Archive for the ‘Stuff That is Actually Useful’ Category

You’ve probably heard of AffBuzz, a neat little site that aggregates a ton of affiliate marketing feeds. The best part about AffBuzz is that it lists PPC.bz towards the top.

That is all.

Jay Weintraub – This dude is heavy on the long posts, but they provide some great insight into the affiliate space.

Many Body Theory – I don’t know what the name means but the blog is good.

PPC Hacking – Diving into some more advanced Adwords theories.

That is all.

FTC got your balls tucked up in your stomach? PPC.bz drops the knowledge yet again.

Here are the actual FTC guildelines for Endorsements and Testimonials. Here’s my “disclaimer” I didn’t read them I don’t know what it says. It looks like a daunting read. I have to print it out so I can read it when I take a duece, then wipe my ass with it. Here’s a link to the Public Comments of a bunch of companies to put in their 2 cents. Maybe Andrew Wee can read it and give us a summary?

Perhaps we should all get together and write our own letter?

“From the Desk of PPC.bz
Dear Federal Trade Commission:
Shallow, and pedantic.
-Signed, The Concerned

But seriously these are “guidelines” and not law or hard-and-fast rules. If you wanted to educate yourself on the topic then you have the information at hand. I just really don’t feel like reading them and writing a post about it. I stopped doing reports when I finished college so fuck that noise.

This is a pretty common question. Some newbcakes will ask, “Will my domain name affect my PPC campaigns? Is spending $500 (or a lot more) on a short-tail and / or brandable, domain name worth it? Or should you just spend $9 on a non-generic, “who gives a fuck” domain name?”

If you know anything, then yes, absolutely everything you do in PPC will have an effect on something else, including the domain name.

For the most part gurus talk out their asses when they give advice, so how about we post some cold hard data? PPC.bz drops the knowledge once again.

Read this Case Study on Improving CTR with a generic domain name by MemorableDomains then stop asking stupid questions.

This is a neat little tool that shows Alexa rank at the bottom of your Firefox Browser. It also adds these mini-graphs to your Google Search Results.

Get that shit

Seriously. It’s easy. By starting your own offer, you get the power of super affiliates promoting your offer through many networks! Then all you have to do is put your product together!

All you need is $33 to get started!

• Go To The Bank and Get Coins of various shapes and sizes with $20
• Print up your own Obama stickers
• Apply to Coins
• Ship Product. Do not let people cancel (key here!)
• …
• Profit!

This might be Newbie 101 shit but I’m writing it anyway. This article is geared more towards actual marketing, rather than those playing the numbers game of copying peoples ads on Facebook. With cheap enough traffic you can pretty much do anything and profit, but when margins aren’t huge and clicks are expensive, squeezing those pennies out of your campaign like a shifty jew can make or break it.

I don’t remember where I picked up this “catchphrase”, but I think it was in the book Always Be Testing: (great book by the way. The book actually has to do more with split-testing practices than Google’s Optimizer. Go buy it and make me 3 cents through my aff link):

Follow the Scent

Now what the fuck does that mean? Well, every online marketing campaign has its main components: traffic source -> ad copy (whether image or text) -> landing page -> offer. Any half-assed affiliate marketer will split-test the offers and networks, the landing pages, the ad copy, etc… but sometimes we forget that there’s an actual path taken by the visitor. You’re looking at your campaign front-to-back, back-to-front, upside-down, while the visitor is taking a path laid out to them. We might change something on an LP and completely fuck up conversion rates because we broke the “scent.”

So when you’re split-testing and creating campaigns, you have to carefully look what you’re doing so you can separate things into changes that will effect the path (example: headline), and changes that are isolated from the path (example: color of a call-to-action button). Of course there’s crossover, but most changes will lean to one side or the other.

“Follow the scent” implies that a visitor has intention when they click your ad. They read your ad, like what you’re saying, and expect to have their curiosity answered on your landing page. So if your ad has nothing to do with your landing page, or your landing page has nothing to do with your ads, then you’re not providing a very “followable” scent, are you?

