The Importance of Understanding Results
Understanding the “results” of your campaigns is very important as you will be able to make “tweaks” and optimizations to increase your efficiency, sales, ROI, and overall profits. Before we jump into things it is important that we clearly define what we mean when we refer to “results”.
Campaign results are basically any analytical data that you can gather from your campaigns. Landing page hits, affiliate link click-throughs, ad click-throughs, overall traffic, unique visitors, page views, CTR, impressions, sales, and leads are among the most common analytical data that you can gather from your campaigns. These campaign results can be used to further enhance performance and this is what we are going to be helping you out with this week.
The more data that you can gather from your campaigns, the easier it is to benchmark results and analyze, test, and improve upon them. In order to do this you need to understand why collecting is so important.
Here is an example:
Let’s say that you have been advertising Product A for three weeks and you have been getting approximately 30 clicks a day from 100 keywords that are spread throughout your campaign. You have been sending traffic from your ads to a landing page that you setup that targets a specific “niche” within a larger market. Things seem like they are running fine because you have made some sales, but the overall net profits (money you’ve earned after advertising expenses) aren’t as high as they could be.
Upon analyzing some of your data, you realize that only 10% of the traffic that makes it to your website is actually clicking on your affiliate links and visiting the merchant page. In other words, you’re wasting 90% of your ad clicks because your landing page isn’t converting visitors into “potential” customers.
There are several things that you can do to improve upon this and many of them have been discussed in earlier weeks (relevance, landing page optimization, etc). But without understanding this data, you are going to be limiting your campaigns overall return drastically.
This is just one simple example of how understanding campaign results can help you realize the good things that you are doing, and what campaign aspects you can improve on. In this case, the landing page needs to be optimized.
Determining the Effectiveness of your Campaigns
There are many different ways in which you can determine the effectiveness of your campaigns. We are going to focus of the most important techniques in this section.
Analyzing CTR
All of the data that Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing make available to you as paid advertisers is very important. One of the most important points is Click-Through-Ratio (CTR) and is also one of the first pieces of data that you can analyze to help improve your campaign profitability.
CTR is the ratio between how many times your ad has been displayed in the search results (also known as impressions) to the number of times it has been clicked. The higher your CTR, the better your entire campaign is going to run. The reason for this is because as you increase the CTR, the performance is directly related to how well written your ad is. A CTR of 5% or higher means that of every 100 impressions there are five people are clicking on your ad. This is a pretty good CTR. With this being said, a CTR of less than 1% means that you are most likely not being relevant enough, or simply that your ad is not performing well.
Remember, that the higher your CTR is, the lower your bids will be, and the higher your ad will be displayed within the search results. This is because Google and Yahoo like people that write ads that get clicked on more because it makes them more money and they will reward you with better positioning because of this.
We have an entire tutorial written that explains how to improve your CTR through using good copywriting techniques:
Adcopy Writing Tutorial
Adcopy Writing Case Study
Analyzing your Data and improving your CTR
When you have determined that your ad needs some work, there are some techniques you can use to improve the CTR.
Utilizing Your Common Keywords
The root of all good (high CTR) ads is derived from it’s overall relevancy to the keywords.. It is VERY important that you implement the Common keyword technique within all of your adgroups so that you can use the same common keywords in your ad. Ideally you want to be able to include ALL of the keywords within an ad group somewhere within the ad. If you cannot do this, chances are your ad group has been created too “loosely”.
Your Ad Title: Your common keywords should always be written within your ad title, as this is the first part of the ad that people read. If you have an ad title that is highly relevant to the keywords that the user searched for, you will achieve a higher CTR than if didn’t have the common keywords in the title.
For example, if you have an adgroup with the common keywords: “train pug to heel”, you want to try to include these keywords in your ad title.
Train Your Pug To Heel
Learn How to Train Your Pug
To Heel In Just Minutes Here
YourWebsite.com
If you see that your campaigns are suffering from low CTR then this is the first part of “tweaking” that you want to do. The benefits of having a CTR above 2-3% are very substantial and can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic you receive (thus your earnings could increase substantially).
We have an entire tutorial that will teach you all about analyzing your data located below:
Analyzing Campaign Data
How Does Conversion tracking actually work?
Conversion tracking is one of the most important aspects as it allows you to track the effectiveness of your campaigns based on several metrics. Without it, Internet marketers are left “blind” because they will not know which areas of their campaigns need to be improved and which should be left alone. The common misconception is that a “conversion” refers to a sale only, and this is simply not the case. A conversion can be a click on an affiliate link, a sale, a lead, or even a hit on a specific webpage on your site. Conversions give you the ability to track certain actions that occur and they are VERY important.
In the example above, conversions were tracked each time a visitor clicked a merchant link. This is just one of the ways that conversion tracking can be used to improve your campaigns and enhance earnings.
Sales Conversion Tracking
SALE conversion tracking is probably the most beneficial out of all types of conversion tracking because it allows you to determine the EXACT keywords that are converting into sales. Having this data will allow you to tweak your highest converting keywords and ads and improve the ones that are not converting. Sale conversion tracking is the most important data that a PPC marketer can have, but unfortunately it is not available to everyone.
In order for sale conversion tracking to work, the merchant (owner of the product), must place a small piece of code on their order “confirmation” page. NOT all merchants are willing to do this, so it’s always a “blessing” when conversion tracking is offered.
You can also email merchants and ask them to put your conversion code on their order confirmation page. Typically the merchant will only do this for their high volume affiliates, but it is definitely worth a shot. Some affiliate programs have created scripts that allow all affiliates to do this. An example of this is “Who Loves Money” and you can see how this works by visiting the following page:
http://www.wholovesmoney.com/affiliate.php
In order to take advantage of merchants that do offer sale conversion tracking, you will need to supply them with your conversion tracking ID from within your Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing account. Finding your tracking ID is simple and can be found very easily.
Google
Step 1: Log into your Google Adwords account and click on the “Conversion Tracking” link at the top of the page:
Step 2: Click the “Start Tracking Conversions” button at the bottom of the next page
Step 3: Select “Purchase/Sale” from the conversion type list. It doesn’t matter what you select on this page because you only need your Conversion Tracking ID, so you can choose any option you want here.
Step 4: Simply click “Continue”
Step 5: Copy your “google_conversion_id” from within the code that is provided to you
Yahoo
Step 1: Within your YSM account, click on the “Administration” tab.
Step 2: A set of links will appear below the tab, click on the “Analytics” link.
Step 3: The code will then be displayed for your conversion tracking. You will be able to find your conversion tracking ID within the code that reflects the following:
var ysm_accountid = "yourUNIQUEconversionID";
You’ll want to save your Google & Yahoo conversion IDS, or write them down so that you do not have to go through the same process each time you need it! You will also need it if you choose to use My-Linker (discussed next).
