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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Easy Profits Using PPC In Your Affiliate Marketing Business

PPC is one of the four basic types of Search Engines. PPC is also one of the most cost-effective ways of targeted internet advertising. According to Forbes magazine, PPC or Pay Per Click, accounts to 2 billion dollars a year and is expected to increase to around 8 billion dollars by the year 2008.
Let us take a quick look at how PPC Search Engines work.
These engines create listings and rate them based on a bid amount the website owner is willing to pay for each click from that search engine. Advertisers bid against each other to receive higher ranking for a specific keyword or phrase.
The highest bidder for a certain keyword or phrase will then have the site ranked as number 1 in the PPC Search Engines followed by the second and third highest bidder, up to the last number that have placed a bid on the same keyword or phrase. Your ads then will appear prominently on the results pages based on the dollar amount bid you will agree to pay per click.
How do you make money by using PPC into your affiliate marketing business?
Most affiliate programs only pay when a sale is made or a lead delivered after a visitor has clickthrough your site. Your earnings will not always be the same as they will be dependent on the web site content and the traffic market.
The reason why you should incorporate PPC into your affiliate marketing program is that earnings are easier to make than in any other kind of affiliate program not using PPC. This way, you will be making profit based from the clickthroughs that your visitor will make on the advertiser’s site. Unlike some programs, you are not paid per sale or action.
PPC can be very resourceful of your website. With PPC Search Engines incorporated into your affiliate program, you will be able to profit from the visitor’s who are not interested in your products or services. The same ones who leave your site and never comes back.
You will not only get commissions not only from those who are just searching the web and finding the products and services that they wanted but you will be able to build your site’s recognition as a valuable resource. The visitors who have found what they needed from you site are likely to come back and review what you are offering more closely. Then they will eventually come back to search the web for other products.
This kind of affiliate program is also an easy way for you to generate some more additional revenues. For example, when a visitor on your site does a search in the PPC Search Engine and clicks on the advertiser bided listings, the advertisers’ account will then be deducted because of that click. With this, you will be compensated 30% to 80% of the advertisers’ bid amount.
PPC is not only a source of generating easy profits; it can also help you promote your own site. Most of the programs allow the commissions received to be spent for advertising with them instantly and with no minimum earning requirement. This is one of the more effective ways to exchange your raw visitors for targeted surfers who has more tendencies to purchase your products and services.
What will happen if you when you integrate PPC into your affiliate program?
PPC usually have ready-to-use affiliate tools that can be easily integrated into your website. The most common tools are search boxes, banners, text links and some 404-error pages. Most search engines utilize custom solutions and can provide you with a white-label affiliate program. This enables you, using only a few lines of code, to integrate remotely-hosted co-branded search engine into your website.
The key benefits? Not only more money generated but also some extra money on the side. Plus a lifetime commissions once you have referred some webmaster friends to the engine.
Think about it. Where can you get all these benefits while already generating some income for your site? Knowing some of the more useful tools you can use for your affiliate program is not a waste of time. They are rather a means of earning within an earning.
Best know more about how you can use PPC search engines into your affiliate program than miss out on a great opportunity to earn more profits.

Why Do I Need Google Adsense?

Because it’s there, it’s fun and it’s free. If you’re reading this, you obviously have some interest in the internet. You don’t even have to have your own site, although the more sites you use Google Adsense on, the more money you will make. For example, anyone can write a blog even if it’s just your own opinion on something.
You can also make money referring other people to Google Adsense. By placing a referral button on your site you increase your earnings potential. When a publisher that you referred makes their initial $100.00 within 90 days of sign-up and is eligible for payout, your account will also be credited $100.00. Additionally, they must never have registered for a Google Adsense account before.
Don’t be intimidated by the html code. It’s already formatted. All you have to do is choose the language and kind of button you would like, and copy and paste the html code to your site. Look for the referral code and more information under Adsense support.

