water!

A little while back Linda Buquet of 5 star affiliate forum asked me to address the question of domain strategy.

A lot of affiliates are very confused about what domain to choose for their sites and fail to understand why the proper choice of a domain name is absolutely critical to affiliate success.

Here a few tips when choosing domains for your affiliate sites (Linda, this will answer your reader’s question) :

1. NEVER use a general domain like abcmarketing.com and use subdomains for different niches. You may as well shot yourself in the foot. You domain builds or destroys credibility with your visitor, instantly. They say never judge a book by it’s cover, well, people will judge your site by it’s domain, whether you agree with it or not.
2. You want your domain to be targeted as closely as possible to the niche and to convey what your site is all about. If your promoting an ebook about dog training, then you want a domain like : dog-training-tips.com. Your choice of domain will effect your CTR AND Your Conversion rate
3. When entering a new niche, buy MULTIPLE domains tightly related to the niche, setup the domains as aliases and test them to see which one generates the highest CTR. You’ll be amazed, a slightly different domain name can double, even triple your CTR.
4. If your domain name contains your main keyword it will boost your Google QS.

So when it comes to domains, choose wisely, and test.

Last week I was going over some items on my “to do” list that for some reason or another, I never got around to in 2007.

As I scanned over my chicken scratched notepad, I came across an entry that read “check SEO skills - SEO test/seomoz”. I remember reading about this test somewhere online so I jotted it down real quick and thought “I’ll have to comeback and see how bad I suck at SEO.”

As a PPC marketer, it’s easy to get wrapped up in “your baby” for the week. You tend to spend most your time analyzing a new market your excited about, you start building landing pages, structuring keywords, uploading campaigns etc. while envisioning how great you’ll look on the cover of TIME magazine as “Brilliant Marketer of the Year”. No Google fridge or 2 GB pocket drives for you buddy, this is the big time

Unfortunately, thats not enough.

With the convergence of PPC and SEO, you have to think long term. Gone are the days of 1 cent bids and direct-to-merchant affiliate linking while you sit at home and wallpaper your living room with hundred dollar bills. Nowadays, you need your own freakin Wiki about “the past, present and future of boy bands” if you want to continue bidding on “backstreet boy fanny pack”.

Don’t think thin affiliate sites and fast offers - think big, content-rich SEO’d super sites! This should be your goal in 2008 and beyond - if it’s not already.

Case in point: Being lazy will eventually kill you in this business. Build a visitor worthy site, not crap.

Ok, back to the quiz…

So the other night, I went over to the SEOmoz and took the SEO Quiz. To my surprise, I was considered a “Dark Lord” of SEO. I don’t know exactly what that means, (you trying to tell me I’m a black hat or what?) but my score was 93%.

I was REALLY surprised. I expected my score to be lower because it’s difficult to keep up in the ever-changing worlds of PPC, SEO and Boy Band Reunion Tours for my Wiki.

No doubt the test is fun, but to be honest, there were a couple questions that I thought were debatable and there were two or so I wasn’t 100% sure about but I made a best guess stab at em.

I recommend that you take the quiz, you will learn a few NEW things about SEO while you brush up on your current skills - (it’s a mix of SEO techniques everyone should know, the SEO industry, and some PPC).

I’m interested in what you think about it so please feel free to comment with your thoughts and scores if you take it.

Amit will be returning from India and be back to his regular postings soon. I hope you all have a great and prosperous 2008 and look forward to meeting some of you at the Affiliate Summit in Vegas this year.

-Thomas

Okay, here’s Part II of the Secret to Affiliate Success Part I post I did.

This time I really want to talk more about scaling and WHY that’s a big secret to success in affiliate marketing. I already talked about HOW last time.

If you really think about it, building scale is an important part of any business. If you own one hot dog stand, you’re very limited in how much money you’ll make in one day, and on top of that it will consume all your time.

So how do you scale a hot dog stand?

You hire out someone to run your hot dog stand, heck, franchise it out, give then 90% of the profits and you take 10%. Now do this 100 times, and you’ll be making 10x more than you were with just one hot dog stand and have free up all of your time (except for possibly training new hot dog stand owners)!

Now you can imagine the enormous time and money it would take to sell a 100 hot dog stand franchises to people and get them up and running.

In most traditional businesses it’s REALLY hard to scale. Even in online businesses, outside of affiliate marketing, scaling can be a pain in the butt.

Think about it.

Even if you’re selling a software product online, how difficult would be to take your company from $1M/year to $10M/year? With 10 times the sales you’re going to need 10 times the customer support, ten times the server capacity, bigger office space, etc, etc, etc.

A lot of start ups go belly up because they face fast growth in the beginning and they can’t handle it, that is they can’t scale fast enough to handle the growth. Now that’s a scary thought!

