PPC Ad Optimization and Tips

Tips

One of the biggest challenges when starting out in an affiliate marketing business is just how to maximize traffic to your affiliate website without spending a lot of money doing so. Last time I discussed free marketing strategies, that have dramatically helped my business. This time I really want to talk about getting the bang for you buck, so to speak, when it comes to pay per click advertising.

The first thought that many of us have is that more is better. By that I mean the more keywords the better your ad will perform. The problem is not really that simple. We want to be able to allow our ads to reach a wide audience but at the same time we wish to have attention from people specifically looking for what we are offering. The bottom line that affects how much we pay when it comes to PPC marketing is the dreaded quality score. What is the quality score? Yahoo and Google are in agreement when it comes to quality score. Google states the following:

“Quality Score is the basis for measuring the quality and relevance of your ads and determining your minimum CPC bid for Google and the search network. This score is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR) on Google, and the relevance of your ad text, keyword, and landing page.”

So, if you take the above statement literally, it is in your best interest to cater to as specific an audience as possible. More practically these are the things that you should think about when writing an ad, selecting keywords, and landing pages.

1. Make sure the ad body contains the keywords that you wish to use.
2. Make sure the keywords are longer rather than shorter.
3. Make sure the landing page also has the keywords within it.
4. Keep the number of keywords to 5 or less, if you have more than 5 split the keywords up into separate ads.
5. Make ads for specific offers rather than groups of offers
6. Stay within compliance when it comes to writing ads and what can appear in the ad body.
7. Do not constantly fiddle with ad keywords. Allow them to sit for at least a week before making tweaks.
8. Create one ad per ad group.

Note: The landing page is the destination URL that you specify during the creation of your ad.

The more relevant your ad/keyword/landing page relationship is, the higher the quality score will be. An example of this would be:

Green Dot Prepaid Card
Prepaid Gold MasterCard
No Credit Check. Apply Now!
<your display address here>

The wording of the ad body has many elements of what is on the landing page for this particular offer. Thus that point is covered. For keywords you would select things like:

• green dot prepaid credit card
• green dot prepaid debit card
• green dot prepaid credit cards
• green dot prepaid gold mastercard

The reason behind using longer keywords is to basically not compete for the short very expensive keywords. Highly popular keywords will for that very reason have a higher cost per click. Using longer keywords will have two results. The first is the number of impressions that your ad will receive will be fewer. The second result is the clicks that you get as a result will be high quality specific traffic typically resulting in a click through. This in turn increases your click through rate, which will ultimately increase your quality score. A steady high quality score has immediate benefits when it comes to cost per click, as well as your position within search results.

Following what I have mentioned so far has yielded very positive results for my campaigns. This is a snapshot from today. The grey line is the overall count of what was going on, while the lines below are from particular ad groups that I am running. The tips above basically yield high click through rates.

In some instances you may wish to test ad variations before ultimately deciding on one. While I said above that you should create one ad per ad group. This really should only be used for the purpose of testing your keyword/ad body ideas, as it causes your ad variants to compete with each other. I would rather create several different ad groups with the same keywords, or turn off serving optimization for the ad variants. This would be the best way to truly test the ads if you should chose to create several ad variations in an ad group. After a week of tracking ad progress you simply select the best one and get rid of the others. The reason for letting things run for a week or so, is simply due to the fact that demand changes each day, and you really want to collect a full week of data before making choices on ads/keywords.

Keep in mind that things work best when you have control over both sides of your marketing structure. By that I mean, having control over ads/keywords, as well as control over your affiliate website. In my case I only have control over one side my marketing effort. I have control of my ads/keywords, though I will be making necessary suggestions. If I had full control there would be a couple of ideas that I would implement. Those would be:

1. Add best performing keywords to the offer landing page.
2. Add the best performing keywords to the meta tags for the landing page.

There are other tips that I can note, but I do not have enough personal experimentation with them. Those would be things like:

1. Experimenting with different match types
2. Use Google Analytics to test landing page/ad performance

Typically exact match wins over broad match, phrase match, or even negatives. I use Google Analytics to track traffic, bounce rate, overall volume, traffic sources, and so on. Google has a great write up on using analytics to test ads, and landing pages. Once I use that feature, I will write about it as well.