If you have sale conversion tracking available to you, determining the effectiveness of your campaign will be much easier and you will easily be able to weed out the poorly converting keywords.
Analyzing your Landing Page with My-Linker
One of the most important “actions” that an affiliate needs a visitor to perform on their page is to click-through to the merchant pages. If your visitors never visit the merchant pages, then you will never make a commission, so it’s very important to keep an eye on this. Many people fail to track this and never really understand the performance of their landing pages. These people are missing out!
To track merchant page click-throughs, we have created a program called My-Linker that will allow you to create unique campaigns where you can insert your Google Conversion Code to track merchant page conversions instead of sales conversions.
You will need to insert the code that is generated by My-Linker in place of your affiliate links, and then you will be able to track which keywords are producing the highest merchant page conversions and which ones are under performing.
If you use my-linker links on your page rather than your direct affiliate links, you can track how well your landing page is performing and collect data on exactly which keywords are prompting your visitors to click on your links. The my-linker links also mask your affiliate links so that your competition cannot see what you are linking to!
To access your My-Linker account you can use the link below:
Access My-Linker Here
What is Split Testing?
Split testing is a technique that allows you to analyze two different “scenarios” and find out which one is performing more optimally. There are many aspects of a campaign that you can split test and we are going to go into detail with these in this section. Split testing is something that you will want to implement in order to fully optimize your campaign by using statistical data, rather than playing the “guessing game”.
Split Test Ads
Split testing ads is a very good way to help you improve your CTR it is very easy to perform various different split tests within Google Adwords. What you want to do is create two ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.
Keyword 1 Ad 1 (different text) Same URL
Keyword 2 Ad 2 (different text) Same URL
You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not running “optimized”. This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time. If you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better and quickly obtain the data we need.
Once you have found that you have a “winner” (based on CTR) and can clearly see that one ad is performing better than the other, you can perform the test again. What you want to do is update the under performing (Losing) ad, replace it with a new one, and start the test all over again. If you are constantly split testing ads you will be able to really maximize the effectiveness of your ads and achieve a better CTR.
Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad and we suggest that you give each ad at least 200 impressions for an effective test.
Split Testing Landing Pages
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (unique CB id’s)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (same but unique CB tracking id’s)
There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.
For example, if you were to want to split test two different landing pages where you are promoting Clickbank products, this can be done very easily. You will need to create two different landing pages that contain two different sets of Clickbank links. You will create one landing page using the one tracking id, and one landing page using a different tracking id.
Sample Clickbank Tracking ID: http://yourid.beatadword.hop.clickbank.net?tid=SomeID
You will then want to create and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s. You will also want to have your ads served equally (“Rotate”) so that each page receives an equal amount of traffic.
By using different tracking IDs, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.
Based on your results you can perform several different tests and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.
Note: Many other programs besides Clickbank allow you to create unique tracking ID’s and this split testing technique can be used for those programs as well.
Split Testing Product Appeal
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (focus on product A w/ tracking IDs)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (focus on product B w/ tracking IDs)
Split testing products is another very easy test that you can implement on your landing pages to determine which product is the best “fit’ for your website visitors. When we refer to split testing products, we’re talking about having different products on your landing page, or recommending them in different orders.
To perform a product split test, you need to have 2 different landing pages.
The ads will be identical; however the destination URL will be different so that each can send traffic to the different pages that you have created. You will want have product A the primary focus on one page and product B the primary focus on the other page.
If you have a review style page that you want to product split test, you can simply rank product A higher than product B, on one, and visa versa on the other page. If you choose to do this though, you need to use tracking IDs on your page so that when a sale is made, you know exactly which page it came from.
Over time, you may see that product A sells twice as much as product B, thus when you are finished testing you can use product A as the primary focus on your landing pages.
Split Testing Direct Linking
In the examples above we’ve talked about split testing using different landing pages, but you can also split test while direct linking using the exact same techniques. Rather than having the affiliate links with Tracking Id’s on your website, you need to put them right within your destination URL of your ad.
You can split test your ads by creating separate ads with different adcopy and different direct affiliate links for the destination url.
For instance, if you want to split test two ads for Beating Adwords, your destination urls could look like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad1
Ad2: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad2
Perhaps you want to perform a product split test to see which product sells better for your ad. You could do this by creating two identical ads, with destination urls that point directly to different merchant pages like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Beating Adwords
Ad2: http://yourid.ulovemoney.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Who Loves Money
Split testing is one way to effectively optimize your campaigns. There are always ways you can improve conversions and your overall ROI and we have provided you with many split testing techniques that you can quickly implement.
We have a downloadable e-book that we wrote that talks all about Research, Analysis, Implementation, and Testing (The RAIT Guide). This guide will further help you with analysis and testing your campaigns.
Download R.A.I.T Guide Here
Crunching the Numbers
Optimizing your campaigns will enable you to increase the overall profitability and remove a lot of the wasted adspend that you may be incurring. Sales conversion ratios are calculated by determining the average amount of clicks it takes to generate a sale. For instance, if you paid for 100 clicks in your Google Adwords account and received 2 sales, your conversion ration would be 2% or 1 in 50 (written 1:50). Calculating your conversion ratios does not require you to have any kind of tracking installed as you can simply tally up the amount of clicks paid for vs. how many sales.
All products convert at different ratios depending on the industry, the quality of traffic that they receive, and the product itself. In our experience, we’ve determined that the highest converting products available convert at less than 1:30 (for every 30 clicks, you average 1 sale), but it is possible to convert at 1:10 or lower if you have a highly optimized campaign.
There really isn’t any way to know a product conversion rate unless you ask the merchant yourself, and in many cases, they will give you a number that is not entirely true. We (Kyle & Carson) can’t figure out why a merchant would like to “embellish” their conversion stats because it only hurts affiliates as they are the ones that end up losing in the end.
Increasing the overall effectiveness of your campaign will increase your conversion ratios, lower the amount of money you spend on advertising, and ultimately put more money in your pocket.
There are many different ways to analyze data and test various parts of your campaign, and we have really just brushed the surface with this topic.
If you have questions about performing tests, you can ask them in the forum.
A Note about Conversion Tracking from The “Big Three”
Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter all offer conversion tracking. With this being said, we need to tell you that the conversion stats that you get are NOT always 100% accurate within these systems. Sometimes you will get a sale, and even though the merchant offer conversion tracking for the product you are selling, you won’t see a conversion calculated in your advertising account. This works both ways as well. Sometimes you’ll see a conversion tracked in your advertising account, but in fact you did not make a sale. This is just something that we as Internet marketers have to accept as there are many variables that can cause this to happen.