Monday, October 29, 2007

Another Get Paid for Blogging Website

Smorty.com is the latest get paid to blog company I've seen. They provide blog advertising service to advertisers as similar to Payperpost.com and give bloggers an opportunity to earn money by blogging about the products, services and websites of the advertisers.
The Main Requirements to be an Approved Blogger of Smorty
  • Your blog must have been indexed by Google and Yahoo
  • Your Blog must have been stayed online for more than 3 months
  • The content of your blog must be family-friendly
  • Your blog must be active and have a history of minimum average 2 new posts per week

How Much You can Earn and How to Get Paid

You can earn a minimum of $6 per approved sponsor post. Smorty uses a unique ranking system to calculate the amount you can charge for each sponsor post. Their system will combine the following factors in the calculation:

  • Googles PageRank
  • Alexa Rankings
  • Return rate of given tasks
  • Approval/Decline ratio of completed tasks and
  • Number of completed tasks

And Smorty pays on a weekly basis through Paypal to bloggers.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

How To Get Traffic For Your Blog

Here are the first 30 of 56 ways of getting web traffic from Seth's Blog:
1. Use lists.
2. Be topical... write posts that need to be read right now.
3. Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
4. Break news.
5. Be timeless... write posts that will be readable in a year.
6. Be among the first with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.
7. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
8. Announce news.
9. Write short, pithy posts.
10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.
11. Don't write about your cat, your boyfriend or your kids.
12. Write long, definitive posts.
13. Write about your kids.
14. Be snarky. Write nearly libelous things about fellow bloggers, daring them to respond (with links back to you) on their blog.
15. Be sycophantic. Share linklove and expect some back.
16. Include polls, meters and other eye candy.
17. Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
18. Coin a term or two.
19. Do email interviews with the well-known.
20. Answer your email.
21. Use photos. Salacious ones are best.
22. Be anonymous.
23. Encourage your readers to digg your posts. (and to use furl and reddit). Do it with every post.
24. Post your photos on flickr.
25. Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
26. Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
27. Include comments so your blog becomes a virtual water cooler that feeds itself.
28. Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
29. Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
30. Point to useful but little-known resources.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Good Idea For Generate And Convert Targeted Traffic.

I've been meaning to put this together for a while, but I've been staying fairly busy. Well, with all the posts and questions I've seen lately in the STS, Aff. Marketing, and Newbie thread about zip/email submits, it's pretty obvious to me that it's high time that I put this out. Take note: this is not a definitive guide to EVERYTHING zip/email, but it is a method that I've used to generate a lot of zip/email leads. I'm not going to hide anything from you either - I'll give you the exact campaign that I ran that converted at over 300%.

Step 1: Pick a popular news topic (something big that will get a lot of searches is good)

Step 2: Scrape keywords from several of the top news stories online. When I've done this, I've actually grabbed quite a few news article titles as keywords.

Step 3: Setup a quick one page (multi page if you want to put up privacy/copyright/about pages) site. The key here is QUICK. Don't go complex. THis is easy. This website is truly a case of KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid). You should put this together in no more than 30 minutes. Use the keywords you scraped from the news article and run a poll based around the news topic. Try to make it a very easy yes/no question so that you don't confuse your audience and drive them away. Have the poll setup around 2 buttons (Yes or No, Now or Never, etc). Have both the buttons take the user to your zip/email submit.

Step 4: Setup an ad campaign in one of the search engines for this topic. Use your scraped keywords and set your bids as low as you can go. (I did $0.05 in Adcenter and Adwords and $0.10 in Yahoo). Point the ad to your poll landing page.

Step 5: Grab the most relavent zip/email you can to the demographic that you think will be most likely to be searching for this news article.

Step 6: Profit.

Ok, this may seem oversimplified, but it can really be that easy. To give you an example I'll be posting the exact campaign I used to do this.

Now for the actual example and the numbers. How did I come up with this idea? Well, I just quit my job about 2 months ago. While I still had this job, I was driving to work and listening to the radio. I live in Atlanta, and on that day the news broke that Michael Vick was being indicted on dogfighting charges. No matter what station I listened to it was on. AM or FM, people everywhere were talking about it. All I could think was, TONS of people will be searching for info on this online - HOW CAN I CAPITALIZE? It hit me that I could setup a website that could ask people whether or not they thought Michael Vick was actually guilty of the charges. So that day at work I set about setting up this site:

Mike Vick Survey - Michael Vick is the Atlanta Falcons Quarterback Dogfighting and Indicted for Running Dog Fights

I set it up in about 30 minutes. I scraped the content from a few news articles and filled out the meta with my keywords. I simply grabbed the keywords from large news articles online that were breaking the news that morning.

