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.

This reminds me of a really well known blackhat seo guy I used to be friends with and what he told me one time; Apparently tons of people would come to him for help with questions about site structure, indexing, etc, etc, etc. and he said his answer 99% of the time was just that they needed to build more links. That was it, forget everything and build more links.

Going back to Adam’s advice above…I agree 100% that simply building more campaigns will make you progress faster and further than almost anything else. I’m not saying don’t ask questions or anything at all, just not matter what build new campaigns every day.

So, I want to see how many of you are up for a 30 day experiment. For the next 30 days, commit to building at least 1 campaign and up to 5 campaigns each day. A new campaign could mean simply taking a campaign you already have running and moving it to a new traffic source, or doing the same campaign in a different country. It doesn’t always have to mean building a totally new campaign from scratch. A campaign should not be taking you days to launch. If it is, let me know and let’s talk about your approach.

Don’t over complicate this…the point isn’t to make perfect campaigns, just to make campaigns.

If you want to keep track of this yourself that’s cool..get a calendar or something and cross out every day you build x amount of campaigns every day for the next 30 days. We started a thread in the forum where people can post each day the # of campaigns they make (myself included). It’s going to be really interesting to see how many people follow through with this. I will report back on that one!

I don’t know if many people will do this but it is probably the one thing I can recommend doing that would take you to the next level.

So what does it take to get credit reports to work on PPV? The answer (at least in my experience) is to really learn about your target audience. I see so many people that blindly pick targets without really thinking about them (in all niches)  I wanted to show you how to get inside your customers head.

Think about credit reports, spend a couple hours reading about the different credit bureaus like Experian, Equifax, and Trans Union. Get to know what a FICO score is all about, and generally just how credit reports work. I believe this is crucial if you really want to succeed in a niche. You will pick up so many more ideas than someone who just knows what a basic credit report is.

Next, I like to list all the reasons someone would want or need a credit report. You can do this on pen and paper (a personal favorite) or online. First, just brainstorm the basic reasons people get credit reports;

• Applying for a loan (house, car, boat, etc)
• Refinancing a home
• Getting a credit card
• Renting a house or apartment
• Divorce
• If you’re a landlord running a credit check on a perspective tenant

With just that basic list, you can come up with all sorts of creative ways to target your credit report offers. One example is to target sites aimed at landords, and brand your LP as a resource for running credit checks on tenants.

The second thing I like to do is think of what people who were getting a credit score might also need. My thinking might go something like this; I know people who need a credit report probably need extra money so they might also be interested in loans. Loans to buy cars, loans to get a house, loans until payday (cash advance) are all things I could target and pop my credit report landers over.

If you target keywords, you can target a lot that most affiliates miss if you really learn the niche. Terms like fico, 3 bureau, true credit, etc. will be terms you  will not only bid on, but understand what they mean.

Learning about the niche you are promotion is such an important thing that many affiliates just don’t do. Try it next time you decide to tackle a niche and you’ll see the results first hand.

I thought about how to write this blog post and how I could possibly summarize everything it did and realized the video Robert (the creator) made, does a much better job than I could ever do. The video is about 30 minutes long but I highly suggest watching it….it will really blow your mind what this thing can do.

I talked to Robert for about an hour on the phone yesterday and by the time we were done my head was spinning. He has some amazing plans for this software that I am really excited about.

Robert isn’t offering any kind of coupon code or discount but after seeing that video, you should know exactly why. CPV Lab is worth way more than the current price of $297 .

CPV Lab is not some magic software though that will make you instantly profitable. You still need to have the basics of running campaigns, selecting targets, building LP’s, etc down to get the most out of it. This is not a tool to buy if you are a total newbie, or think the price is too high. If you are a serious marketer though, you simple can’t get a better piece of tracking software.

Check out CPV Lab here

This PPV trick and/or tip isn’t going to change your life but it sure could make that “loser campaign” into a relative golden nugget.  I just started PPV marketing at the end of 2009.  That is when I joined David Ford and his PPVPlaybook Forum.  I was slow jumping on the bandwagon and I’m disappointed that I didn’t jump on earlier.  So, what I’m saying is I am still new and this little tip bumped my campaigns across the board.