Tools

There are very useful tools that are available for use in the creation and maintenance of ads/ad groups. Google has released an Adwords Editor, that is available now in version 7.0.0. It allows you to download your entire CPC campaigns, create new ads, make changes, and post those changes to your campaign all from a desktop application. It also allows exporting and importing. The import stipulation seems to be at least based on a minimum budget amount. I ran into this when exporting my ads from the Adwords Editor, and trying to import those ads into Yahoo. There is a similar stipulation for Google.

I cannot say enough about Google Analytics, but I would have to talk about that in the next post.

Next Post: Tools and Tips

References:

10 Ways To Increase Your Adwords Quality Score at RedFly Marketing
Google Analytics at Google

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Free Marketing Strategies

When I started this business (Affiliate Marketing), all the talk and training focused mainly on PPC (Pay Per Click)/PPM (Pay Per Impression) advertising. When you are starting small, following PPC alone really can limit the progress and growth that as a new business owner is essential for continued motivation and even more so, innovation. I had a chance to sit down with others who started this business at the same time I did, and among them it was common to have low morale due to PPC/PPM ads not performing to their liking and driving the amount of traffic to their websites that would keep the excitement going. I did have the chance to reinvigorate their morale by showing them that it is indeed working for me. I hope my friends are reading this entry because I wish to give more advice on driving traffic to our websites, and how it can be done without actually having to pay for it. All it takes is a little time. Time is something that we should not be afraid of devoting anyway since it is our business and we all have our reasons for starting a business in the first place.

There are several free marketing strategies out there that are available. Many times we tend to overanalyze things and in turn miss out on various possibilities since we ourselves do not think in such a way. For example... when I first thought of using PPC/PPM advertising, I thought, "Who clicks on those sponsored ads? I never do." Of course, I have had my eyes opened on that particular topic as well as quite a few others recently. What are the free marketing strategies?

1. Web Directories
2. Blogs
3. Twitter

These free strategies have a two fold effect on your affiliate website. The first effect is via search engine optimization which in turn leads us to the second, which is basically to drive traffic to your site in as many ways as possible.

Web Directories are just that. They are directories on the world wide web that specialize in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links. There are different types of directories, but I am only going to talk about those that are free. Also these are human-edited directories. Linking your affiliate website to these directories will improve your pages ranking in the major search engines. Improving your page rank in the search engines will mean better placement for your PPC ads, and subsequently lower cost/click, as well as your website appearing higher on regular searches. Another added benefit is that you increase organic searches through referring sites. Your page rank is essentially calculated from the number of sites your page is linked to and how many sites link to your page. All in all this helps to increase traffic to your site(s).

There are great resources for finding these web directories. One such site is www.addurl.nu. It contains a list of nearly 1000 free directories. I would recommend adding your site(s) to the listed directories at a rate of 10/day. This keeps you from appearing as a spammer to the search engines. As with anything, please note that the affect of doing this will take a little time as there are approval times on some of the directories as long as 180 days, but do not let that stop you from adding your site to the directory. I have personally been doing this, for roughly a month, and have seen my traffic increase by nearly 300%. By the time you make it though the nearly 1000 directories, I can guarantee that one would be pleased with the results. I must also stress that you should be consistent in adding 10/day, as well as keep records of the directories that you have added your site(s) to. One further piece of advice, and that is stay away from reciprocal links.

Blogs - short for web log, has a couple of easily apparent benefits. First it can help one garner a following. By that I mean people that are interested in the topics you write about will follow your blog, or at least read it from time to time. This blog is a perfect example of the type of content that could prove interesting to those working on the same sort of business, or even business in general. Taking the time to create a blog also helps you to become an expert in the subject matter of your blog. For instance, I am learning additional strategies to apply to my business because of the fact that I am writing this blog, and vice-versa. After a while of having a blog and a following, people will provide feedback, and even ask questions about various things. Blogs are linked to your sites (for me in the personal pages on the right), and my blog is linked to other blogs that I find interesting. All in all it adds to the conglomeration of information about my site(s), and about my business in general, all of which provides another source of traffic. I would recommend the following as guidelines:

1. Blogs should stick to one niche and not deviate from it.
   
2. Blogs should be updated regularly. Decide on once or twice a week and stick to the same day if at all possible.
3. Blogs should reference other sites, blogs, articles, or material on what you are speaking about
4. Keep each blog entry relevant and interesting.
5. Be credible and always fact check.
   