So what makes affiliate marketing different?

If you take your affiliate business for $500/day in sales to $5,000/day in sales you don’t have to worry about : hiring more employees, getting more office space, or anything like that.

Now the only bottleneck you may face here is your credit card limit, if you want to make $5,000/day in sales you’re most likely going to have to spend $2,000-$3,000 A DAY on ppc to hit that. If you get an American Express Gold card and build up your history you’ll have nothing to worry about (BIG TIP).

The ability to easily and rapidly build scale is what makes affiliate marketing a really unique business model.

I mean, what other business can you go into and start making $10k/month profit in within 3-6 months?

Now, last time I talked about how you need to build a team and a system to do the work of building scale in your affiliate business. I realized I talked above most people’s heads, so let me give more practical advice that newbies and intermediate affiliates can start applying right away.

Lets say you have success with dog training, you understand what keywords convert, what copy works. You’ve setup a nice review site, where you review various dog training ebooks etc.

So how do you scale this?

Easy, promote other types of pet training ebooks using the same methodology you used for dog training. You can go into cat training, bird training, etc.

In different markets you need different strategies to be successful. You want to milk one market as much as you can before you go into another market, pet training is a perfect example.

So if you’re just starting out don’t get overwhelmed by Part I of my post, just do this:

1. Find a good niche, you’ll know it’s a good niche when you start making consistent profits!
2. Build on your success by split testing your landing page, split testing your Google ads, adding more keywords, and expanding your campaign onto other PPC search engines.
3. Now go into closely related niches (ie dog training, cat training, bird training) and use the same strategy you used in the original niche and duplicate your results.

It really is THAT simple!

Andrew Wee and I are closing the pre-launch promotion of Super Affiliate Accelerator (SAA), today, Wednesday at 12 midnight EST. So if you want to learn the EXACT strategies I use to make millions with PPC (a lot of stuff I’ve NEVER revealed on this blog), this is your last chance to get SAA at the pre-launch price of $297, after that the price will go WAY up when we do the official launch.

Here’s the link, and your last chance to take advantage of this special promotion while it lasts:

Get Your Copy of Super Affiliate Accelerator Now

For those of you who have set your goal of reaching a $100/day profit, SAA will help you hit that goal at blazing speeds.

So what happened to Joe’s campaign (if you haven’t, please read part I first)??

An astute reader of mine let the cat out of the bag, if you read the comments for the last post you’ll have discovered this:

1. When Joe first started his campaign, he bid 0.20, and the ads for his top converting keywords were on the first page. This is where he got his 4 sales from.
2. By bidding all of his keywords down to 0.10 he pushed his top converting keywords onto the second page. For the next 5000-1000 clicks he got barely any clicks from these high converting keywords, as a result he made ZERO sales!

Here’s a simple fact: High converting keywords have a higher cost per click, since they convert better there is more competition for these keywords.

In a previous post I suggested just bidding high to assure that your high converting keywords get a decent ad position, and thus a decent amount of traffic.

The only problem with this approach is that you have to be willing to loss some money, actually in most cases a lot of money, before you collect enough data to optimize your campaign.

When I launch a new affiliate offer, I’ll drop a $1k-$2k without blinking an eye. For one offer I launched a few months back I dropped over $5000 before it started making a consistent profit!?! When I mean drop I mean NET LOSS.

However, I’ve developed a more sophisticated way to assure that your high converting keywords get good traffic WITHOUT bleeding red for weeks.

Here’s the idea: start your bid at 0.20 (or whatever) across the boards in starting out your campaign, after a day or two look at your ad positions, you’ll notice some adgroups your ads show up in position one, and for other adgroups your ads are in position 12 or higher.

You want all your ads on the first page, right? Preferably between positions 3-8 (positions 1 and 2 tend to get too many ‘click happy’ browsers).

Here’s what you do next:

1. Go into Adwords Editor, make sure you have campaign statistics showing.
2. Go to ‘Ad Groups’ tab for your campaign
3. Then Click on the ‘View’ drop down box above the tabs, select ‘Create or Set Custom View…”
4. Filter your data by ‘Performance Statistics’, it’s at the very bottom.
5. Set Avg Pos greater than 8
6. Now you’ll see adgroups who’s ads are greater than position 8, Select all of these adgroups and increase the max cpc (in the box below) by 30% (more or less depending on the positions of your ads).
7. Repeat the above steps expect this time set your filter to show all ads in positions less than 3, and then bid them down by 30%.

By adjusting your bids by ad position you’ll push all your ads into the sweat spot, positions 3-8. Now you can let your campaign run without losing your shirt, and rest assured your high converting keywords are getting good traffic.

So you can have your cake AND eat it!

