Adwords Bidding Strategy

January 5th, 2012 by admin 4 comments »

google adwordsStart off bidding high while you’re gathering data and just to get the ball rolling. Always pay closest attention to which adcopy converts best in your testing phase.

Then lower your CPC bid every other day or so until your position starts suffering. If you don’t lower your bids over time, which is most beginner PPC advertisers, then you’re overpaying for clicks plain and simple.

A hypothetical example

You start your campaign and you’re bidding $3/click, but your clicks are actually costing you $2.32. After a day or two, you lower your CPC bid to $2.30 (a couple ¢ under what you’re paying) and then wait for some more traffic to flow. Then check on it a day or two later. Now you may see that your clicks are actually costing you $1.83, so you then lower your CPC bid to $1.81.

When you keep repeating this process of lowering your bids over time, at some point you’ll reach the lower bid floor and your position will start suffering. Obviously you don’t want to trade cheap clicks for shitty position, so raise your bid a little bit until you find a happy balance between position and CPC price.

Update:

I decided to update this post real quick and try to explain the “reason why” a little bit more thoroughly. I always seem to hit the publish button a little too soon :)

CTR matters to Google because that is what makes them money. They want to put the ads that make the most money in the best positions, obviously. If your ad has the highest CTR, you’re able to pay a lower CPC than all your competitors if your CTR makes up for it. Consider this scenario…

You are paying $0.20/click and have a 8% CTR. With that math, we can deduce that Google will make $16 per 1,000 impressions of your ad (CPM).

1000 imp X 0.08 = 80 clicks
80 clicks X $0.20 = $16 CPM

Now let’s say your next best competitor is getting a 5% CTR and is paying $0.30/click

1000 imp X 0.05 = 50 clicks
50 clicks X $0.30 = $15 CPM

As you can see, Google would give your ad a better position even though competitor #2 is paying a higher CPC than you. Competitor #2 would have to raise their bid or increase their CTR to beat you.

The most IDEAL situation is when your best converting ad is also the one with the highest CTR, but that is usually not the case. Usually, your best performing ad is NOT the one with the highest CTR.

4 comments »

Posted in Basics, Traffic

Are Your Ads Believable?

January 1st, 2012 by admin No comments »

Ask anyone what they think about the ads they see on the internet and the majority will say… SPAM! And frankly, it’s not hard to see why…

unbelievable adcopy

$90 dollar per hour at-home job? YEA FUCKING RIGHT. Only a small percentage of people would believe that shit (ie extremely desperate suckers). That ad very well may get a high CTR… but a high CTR is completely pointless if you are getting a shitty conversion rate!

Here’s another I just saw on Reddit.

not believable

/facepalm.

It’s been said that there are 3 reasons why people don’t buy.

  • Don’t want what you’re selling
  • Can’t afford it
  • DON’T BELIEVE AND/OR TRUST YOU

People will take action if they believe it can be done.

One way to make your stuff more believable is to show the flaws in the product. If we’re talking about those survey offers from the first example, tell them upfront that the most frustrating aspect of taking surveys is that they won’t be eligible to take every survey they come across.

That little bit of honesty right there goes a long way in building trust. Furthermore, it sets up expectations for the offer so people don’t refund it right away.

You don’t need to make your offer seem like the best thing since sliced bread because that comes off as desperate (<-- make sure to read that some time).

Gary Halbert talks about believability in a few of his newsletters. Use this link to find them via Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:thegaryhalbertletter.com+believability

The other issue is Trust. Once people believe you (or WANT to believe you) you need them to trust you. By far the easiest “thing” to do is to add contact info on your landers. As Gary Halbert says… “people want to know they can reach out and get ya!”.

Moving on… I wanted to do a quick poll of all my readers so I can understand you guys better. 2012 is now here and I want to write stuff that is actually relevant for you.

Firstly, do you do SEO, paid traffic, or both?

[polldaddy poll=4888799]

[polldaddy poll=5524067]

If there is anything you want to me to write about, leave a comment. If you want a certain kind of landing page template, let me know and I’ll add it to the landing page templates page.

No comments »

Posted in Basics, Copywriting, Haha

Need Coding Help? StackOverflow FTW

December 29th, 2011 by admin No comments »

stackoverflow.com logo

From basic HTML/CSS to advanced programming, StackOverflow.com is THE best place to get coding help on the entire internet bar none! Shit, just take a look at some of the response times…

stackoverflow response time

Questions answered in under 1 minute! They’ve got an Alexa rank of 156 so pretty much every serious programmer is on there. This place has saved my ass a few times now.

All the talented people on StackOverlow are extremely helpful and will help out when you’re in a bind. If some coding problem is keeping you from making teh monies, now you know where to go! Best website ever and I had to post about it because it’s so damn useful.