6. Correct things that need to be changed.
   

There are a couple of good blog sites that are more widely recognized. One is www.blogger.com, and the other is www.wordpress.com. Wordpress is more commonly used by business, but blogger is as well, and may have a larger following overall. I chose Blogger because it is driven by Google, and it allows you to have Google ads on your blog via Adsense, which honestly is another means of making money with the blog. So, based on the words in your blog post, relevant ads will be shown. If ads are clicked on, you are paid for that. So the larger following that you are able to acquire, the better you will do with making money that way too.

Twitter - is another form of free marketing. The essence of Twitter is that you enter in status messages as you go through your day. For example, I wrote: "Added another blog entry on Free Marketing Strategies". My Twitter profile is linked to my blog. People will follow you on Twitter, and you should follow others on Twitter with similar interests, whether they be individuals or business entities. The affect of this is traffic to your blog, which is in turn another means of garnering a following and bring traffic to your sites in the end.

Each of these items are easy and do not require an abundance of time.

Next Post: PPC Ad Optimization and Tips

References:
________________________________________________________
Web Directories at WikiPedia
Page Rank at WikiPedia

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Business Financial Foundations and Fundamentals

I have learned quite a bit when it comes to starting and running a business. One of the things that oftentimes gets overlooked or at least severely delayed is the setup of a basic business structure. There are several different types of business structures. When I started I only really knew two structures in depth, but not much beyond those two. What are the business structures that really fit for small businesses?

1. Sole Proprietor
2. LLC - Limited Liability Company
3. S-Corporation

I knew of sole proprietor and had personal experience with that structure. I also knew of LLC since it offered some liability protection should your business require it. What I did not know is that the tax benefits between these structures and an S-Corp are like night and day quite literally. I will give a brief rundown of the differences, and will provide links for more in-depth study.

First we have the sole proprietor. The first question that I asked was how is such a structure taxed. I got my answer and did not like it at all. The basic truth is that as a sole proprietor you must report all business income and losses on your personal tax return, as the business itself is not taxed separately. When it comes to how much you pay in taxes the basic gist is that you pay 15.3% in the form of a self employment tax, and you pay another 24% tax as an income tax. So, can you imagine paying up to 39.3% in taxes? That would make someone not wish to do business. The next question for me was, what protections are in place for a sole proprietor, or in other words if someone wished to file suit against the business, what is the bottom line with respect to me and my own personal holdings? The answer to that is basically as a sole proprietor you are personally liable for any suits that are filed against the business. So, if someone should file suit and win, any and all personal assets are available and can be seized as restitution. Another thing to note is the sole proprietor business structure is the default business structure that the government will lump a business into that has not filed to be any other business structure.

For the LLC, one is afforded personal asset protection, however the tax structure is basically the same as that of a sole proprietor, meaning that you are still liable for up to 39.3% in taxes. I did not like that idea much either.

After lots of research and gnashing of teeth, I chose to utilize the S-Corp structure. I chose this structure because of the protections, as well as the tax structure. Utilizing this business structure provides legal separation between me and the business. This is the fundamental reason behind liability protection. An S-Corp is an umbrella business, making it possible to operate an unlimited number of DBA's (Doing Business As) within the corporation. As an S-Corp "shareholder", you are essentially an employee of the corporation so that self employment tax that is common to both sole proprietor and LLC, goes away. There are something like 330 tax deductions that are available to S-Corps. Operating costs are 100% deductible, and can include things like rent/utilities, internet access, gas mileage, cell phone, meetings, marketing, training, further investment, vacations, leasing of vehicles and so on. An S-Corp is in essence a pass through entity allowing some of the deductions of an S-Corp to be applied to my individual taxes. The basic paradigm is:

"Anything I do in the pursuit of profit is a deduction."

Needless to say the benefits here are phenomenal.

Each state has their own filing fees, but the what remains the same are the required forms needed to establish an S-Corp.

1. Pre-Incorporation Agreement
2. Corporate Bylaws
3. Shareholders' Agreement
4. Notice of Shareholders' Meeting
5. Notice of Directors' Meeting
6. Shareholder Proxy
7. Minutes of Shareholders' Meeting
8. Minutes of Directors' Meeting
9. Consent of Shareholders
10. Consent of Directors

It is obvious if you are the sole entity within the corporation that several of these forms can be abbreviated or passed over. The required forms can be found in your state at the Secretary of State website.

With any business it is a necessity to keep good records of expenditures as well as income, for the simple fact that it makes tax time a lot easier if you can simply go to the file cabinet and pull income, expenditure, marketing, training, and other such records at will. I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep good records on a daily basis.

