Archive for the ‘Stuff That is Actually Useful’ Category

The post below is ripped directly (with permission) from PPV Playbook forums. I keep telling people that PPV Playbook is good shit and tutorials like this from its members are the reason why. It’s one of the best tutorials I’ve ever seen.

The wicked ginger Papa Groomez authored this wonderful article. He doesn’t do much with his website but you can follow him on on the twitter.

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Click images to enlarge them

It’s been a while since I’ve started a thread on here and shared some info with everyone. This is geared to newer marketers, but if you are an experienced know-it-all that wants some laughs, keep reading.

.<.rant>
I was just responding to a thread started by someone that now seems to have been deleted. It was a very broad question on making high ctr banners.

After typing my response and making 6 banners to show examples, I was a little perturbed that the thread was gone so I’m going to post my work here.

A lot of us already know that there is no secret to getting high ctr on banners (or anything for that matter ie landers, text ads, ctas, popups). It’s just a lot of speculating (at first) at what we think will work and then gathering data and going from there. As marketers, it’s important to test.

I remember when I didn’t know what a landing page looked like when I first started in this business. I looked everywhere to find the answer. I realize now that it was a dumb question but I really had no concept of what a landing page was. Conversely, it’s easy to look at a virgin marketer asking questions like this and scoffing at them. I’ll speculate and say that 80% of the time, they really aren’t trolling and have no clue, no direction and no guidance on where to go from here.

.<./rant>

So, here’s how to make high CTR banners:

Let’s say you have a 728×90 leaderboard

Chances are, that banner is going to have a low ctr, but not necessarily. It always depends on your audience or who you are marketing to. They are the ones that decide the ctr of a banner. Always make multiple versions to see what works and what doesn’t and go from there.

However, there are a few things you should do when making multiple versions.

#1 Add Call to Action

First, address your call to action. Can you drive more attention to it? Sure, let’s make it look like a link. There are many ways to drive attention to your call to action. You can make it a button, render it to look like a link (like we did here), change the text etc…

#2 Add Images

Secondly, we can add images. Maybe if we put a cute pic of a bear saying something, our audience will respond with a higher CTR.

#3 Make the Image Pop (Split test it!)

If we see a rise in CTR, we know we’re on to something. There bear is doing the job. Let’s keep playing with the image. One trick I like to do is make a false border. It’s nothing more than putting an image in front of a border to make it “pop out” to the visitor.

#4 Animate!

Animation is another way to drive up CTR. Feast your eyes on this delayed animation banner. This works very well when annoying the viewer with ugly colors, animating the cta, or using it with ad text.

#5 Tweening for Better Animation

If that’s not enough, you can play with tweening your banners. In photoshop this is a fun way to make fluid animation within your ads. It can work to increase your CTR, but it doesn’t necessarily mean more ROI. Always test.

(Editors note: Tweening is very easy in Photoshop- just look up some tutorials. Be aware! It adds significant file-size versus something that is a simple on-off blink!)

Hope that gives you some help. Just make many variations with these tips in mind and you’ll find your gems. For more info, Ryan has some other tips on this blog: Tips for Massive CTR and there is another good thread on animation here on PPVPlaybook.

Follow Big Papa Groomez
for more funtastic facts

My comrade turned me onto DonorsChoose.org. I actually heard a lot about this site when it was being mentioned a lot on Colbert Report last month, but never checked it out.

DonorsChoose is a truly amazing idea. Basically teachers and classrooms from our decrepit education system put up ‘projects’ and you, the donor, get to throw money at them. Whether its $5 or $100, you put that money towards individual projects to help teachers chip away at their goal. Some want to buy computers, some art supplies, and others muscial instruments. At the same time, it’s pretty depressing to know how in-need some of our schools really are. (“We need to buy books…. ” Really? They don’t give you books at that school?)

I love this site because it’s addicting. Once you donate a few bucks, you want to do it some more. It’s beautiful because it bypasses our ignorant government. “Every Child Left Behind!” Why pay taxes that will end up in the hands of nimrod politicians who have to distribute the money back to schools (with a little off the top).

Cut out the middleman and start donating to kids that really need it! The power of the internets!