No comments »

Posted in Coding, HTML/CSS, Javascript, PHP, Useful Sites

How to Bypass a Clickbank Sales Page

December 20th, 2011 by admin 11 comments »

It’s really easy. All you do is drop your affiliate cookie and then redirect to the order page. Since you dropped your tracking cookie before redirecting to the order form, Clickbank will track fine and see you as the referring affiliate.

Doing this enables you to control and split test your own sales pages for any Clickbank offer and gives you amazing flexibility when it comes to promoting offers.

courage wolf affiliate advice

Can’t direct link because it’s got a fucking exit pop? Re-create it yourself without the exit-pop.

Is the owner shamelessly building an email list off your traffic and diverting the sale? Build your own (better) page without the optin box.

Seriously, how many sales pages on Clickbank are complete shit? How many need to be split tested? How many would you be embarrassed to show people in real life if they were your own? A huge percentage of them.

How to Drop the Cookie

All you do is put your affiliate link in an <img > tag and drop it on your page somewhere. Like this….

<img src="http://yourafflink.com" width="1" height="1" />

Whenever somebody loads a page that has that code, your affiliate cookie gets set – it acts as if somebody actually clicked your affiliate link. This is referred to as “cookie stuffing” and there is a right and wrong way to go about it.

The wrong way is to stuff cookies on your sales page (index.html) and drop a cookie on every single visitor. If you get caught, chances are you will get kicked out because you’d be getting sales that you really don’t deserve.

The right legit way is to drop the cookie on the redirect page (order.php) and then send people straight to the order form. Here is a code example of what your order.php page would look like.

<html>
<head>
<title>Processing</title>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://3.mikegeary1.pay.clickbank.net/" />
</head>
<body>
<img src="http://yourafflink.com" width="1" height="1" />
</body>
</html>

By doing a meta refresh set to 2 on order.php, the browser gets an extra second to completely load the page which is just to ensure that the cookie gets dropped. Just know that the meta refresh must be set to at least 1 so the cookie actually drops. You could add a little loading icon in there for effect if you wanted as well. It would probably be smart to add some tracking code in there as well (Clicky FTW).

Redirect to the Order Form

The format for order form links on CB is http://ProductNumber.VendorID.pay.clickbank.net/. Inspect the merchants sales page and hover your mouse over the “Add to Cart” button. That’s the link that goes straight to the order form and where you redirect people to after you drop the cookie.

Check out my demo page if you’d like to see a working example. When you click on the order button, it will drop my cookie and redirect you to the Clickbank order page. On the bottom of that page, you should see my example affiliate id: funkyslut

Why Do This At All?

Because most sales pages don’t convert well with cold traffic and being able to split test the merchants sales page yourself gives you a huge advantage when it comes to monetizing your traffic.

Fucking sales pages these days. They all take that standard formula that hasn’t changed since 1995: Centered text, big red headline, ugly graphics and hype-fueled adcopy. I can tell a sales page just by glancing at the template, and chances are your vistors can too.

Don’t you think the template alone might create some buyer resistance? We all know that people don’t like being sold to. Why not split test a page that looks like a sales page with a page that looks more like an article? And then split test headlines and openers until you find that magical appeal that blows everything else out of the water.

11 comments »

Posted in Basics, Coding, Copywriting, HTML/CSS, Scripts

TheGaryHalbertLetter.com Organized

November 25th, 2011 by admin 42 comments »

gary halbert

If you want to learn how to write high-converting adcopy then you need to study Gary Halbert, one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived. The thing is, if you’ve ever been to his site at TheGaryHalbertLetter.com, you know that the website is terribly organized. The content is amazing but all the newsletters are completely out of order.

You’ll be reading one where he refers to the last newsletter and you’ll be like damn, I haven’t read that one yet. So I did my best to organize it a bit. I did this for myself but then figured it would benefit everybody so I posted the links here.

For the most part, everything is pretty organized from 1986 (the year the newsletter started) to the 2000′s. All the misc. stuff at the bottom was taken directly off the website, but since there are no dates posted, is impossible to organize.

Note: Since some of the newsletters seem to be missing from the website (or just not indexed in Google) I uploaded the PDF here where you can read the missing pages. If you also hate reading 1,000 page .pdf documents, here are the links so you can read them online.

Read More: TheGaryHalbertLetter.com Organized

42 comments »

Posted in Copywriting, Useful Sites

Traits of Common Traffic Sources

November 23rd, 2011 by admin 3 comments »

Every traffic source is different, but here are a couple traits I think apply to certain kinds of traffic based on my experiences.

Search PPC – Probably the most stable paid traffic source due to new eyeballs consistently seeing your ads every day. Kind of like advertising with a billboard above the freeway. My longest campaign has been running untouched for over 1 year. Biggest problem is dealing with other PPC advertisers constantly coming in and bidding on your keywords.

Organic SEO – If you are ranking for 1 keyword, then it’s not very stable because it’s so easy to knock you out. But if you are ranking for thousands of keywords across hundreds of pages, then it is pretty stable in my experience. Organic sites are my favorite because they don’t require the day-to-day monitoring that paid traffic campaigns require.