Next Post: Free Marketing Strategies

References:
_____________________________________________________
Business Ownership Structures at Nolo.com
How Sole Proprietors are Taxed at Yahoo Small Business

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Business Emergence Status Update

Sorry for the delay... I have been fighting the bot flag. For some reason my blog was flagged as spam, and the notification message reads:

"We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of spammers."

So it has been an interesting few days trying to get that flag lifted. I think it has finally been lifted since I no longer see the flag information on my blogger dashboard.

I think I like the fuzzy logic reference, but that is just humorous to me due to years of being a software engineer.

Next Post: Business Foundations, and Fundamentals

Pay Per Click, and Pay Per Impression Marketing

The initial work in driving traffic to my affiliate websites came in the form of pay per click marketing via the search engines Google and Yahoo. Keep in mind that there are more search engines out there than just Google and Yahoo. I chose those because Google is the largest commanding over 80% of the search engine market, and Yahoo because it is one of a few that make up the remaining 20% of the search engine market. If you look at the pie graph it kinda becomes obvious as to why I made my initial marketing choice.





The first thing that I did was sign up for a Google Adwords account, and a Yahoo search marketing account. These are cost per click marketing systems. This means that your ads are shown to people until your daily spending limit is reached. You are not charged for your ads being viewed, and you are not charged until someone actually clicks on your ad. There are some interesting points to note. Both Google and Yahoo rotate ads, thus your ad always appears on someone's first page. You have control of how much you wish to pay per click, as well as how much you wish to spend on content match ads. Content matching is also very useful. For example if someone is searching for acai berry free trials, and someone has a website dedicated to all things acai while utilizing google adsense on their website, this website becomes a candidate for your acai ad to be shown on.

Signing up for those is pretty straightforward. Google only charges for their service once a month, while Yahoo implements a pre-paid account model where you have a minimum balance threshold before being charged again. The good thing here is that you are in control of your monthly budget. Once the accounts were set up I turned my attention toward the creation of text ads. When creating text ads there are some things to consider.

Items of consideration

1. Compliance
2. keywords
3. proper ad body

On the topic of compliance... the affiliate is informed by either the affiliate network, or by the merchant as to the articles of compliance that must be followed. This is very important because if compliance is breached you run the risk of losing the affiliate relationship with the merchant, and in some cases, multiple infractions could lead to being kicked out of the affiliate network. More specifically there are usually keywords that are protected that cannot be bid on by the affiliate, as well as trademarks that cannot appear in the ad body, or the keywords. A concrete example of this is... say American Express Preferred Rewards Gold Card. American Express is trademarked and cannot appear in the ad body, or in keywords. In fact there is a long list of words that are off limits for use as keywords. Do not let that be discouraging, because there are still many ways to market the card. A good example ad could be:

Reward Credit Card
No Annual Fee. 10,000 Reward
Points. Apply Online Now!
"your website here"

The keywords for this ad to be something like:

1. reward credit card
2. gold reward credit card
3. reward credit cards
4. no annual fee reward credit card

I also learned that Google started to offer image ads in addition to their text ads. I tried using that and achieved great success with it. You still need to specify keywords, but you no longer have to worry about ad body.

There are also CPM, or cost per impression, marketing offered by entities such as Adbrite. Adbrite allows the creation of text ads, as well as image/banner ads. This is also a powerful means of driving traffic to ones site. I tried this and had some success. Of course when you are choosing images you have to pay attention to the legalities of the image contents. For example, you cannot have a picture of a celebrity and point it to a product offering. With cost per impression marketing you pay per 1000 impressions. An impression is when your ad appears, or when your ad is shown to someone doing a search. The selling point here is the low cost per 1000 impressions. Many times just pennies per 1000 impressions.

I have learned all of these methods of marketing over the last few months and could write at great length about them. If there are any questions about any of these topics please feel free to ask.


References:
______________________________________________________
2008 Market Share Analysis at MarketShare.hitslink.com
Cost Per Impression Marketing at Adbrite.com
Cost Per Click Marketing at Yahoo
Cost Per Click Marketing at Google

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The Business of Affiliate Programs

As promised, I wished to talk about the fundamentals of affiliate programs and to further state why I chose to pursue this particular business model. As I state previously:

"Basically being an affiliate means that you never have to deal with customers; never have to sell or ship products; and never have to call people or coerce others into joining anything."