How to +1 Your Karma Points by Distributing Your Ill-Gotten Gains

1. Visit DonorsChoose
2. Pick a project. If you can’t find a project, pick a school from your hometown or state. If that doesn’t work, do it by hottest teacher.
3 Distribute some of your ill-gotten gains to the project. Make it rain on these kids like you’re putting them through college (in a way, you are…)
4. Repeat once a week.

Stop being a cheap loser and donate at least $10 to some kids now. The smallest amount goes a long way for these kids, and large amounts are just ballin’.

This is an article with some PPV (pay-per-view) tips. Some of these tips refer to Trafficvance, which is a relatively high-quality traffic source for pay-per-view traffic. As far as PPV goes, TrafficVance is one of the best, if not the best, for actually delivering you legitimate people to sign-up and buy shit with decent volume.

Before you ask: No, I will not be your TrafficVance referral.

So if you are a PPV marketer and / or TrafficVance user, these tips below may help with your campaigns.

1. Pausing Campaigns Glitch

This is something that made me “Wtf” for a long time, then today I realized why this was happening.

I have a habit of “Pausing” targets that don’t work. Over time it becomes my little collection of targets that might work for another campaign. Rather than deleting them and losing them forever, I pause them in the campaign.

Obviously the smart thing to do would be to keep them in a text file anyway, then delete them from the campaign so this shit below doesn’t happen ….

1) You pause a campaign, spend some time changing shit on your landers THEN you change your tracking link. This triggers a “review” from TrafficVance. If you change your tracking link in any way, shape, or form, it has to be reviewed again.

2) When the campaign passes review and is “Active” again, all of those “Paused” targets are “Active” again too.

Fuck! For quite a while, I’d be looking at stats and thinking to myself, “I swear to god I paused this target many times before…. what the fuck….”

3) Nothing really happens if you just pause and unpause your campaign. I’m not sure what happens when you change the tracking link on a live campaign (nothing as far as I can tell)

So the pro tip: Don’t change the tracking link on a paused campaign if you have a bunch of “Paused” targets in it. They will all go live again. Change the tracking link with live campaigns only, or unpause the campaign first then change the tracking link.

This can obviously become a problem because you’re wasting money on targets that you already know don’t work, and if they are high-volume targets you’ll spend a pretty penny before you realize it. I don’t know if I’m the only one who has run into this problem before, but if this happens to you, now you know why.

Don’t leave paused targets in a campaign. Export them out and delete them.

2) The Power of Multiplication, or Stop Bidding Like a Dumbass

I’m starting to thing that affiliate marketers don’t know basic math.

PPV has been hailed as some miracle traffic source because “A view is only a penny!” and “You can bid by as little as 1/10 of a cent!”

It’s not some miracle traffic source. You have to make the shit work just like any other traffic source. Just because bids are a penny doesn’t mean you can disregard them and throw them in the air like Andrew Wee.

Let’s take a look at PPV pricing in the real world. The minimum bid for most PPV traffic is $.01 and some are $.015. Per 1,000 impressions, that’s a $10.00 – $15.00 CPM. That’s an atrociously high CPM when compared to media banner advertising.

Then let’s say you have a landing page with a 10% CTR (Clickthru rate). Out of that, 1% of people will convert on your offer. For shits and giggles, the offer pays out $20.00.

For every 1,000 people you send to that landing page, 100 people will go to the offer, and 1 will convert into a lead (1,000 x 10% x 1% = 1). So you spent $10 to make $20. Good job bro.

Now let’s see what happens when you’re competing with people. Every 1/10 of a penny increment essentially increases your cost by $1 (when you think of it in terms of 1,000). If you’re both being aggressive, within a few increments the bid might be $.018 or $.021. “Whatever, I’ll keep increasing the bid because it’s only a tenth of a penny!”

Wrong dipshit! A tenth of a penny is a $1 in terms of 1,000, and when you multiply it by hundreds of targets then its many dollars. It’s the power of multiplication and the reason why small changes have a massive effect on your campaign.

There are only two things I think when I see stupidly high bid prices for a target- 1) “This person must have a ridiculously high converting page or offer” or 2) “This person must be a fucking idiot.”

Usually, it’s the latter.

Learn to Share, or be the First Loser

If you get into a bidding war, you can win but most times you’re both better off sharing. It’s basically a game of chicken. Who will give up first?