Note: This does not mean that the merchant is stealing sales, because in most cases it is impossible for them to do this. Most of the time conversion tracking is very reliable and will produce accurate results.
Refining Campaigns
Refining your campaign can be one of the most awkward tasks for even the best Internet marketers. As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of keywords that are under performing. and just costing us money. It has been said that 20% of an advertiser's keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are either under performing. or not making sales at all. If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.
There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?
There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.
When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.
How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns
Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.
Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.
If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.
For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!
Deleting Keywords
There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!
Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.
One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.
We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.
Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.
Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.
Bridging Campaigns Between Different Marketing Platforms
Increasing sales and the reach of your campaigns is something that can really take your profits to the “next” level. If you have a campaign in Google Adwords that is performing very well, you should expand that campaign into other PPC engines such as Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) and MSN Adcenter. This technique will allow you to take a $100 / day campaign to a $200-$400 / day campaign by simply connecting with a wider range of potential customers. Google Adwords, YSM, and MSN Adcenter all have the same structure for setting up advertising campaigns. They have the “campaign” level, “adgroup” level, and “keyword” level, so it’s easy to re-create a campaign in any of these networks.
This technique of bridging your campaigns and expanding them into other platforms is not something that is only done between two PPC engines. If you have an Article that you’ve written that focuses on a certain group of keywords and you are getting consistent sales from it, you can use these keywords to create PPC campaigns. This is something that we HIGHLY recommend that you do.
Many marketers start out by using free techniques such as Article marketing. When you start to earn sales from your articles, this will provide you with very valuable information that you can use to expand into PPC. If your article is listed under a specific keyword in the search engines and is making you sales, you can easily put together a campaign and advertise it.
Bridging campaigns between different marketing platforms is really something that you should take advantage of. NONE of the top marketers (including us) strictly use one method or platform to connect with potential customers. Your reach is a lot larger if you diversify.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Refining Campaigns
Refining your campaign can be one of the most awkward tasks for even the best Internet marketers. As Internet marketers, we should try to clean or rinse our campaigns of keywords that are under performing. and just costing us money. It has been said that 20% of an advertiser's keywords bring in most of the sales, while the other 80% of the keywords are either under performing. or not making sales at all. If this is not 100% accurate, it is very close to the truth.
There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?
There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.
When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.
How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns
Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.
Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.
If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.
For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!
Deleting Keywords
There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!
Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.
One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.
We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.
Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.
Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.
There are several different aspects to a successful campaign, and there are several different things that you can “refine” to increase campaign performance. Are your keywords performing? What about your ads, are they achieving a high enough CTR? Is your web page converting, if not, is it because your merchant conversions are low?
There is no scientific approach to refining your campaign. However, there are some things that you can do to obtain campaign analytics which will help you when deciding which changes you should make.
When we refer to “Refining” your campaign, we really just mean making changes to the settings, keywords, ads, and landing pages to increase your overall profitability! Below we’ve outlined some of the ways that you can refine your campaign.
How to Determine When to Adjust Your Campaigns
Adjusting your campaigns too quickly can cause you to miss opportunities and allowing your campaign to run for too long can cost you dearly. We suggest using a happy medium, and we’ve come up with a rule to help you determine whether or not it’s time to “refine” your campaign.
Once you spend an equal amount in ad spend that you would earn in a single commission, you need to take a give your campaign a good analysis to see how it is performing. If you haven’t made a sale at this point, then pausing your campaign or adgroup is highly recommended. For example, if the product you are promoting offers a commission of $30, we suggest letting your campaign run until it reaches $30 in ad spend before you address it.
If every Internet marketer followed this rule, there would be a lot more successful campaigns running and much less money lost. The worst thing that you can do if you are not seeing results after you spent as much as you would earn in a single sale, if so leave things alone and “give it more time”.
For instance, if you were promoting Product A, that pays you $30 per sale, and you have spent about $30 in advertising without a sale, it would be time to “refine” your campaign by making changes to various aspects of campaign as we have already talked about. We like to give a campaign a chance, so stopping it after only getting a handful of clicks doesn’t allow you to learn anything about the conversion ratios, or even draw any conclusions about your campaign. The bottom line: Don’t be too quick to modify a campaign, but do not ignore a failing campaign!
Deleting Keywords
There is no need to delete keywords from your adgroups, as you can pause keywords so that they will not be included within the search results. A deleted keyword will not provide you with any information and you will lose the keyword data forever if you delete it. It’s very common to delete an under performing. keyword that was wasting your money, or getting VERY low CTR. Sometimes knowing what not to do is just as powerful as knowing exactly what to do!
Finding the Ideal Positioning For Your Ads.
One aspect of testing that we have not covered is how the position of your ads in the search engines can affect sales. In many cases, the #1 position under a specific keyword is desired by marketers as it will receive the most traffic. With this being said, the #1 position rarely produces the best conversion ratios, or the best ROI. The reason for this is that most people click on the first ad on the page, but they also proceed to clicking on other ads as well. By the time the visitor finds what they are looking for, the cookie from the #1 position will most likely be replaced by the ads beneath it.
We like positions 3-7 as they have produced the highest ROI based on our own tests and experience. We’re not saying that position 1 and 2 won’t make you great profits because sometimes they will. This is dependent on many different factors, including your ad, landing page, product choice, keyword choice, bid price and CTR.
Finding the most ideal position for your ads will take time as you need to be able to determine which positions sell best for your particular campaign. In order to change the positioning of your ads, you do this by changing your bid prices on your keywords and we suggest starting out at a lower position, then work your way up.
Too many times we see new marketers bid very high for keywords ($1.00 and up per click) to get position #1, just to see their campaign fail. It is always better to start off with a lower cost per click, and increasing it over time to achieve higher ad positioning.
What is Split Testing?
Split testing is a technique that allows you to analyze two different “scenarios” and find out which one is performing more optimally. There are many aspects of a campaign that you can split test and we are going to go into detail with these in this section. Split testing is something that you will want to implement in order to fully optimize your campaign by using statistical data, rather than playing the “guessing game”.
Split Test Ads
Split testing ads is a very good way to help you improve your CTR it is very easy to perform various different split tests within Google Adwords. What you want to do is create two ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.
Keyword 1 Ad 1 (different text) Same URL
Keyword 2 Ad 2 (different text) Same URL
You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not running “optimized”. This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time. If you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better and quickly obtain the data we need.
Once you have found that you have a “winner” (based on CTR) and can clearly see that one ad is performing better than the other, you can perform the test again. What you want to do is update the under performing (Losing) ad, replace it with a new one, and start the test all over again. If you are constantly split testing ads you will be able to really maximize the effectiveness of your ads and achieve a better CTR.
Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad and we suggest that you give each ad at least 200 impressions for an effective test.
Split Testing Landing Pages
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (unique CB id’s)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (same but unique CB tracking id’s)
There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.
For example, if you were to want to split test two different landing pages where you are promoting Clickbank products, this can be done very easily. You will need to create two different landing pages that contain two different sets of Clickbank links. You will create one landing page using the one tracking id, and one landing page using a different tracking id.
Sample Clickbank Tracking ID: http://yourid.beatadword.hop.clickbank.net?tid=SomeID
You will then want to create and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s. You will also want to have your ads served equally (“Rotate”) so that each page receives an equal amount of traffic.
By using different tracking IDs, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.
Based on your results you can perform several different tests and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.
Note: Many other programs besides Clickbank allow you to create unique tracking ID’s and this split testing technique can be used for those programs as well.
Split Testing Product Appeal
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (focus on product A w/ tracking IDs)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (focus on product B w/ tracking IDs)
Split testing products is another very easy test that you can implement on your landing pages to determine which product is the best “fit’ for your website visitors. When we refer to split testing products, we’re talking about having different products on your landing page, or recommending them in different orders.
To perform a product split test, you need to have 2 different landing pages.
The ads will be identical; however the destination URL will be different so that each can send traffic to the different pages that you have created. You will want have product A the primary focus on one page and product B the primary focus on the other page.
If you have a review style page that you want to product split test, you can simply rank product A higher than product B, on one, and visa versa on the other page. If you choose to do this though, you need to use tracking IDs on your page so that when a sale is made, you know exactly which page it came from.
Over time, you may see that product A sells twice as much as product B, thus when you are finished testing you can use product A as the primary focus on your landing pages.
Split Testing Direct Linking
In the examples above we’ve talked about split testing using different landing pages, but you can also split test while direct linking using the exact same techniques. Rather than having the affiliate links with Tracking Id’s on your website, you need to put them right within your destination URL of your ad.
You can split test your ads by creating separate ads with different adcopy and different direct affiliate links for the destination url.
For instance, if you want to split test two ads for Beating Adwords, your destination urls could look like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad1
Ad2: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad2
Perhaps you want to perform a product split test to see which product sells better for your ad. You could do this by creating two identical ads, with destination urls that point directly to different merchant pages like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Beating Adwords
Ad2: http://yourid.ulovemoney.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Who Loves Money
Split testing is one way to effectively optimize your campaigns. There are always ways you can improve conversions and your overall ROI and we have provided you with many split testing techniques that you can quickly implement.
We have a downloadable e-book that we wrote that talks all about Research, Analysis, Implementation, and Testing (The RAIT Guide). This guide will further help you with analysis and testing your campaigns.
Split Test Ads
Split testing ads is a very good way to help you improve your CTR it is very easy to perform various different split tests within Google Adwords. What you want to do is create two ads within an ad group both having different ad text, but the same destination and display URL’s.
Keyword 1 Ad 1 (different text) Same URL
Keyword 2 Ad 2 (different text) Same URL
You will then want to go to your campaign settings and make sure that your ads are not running “optimized”. This will allow each of your ads to run 50% of the time. If you choose the setting “optimized”, Google will serve your highest performing ad most of the time. For testing purposes, we want a true 50/50 split test to take place so we can easily determine which ad is performing better and quickly obtain the data we need.
Once you have found that you have a “winner” (based on CTR) and can clearly see that one ad is performing better than the other, you can perform the test again. What you want to do is update the under performing (Losing) ad, replace it with a new one, and start the test all over again. If you are constantly split testing ads you will be able to really maximize the effectiveness of your ads and achieve a better CTR.
Note: You should use different ad writing techniques for each ad and we suggest that you give each ad at least 200 impressions for an effective test.
Split Testing Landing Pages
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (unique CB id’s)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (same but unique CB tracking id’s)
There are two reasons you would want to split test landing pages: to test sales conversions and to test merchant page click-throughs. Both of these tests will give you an idea on how effective your landing pages are performing and will indicate which landing page styles are the highest performing ones.
For example, if you were to want to split test two different landing pages where you are promoting Clickbank products, this can be done very easily. You will need to create two different landing pages that contain two different sets of Clickbank links. You will create one landing page using the one tracking id, and one landing page using a different tracking id.
Sample Clickbank Tracking ID: http://yourid.beatadword.hop.clickbank.net?tid=SomeID
You will then want to create and adgroup and two ads with the exact same ad text, but different destination URL’s. You will also want to have your ads served equally (“Rotate”) so that each page receives an equal amount of traffic.
By using different tracking IDs, you will be able to determine which page is converting into sales at a higher rate. Without having access to conversion tracking through a merchant, this is the most effective way to determine which landing page is converting better for you.
Based on your results you can perform several different tests and make different modifications to your landing pages to increase your conversions. By focusing on landing page conversions, you will be able to increase your overall campaign profitability.
Note: Many other programs besides Clickbank allow you to create unique tracking ID’s and this split testing technique can be used for those programs as well.
Split Testing Product Appeal
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 1 (focus on product A w/ tracking IDs)
Ad Group 1 Ad 1 Landing Page 2 (focus on product B w/ tracking IDs)
Split testing products is another very easy test that you can implement on your landing pages to determine which product is the best “fit’ for your website visitors. When we refer to split testing products, we’re talking about having different products on your landing page, or recommending them in different orders.
To perform a product split test, you need to have 2 different landing pages.
The ads will be identical; however the destination URL will be different so that each can send traffic to the different pages that you have created. You will want have product A the primary focus on one page and product B the primary focus on the other page.
If you have a review style page that you want to product split test, you can simply rank product A higher than product B, on one, and visa versa on the other page. If you choose to do this though, you need to use tracking IDs on your page so that when a sale is made, you know exactly which page it came from.
Over time, you may see that product A sells twice as much as product B, thus when you are finished testing you can use product A as the primary focus on your landing pages.
Split Testing Direct Linking
In the examples above we’ve talked about split testing using different landing pages, but you can also split test while direct linking using the exact same techniques. Rather than having the affiliate links with Tracking Id’s on your website, you need to put them right within your destination URL of your ad.
You can split test your ads by creating separate ads with different adcopy and different direct affiliate links for the destination url.
For instance, if you want to split test two ads for Beating Adwords, your destination urls could look like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad1
Ad2: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net?TID=ad2
Perhaps you want to perform a product split test to see which product sells better for your ad. You could do this by creating two identical ads, with destination urls that point directly to different merchant pages like this:
Ad1: http://yourid.beatadwords.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Beating Adwords
Ad2: http://yourid.ulovemoney.hop.clickbank.net – Testing Who Loves Money
Split testing is one way to effectively optimize your campaigns. There are always ways you can improve conversions and your overall ROI and we have provided you with many split testing techniques that you can quickly implement.