PPV – The longest PPV campaign I had ran for about 4 or 5 months, but I have heard from friends that they have some campaigns that have lasted over a year. Overall PPV campaigns have to be the easiest to run.

Social – Facebook Ads probably has the highest rate of banner blindness. Instead of new eyeballs seeing your ads, the same demographic is seeing them over and over. You need to tweak your ads to keep them fresh if advertising to the same demographic. With that said, you can drive a shitload of volume with Facebook. You can easily do 10,000+ clicks/day if you have enough campaigns.

Media Buys – Unfortunately I do not have much personal experience with media buys (I’ve only done small direct-to-site buys) so I can’t comment just yet. Once I gain more experience I’ll write about it. But I’m guessing if the site gets most of its traffic from organic SEO, then it too would be pretty stable due to new eyeballs seeing your ads everyday. A forum on the other hand likely has the same group of users sucking up most of the impressions.

What has been your experiences? Leave a comment!

3 comments »

Posted in Traffic

Tshirts: The Best Default Offer Ever?

November 12th, 2011 by admin 1 comment »

How many times do you see a trending keyword/topic but can’t find a good affiliate offer to match it? All the time, right?

tshirt - best default offer?

Whatever is happening in the world, you can slap that shit on a tshirt and sell it. Right now the thing that comes to mind is the whole Occupy Wall Street thing.

Don’t think there is any money in Tshirts? Check this article about how a teen from NY made $120k in 48 hours by tapping into a trend that people were passionate about.

Tshirts = Impulse Buys :)

1 comment »

Posted in Marketing

A Look into The Minds of 2 Shopping Addicts

November 8th, 2011 by admin No comments »

Recently, I watched an episode of True Life on MTV titled “I’m a Compulsive Shopper” which profiles 2 young girls who both whip out their credit cards pretty much on demand, and are in credit card debt because of it.

As a marketer, it’s interesting to see how people justify spending themselves into huge debt. I mean, how could you not smile to yourself upon hearing a compulsive shoppers’ rationalization for buying yet another pair of expensive designer jeans…

“…but, but, it has a 5 year guarantee!”

Ha ha! :D Just that right there tells shows me just how effective guarantees really are at clinching the sale. If you’ve got a few minutes I’ve embedded the episode below. You may pick up a few new insights that you have considered before. I know I sure have.

Also, they say you gotta get to know your target market, so if you work in the health/weight loss market it may be worth looking at the “True Life…I’m Obese” episode. You can see a full list of episodes here.

No comments »

Posted in Copywriting, Marketing

A Pic of The Facebook Ads Team

October 25th, 2011 by admin 1 comment »

Finally, a picture of the Facebook Ads Team has found its way on to the internet.

The original if you’d like to Photoshop it and join in on the fun.

1 comment »

Posted in Haha

An Untapped Traffic Source

October 18th, 2011 by admin 1 comment »

I’m probably going to regret posting this but I’m feeling like I should do a good deed for the day :D

The untapped traffic source = press releases

Here are some advantages to promoting with Press Releases…

  • tons of traffic when done right
  • you can get super valuable links for SEO which boost your sites in the serps
  • did i mention huge volumes of traffic when you get it right?

The only thing about submitting press releases that you need to know is…

  • It has to be newsworthy so it actually gets picked up in the first place.

That’s it. You can monetize the traffic if you get it.

Not newsworthy = not picked up = no traffic = no links = no sales.

All you need to do is think in a problem/solution format. You submit press releases about new and current problems in the world and offer solutions to those problems.

Bonus points if you can figure out an angle or niche where you can duplicate it consistently.

What is newsworthy anyway? Well, when stuff is new or things happen it can be newsworthy if given a compelling title. Just start paying attention to the news and try to pair up the news you hear with an affiliate offer. Maybe a creative idea will jump out at you.

What just happened in the news that you can create a news piece around? What’s the problem that is caused? What’s the solution to fix or alleviate the problem?

Some Ideas

Currently, since the US economy is in shambles, you could probably do well by staying up with political and/or financial news and writing press releases related to the financial crisis or whatever. Then funnel that traffic to debt offers.

Violent crimes happen frequently, right? Things like rapes/burglery/assaults. Those stories always get picked up in the news right? Maybe you could write news pieces about big crimes and funnel all that traffic that is generated to a home security offer?

Being able to use the exact same strategy and just duplicate it over and over is how you scale.

Another example since I’m feeling nice.

Let’s say you’re an antivirus/registry cleaner affiliate and you notice new viruses are being distributed every week. You could send out a press release every single week with a news piece on the “new” virus (problem), then you offer the solution (affiliate offer).

Once you are able to see the angles and figure out how to create newsworthy pieces, you can use the media and the news sites as your own personal traffic source. Plus you can a metric shit ton of links for SEO purposes. Basically, you become a reporter who soft pitches at the end of her news reports ;)

1 comment »

Posted in Marketing, Traffic