Sometimes you have to step back and look at your overall campaign. We tend focus on the individual components to squeeze more CTR, or conversion rates out of our shit, but we may not realize that one change is fucking up our “scent”

Of course, most marketers won’t make this mistake and will provide some relevance. But most times you can be even more relevant, like the color theme of your ads can match the color theme of your landing page. That’s just an example, and it’s not a hard-and-fast rule either. Always be testing because what you think will work has a chance of not working when applied.

You want to minimize roadblocks on your conversion path. Roadblocks in our situation are things that will confuse, throw-off, or distract your visitor. But mostly it’s because you’re not providing the visitor what they wanted (or expected) when they clicked your ad.

How Good Campaigns are Made

Some campaigns are made by throwing a bunch of shit on the wall and seeing what sticks. You set-up a 10,000 keyword (which i would never actually do) and over time see that 50 are profitable. That’s good, but not good enough.

When you want to squeeze the money out of a keyword campaign like this example, you would start creating a highly-relevant landing page for each keyword. Improve the conversion path to improve the end result: conversions motherfucker!

You can take this route, or you can plan ahead and build your campaign in a way that provides relevance from the beginning.

Relevance is Right?

Fuck! Was Google right the whole time when they were ramming “relevance” down our throats? Basically “following the scent” is relevance. Creating relevance is an ass-ton of work, but that’s why the hardest working people are making chedda.

Minimizing Workload for Building Out and LP for Every Situation

So ideally you need a landing page for each situation and every type of visitor. But this sucks because it takes a lot of work.

If you wanted perfect relevance, there would be a different landing page for every type of visitor, keyword, ad, etc. In the real world, no one is going to do this shit, but you can find a middle ground. Every minute of planning you do will save you many more down the line.

I read a blog post that inspired this article. I was only going to post the link, but decided on babbling on instead and wasting a few hours of my day. Blogging sucks. Anyway, the post is this: Landing Page Planning and Strategy

That’s a really good read, and definitely something worth considering. When you plan out a new campaign, ask your self the tough questions. Who are my visitors going to be? How did they get here? What do they want? So on and so on.

If you’re feeling sassy create yourself a little chart like that so you have a road map, or at least a general guide line of what will work and what will probably not work so you don’t waste time doing it.

How Does it Apply?

How does the Landing Page Planning article apply to your situation? Goddammit why do I have to spell everything out for you newbcakes?

• Media Buy
  • You have a rough idea of who visits the site you’re buying traffic from because you read this article. Make your landing page relevant to those types of visitors.
  • Or make your offer a “special offer” for that website’s visitors. The now-suspect “Welcome Facebook User!” graphic on popular IQ test offers makes those visitors feel warm and fuzzy inside!
  • While you’re at it, try making your image ad look like its part of the site. It’s worth trying to confuse the shit out of someone to see if CTR improves
• Adwords Search – If you aren’t aware that Google loves relevance then you should slap chop yourself.
• Image Ads
  • Does your banner lead to a landing page that has no relevance? Well, what the fuck? A great example from Always Be Testing: Client had image ads with the Gieco Gecko (if I remember correctly) that lead to lead form with a different color scheme and a woman’s picture. “What does this page have to do with the Gecko?” thought the visitors.
  • Can you split your ads and landing pages to be more relevant to males and females? For example image ad with chick leads to landing page with chick. Ad copy reads more to women’s interests.
• Spamming – I don’t spam for shit, so fuck me if this is right. But see if spamming for relevance works over spamming for traffic… for example spam video game forums with video game sites, not just to get traffic to a bunch of random sites

Use with Caution

Like I said, these aren’t hard and fast rules. Everyone’s situation is different, so always test and track your shit. With cheap enough traffic you can ignore all of this horseshit I just spewed and still be profitable. And sometimes being completely irrelevant can work better than providing a scent to follow.

But you’ll never learn what tends to work and what tends not to work if you aren’t tracking and testing everything.