We have a downloadable e-book that we wrote that talks all about Research, Analysis, Implementation, and Testing (The RAIT Guide). This guide will further help you with analysis and testing your campaigns.
Examples of Effective Adcopy
The following examples show different types of ad writing techniques that can be used to create highly effective, high click-through ads. When writing your copy, you should have a few things in mind. Your goal is to get as many people as possible to click through your ads to your landing page, but you want to do this using techniques that reflect the relevance of your page. Adding keywords like "FREE" in your ads is not a good idea because people that type in "free" into their search queries are not usually going to make a purchase.
If you have not heard of a "call to action" phrase, you will need to familiarize yourself with this term. It is exactly how it sounds; you are calling someone out to take an action. Call-to-action phrases will prompt the user to subconsciously click on your ad. If you want someone to do something, there is no harm in asking and you will find out that asking your customers to do something will greatly benefit you as marketer.
Here are some examples of "Call-to-Action" phrases:
Click Here
Join Now
Sign up
Instant Access
Get Access
And as we mentioned earlier, posing a question can increase your CTR drastically. Here are some examples of that:
Do You Hate...?
Does it Work?
Is it a Scam?
How much is...?
Obviously a question could pertain to just about anything, so you will want to be creative and really think about a question that a consumer may be asking themselves when writing this type of ad copy.
The Use of the Word SCAM
"Scam" is definitely one of those terms that create a red flag. Many people have been ripped off online and many people are weary of making purchases online because they are in fear of being scammed. There is a good chance that you have been scammed yourself. By using the term "scam" within your ad copy you are triggering this emotions and triggering the interest of the people searching. The use of the term "scam" has been proven to increase ad CTR drastically in many test that we have performed and many other independent tests performed online. Want a boost in CTR...add "scam" within your ad.
If you have not heard of a "call to action" phrase, you will need to familiarize yourself with this term. It is exactly how it sounds; you are calling someone out to take an action. Call-to-action phrases will prompt the user to subconsciously click on your ad. If you want someone to do something, there is no harm in asking and you will find out that asking your customers to do something will greatly benefit you as marketer.
Here are some examples of "Call-to-Action" phrases:
Click Here
Join Now
Sign up
Instant Access
Get Access
And as we mentioned earlier, posing a question can increase your CTR drastically. Here are some examples of that:
Do You Hate...?
Does it Work?
Is it a Scam?
How much is...?
Obviously a question could pertain to just about anything, so you will want to be creative and really think about a question that a consumer may be asking themselves when writing this type of ad copy.
The Use of the Word SCAM
"Scam" is definitely one of those terms that create a red flag. Many people have been ripped off online and many people are weary of making purchases online because they are in fear of being scammed. There is a good chance that you have been scammed yourself. By using the term "scam" within your ad copy you are triggering this emotions and triggering the interest of the people searching. The use of the term "scam" has been proven to increase ad CTR drastically in many test that we have performed and many other independent tests performed online. Want a boost in CTR...add "scam" within your ad.
Writing Effective Adcopy
What exactly is adcopy? Adcopy is the textual content contained with your ads. This could be within an medium where you are required to write ads include Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, or any other Pay Per Click search engine. Adcopy is the first point of contact between you and your potential customers. It's a simple fact that if you are good at writing adcopy then you are light years ahead above other internet marketers who can't write adcopy because if an ad does not get clicked, you might as well not be advertising at all.
Within the following text we are going to share techniques will help you write effective adcopy that not only entices people to click on your ads, but will attract prospective customers instead of people just seeking information.
The first thing you should do when you think about writing ad copy is to think like the consumer. What would captivate someone's interest enough to look at your ad and entice this same person enough to click on your ad to see what your web page has to offer. When some performs a search within Google they are bombarded with ads both down the middle and the right side of the page. You are essentially competing head-to-head with 9 other advertisers, so your job should be to make your ad stand out among the rest. How do you do that? By writing adcopy that is relevant, interesting, and different.
The first thing that you need to focus is on ad relevance. If your ad does not contain the exact keywords that the person has just performed in their search, they are probably not going to click on your ad. This means that when you create your ad groups, you should focus on including all of the keywords within your ad group within your ad copy. If you cannot do this, then chances are your ad group is too large and you need to group it tighter. Google bolds the keywords within in your ad if they are within the search query, so use the keyword as much as you can (ideally within both your ad title and description).
Secondly, you need to captivate the interest of your customer by using common language to connect with them. When they read your ad they need to agree with what you are saying. Ask them a question. If their answer is yes, then they are more likely to click on your ad, if it's no, then that's ok too because they probably wouldn't have converted into a sale for you anyway. If they are unsure, then they will definitely be interested in what you offer and they will click your ad as well, so a question within your ad will increase your click-through ratio (CTR).
Lastly, your ad should be different than the other advertisers. You may want to do a quick search under the keywords you are promoting to see what other advertisers are using for their ad copy. You do not want to copy them as this will lower the chance that someone will click your ad. You want to create and ad that is unique so that it will "stand out" from the others.
Note: If you're advertising under keywords that aren't highly targeted (which we do not recommend unless you are experienced) you may waste a lot of money on people who are just browsing the net killing time. If you put a price within your ad it will only attract people who are willing to spend money and not simply a freebie seeker or someone that is looking for free information. Again, this should only be implemented if you are promoting within an industry that is looking for free information or you are advertising under broad keywords.
Within the following text we are going to share techniques will help you write effective adcopy that not only entices people to click on your ads, but will attract prospective customers instead of people just seeking information.
The first thing you should do when you think about writing ad copy is to think like the consumer. What would captivate someone's interest enough to look at your ad and entice this same person enough to click on your ad to see what your web page has to offer. When some performs a search within Google they are bombarded with ads both down the middle and the right side of the page. You are essentially competing head-to-head with 9 other advertisers, so your job should be to make your ad stand out among the rest. How do you do that? By writing adcopy that is relevant, interesting, and different.
The first thing that you need to focus is on ad relevance. If your ad does not contain the exact keywords that the person has just performed in their search, they are probably not going to click on your ad. This means that when you create your ad groups, you should focus on including all of the keywords within your ad group within your ad copy. If you cannot do this, then chances are your ad group is too large and you need to group it tighter. Google bolds the keywords within in your ad if they are within the search query, so use the keyword as much as you can (ideally within both your ad title and description).