Atlanta falcons scandal
Bad Newz Kennels
Larry Woodward case
Larry Woodward dog fighting case
Larry Woodward dogfight
MV7 Inc
Michael Vick Indictment
Michael Vick dog fighting
Michael Vick indicted
Mike Vick Indicted for sponsoring dog fights
Mike Vick Indicted for sponsoring dogfighting
Mike Vick Indicted for sponsoring dogfights
Mike Vick K-9 Kennels
Mike Vick guilty
Mike Vick indicted
Mike Vick indictment
NFL dogfighting VA dog fights
VA dogfighting
Vick Indicted
Vick indictment
Virginia dog fights
Virginia dogfighting
atlanta falcons quarterback indicted
atlanta falcons scandal
falcons dog fighting
falcons qb indicted
falcons qb indicted for dogfight
falcons vick indicted
falcons vick qb
falcons vick quarterback
is michael vick guilty
is mike vick guilty
michael vick
michael vick dog fight
michael vick dog fighting
michael vick dogfighting
michael vick dogfighting case
michael vick dogfighting raid
michael vick dogfights
michael vick indicted
michael vick running dogfights
michael vick survey
mike vick
mike vick dog fight
mike vick dog fighting
mike vick dogfight
mike vick dogfighting
mike vick dogfighting case
mike vick indicted
mike vick indicted for dogfighting
mike vick scandal
mike vick survey
news about michael vick
news about michael vick dogfighting
news about mike vick
news about mike vick dogfighting
nfl scandals
vick dog fighting
vick dogfight vick dogfighting case
vick dogfights

Imagine my joy when I saw that NO ONE else was bidding on ANY of those keywords. (I got lucky). My campaign was live by 11:00 AM. I set up the following ad copy in Adwords:

Is Michael Vick Guilty?
You decide. Vote to get a $500 gift card.

By 3:00 PM I had the ads setup in Yahoo and MSN as well (remember, I did all this while at WORK). I chose the Foot Locker Email submit offered by Copeac. It paid out at $1.50/lead. I later changed to a $500 Visa gift card zip submit that paid the same and changed my copy to say:

Is Michael Vick Guilty?
Vote now and receive afree $500 Visa Gift Card


I found that the zip submit converted at a higher rate than email submits (this may vary depending on your niche/traffic). I chose the first offer to target the male sport audience that I expected to be searching this topic. It worked very well. The only thing was I wanted to try a zip submit and they didn't have a similar one. I even tried the iPhone email submit with the following copy:

Is Michael Vick Guilty?
You decide.
Vote now and get a free iphone

It didn't do poorly, but the others did even better. With the $500 Visa Gift card I began to convert about 20% of my traffic with bids of 5-10 cents. That means for every 5 people, one would convert. I'd pay 25-50 cents for those 5 visitors, but got paid out at $1.50. So, what's the end of the story? Well, I have to give props to PETA. They got a campaign going on quite a few of my keywords within 2 days in Google. They were the only advertiser competing with me for about 3 weeks though. After that, competition in Google increased for these keyterms as newspapers and magazines started covering the Michael Vick issue more and more. I shut down the campaign in google as the keywords went inactive for search and needed bid of $1+ to get active (obviously that woudn't work). I kept Yahoo and MSN going up until about 2 weeks ago. At that point the offers started converting kind of poorly, and I shut them down. Here's my stats on the Visa Gift card zip from Copeac:

Visa Gift Card for Best Buy - $500 ^ Zip Submit 2,450 0 337 0 0% 0% 0 $0.00 N/A $1.50/lead $505.50

I know the conversions here show about 13%, but it was closer to 35% when the campaign started. It evened out at about 25% before the conversions went to hell. This just goes to show, when you are paying for traffic you need to keep an eye on campaigns and kill them if they go negative (which this did after a litle over a month and a half). I could have switched out offers and tried some other one to see if it would work, but I was bored with this and had higher paying offers to spend my time/money on. I've tried this method several times, but this was one campaign that it really worked on for quite a while (I assume most of these will die out closer to 1-3 weeks). If you have half a brain you can follow my process though and figure out how to make it work for you.

Will you get rich off this? Probably not. Maybe... it depends on how many niches you hit. There are several things I can think of that could increase conversions even more. You could spend more time on your landing pages and match the color/look/feel to the zip/email submit that you are promoting so that it looks like the visitor never left your site. You could tweak your ad copy, add more keywords, add more ppc engines, etc. You could also forego PPC and try using blackhat to get your page to the top results in the engines for your keywords and try getting some organic traffic like that. All in all though, this campaign took less than 4 hours of real work to setup, and gave me a 300% conversion rate for over a month. You can start with a small budget (as low as $5/day, but for best results be ready to set a budget of like $50/day to maximize on traffic - which will be highest right after the story breaks).
Also I make money via Copeac, Text Link Ads, AuctionAds and new affiliate network Pepperjam

Monday, October 1, 2007

Any Idiot Can Make millions off Google.

