Here are some ways you can make the most out of keywords in your PPV campaigns

The simple approach

You can make keywords out of the url’s you are bidding on. For example; if the url I was bidding on was autoinsurance.com (just an example) I could break this out into a few keywords like this;

autoinsurance
auto insurance

From that one target we now have 2 more keywords to bid on.

Hot Keywords

I was talking about using PPV with hot trends in the forum and one of our knowledgeable members shared this site http://trendsbuzz.com/

It’s an aggregator of some trending keyword sites. These are great because you can often find keywords that have little competition. You do have to get creative targeting these with offers because not all of these are going to be an easy match to an offer.

There is actually a LOT you can do with trends.

Good Old Fashioned Keyword Research

Head on over to the Google keyword tool and start some research. This tool is probably the best overall to see search volume (for our purposes). You could do a couple things here;

- Search for relevant keywords for your offer. Look at the search volume and also what you think would be a relevant keyword to your niche.

- Use the tool to find related keywords that you might not have thought of. It’s tough to know all the potential keywords for a niche so use the Google keywords tool to spark new ideas.

One note about keywords – generally the shorter phrases will work better. Don’t go after super long tail keywords. Normally 1-3 word keywords perform best, so think broad.

You might be surprised how well keywords work. Give them a shot in your next campaign!

Think about these two scenarios

- You have a campaign sending traffic to a landing page promoting a dating offer. You pay for traffic and hope the visitors convert enough to cover your traffic costs, and leave you with a profit. Once someone converts, you’re pretty much done with them.

- You have a campaign sending traffic to a landing page with an opt-in form. Just for example purposes say you get someone to opt-in for $1 (meaning you spend $1 on traffic for every opt-in). Now, you might have spent money without an immediate conversion…but once  you have that email address, you can market to that person over and over. One email  you spent $1 on collecting could earn you hundreds of dollars in commissions as they convert on the many offers you email out.

Most people start collecting a list, then stop because  they don’t see an immediate return. You aren’t going to see steady conversions when you have collected 50, or 100 emails. You need to get to the thousands (this somewhat depends on the niche) before you will most likely see some sales come in. So, yes…in our scenario above, you might spend a few thousand dollars building a list before you see much revenue from it.

That doesn’t sound real appealing I know. There are some ways you can break even, or even earn a positive ROI while you are building your email list. It’s not a guarantee that these will always work, but it’s worth trying for sure.

One strategy is to collect someones email, and immediately send them to an offer. Depending on how targeted your campaign is, and how creative you are with collecting opt-ins, this can work pretty well and it’s very easy. You can also send them to a landing page with multiple offers, increasing the chance that they might convert for something.

Another strategy is to send  your traffic to a landing page with an offer/offers that also has an opt-in form on it. You need to give them a good reason why they should convert and opt-in at the same time. You might explain how the visitor can get a great deal by signing up for one of your offers today, and get future offers sent to them by email.

You can, and should get really creative with this. There are a lot of cool possibilities, and if you get it right you can build a huge email list that pays for itself. It’s not going to be overnight. I just did one campaign that took months to just start seeing some sales coming from my email blasts. You have to get out of the quick one hit mindset so many people have with affiliate offers, and start thinking how you can earn the most from each visitor.

New affiliates like to have everything lined up perfectly. They have tracking all set, very professional landing pages, meticulously researched targets, and hours of planning. While some of those things have importance, they often take so much time that campaigns never get launched.

Below is my plan for being a sloppy (yet fast and profitable) affiliate. This is based not only on what has worked for myself, but others I talk to or work with. This is for launching PPV campaigns but could be adapted for any traffic source.

Pick Offers Quick

It’s best focus on one niche. Having said that, I do still have luck testing random offers. One thing I like to do is pick an offer payout I want to work with (usually in the $2-12 range) and just run every offer I can find that fits that one criteria. I’ve found some really good campaigns doing this actually, and some with little to no competition.

I really don’t do anything more than just pick an offer in that payout range.

Grab Targets

Search Google for a couple keywords closely related to your offer and grab the URL’s from all the organic and paid results (if they are relevant). This is a quick way to get 30-50 initial targets. Even if you do this by hand, it should only take 10-15 min.

Slap Together a Landing Page

I just talked about this here

1460 New Campaigns Per Year

Once you get this process down, you should be able to do a campaign in about 15 min or less. Think about this for a minute; set aside 1 hour per day to build new campaigns. 1 hour a day is nothing…even if you have a full time job it could be as simple as getting up a little early, or doing this on your lunch break.