Secondly, you need to captivate the interest of your customer by using common language to connect with them. When they read your ad they need to agree with what you are saying. Ask them a question. If their answer is yes, then they are more likely to click on your ad, if it's no, then that's ok too because they probably wouldn't have converted into a sale for you anyway. If they are unsure, then they will definitely be interested in what you offer and they will click your ad as well, so a question within your ad will increase your click-through ratio (CTR).
Lastly, your ad should be different than the other advertisers. You may want to do a quick search under the keywords you are promoting to see what other advertisers are using for their ad copy. You do not want to copy them as this will lower the chance that someone will click your ad. You want to create and ad that is unique so that it will "stand out" from the others.
Note: If you're advertising under keywords that aren't highly targeted (which we do not recommend unless you are experienced) you may waste a lot of money on people who are just browsing the net killing time. If you put a price within your ad it will only attract people who are willing to spend money and not simply a freebie seeker or someone that is looking for free information. Again, this should only be implemented if you are promoting within an industry that is looking for free information or you are advertising under broad keywords.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
9 Techniques to Writing Interesting Email
People do not want to be bored with your content. It is very important that you write your emails from the heart and in a manner that is not boring. People do not want to get an email that sounds like it was spit out of a robots mouth each week, so add a personal touch to your emails. Here are some ideas of things you can communicate with your list to achieve great results:
- Holiday Celebrations
Many people like to celebrate holidays, and even more people spend money during these holiday periods. What about sending your dieting list a New Years Celebration regarding a resolution about losing weight. How about reminding your dating list that you are thinking of them on Valentine’s day? Keep the line of communication open and take advantage of every holiday as possible. Emotional connections are easiest during these times of the year. - Industry News / Insight
You can obtain industry news quite easily by doing a simple search within Google News or picking up the latest magazine or newspaper that would contain industry-related information. If you can continually deliver current information to your list, they will be inclined to open up your emails regularly, thus improving your chances of more conversions. - Related Industry Info
People that are interested in one thing are probably interested in many similar things. People who are interested in dog training dogs are likely interested in dog supplies. People who are interested in dieting may also be interested in quitting smoking. People interested in dating may also be interested in looking better. There are many connections that you can make between different industries and this gives you the ability to cross-promote to your lists. Do not limit your options! - Expert Interviews
Lining up Interviews with industry experts can be a great way to increase your credibility with your list. People love to learn information from experts. Other than the time it takes to line up an interview, the work on your part is very little. Many experts like to get their name out to as many people as possible and would be more than happy to do text, audio, or video interview for you. - Personal Testimonials/Review
Ready to recommend a product/service to your list? Give them some value and a reason to take a further look into what you are offering. There is nothing better than giving a candid review of a product, create a short little review page that outlines what you liked and did not like, or even put up a video review for your list to take a look at. The personal approach will be well received by your subscribers and they will be much more inclined to buy from you if you are honest and not overly “salesy”. - Reach Out by Asking a Question
Remember, often times people will see you as an imaginary figure and do not see that there is a real person behind the email. If you open a line of communication with your lists, it will give them the opportunity to contact you and will give you the opportunity to open up the dialogue with your potential customers. This will benefit you in many ways. If someone contacts you they are interested and are usually the easiest people to convert into paying customers. You will also gain valuable insight into the things that your consumers are looking for and you can in turn use this information as part of your marketing campaigns. - Tips & Techniques
People love to receive free tips & techniques, especially if they contain good information. If you prepare a “Top 10” list of industry tips, your list will be very responsive. How about delivering the Top 10 ways to create, improve, enhance, start, stop, remove, prevent, choose, select, run, reduce, make ___________.” This should give you ample ideas to get up and running with a Top 10 list. - Guides
Whip together a free guide or course and your list will love you! Looking for some information on what you could write on, just look through some of the article engines like ezinearticles.com or squidoo.com, take a few articles and put them together, re-write the content, and package it in a PDF. This is a great way to offer bonuses to your customers as well. - Competition Hack
Most people that would sign-up to your list have industry intelligence. By this we mean that they have an understanding of other products and chances are they have tried some of the other ones before. When a product has a lot of hype, it will be on people’s minds when they are contemplating buying yours. If you can give them reasons to buy yours instead with a real (and fair) comparison, you are likely to earn yourself a customer. Worst case scenario is that you earn a commission from the other product if they offer an affiliate program.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Profiting with Your Article
Now we are going to answer the big question – “How do I make money article marketing?” Some of you may already have article marketing experience and will know the answer. But for those who are new to the process we are going to suggest four different methods of generating value from an article:
- Promote affiliate product directly
Sending your traffic directly to an affiliate URL is one of the most commonly used techniques associated with article marketing. You simply write a review, testimonial, or story about a product and link to the affiliate URL within or at the bottom of the article. How well your article converts to sales will depend on how captivating it is. Note that not all article engines will let you "direct link" to the merchant pages. In situations where a direct link is not allowed, you will need to create a webpage to send your traffic to. - Send them to your own product website
If you own your own product you will obviously want to create articles to drive additional traffic to your website. You could write an unbiased review, an article full of useful information, or an article on a particular subject relevant to your product. If you have a product that shows people how to make money on eBay, you may want to write an article outlining the steps that someone should take to become successful on eBay, or some tips on how to set up an eBay account. - Send them to a squeeze page
If you have a squeeze page, you may want to drive your article traffic to it. You can do this by writing articles that would attract visitors who would be interested in your mailing list, and then redirect them to your squeeze page. Make sure your offer is worthwhile or people will not subscribe to your list. Magazines, newsletters, reports, guides, and books are great giveaways. - Send them to a review site
In the same way as you promote an affiliate product, you can write articles about particular products that you are comparing on your website and then send the visitors to your review website. By the time they get to your website they will be interested in one or several of the products and will be more likely to buy. If you have five products on your review site, you could write an article about each of them.
The "Side Job" Technique
If you look around the Internet it is very apparent that many (if not most) companies out there are lacking something on their website or are not up to par with the advertising techniques. It's very likely they are aware of their shortcomings and would be more than happy to get help if someone offered their services.
Many businesses do not know how to get their company website to show up within the natural search engines. You could offer your services in exchange for some cash. There are also a lot of companies that do not know how to create relevant advertising campaigns, or the importance of having multiple landing pages. There are a TON of companies that have loads of spelling mistakes on their sites! Etc..etc..
You can offer to help these companies with their graphics, site navigation, proof-read/editing, marketing etc. Many people will jump at this offer because they have been “meaning to” get it done, but haven’t had the time or resources (but often have the money). This is also a great way to create a business relationship and could easily result in long-term income.
If you’re browsing a website and find a spelling mistake or grammatical error, send the owner a quick email saying that you’ll proof-read their sales page for $25. Now that’s easy cash!