PPC, which stands for Pay Per Click is making a lot of people very very rich. The surprising thing is that very few of the top earners have much in the way of a computer background. I have taught a lot of people how do PPC and the ones that have the most success are the ones with the most patience and drive.

Here is how it works, when you do a search on google the right hand side contains paid listings. If you search for the term "online dating" all the ads you see on the right hand side are from people bidding on the term online dating.

How do these people make money? Well there are many affiliate networks out there that will pay you to promote products and services. My favorite networks are ones that pay per action, ie someone just has to give their email address or phone number. This lead pays out $5.60 for anyone that fills out the form. This Cell phone offer get paid $4.00 for every person that enters their cell phone number.

Here is a sample of a google Ad which you place by signing up here www.google.com/adwords, you pick a list of search terms you want this ad to display for and the max price you want to bid. You then direct traffic to a link provided by an affiliate network.

Googe Ad




Sample Affiliate Network listings of offers you can promote





Sample Pay Per Lead Affiliate network COPEAC.

The max you can make by yourself doing PPC ads is around $100,000/month this is the point where you replace ads as fast as you can create them. There are many hot offers like ring tones that only work for 6 months or so before they are replaced. Also competition may drive up prices and its no longer profitable for you to bid on those terms.

If you have your own website affiliate networks are great. If don't have many users (under 30,000 uniques/day) and they are all focused on your subject area a good rule of thumb is you can make $2.00 off affiliate ads for every dollar you make off adsense.

Looking for inspiration? Many of the sites that show up in the non paid listings in google for travel, credit card and drug are making over $10,000 a day.

You Have Small or Young Site/Blog. Make Money with Google AdSense Right Now.

One of the most well-known and popular advertising networks on the internet, Google’s AdSense offers its users a way to monetize their sites through both ad links and the Google search feature. Its main draw is that the advertisements it offers are targeted to fit the content of the page on which they appear and the search terms that are entered into the search field.

This means that the advertisements it displays are more relevant to the content of the site on which they are posted, and therefore more likely to be clicked by visitors to that site. This is a major innovation in advertising and still fairly uncommon among ad networks, and has proven much more effective at earning money for site owners than untargeted advertisements.

In addition, AdSense provides a variety of ways to customize both the ads’ appearance and the way in which their value is reported, making it a very comprehensive and straightforward provider of relevant advertisements.

Features
AdSense works by instantaneously auctioning off the available advertising spaces on a site to various advertising companies.

The default form of advertisement available from AdSense is CPC, but CPM may also appear on sites if the ad agency chooses the site and wins the auction, but these types of ads cannot be specifically requested by an AdSense user.

The advertisements are targeted by language and geographical location as well as content, and include both large and small businesses in a wide array of categories.

Google chooses not to officially disclose the percentage of profit it takes from what the advertisers pay for its services and ad space. The New York Times, however, calculated from Google’s published financial reports that AdSense partners receive 78.5% of the profits that Google makes off of their ad space.

Controls
AdSense accounts are managed by logging into www.google.com/adsense. From this page, users can customize their accounts in a variety of ways. Firstly, they may control whether to enable ad links, the Google search feature, or both. If advertising links are enabled, the site owner may choose whether to show only text ads, or to also allow image and video ads.

AdSense also offers link units and referral buttons, which can be enabled or disabled. Furthermore, the appearance of the enabled ads can be customized from this page. Users may choose the color and template of their ad links and search results so that they are more integrated into the site’s overall appearance and therefore will likely be clicked more frequently.

Another way in which AdSense users can customize the ads that appear on their page is by applying and adjusting several filters, which can be used to filter out competitors’ advertisements, as well as ensuring that content on the site is relevant and appropriate. If users do not feel that many of the ads selected by AdSense are useful, they can also set their own default advertisements or fill the space with a solid color until better ads are available.