Don’t be suckered into thinking your campaign mysteriously fizzled out after making sales for 2 days. Chances are you did something seriously wrong to make that happen.

In a previous post I talked about how you need to go wide (bid on broad keywords) before you go deep.

Now there’s another pitfall I didn’t mention that can kill your ppc efforts died in their tracks, even if you have an excellent keyword list, and you go wide, bidding on all the broad keywords right from the get go.

Before I tell you what this major pitfall is, let me paint a scenario for you, that I’m sure is all to familiar:

Joe is launching a new affiliate offer on Adwords. He has really done his research and compiled a nice broad keyword list to bid on.

Joe launches his campaign bidding 0.20 to start with. He lets his campaign run for several days. In those several days he gets 500 clicks from his Adwords campaign and ends up making 4 sales at $20 per sale = $80 in commission.

However, Joe spend 500×0.20 = $100 (I know average cpc is less than max cpc, this is JUST an example). So he has a net loss of $20.

So now Joe figures : “Great, I found a winner! Now let me lower my bid to 0.10, so then for every 500 clicks, or $50 I spend I make $80 in commission. A $30 net profit!”

Joe lowers his bids to 0.10, he notices he’s traffic drops considerably. He thinks : “Okay, so I have a fraction of the traffic I used to, no big deal, at least I’m profitable at 0.10/click.”

After waiting almost two weeks, Joe notices he has 500 clicks on his campaign but no sales! He thinks : “Okay, this is bad, but it’s probably just a bad week! Damn! I’ll let it run for another 500 clicks.”

After another 500 clicks Joe still has no sales on his campaign. At this point it’s been weeks since he started the campaign, in frustration he figures “Things just fizzled out!”

He pauses the campaign and moves on.

Sound familiar?

So what went wrong with Joe’s campaign?? Stay tuned for Part II…

If you have not heard of Derek Beau, he is one of the top affiliate bloggers on the net, in my opinion. Derek’s blog is a veritable online ebook, a step by step guide really, on how to make money online.

Derek recently introduced a cool new tool, The Campaign Builder & Keyword Mixer. It’s an absolutely free tool that allows you to setup your campaigns, ads, and keywords in bulk.

In Derek’s own words here’s how this tool works:

“The concept is actually very simple. You take two sets of keywords, set some options, and write some ads. The tool will then create the CSV data required to import everything into your AdWords account. All you have to do is copy/paste it into AdWords Editor.

The beauty of this is that it will create highly targeted ad groups with custom text ads for each of them. You really have to try it to see exactly how it works, but it is possible to create, for example, 300 ad groups with 10 keywords and 3 custom ads each, in under 10 minutes. The end result is an expanded keyword list, higher CTRs for your long-tail keywords, and higher keyword quality scores.”

Speed PPC does exactly, more or less, what Derek’s tool does, except it costs a whopping $497. I would strongly recommend you download Derek’s tool and at the very least learn how this bulk method of building campaigns works. It will dramatically cut down the time it takes you to launch a campaign and increase your profitability big time as a result.

Before any of these bulk tools came on the market I developed a method using Adwords Editor, Excel + some powerful add ons to setup Adwords campaigns at blazing speeds.

This method allows me to setup hundreds, even thousands, of lazer targeted adgroups, in minutes. Using this method and other advanced techniques, I’ve developed a system to scale my affiliate business so I can launch a 500 keyword campaign and a 10,000 keyword campaign in roughly the same amount of time. As you can imagine, this has allowed me to skyrocket my profitability.

Plus I also manage all my campaigns using these advanced methods, which includes everything from testing ad copy and adjusting bids in bulk.

If you’re interested in learning exactly, step by step, how my system works, I divulge all my secrets in an info product I’m developing with Andrew Wee called Super Affiliate Accelerator. This product includes a series of interviews, camtasia videos, and case studies on how I : setup, launch, optimize, and manage my campaigns.

This product is basically the bonus we offered to anyone who purchased PPC Classroom through my link.

If you’re interested in purchasing a pre-launch copy of this product (it goes for $297) please email :

support [at] amitmehtareveals.com

to get further details.

You know, a lot of you out there think if you have good keyword list then it’s just a matter of :

1. Setting up tightly targeted adgroups
2. Having effective Google ads that have the keyword in the headline, benefit in the description, & a strong call to action
3. A landing page that converts

then you’re set, and ready to make windfall profits in your niche.

Right?

Wrong!

There’s one very common mistake that stops a lot of affiliates dead in their tracks.

I’ve helped and coached a lot of affiliates and I’ve seen this mistake come up again and again, and chances are you’re probably doing it too. I know I made this very mistake all the time when I got started.

Before I explain exactly what this often fatal mistake is that so many newbie ppc affiliates make, let me lay the ground work…

I want you to think hard about this statement:

When you first launch your campaign, the breadth of your keyword list is MUCH more important than the depth.