We have had people contact us in the past to do jobs such as these and have been willing to pay them. Don’t think that just because you do not own a big consulting company or a web design firm companies will not take you on board. It is quite the opposite actually, especially if the price is right. They are often used to being “taken to the cleaners” and overcharged for such services.
Selling T-Shirts (and other items)
Selling shirts… that is right. There are many people out there making a full-time living online simply creating t-shirt designs. There are now sites available to the public such as Cafépress and Zazzle that allow you to open up your own t-shirt store and create your own unique t-shirts.
What you can do is pick a hot topic such as a political campaign, a hot news event, or a world event that is taking place and create funny, motivating, rude, or just cool shirts with a message that is highly relevant to the subject matter. You can then promote your t-shirt and other items via forums, a blog, your web page, or the marketplace within Cafepress or Zazzle and earn money on each item you sell. People will be very inclined to buy these for gifts, pranks, or timeless items.
Here are some sites that you should use to get started:
You do not need a huge budget in order to make money online, and quite often you are better off learning marketing using free techniques before you move into PPC marketing. Use the strategies within this tutorial to start earning money online today!
Monday, May 11, 2009
Choosing a Direction
This is probably the most difficult decision starting out as an Internet marketer, so please pay full attention here. You have now been exposed to many Internet marketing techniques, some of them paid, some of them free. You do not need to know all of these in order to succeed. Actually, if you are just starting out, it is better that you don’t.
Choose your direction. We recommend that if you have a limited budget that you start off by becoming an article marketer. This is probably the best free technique, and requires much less work than creating 100’s of web pages that are SEO friendly. Writing articles will give you a solid understanding of different niches, how to find niches, copywriting skills, and how to target different demographics & audiences. These are all essential Internet marketing skills and can be incorporated into any Internet marketing technique.
If you do have a budget available to invest into getting your business up and running, you may want to start off with PPC marketing. This will allow you to get instant results as you can dictate exactly where your ads are in the search engines, what your web pages look like, and what keywords your ads will show up under in the search results. Is this more risky? Well, the fact that you have to outlay your own money for advertising is the only risky part. If you follow the techniques that we outline in the coming chapters focusing on consumer research, marketing, and the use of landing pages, you will be well on your way to creating a successful PPC campaign. The biggest risk involved with PPC is for people who RUSH into things before they know what they are doing. Take your time to learn PPC marketing techniques before you even consider writing your first ad!
It is much better off to become an expert at one thing than to be a “jack of all trades” within the Internet marketing realm, especially if you are just getting started. We like to use the “doctor” analogy for this.
There are many different types of doctors in the world, and guess what doctors make the most money? Specialists! If you become a brain surgeon or an anesthesiologist you will make much more money than a general practitioner. The same goes for Internet marketing. It is much better to be great at one thing (such as Google Adwords or article marketing), then to just “ok” in both.
So, as a rule of thumb become good at one thing before you become good at many.
The same goes for your marketing campaigns. Before you tackle multiple industries, figure out how to create a successful campaign within one. It is easy to duplicate campaigns once you have created one, but it is difficult to become successful if you spread your resources thin by setting up many average or failing campaigns. Think about it. If you try to be the Wal-Mart of the online world (the generalist), then you are going to need a budget like Wal-Mart. Start with a focus, and diversify once you have mastered one thing. Diversification can be very harmful if you are not ready for it just yet!
Now here is the cool part. If you fail at the first thing, you can always move onto something else. There are endless amounts of opportunity and if one thing does not work out, the next one might. Everything you do in your “online career” should be considered a learning experience, especially failure as it is very important to the success of any business. Thomas Edison failed 1000’s of times while inventing the light bulb before he got a working prototype! We (Kyle & Carson) have also experienced many failures along the way, but this made us better marketers.
Remember, if you become good at one thing, other Internet marketing strategies will come to you easily. Look at athletes; most of them are very good at more than one sport, even though they specialize in ONE. The same goes for marketers.
We started off by using strictly PPC techniques, and then evolved into much more diverse marketers. Now have a very complex understanding of Internet marketing, and implement almost every Internet marketing tactic you can think of, but we started out by specializing in one thing… PPC marketing.
Internet Marketing Basics
Introduction
Well, before we start we should introduce ourselves and the way we approach Internet marketing. Putting things into perspective like this will help you because you will discover that you are no different than us and success within Internet marketing is 100% possible by everyone at Wealthy Affiliate! Our names are Kyle and Carson and we have been Internet marketers since 2002. We first started out in the Internet marketing (IM) industry because we were starving students taking computer science at school! We needed to make some money in our spare time, but with homework and labs at school we didn’t have the time to get a job. At that point, we decided to use the skills that we had and do some research into making money online. We quickly figured out how it was possible to make money online without having your own product. Even better, we found out that we didn’t necessarily need a website.
Now let's go forward a few years to the present. We're now full-time Internet marketers and have developed a lot of our own techniques. We went to college together and started at about the same time, and now have decided to merge our talents and form our own company and help others build successful businesses online.
We started WealthyAffiliate.com (WA) because we wanted to provide something that no other site offers. At WA you have access to support from us as well as the opportunity to "mingle" with other aspiring and very successful Internet marketers. Some members here are making upwards of $3000/day, and guess what, they started with nothing! We are not saying you will get to this level, however it is possible if you set this as your goal. We continue to build new resources, tools, and services into Wealthy Affiliate so everything you need to run a business online can be found here!
Without coaching of some sort, it could take years and thousands of wasted dollars to "see the light", and in most cases this is too long to wait. Internet marketing sounds like a great idea, but unless you know what you are doing it can be very easy to waste money. This is what happens to many people. Not you though - because here at WA you’re in safe hands!
Now that you know more about us and our motives in creating Wealthy Affiliate, we’re going to describe what Internet marketing is and help you understand many of the concepts and processes involved.
Internet Marketing Background
What is Internet marketing? IM has been around for years (since 1996), but has recently gained more exposure because of the huge opportunity it provides for anyone who wants to start an online business. People like you and us! If you could make some money from the comfort of your home, perhaps just bring in a little bit extra that would help pay the bills, this would be great wouldn't it? Internet marketing allows you to do this. IM is a growing occupation as more and more people take it up full time and earn $100,000's every year advertising other people’s products and services online. The concept is similar to any regular job. You go to work and make money for the company that you work for. It’s exactly the same with IM, but you are your own boss, you get to choose your own hours, work as much (or as little) as you want to, and the company you are working for is yourself. This way you get to keep all the money and not just make someone else rich!
There are 10,000's of companies online that are willing to pay you a performance-based commission if you can drive sales to the websites promoting their products and services. To do this you join the "affiliate programs" run by these companies. Your job as an "affiliate" is to align online consumers with the products that they are looking for. Affiliate marketing is a fantastic opportunity because billions of dollars are spent online each year and a large percentage of that goes to affiliates.