The basic premise is that the affiliate is compensated by the merchant for each visitor/customer directed to the merchant by the affiliate's marketing efforts. I could say it another way. Affiliate marketing is an internet-based marketing practice in which the affiliate markets the products of other businesses in return for compensation when traffic is driven from the affiliate's efforts to the business.

Compensation occurs when a customer performs a conversion. Conversion criteria are provided to the affiliate by the merchant. There are a few typical forms of customer conversions, CPA, CPL, and CPS.

(CPA) -- Cost Per Action conversions are typically achieved when a customer is directed to a merchants site and fills out a short form, such as an application, or provides as little information as a zip code, email address, or even create a free account.

(CPL) -- Cost Per Lead conversions are similar to CPA conversions but requires the customer to do a little more. For example: A customer signs up for a free credit report.

(CPS) -- Cost Per Sale conversions are pretty straightforward. The merchant pays per sale, via either a flat fee, or a percentage of the sale.

There are a couple of ways to break into the business of affiliate marketing. One such way is personally going to each company/business that offers affiliate programs, signing up for, and be approved by each of them. Another way is to buy into an already established affiliate network. I chose to buy into a couple of networks. One was financial based, in the areas of credit and personal finance, while the other contains direct sales/deals items like, "As seen on TV" products, health and fitness products, and so on. I chose these networks based on the demand for the products and services within the network. The second criteria for me when it comes to choosing a network is simply, if I could believe in the products being offered, or at the very least see them as needed and positive.

In my particular case, access to the network also came with the affiliate websites. Coming this far is really most of the leg work in getting things setup. This left me with only one task, and that task was to drive traffic to my affiliate website. The websites contain links to a multitude of merchant products, offers, free trials, and the like. The initial charge in driving traffic to the websites took the form of CPC/CPM marketing through the main search engine providers, namely Yahoo, and Google. I will go into the various marketing aspects in the next post. I will say this however... my first effort yielded a nice income. It honestly gave me faith in what I have plunged myself into. Money to reinvest back into the business itself and motivation to multiply these initial earnings.

References
_________________________________________________________

1. Affiliate Marketing at Wikipedia
2. Affiliate Programs at Affiliate Scout

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Business Emergence

While I have always understood fiscal responsibility and the need to "live within my means", life has been more reactive than proactive. One would ask, what do I mean by that? Think about how we are raised. The first thing that many of our parents focused on providing for us, outside of a stable home environment, was our education. We are taught to go to school, go to college, and eventually to settle into a career. Many of us do so without question, go to college and even graduate school, and are generally very good at what we do for a living.

The scariest part about living in a reactive manner is that, we are not in control of what happens to us, and when a crisis comes along, sometimes it can wipe us out, or at least knock us down for a little bit. For example... the current economy has caused many to be without jobs for protracted periods of time. I was one of these. Working in a high tech industry, for a long time, one would think that it would not be difficult to find work elsewhere. The problem happens to be a little more complex than that. There are many people at the same time seeking jobs, many of which have similar credentials. Needless to say when you find yourself looking for a protracted amount of time, it really does serve as a wake up call. That simply means that what we have been taught about establishing a good career is not enough in the current day and age.

I really do wish we were all taught to diversify, seek out business ideas, as well as business fundamentals during our years in school. I wonder what the country would look like if we were all taught to be proactive in our lives. Living proactively just means focusing on the multiplication of what you currently have. For me it meant starting a business, because working alone, even with investment was simply not enough, and I know that the continuation of what I have been doing leaves me much too vulnerable to economic downturns, and company politics. I thought to continue relying on employment alone was madness.

Does this mean I do not work? No. It does mean however that I am working, as well as spending time building a business. I am sure that you are asking, what kind of business? I spent quite a bit of time looking for business ideas, and finally chose a business model based on affiliate programs, all of which can be conducted online. I will go into the details of affiliate programs in the next post, but I will at least say why I chose to do affiliate programs. Basically being an affiliate means that you never have to deal with customers; never have to sell or ship products; and never have to call people or coerce others into joining anything.

It is double edged. What does that mean? The good news is that you are in control of your own future. The bad news is you are in control of your own future. That always has seemed a funny statement to me. The fact that it is something that is mine, and my own efforts dictate how well I do, is refreshing.

The two sites I have so far are:

http://www.americanccplace.com

and

http://treasures.dealsmall.com

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