If you can build a campaign in 15 min, then in an hour you should be able to build 4. If you built 4 campaigns every day,  you would have built 120 campaigns per month. Say just 10% of those worked out and each earned a measly $200 a month (that’s just $6 per campaign per day). That’s and extra $2400 a month, or  for an hour a day’s work.

Over a year, you would have built 1460 campaigns. Applying the formula from above, you can see how this really ads up.  You don’t always need to have that one giant campaign to make great money.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that calculations about campaigns like this aren’t always really accurate. Things happen, and individual marketers abilities come into play. My point with this wasn’t to show you some surefire way to see how much you would make based on how many campaigns you built, but to show you how powerful just setting aside an hour a day to build campaigns is.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. In the forum we did a 30 day challenge where people posted their results. It was really interesting to see who finished and who didn’t and why. I’m sure you can guess the results of the people that did finish. Even if they didn’t have profitable campaigns they were SO much farther ahead of where they started.

So, if you are constantly searching for the latest info, technique, trick, etc. that’s cool…but the people that are basically just putting one foot in front of the other every day building campaigns even when it’s really boring are going to out earn you by a lot even if you know all the latest tricks.

Ask for a payout bump

This has got to be the easiest, and kind of surprisingly overlooked, ways to scale a campaign. Any payout increase will help. So how do you go about getting a pay bump? Usually the network will want to see some traffic and gauge the quality a little. Sometimes they will bump you right away (usually when they were offering a low payout to being with).

Talk with your AM and see what they can do..even a small payout bump can take a campaign to the next level.

Rotate offers between CPA networks

This seems like a weird one to some people, but the same offer can convert very differently on different networks. The reasons why could take a whole post, but for the sake of scaling I would highly recommend split testing the offer you’re running with a few networks.

Bid into a lower position

This might seem the opposite of what you would expect, but being in a lower position can increase your ROI quite a bit. Have you ever seen those insane bid differences between 1st and 2nd position? Let those idiots auto bid each other into the red, while you sit back and pay a ton less (leading to much higher ROI in some cases)

Duplicate your campaing on another traffic source

Got a winner on Traffic Vance? Why not run it on Lead Impact and other PPV networks too. Since the campaign is already built, it really only takes a few minutes to copy it over. I’ve had campaigns where just doing this literally doubled the net profit.

There’s no reason you can’t run your campaign on a totally different traffic source too. It will take a little adapting, but if you know an offer is converting there is a good chance you can make it work somewhere else.

Bid on target variations

Most people bid on domain.com but there are a ton of variations that get traffic and often have less competition.

You can use some variations like
.target.com
target
/target.com
etc
some variations work better on certain ppv networks.

Figure out why that target converted

Say you are bidding on a target that’s producing a great ROI; see if you can figure out why it’s performing so well. Does a certain demographic visit that site? Is it in a certain niche? Are the visitors of that site looking for something there that makes your offer really appealing? The cool thing about doing this is there is really no tool to do this other than your brain. If you can master this, you’ll be far ahead of other ppv affiliates.

So there you have it. Even if you have a campaign doing just a few dollars a day, applying some or all of these techniques will absolutely squeeze more money out of it.

I’m going to keep this short and simple.

1. Positions 2-4 can often make a huge difference in ROI. Stop bidding into first position and let those idiots overbid you by .10

2. Test lowering your bids. Basically, you don’t know if you always need to be bidding that high. Check out this post from barman.

3. There’s gold in them there text links. If you haven’t ran text links you need to. It’s a little bit of a different beast but one with a lot of potential.

4. Add audio to your landers. It can make a 10%+ difference in CTR.

5. Ugly works. Use plain blue text links as your call to action for a nice CTR boost.

Bonus tip – a hot niche to run right now is payday loans.

If your a forum member, we are doing a webinar with Traffic Vance on June 2nd so don’t miss your chance to get your questions answered directly from the source.

Download the guide here

Like most traffic sources, niches, techniques, and landing page styles, direct linking goes in and out of style. Go back to some of the earliest affiliate marketing on AdWords and many people direct linked. Now of course, most people use landing pages but that’s a whole post in itself.

This post is about direct linking with PPV. I’ve seen many people who start out and immediately jump into making landing pages. In a lot of cases, the reason for building a landing page and not direct linking is the belief that landing pages always do better. The thinking is almost like direct linking would be ‘too easy’ and you have to really struggle at making a great landing page to be successful. Fortunately direct linking works really well.