In order to win, you must know your boundaries. In the example above, $.02 is your break even point. Go any higher than that, and you lose money. Get close to that ($.019), and your margins are slim as shit. Ideally you want the bid to be as low as possible (no shit huh?)

So you win if the other guy gives up and you’re left with 1st place. Half the time this happens (Victory!), but the other half of the time is when it doesn’t….

Managing bids with PPV is a pain in the dick. There are two reasons why you won’t win a bidding war, or don’t even want to win:
1) Managing the bidding takes up far too much time, especially if you’re going back and forth with someone else who apparently has nothing better to do. At some point its just not worth it.
2) You’re playing against automated bidding software.

In these 2 cases, the time spent adjusting bids is better spent working on another campaign, taking a shit, or reading a book. This is especially true if its a low-volume target. Why spend so much time trying to score a 18 more views a day?

Learn to Share – The best resolution in a bidding war is to share. That means matching the bid to the other guy and splitting the 1st place traffic 50 / 50. You’ll get less traffic, but it’s better than increasing the bids to the point where no one makes money (except the ad network.)

Be the First Loser – If you don’t get the joke: Being the first loser means 2nd place.

Sometimes matching the bid of the 1st place guy is impractical, especially if the bid price looks like Exhibit A:

I don’t know what this guy is smoking, but that’s almost a 3 cent difference in bid price. For every 1,000 views, that’s $30. Basically this guy is paying $30 more per 1,000 views when it could only be $1 (lowering his bid to $.013 and still keeping first place)

In these cases you want to be second place. Using the original example, you’re making money in 2nd place with a $.014 bid. The 1st place bid might be $.022, where you’d be losing money. Even though its less traffic, it really doesn’t matter because you’re making money- not losing it because you want to be an aggressive dickhead.

Don’t Hit the “Make My Bid the Highest” Button

Josh Todd at InsideAffiliate wrote about this a while ago.

When I first ventured into PPV, I noticed that someone would always outbid me by $.005. I thought it was a script or software, and I always got pissed because it just meant paying more to match him or go over. And when I went over, low and behold, he’s back in 1st with a $.005 higher bid….

The race to being unprofitable was swift.

It turns out that it wasn’t some script. It was just some tard hitting the “Make My Bid the Highest” button. Since I never used that button before, I didn’t know what it did. I always assumed it’d go a 1/10 of a penny over the next highest guy. Nope, it’s half a penny.

I guess some people like to pay $5 (per 1,000) for their 1st place position instead of $1.

Nobody but the ad network wins when using the “Make My Bid the Highest.”

Reset Your Bids Once in a While

I don’t use any automated bidding tools. Generally I am able to leave my bids alone and not have to give too much of a shit about the bidding. I start a campaign and bid up until my “break-even” point (or what I think it is at that time), then just let it run.

With some targets, you want 1st place and are willing to pay for it. You might get into a bidding war at first, win, and not touch your bids for days or weeks. Over time, the other bidders have lowered their 2nd place position to a bid much lower than yours.

TrafficVance doesn’t tell you the bid price of people lower than you. So you could be paying $.03 for a target when the guy in 2nd is only paying $.011. In this case, you’re over-paying for 1st place. I have a really ghetto way of remedying this, which I like to do every few days. Really it’s just a “bid cleanup” and it helps to lower your overall campaign CPM.

Managing hundreds of targets individually sucks. This method will leave you with a few competitive targets that you can manage by hand.

1) Reset all your bids to $.01 (minimum)
2) Sort by bid position. The most competitive targets show up at the top (for example you’re in 20th place because 20 people are bidding on the target)
3) Select every target that’s 2nd place, 3rd place, and higher. Make their bids $.011.
4) This knocks you into 1st for many targets where its just you and someone else (and the other person is bidding $.01). It increases your bid position for targets that are more competitive than just two people.
5) Keep repeating the process, but each time take a careful look at the bid positions. If you’re 2nd place with a $.012 bid and 1st place is $.021, there’s no point in going any higher (incrementing to $.013) to pay for the same amount of traffic.

Deselect the ones where there is no point to increasing, and increase the bid to $.012.

6) Keep repeating the process until you’re left with a small number of competitive targets where you can manually bid.

This post has gone on a lot longer than what i originally intended it to be. Thanks adderoll!

