I’m not into PPC marketing right this instant, as I took a break from it/quit to attempt to start a blog network. Either way, I still know how to do it and never really gave out too many tips about it, so here we go. This is my process from start to “finish” using no paid tools.

The first thing I do once I have found a campaign I want to run is view the source code of the merchants landing page and see with meta tags they have in it. Obviously those keywords are what you should use to build a list. I wouldn’t say use those exact keywords because usually they are pretty broad and could kill you in Adwords. Once I have those keywords I do some simply plugging into Yahoo as that is where I usually start all my campaigns. I take note of the competition and review the current ads. Make sure to pay attention to how they are written, if they are all very similar you are going to want to make yours much more unique. For example, I read this on Wicked Fire, if you are promoting a weight loss offer and everyone’s ad says “Lose weight fast Free trial just pay shipping”, you could say something like “Stop being a fat loser and get in shape. Start shedding those pounds fast”, a bit too long but you get the picture?

So now that I have reviewed the competition and I like what I see it is time to email MyOwnDemon for a landing page. He makes really nice landing pages! The thing I like about him is that he is usually booked and wont be able to finish my page for like a week which gives me ample time to test my offers on Yahoo direct linking. Yes, I do direct link my offers on Yahoo for awhile until I get my landing page done. May seem really weird to some people, but that’s just how I do it. I may even leave my offer direct linked on Yahoo if it is converting well and conversions don’t change when using a landing page. Crazy I know.

You have to track your stuff. Something I never did in my early days in AM, and really wish I would have. However, back then there was no Tracking202, or Prosper202. Now there is so take advantage of this amazing free software!

Everything is setup in T202, and I start testing my keywords on Yahoo. Pretty simple really, just sit back look at my ads and see which keywords are converting. Writing new ads, deleting the ones with a low CTR, pretty basic. Lets say a few days go buy and I have a small amount of keyword data to build off. Hopefully my landing page is done and I am ready to start with Adwords. (don’t forget a heatmap)

Adwords is a bitch and I just think Google enjoys pissing people off. I hate Adwords but it is a must use if you are going to be a PPC marketer. What to do first? Simple, upload your keyword data into Adwords, only the keywords that converted on Yahoo!. Thanks to T202 everything is there in an excel spreadsheet. One thing to remember with Adwords is when you first launch your campaign obviously you have to CTR, only keyword quality score. So in a sense Google shoots your ad a little higher in order to establish a CTR. You must closely watch your ads and find out which ones have the higher CTR and make sure those are the ones that are running. (If not, the next day you are going to be screwed and getting hardly any traffic.) Hopefully this is where things start going good, and you have some consistent conversions across both Yahoo and Google. If not, look at your competition, write some new ads, expand your keyword research. It is really amazing to see some of the misspelled keywords that have converted. Bid on misspellings, they count too!

Scaling your campaign is really hard, and I’m not really that good at it either. Recently I had a campaign where I tried everything to scale it and nothing worked, it really pissed me off! But my recommendation would be to check out Facebook and other social media advertising. Possibly even SocialMedia.com, Matt Marcin just did a great write-up about this service, so make sure to check out that article before you try them. Enhance.com is pretty low quality traffic, but the guys over there are really nice and helpful and you can get tons of cheap traffic from them.

Create a subdomain off the domain of your landing page and create a blog. Order/write tons of articles, basically saying the same thing over and over just in different ways and with different form. Main focus….this product is amazing, it is the best product, and I love this product. Submit to every social bookmarking site possible, could add a few more sales/leads a week to your campaign.

 So, I hope these ideas helped someone. This is exactly how I create a campaign. Would love some feedback from the mega dudes as to what I should add. I probably forgot to add a few things though….

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Popularity: 13% [?]

I have been writing alot for my blogs recently and have noticed one thing, people love to pick out every little thing about my articles and bitch about it.

I’m not sure why, my articles are pretty well written, if I used a source for the information I always provide a link, as well as the images. I don’t see why people spend this much time just bitching.

Maybe it is because I am not looking at my articles in a purpose serving sense. I see my sites as $ and nothing more, probably not a good way to look at things. My sites are not jam packed with ads, only two ads per blog right now. That’s it!

So I am wondering, do you think this is a good thing that people are actually taking the time out to write lengthy comments explaining why they disagree? OR is this really really bad?

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Popularity: 13% [?]

So if you have been reading my blog lately, you know that I have changed my online money making focus to blogging and building content sites. Although I only have 6 blogs to write for, it is still pretty hard to come up with my own unique content. On top of that, logging in to each blog and trying to remember all the passwords was insane! So, I went out and bought Contribute CS3, some great editing software. Instead of logging in to each blog I set up all the blogs I am writing for in the Contribute program. It making throwing up posts about 500 times faster and is some really cool software I didn’t even know existed.

 It is kind of expensive for what it does in my opinion, about $180. However, without this software I was going to go nuts with all the passwords to remember!

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Popularity: 17% [?]

Over the past few weeks, I have been researching so much about blogging and it really made me realize how many blogs there are, and how many blogs there are with pretty decent readership/following that I have never heard of. One thing however in common with all these blogs is that their designs are really cool, and usually 100% custom.