What in the world do I mean by that?

A broad keyword list is one that has lots of related and lateral keywords, and not just variations of one root keyword.

Here’s a simple example of a list of keywords that has breadth :

delete adware
delete backdoor
delete browser hijacker
delete cookie
delete Dialer
delete keylogger
delete malware
delete spyware
delete toolbar
delete trojan
delete w32
delete worm
destroy adware
destroy backdoor
destroy browser hijacker
destroy cookie
destroy Dialer
destroy keylogger
destroy malware
destroy spyware
destroy toolbar
destroy trojan
destroy w32
destroy worm
find adware
find backdoor
find browser hijacker
find cookie
find Dialer
find keylogger
find malware
find spyware
find toolbar
find trojan
find w32
find worm
remove adware
remove backdoor
remove browser hijacker
remove cookie
remove Dialer
remove keylogger
remove malware
remove spyware
remove toolbar
remove trojan
remove w32
remove worm
Now you can see these (trojan, worm, w32, etc) are all different types of spyware.

Now here’s an example of another keyword list that has depth:

anti spyware
anti spyware free
anti spyware software
antivirus spyware
best free spyware remover
best spyware
download free spyware
download spyware blaster
free anti spyware
free kazaa spyware remover
free removal of spyware
free spyware download
free spyware downloads
free spyware protection
free spyware removal
free spyware removal programs
free spyware removal software
free spyware remover
free spyware scan
mcafee anti spyware
microsoft anti spyware
remove spyware
spyware blaster
spyware blocker
spyware cleaner
spyware detector
spyware doctor
spyware download
spyware programs
spyware protection
spyware removal
spyware remover
spyware scan
spyware software
spyware terminator
spyware virus protection
totally free spyware removal

You can see that the above terms are related to removing or detecting spyware. And all the above keywords have the root word ’spyware’ in them. This is a keyword list with depth.

Now if you want a lot of depth you can dig up long tails, but I’ll get in a later post!

So what’s the fatal error that a lot of ppc affiliates are making, even if they have a excellent keyword list, that is one with both breadth and depth??

Most affiliate focus on going deep (deep means : launching one root keyword with lots of variations, such as the second spyware list) FIRST, before going wide ( wide means: launching broad keywords, ie the first keyword list).

Here’s problem with going deep first:

TOO NARROW A FOCUS ON THE MOST COMPETITIVE KEYWORDS

Most affiliates find every freaking variation and combination with spyware (or whatever the main keyword for that market is) in it until their blue in the face, setup their Google campaign, and launch.

Then they’re surprised when they hardly get any traffic bidding 0.20 (spyware is a high cost per click keyword), and their conversions suck since every affiliate is also bidding on spyware.

Frustrated they pause their campaign after a few weeks and move onto something else, without even attempting to try a bidding on : trojan, w32, etc, etc, or any of the other broader keywords.

They figure if spyware keywords don’t convert for them, it’s hopeless! Besides they lost $500 on the campaign, and don’t want to mess with it anymore.

Sound Familiar?

MISSING OUT ON THE MOST THE TRAFFIC & PROFITABLE NICHES

Even if you managed to get the spyware keywords to convert, with a sharp professional looking review site that compares every possible benefit and feature of 3 different spyware removers, you’re still may be missing out on the most profitable niches in the market.

What’s worse, in many markets a broad keyword list will deliver WAY more traffic than a deep one that focus on the main most competitive keyword.

This is why it’s so important to go wide FIRST before you go deep, it will assure that you get the maximum amount of traffic and allow you to identify the most profitable sub niches in the market you’re in.

Once you go wide and see which sub niche of keywords (malware, keylogger, worm ,etc) are producing the most traffic and conversions then focus in on those keywords and start going deep.

So if you find (just an example), that trojan keywords are getting a lot of traffic at a bid price where your Cost/Conv is low, then focus in and start going deep. That is, start finding as many variations and combinations of trojan keywords that you can find.

By doing this you’re now employing the 20/80 principle and focusing your energy where you’re getting the highest return.

So here’s EXACTLY what you need to do when launching your affiliate offer:

1. Go wide, as wide as you can to, spend some time identify every related and lateral keyword in your market.
2. Once you launch this broad set of keywords, your campaign will be getting traffic from all the major sub niches in your market. Tip: To get a good Google QS (Quality score) you may want to setup a separate page for each sub niche (ie a page for trojan, a page for w32, a page for browser hijacker etc)
3. Let your campaign run and identify the sub niches where you’re getting the majority of traffic and sales. Focus in on those top sub niches and go deep.

This is how you build a ppc affiliate campaign with a solid foundation that will bring in profits for months, even years to come!