This post is based on a reply I wrote in the PPV Playbook forum. I really like the quality of PPVPlaybook’s forum because its a closed community, and people are more willing to share than on a public forum. Despite being an overall scumbag on the internet, when it comes down to it I like to help people when I can (unfortunately, there is no e-book coming soon from PPC.bz. Or ever.)

This isn’t an affiliate link. PPVPlaybook is legit.

Now, I know I’ve been a little hard on the newbies lately. I realize that we’ve all been in that newbie position, and when someone can post something helpful it usually doesn’t go unnoticed. Maybe this post can also help some people who are not necessarily newbies, but are struggling to figure out paid traffic.

The problem some internet marketers have is Traffic Source Attention-Deficit Disorder. This is the act of jumping to and from, back and forth, to all the traffic sources out there. Rather than focusing on one thing and getting it working, they think their problems can be solved by finding a different traffic source and getting it working there. And when it doesn’t work at the new traffic source, they repeat the steps… forever and ever until they give up and have to get a job at McDonalds working for Nick Throlson. (Just kidding Nick, I love you in that ‘you make me laugh but you’re oblivious as to why’ way. Enjoy the traffic.)

“I can’t get this traffic source to work, which one should I try next?”

Anyway, someone had a question that went like this:
“When do you move over to other traffic sources like social media or PPC when you can’t get PPV to work? How will I know if PPV isn’t for me? How and when to scale to other traffic sources?”

While this question seems like a “How do I scale to other traffic sources?” kind of question, it’s not. It’s more of a “I can’t get this traffic source to work, which one should I try next?”

My reply, although modified quite a bit for this post, is below.

Every Traffic Source You Jump into Needs to Become Your Bitch

Scaling means taking a successful campaign, and moving it into another traffic source. There are few times where a campaign can be ported over to another traffic source without any changes. Most of the time it will require a few hours or days to understand the new traffic source and adjust accordingly. PPV traffic is the least strict, Facebook has its own rules, and Adwords has very defined rules on what needs to be on your landing pages.

The problem is many newbs give up on traffic sources too early. They blame it on the traffic source “It doesn’t work!”, but don’t blame the fact they are still poor marketers. If you know how to market your product, if you really know how to sell – you can make almost any campaign work on any traffic source.

When I say campaign, I don’t mean some $5 a day direct-linking campaign. I mean campaign like you’re taking this shit seriously. You took the time to setup landing pages, maybe an autoresponder, the bells and whistles. Something that is your “property” that doesn’t depend on one offer going down (meaning it’s non-dependent on any offer- such as, you’re collecting leads yourself, or your target niche is big enough to have sufficient offers for switching out.)

Some people preach “Don’t depend on one traffic source.”

While that’s true in a some instances, newbies tend to take this too literally. They move around blaming the traffic, but usually its because they don’t know the fundamentals of marketing and salesmanship. When you spread yourself around to many traffic sources, you might be thinking “I’m covering my bases in case this traffic goes down!”

That’s true, and its a necessary strategy, but it only matters if your campaigns are making money. If you’re consistently unsuccessful, then there really is no point to diversifying garbage.

There are very few chances of your business going down because of the traffic source kicking you off. Adwords is the huge exception to the rule. Otherwise, traffic sources will modify their rules to make it harder on affiliates, but if you have that traffic source mastered, you learn to weasel into the nooks and crannies. (For example, Facebook’s consistent changes to their guidelines.)

While you can take a direct linking campaign and spread it all over the web, success doing this is mostly sheer luck (you would have been much luckier 3 to 7 years ago.) Still doable, but not as easy as it used to be.

Why not just create your own luck? Master one traffic source with one or a few campaigns. Make that traffic source your bitch. Once you have a real winner, move onto the next traffic source. Don’t stop until its profitable there. Rinse and repeat. If you’re doing it right, this process will take a while to “key” your ads on every source of traffic, but its well worth it.

Tweaking your sales funnel is an on-going process. The work never stops on that. But moving to a new traffic source requires getting over the learning curve. That can take an hour, many hours, or many days.

Every traffic source has its own technical details you need to learn. At the same time, you need to understand where the traffic is coming from. Not all traffic is created equal.