So the month of May is the first month I will be building content on my blog network. During the first month, basically all I am going to do is blog all day everyday and build as much content myself as I can. The advertising budget for each blog is so small, it is not even worth mentioning. Social media traffic, although not the best quality, is still traffic and that is where my main focus is going to be.

Back to the title of this post, can a blog become popular with a free theme? I am going to find out. (I am not going to pay out the ass for a custom theme for each blog in its first month!) Now, my idea of popular is probably very different than yours. All I want for the first month is a small amount of readers and a decent amount of traffic. Can this be done? I’ll find out!

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Popularity: 21% [?]

I’ve decided to no longer do PPC marketing. Affiliate marketing is a really great fun industry to get into, and I wish I could handle the failure involved.

Popularity: 26% [?]

It is no secret that I really like Advaliant and everything they are about. I got the chance to interview Mr. Jivan Manhas, who is the President of Advaliant. Here is a little background info taken from Advaliant.com:

“Jivan Manhas is a Founder, and President of Advaliant, Inc., MediaTrust’s performance affiliate network. Both a seasoned executive and experienced entrepreneur, Mr. Manhas possesses diverse business experience, a fundamental understanding of how to leverage cutting-edge technologies within online media, and valuable strategic and operational experience in creating new ventures. Prior to co-founding Advaliant, Mr. Manhas was a co-founder of three Internet consulting companies, ViaCentrix, Digital Bytes and Consultica.“

Thanks again to Mr. Manhas, and my AM Geofferson for helping me get this set up!

Could you explain what initially got you started in the affiliate marketing business?
[Manhas] In late ’98 I was hired as the ecommerce Marketing Manager for a company called MGI Software based in Toronto.  As part of my responsibilities, I was to look into the best affiliate marketing program to partner up with and the two main choices were Commission Junction and Be Free.  As I started doing my research into this relatively young online marketing method it peaked my curiosity and interest in the field.
 
What do you think sets Advaliant apart from the rest of the CPA networks out there?
[Manhas] Besides the usual jargon espoused by most other networks (high payouts, timely payments, etc.) we really pride ourselves on making honesty, integrity and great customer service a part of our company culture.  As one of our team members likes to say, “ask us why we’re the same and you’ll understand why we’re different.”
 
Were you surprised at all by winning Best Affiliate Marketing Campaign of 2007 at ad:Tech San Francisco last year?
[Manhas] We were confident that we had built a strong campaign with Playphone but we were up against a number of brands that had been in the marketplace longer than Advaliant and Playphone so making top three for us was a great achievement.  Winning was amazing and validated the approach we take with our advertisers which is centered around long term relationships built upon honesty, integrity and very much of an agency approach.  Our approach with advertisers is to work with them to make their campaign as successful as possible within the Advaliant affiliate network.  That includes using our experience as well as affiliate feedback and our technology to make their campaign not only successful for the advertiser but for our affiliates and publishers as well.   We worked very closely with Playphone to understand their long term strategic business goals and built a program to help them achieve them.  Winning the Best Affiliate Marketing Campaign of 2007 was a great validation of our core strengths of building relationships based upon honesty and integrity in helping our clients achieve their goals. 
 

I have heard of a new tracking system being released for Advaliant soon, could you explain more about it?
[Manhas] Without giving away too much detail (we need to keep some things a surprise for the launch), we are currently developing out a new Advaliant affiliate marketing technology that will put us in a leadership position amongst performance marketing networks.  We are taking advantage of various different social feature sets, semantic A.I. programming as well as a large amount of feedback from our affiliates and advertisers to build out a cutting edge, industry leading technology that will allow us to evolve into the premier online brand for performance marketing.  I realize that is a bold statement but unfortunately affiliate marketing is seen as the ugly step child of the marketing world by many companies and if we want to survive as an industry we all need to take our industry up a few notches and start attracting the big dollars from the Fortune 100 companies.  This is our intent and as we continue to grow as an organization we’ve been fortunate enough to attract some top industry talent which will allow us grow our network in a direction that is consistent with our core beliefs.
 
From a CEO’s standpoint, where do you see affiliate marketing in 5 years?
[Manhas] As stated earlier, the industry as a whole needs to evolve and grow beyond where it is today.  I believe a handful of performance networks will have positioned themselves as Tier 1 brand networks to attract the Fortune 100 ad budgets, will rule the industry.  These networks will be more than just CPA networks and will have integrated ecosystems that offer various performance services across various different platforms such as web, search video, WAP, as well as offline.  More importantly, these networks will have taken a very professional,  ethical and transparent approach to  the way they do business and will also incorporate a strong “human element” into their business model to ensure their clients get the best service possible.  Those networks that do not have proprietary technology with strong professional and creative services teams will either have gone out of business, or fight over a smaller piece of the CPA pie.  I also believe some of the larger agencies will start acquiring some of the more successful performance networks over the course of the next few years in order to compete in the digital marketplace.  Keep in mind that even though performance or affiliate marketing has been around for quite a few years, it has never been the “hot” buzzword amongst venture capitalists and once it does, it will result in a lot of investment money coming into our space, a wave of consolidation and as stated above, a lift for the entire industry in a positive way.  Those with the bigger vision will build the bigger networks, bigger brands and become the industry leaders.

If you are not with Advaliant yet, get signed up! Click on one of the banners/links here and I will help you get approved ASAP.

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Popularity: 46% [?]