Available Types and Formats
Currently, AdSense offers text only, image, video ads, link units, and referral buttons in a variety of shapes and sizes. Note that some ad sizes only support text or images:

Text, Image, and Video Ads:
  • 728 x 90 Leaderboard
  • 468 x 60 Banner
  • 234 x 60 Banner
  • 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper
  • 120 x 600 Skyscraper
  • 120 x 240 Vertical Banner
  • 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
  • 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
  • 180 x 150 Small Rectangle
  • 250 x 250 Square
  • 200 x 200 Small Square
  • 125 x 125 Button

Link Units:

  • 728 x 15
  • 468 x 15
  • 200 x 90
  • 180 x 90
  • 160 x 90
  • 120 x 90

Reporting
The final function of the control panel is to report the users’ earnings through their ads. AdSense offers several ways to customize these reports. Updated hourly, reports on earnings can be sorted by page, date, ad type, and a number of other factors.

Users can create both URL and customized channels in the advanced reporting tab of the control panel. With URL channels, site owners can create clusters of URLs to see which pages or clusters of pages are earning them the most money through advertisements.

Customizable channels allow users to create their own groups of links, allowing them to test, for example, whether their red banner ads or their blue side links generate more clicks so that they can alter the layout of their site accordingly.

How to Get Started
To become an AdSense publisher, prospective users must complete a short online application on their website.

After 2-3 days, AdSense will process the application and reach a decision on whether to support the site or sites, as AdSense will support multiple sites for only one user. After they accept, users simply need to log on, select which type of ads they wish to display, and customize their options.

When this is completed, AdSense will generate an html code that site owners can simply paste into their page like any other code. This will allow the advertisements to show in this space. For the first day or two, only public service ads may appear, for which the site owner will not be paid. These can, however, be replaced by the site owner by default ads or a solid color. After Google’s bots have inventoried the site, however, content specific links should begin to show and site owners will be paid for the clicks these links receive.

Continued service from the AdSense network is contingent upon users obeying their terms and conditions, which include not clicking their own ad links, not bribing others to click the links or pointing them out in any way, and not displaying pornography or anything illegal on their site. It is acceptable, however, to have non-Google ads on the site as long as it is clear that they are unrelated to the Google ads.

Payment
Receiving payments from this network is fairly simple. AdSense offers both EFT and mailed checks in the user’s specified local currency. When a site owner’s ad revenue reaches $100 or greater, a payment will be issued to that owner within 30 days of the end of that month. If revenues do not reach $100, the account balance is rolled over to the next month and does not expire.

Referral Program
Google's AdSense does have a referral program. Unfortunately, due to its immense popularity, it is difficult finding prospective publishers who have not already signed up.

When a referral earns $5 within 180 days of sign-up, the referring publisher will be credited with $5.

When that same referral earns $100 within 180 days of sign-up and is eligible for payout, the referring publisher will be credited with an additional $250.

If in any 180-day period, 25 publishers are referred who each earn more than $100 within 180 days of their respective sign-ups and are all eligible for payout, the referring publisher will be awarded a $2,000 bonus (bonus payouts are limited to 1 per year).

More Information and Support
Google is very thorough in supplying information about AdSense, and information regarding a vast range of issues and possible problems is available at AdSense’s main website, along with demos and guides designed to walk new users through most of AdSense’s functions. News, updates, and tips are also available at www.adsense.blogspot.com. Finally, the support staff at AdSense is reachable by email and usually responds politely and intelligently within 1-2 days of receiving an inquiry.

Summary
AdSense is a very user friendly ad network that is simple to set up and run for even new site owners. Its targeted advertising makes it more likely that the posted advertisements will appeal to site viewers, and the Google search feature allows site owners to keep viewers on their site longer and also lets them receive revenue for clicked searches.

Reports are customizable so that Adsense users can view and maximize their profits, and receiving payments from AdSense is simple for most people with a major bank account.

Overall, AdSense seems to be a very simple and flexible advertising network.

Advertiser details
URL: Google.com/adsense
Category: Contextual
Creative: 120x240 Banner, 120x600 Skyscraper, 125x125 Square, 160x600 Skyscraper, 180x150 Rectangle, 200x200 Square, 234x60 Rectangle, 250x250 Square, 300x250 Rectangle, 336x280 Rectangle, 468x60 Banner, 728x90 Leaderboard, Search Box.
Payment Methods: Check, Direct Deposit.
Minimum Payment: $100 USD
Payment Frequency: Net-30
Features:
Ads Allowed on Forums: Yes
Referral Program: Yes