I actually hadn’t done much direct linking in a while until a really successful forum member reminded me how well it worked. After that, I started direct linking more and was pretty surprised with the results. I also started split testing a lot of my campaigns with a simple LP vs direct linking and was proved wrong a few times when direct linking outperformed the LP.

One question people have is when to use direct linking and when to use a landing page. With PPV there isn’t really a hard and fast rule of when to use each. I mean, maybe someone has a theory but based on the split tests I’ve done, I haven’t found a specific situation where I can say ‘always do direct linking here’. This is why I have been setting up a lot of my campaigns as a simple split test between a landing page and direct linking. This gives me a pretty quick idea of which is going to perform better, and I can further optimize from there.

If you’ve been busy building landing pages, give direct linking another shot and you might be surprised with the results!

I ended up making 53 new campaigns. This is a lot lower than I had hoped for, but I had a lot going on this month. Posting my daily campaign totals definitely made me build more than I would have otherwise. I cringed every time I had to post and say I did 0 campaigns.

Out of the 53 I had about 15 that were profitable or near break even. I had some more with conversions (but not near break even) that might have some potential after tweaking a bit. That’s not bad at all for building about 1.5 campaigns per day and I haven’t really taken the time to tweak these much.

Some people might have been intimidated by the challenge because of limited funds to test. I started each campaign with a daily budget of $10. If I saw some potential, or thought it needed to run a little more I let it. I ended up in the green after all was said and done.

I used pretty basic techniques to build my campaigns. Most of the time split testing between a simple LP and direct linking. Targets were mostly picked from Google by searching relevant keywords.

We had a lot of interest in this experiment. Quite a few people started but not all kept posting until the end. There was a solid group who continued updating until the end.

I’m really curious to hear from them, but also the people who might have only made one post or those who stopped updating. So I am asking all participants

1. How many campaigns did you end up building?

2. Out of those, how many were winners or showed potential?

3. What kept you from building more campaigns?

4. If you started the challenge but didn’t keep updating…what caused you to stop building campaigns or updating the thread?

After I get some data I will update!

When I say beginner, I don’t mean we are going to be talking about ‘what is PPV’ or how to install Prosper. This is more for people who know the basics of PPV, are actively building campaigns, but aren’t making a consistent $100-$200/day net profit.

To get the most out of the session you would ideally have the basics down including

* Tracking
* Building a simple landing page
* Building & launching PPV campaigns

You don’t have to be proficient at any of these, but a decent understanding of them will be very helpful.

Topics we will be discussing will include;

* Several techniques & strategies for consistent campaigns
* A unique case study showing a simple, profitable campaign
* How to simplify picking targets for a better chance of success
* How to test campaigns more efficiently
* I will be launching a live campaign so you can see the exact process I go through from start to finish

It’s been a year since the first mastermind I did, and I’ve talked to a LOT of forum members and PPV marketers in the last year. What I find about 99.9% of the time is that people who aren’t making a consistent profit are often making things harder than they need to be.

The goal of this mastermind will be learning how to simplify your approach, what exactly to focus on, and how to start turning a consistent profit.

The mastermind will include the presentation, and plenty of time for questions. There will also be time afterward if you want me to look at your campaigns, or ask me questions privately.

When & Where

Monday January 10th from 2-4pm at a conference room in the Wynn.

The cost will be $500 and include the mastermind, a recording of the session, and binder with notes/examples, and 1 year free access to the forum.

I will be limiting this to 12 people, just so everyone can get the most out of it. If interested, payment can be made by Paypal to reserve your spot.

Please PM me in the forum, or email me here before sending payment to make sure there are still spots open.

If you have any questions you can ask here, or by PM/email

When you give someone a referral to Traffic Vance, you are responsible for that persons actions on the network. What this means is that if I refer someone, and they are caught doing something against Traffic Vances TOS, I can potentially lose my account.

Basically we (referrers) are responsible for the people we refer into the network. I would strongly urge people to not just hand out referrals because what seems like a nice gesture, could actually get you kicked out of the network.

This is good for current advertisers, but I can understand how it will be frustrating for people wanting in. The best thing to do is network in the industry and build up some good friendships so people feel comfortable referring you.

I definitely wouldn’t hand out a referral to somebody just asking for one on a public forum or anything. My Traffic Vance account is worth a lot more than that.