Internet marketing is a broad term and there are many different ways of making money online. Some methods are free, some are paid, some require more work, some require less; but the fact of the matter is that anyone can make money online and there are hundreds of different ways you can accomplish this. The majority of these methods are covered here at Wealthy Affiliate and, as we learn of new opportunities online, we will continue to reveal them to our members.
Your office is the Internet, and you can do whatever your mind will allow you to! There are unlimited opportunities and the amount of money you can make within the Internet marketing world is endless.
Affiliates
We're sure you’ve heard the term "Affiliate" before and many of you probably know what it means, but for those who don't we are going to explain exactly what an affiliate is.
In the Internet marketing world, you will likely take on the role of an Affiliate unless you own a product, in which case you would be called the Merchant. Affiliates and merchants have a direct relationship and it is very important that the relationship is a good one. The term "affiliate" stems from the fact that you are "affiliated" with a company, and are working for them, though you don’t usually have a contract. At any one tim
e, you may be working as an affiliate for many companies, promoting a large number of different products.
Affiliates work for merchants by bringing customers to the merchant’s front door (in this case the website) and earning money in the process. If you are an affiliate of a company and you send a visitor to the merchant website through your special link, you are now eligible to be credited for anything that the visitor buys while at the merchant website. When a visitor buys something, the merchant will pay you a commission ...sometimes up to 75% of what the item costs. So, it’s simple; as an affiliate, it is your job to get web surfers (traffic) to visit the merchant site.
Why are affiliates important to merchants? If y
ou are a merchant and have a product that you want to sell online, you may not have the expertise to advertise the product online, so you have partnerships with affiliates who will do this for you. You pay your affiliates a percentage for every sale that they generate. As a merchant, you’ll get less overall return on investment (ROI), but you will reach potential customers you wouldn’t have been able to attract otherwise. Many companies rely completely on their affiliates to bring them business and they are more than happy to pay them for that service.
The relationship between affiliate and merchant i
s very important. As a merchant, you must provide your affiliates with as much support and as many promotional resources as you can to help them publicize your product. You must also be sure to send out your payments on time. The fastest way to lose affiliates is to not pay on time.
Advertising
Now you know what it means to be an affiliate and how an affiliate relates to a merchant. Since you are likely to start your business as an affiliate, you are probably wondering what your main role is. It must be simple to just send traffic to a we
bsite and make money from it- right? WRONG! This is the role of Wealthy Affiliate: to help affiliates learn how to send traffic to their merchant websites and how to turn this traffic into buyers.
There are a number of ways to generate traffic, but the fastest way to get results is to advertise. When you visit www.google.com, and do a search for something, you’ll most likely see a list of boxes on the right-hand side of the screen. These boxes are called sponsored listings, and advertisers are paying Google to put their ads there. There isn’t a set cost to have an ad placed, as your cost depends on how many people click on your ad and the quality of your ad campaigns. This is called "paid traffic", and is also known as "
Pay-Per-Click advertising" (PPC).
When a web surfer does a search and clicks on a sponsored listing, it costs the advertiser money. How much depends on the amount the advertiser is bidding on the term that the surfer typed into the Google search box.
Wait a minute, so what do sponsored listings have to do with me, the affiliate? As an affiliate, it is your responsibility to get people to visit the merchant site. Advertising in Google is a great way to do this. This is the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising. You sign up with Google Adwords (their advertising network), and create ads that wil
l be shown in the search listings. You will pay Google every time someone clicks on your ad and is taken to the web page of your choice (usually a page that you create, and in turn links to the merchant site).
Google Adwords isn’t the only place that you can advertise online. It isn’t the only search engine out there. Another big PPC network is Yahoo! Search Marketing. It works in a similar way to Google Adwords in that you pay for your ads to be displayed within the Yahoo search results. We’re not going to get into the specifics of Google and Yahoo advertising here because both techniques need more explanation than we can give in an introduction.
Although there are paid advertising techniques, you should be aware that there are also free advertising techniques. We offer tutorials and exp
lain many of these here at Wealthy Affiliate. The main ones include Article Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and Forum Marketing. As with PPC, we are not going to elaborate on these here, but you should definitely be aware that there are free marketing techniques that you can use to earn money online.
Conclusion
If you are starting out and wanting to become a successful Internet marketer then you need to understand the basics. You need to understand how IM works and the nature of the affiliate/merchant relationship. The role of an a
ffiliate is to sell the products/services that are offered by the merchants. When a purchase is made by the traffic that you generate, you will get a commission (anywhere between 1-75% of the sale)! Most companies pay commissions every 2 weeks, some instantly and some once per month.
You now understand that to sell products for merchants, you need to send traffic to the merchant website. Pay-Per-Click advertising is the most popular form of generating traffic as you can start attracting potential customers in very little time (usually a day or so). Google Adwords is a popular PPC advertising network as is Yahoo! Search Marketing, both having many similarities and differences. There are also many fre
e marketing techniques that can be implemented to generate traffic as well, and these are also explained here at Wealthy Affiliate.
This is just the start of your Internet marketing career and if you set goals and push yourself to achieve them, you will become a highly successful Internet marketer!
WA Forum
The forum is probably the most overlooked aspect at Wealthy Affiliate, yet there is so much great information within it that you would be very foolish not to spend a significant amount of time reading past posts. We recommend that all members go over at the very least some of the posts that have been labeled Sticky. The $500 Challenge has also proven to be a highly valuable forum as well, and this is one that you want to spend hours reading through.
So what makes the forum so valuable? Wealthy Affiliate is a “community” where we are all working together to create mutual success online. We share, we learn, and we help each other using the forum as a medium to ultimately create success. There is enough room for all of us to make large sums of money online, so by sharing something in the forum. Whether it is a mistake, a success story, something you learned, or a question you have, you are going to be bettering your position within the community. Other members are ALWAYS more than willing to help fellow WA’ers out.
If you are new to using forums, that's OK! You are going to find that our forum is very easy to use and navigate. It'll be that "thing" that you read while you have your breakfast, or before you go to bed at night. The Wealthy Affiliate forum is just a great place to learn about making money online. We have a full tutorial dedicated to learning how to use the forum. In the main menu to the left, click "Forum", then "WA Forum Help".
 Go Ahead and Get Started in the Forum Here! |
The power of building relationships is 100% important in this business. Trading skills and knowledge is something that we have "promoted" here at WA since day one, and we fully support a shared knowledge community. There are no secrets, and you are only limiting your own potential by holding back. Offer value, and it will come back to you 10 times over.
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