Credit Where Credit is Due

I can’t take full credit for this wisdom in my post (if there is any.) The idea of “focus on one traffic source” really didn’t solidify in my brain until I listened to some stuff from Scott Rewick at Media-Mentors.com. Specifically, it was an interview with Jason at A4D Affiliate Network, aka Smaxor, that brought the point home.

I don’t remember where I heard the interview, but if you can find it, definitely listen. The main point from the interview was that Smax doesn’t jump into shit like a pansy. He will spend thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to make this work on that traffic source. All successful affiliates have the same mentality- if the traffic is there, and your offer seems like it should work, then there’s no reason why you can’t make it work.

Sometimes an offer on certain traffic just won’t work, no matter what you try. That’s just a fact of life. Maybe that traffic is all junk. Maybe the offer isn’t hitting home with the traffic. But you will be far more successful in the long if you take the “I’m going to make this traffic my bitch” approach, rather than the “I hope this shit works. Oh it didn’t work. Let me try something else… rinse and repeat” approach.

One approach is wishing for success. The other approach is forcing success.

The Fundamentals of Selling

It all boils down to salesmanship. If you don’t know how to write copy, then you’re at a huge disadvantage.

Even if you’re strictly doing direct linking, you still have to be able to write tiny ads, whether its small POF and Facebook Ads, slightly larger Adwords ads, or bigger creatives for media display. Even the ads on your shitty blog can always be written better.

You just can’t escape this. If you’re doing affiliate marketing, you need to be a marketer. It’s in the goddamn name. What’s fucking wrong with you?

If you want to be a better marketer, read these books.

Understanding Where Your Traffic is Coming From and Scaling

Each and every traffic source has its own nuances, and they all take a little while to learn. PPV traffic is different from MSN’s sponsored listings, which is different from Facebook’s social traffic, which is slightly different from Plenty of Fish’s traffic.

Assuming you have a decent grasp on copy writing, the next step is understanding the traffic source.

Technically, they are all different. By technically, I mean the actual processes of setting up campaigns, targeting, reporting, rules, regulations, and all that. Then you want to understand where the traffic is coming from: how and when do they see the ads and who sees the ads.

Pay Per Click Search – Adwords, MSN/Yahoo, and everything else. Pay per click is fairly straight-forward to understand. Someone is searching for a keyword, you display an ad. Relevance is most important.

Most people have difficulty figuring out the technical aspects of pay per click: Bidding strategies, finding keywords, and keeping their landing pages within certain guidelines (like Quality Score bullshit.)

Scaling PPC is also fairly straight-forward too. Once you understand how PPC works, you can scale it up internally (sticking with Adwords for example, but adding new sets of keywords) and / or moving to another PPC platform (moving your MSN campaign to Google.)

Pay Per Click Content Networks – Google’s Content Network, for example. You create ads, text, image, or flash, that get displayed on all of Google’s Partner’s sites. Technically, it’s not too tough to figure out, especially once you get familiar with a platform (Google’s Search to Google’s Content Network is nearly an identical process).

You need to consider how people see these ads though. They’re not searching for anything specific. The ads are displayed on websites that are relevant to your keywords. Your goal here is to distract people from what they’re doing. Strong offer and strong call to action are a must.

Display Media Buying Networks – Adblade, Burstmedia, Pulse360 and tons of others. Display media is for more plentiful than what Google’s Content Network can come up with. People “see” these ads the same way as Content Network: They are displayed alongside relevant content, if the ad network lets you target directly or by keyword. If you don’t target directly, then its an optimization process. Show your ads everywhere, then start eliminating the stuff that isn’t working.

The biggest technical difference from Adwords is that you’re dealing with a person.

In most cases, you’re dealing with an account rep. While the traffic works nearly the same to Google’s Content Network, personal relationships are a key factor. You’ll never talk to anyone at Google (well, 99% of people), but most media buy platforms give you an account rep. Sometimes, you might meet that account rep at a conference like Affiliate Summit and they hook you up, rather then you finding them first.

I’m far from a media buying expert, so I’m not gonna ramble on here too long. I just want to point out the difference between traffic platforms that require more dealing people, and those that have no people. Its something you have to consider when scaling a campaign from PPC to media, or media platform to other media platform.

It takes some negotiation skills. They have all this inventory and you want some. What you’ll pay for it will depend on how good your hustle is.

Pay Per View – Technically, it’s simple. Bid on shit, pop. The questions you need to ask yourself are: Is it pop up, or pop under (massive difference in how you have to create your ads.) What do I do with the landers? Since you’re not creating ads, your landing page is going to be your make it or break it point. How does the platform get their installs to pop their ads?

Who is looking at these ads? This is going to vary greatly depending on your targets. Some people do the simple ‘find super-relevant targets to this offer and pop’. Still works, but since everyone else does that, it gets competitive. If you’re doing it right, you’re more focused on either demographics (collection of sites that a demographic visits) or high traffic targets.

Focusing on a demographic means scaling is easier because you’re always able to add related targets. Then you can move it to another PPV platform. Or you can modify your offer / landing page to pertain to different demographics.

You can also focus on a high-traffic target which you could spend a significant amount on per day. The work involved there is a massive amount of testing to key your ads, that is, if you can ever key them. In some cases its just a matter of rotating offers and keeping the one or few that work.

Social Traffic – They display like tiny search ads, but nobody is searching for them. You have to get highly creative and relevant (by hitting the right demos). People aren’t looking for shit- they’re playing games and looking at party photos. How are you going to talk them into clicking on your shit?

Shit Traffic – Last but not least, there is some traffic you just can’t get to work because the traffic itself is garbage. This traffic comes from various nether-regions of the internet, but the point is that it will take a lot of money to figure out, or will never work at all.

Earlier in this post I wrote “You can make almost any campaign work on any traffic source.” That’s true when you stick to the major, well-known ad networks out there. Here’s a list. Don’t believe buying 50,000 hits to your website for $9 on DigitalPoint is going to get you very far.

Stay Focused – Master Something

There are a ton more types of traffic. Some traffic combines variations of the above, some are completely different. I won’t even touch on email traffic, mobile traffic, and network syndication.

The lesson here is that each and every traffic source is different in its own little (well, massive) way. It might be easy to port a PoF campaign to Facebook, but it will be much harder to port a PoF campaign to TrafficVance. Try taking a PPV campaign (usually very lax rules) to Google (very strict rules on what needs to be on your landing page) and you’ll soon see the work involved.

Always Be Improving Your Funnel – You funnel can be simple landing page to a complex email capture and followup campaign, all the way up to your own offer. You should always be improving your sales funnel so the revenue goes up. Switching to a different traffic source will require some changes to your initial contact with the visitor (changes to a landing page based on a new demographic, which creatives to use, etc), but most of the time your end goal for the visitor remains the same.

The Traffic isn’t Going Anywhere – Stop worrying that Facebook or Google will dry up. They won’t. There’s more traffic out there that anyone can buy.

Winning Campaigns FTW – Once you have a successful campaign, you have two options.

1) Take this campaign to other traffic sources. Port a PPC campaign over to another PPC platform. Or modify a successful PPV campaign to work on a Social Network platform.

2) Scale Internally – A winning PlentyofFish campaign can be scaled to different demographics on PoF. A winning PPV campaign can be scaled to a slightly different set of targets. Or, you can create a new campaigns entirely on the traffic source you’re using (as long as you’re seeing the light on how this type of traffic works.)

The point is that a winning campaign gives you motivation. At some point, it just clicks. It’s easier to modify something that’s already working, then to try to continuously create something successful from scratch.

It takes time and money to master paid traffic. If you spend a few hundred bucks on a traffic source, give up, and move on to spend another few hundred bucks at a new traffic source, give up, you’re going to be worn thin. Many newbies wonder why this happens, but the writing is on the wall. You’re wasting your time and resources looking for that golden nugget, when you should be creating that golden nugget (or magic bullet lolz) yourself.

This may or not be helpful for some people, but Adexchanger.com released a pretty in-depth report, along with a cool chart of the online media eco-system. To download the report, check out their post (look ma, no email required!)

True story, I once did a “media buy” on dg and lost all 8 figures I had chillin’ at JP Morgan Chase. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

I forget where I found this, but it is a comprehensive little PDF on mobile marketing. If you want a start to finish guide on this space, Download the Mobile Buyer’s Guide. I haven’t read it, so don’t quiz me on it.

To celebrate the season premiere of Hell’s Kitchen

source site