I have to give credit where it is due.  I have private messaged this guy something to the effect of “you changed my life”.  Well not quite but it was a great tip that I didn’t think about before or maybe i didn’t pay attention too it when I saw it.  His name is Derek and he posts on the PPVPlaybook Forum.  There was a thread he created by giving some random tips about keywords and url’s.  Most of the stuff I had read before but this one just happened to catch my eye;

There is a difference, in some networks, between .com and .com/

There are 100′s of little case studies and tips and tricks on all of these internet marketing blogs and forums but I swear I had not read that before.  I have been profiting on many campaigns since I started taking his advice and you can see why below.  Here is one particular offer that has brought in 150% ROI everyday for over 2 weeks because of this tip.  If I didn’t take his tip to heart I know for a fact I would have deleted this campaign because there is no way I would bid that high.  Here is a screen shot.

As you can see people are bidding $0.60+ on the .com and I’m #1 for the .com/ at $0.034

Thank you Derek for that and I hope some one else or many of you find this post helpful and will take action on your PPV campaigns.  The point to this post is that any little detail can bump your campaign from a loser to a winner.

Pre populating an offer is when you send someone to a form (in this case an email submit) with their email address already filled out on the forum. All they have to do is hit submit! There are a few reasons I like pre-pop so much:

• The offers usually convert much higher (they’re already filled out, duh!)
• You can keep the email address yourself and pre-pop so you get the best of both worlds

Below is a case study of promoting an email submit.

Step 1 – Offer Selection

Ok so obviously we need to pick an offer that can be pre-populated. Most of the time, your CPA network will have a way to search which offers can be pre-populated. The way the offer is pre-populated is by adding something at the end of your affiliate link. For this campaign I chose the BrandGiveawayCentre – Free $500 Grocery Gift Card offer from Neverblue.

I know this can be pre-populated and find out how to do it by looking at the campaign details:

This offer is pre-poppable! Please add &em=test@aol.com to the end of the link.
For example: http://adserve.brandgivewaycentre.com/DefaultPage.aspx?c=5811&em=test@aol.com

If you load that URL you will see that whatever you add at the end – &em=enteremailhere gets pre-populated.

Step 2 – The Landing Page

For this strategy we need a landing page. Just like the offer page, ours should be simple and have a clear form to enter their email on. I’m not going to get into all the technical specifics of setting this up because 1) It would be beyond the scope of this blog post and 2) There would be a lot of question and I spend a lot of time answering questions in the forum already lol

If you have some PHP skills you can do this yourself, or hire a programmer to do this for you for a minimal cost. What you need to do is build a landing page with an opt-in form on it that collects the email into your autoresponder (like Aweber) and then sends them to the affiliate offer with their email pre-populated. This way you get to collect their email which you can market to over and over, and possibly get a commission also.

Step 3 – Collect Targets

For targets I chose keywords and URL’s. Some of the areas I focused on were:

• Recipe sites
• Parenting/baby sites
• Food stamps/aid sites

I started with about 300 sites but only kept the ones that I needed a very minimal bid on.

Results

Without any optimizing:

$250 adspend

$165 in conversions

about 315 email addresses collected

So on the surface this campaign doesn’t look profitable. That’s ok though because I look at any conversions I got as just offsetting the cost of collecting email addresses. For this campaign I collected email addresses for about $0.27. 315 email addresses is a REALLY small list but I can market to them over and over, and with much higher paying offers. With only a few commissions from marketing to my list, I could be in positive territory on this campaign.

So instead of just promoting email submits for a $1.25 commission, get a little creative with pre-populating and see what you can do!

The offer I ran was a popular IQ quiz offer. Those are hot right? People are killing it right?

I started off direct linking and came up with a few angles to target:

• Quiz sites
• Cheap targets with a young demographic
• Music sites

For each idea I scraped together a hundred or so targets (URL’s and keywords).

I ran this offer on Lead Impact, Media Traffic, Traffic Vance, and Adon. After about $200 spent total and 1 conversion I knew I had to change something.

Next, I decided to build a simple landing page. I picked a couple more angles to target and removed the targets that I had spent a conversion or two on. I let this run for about $100 more in traffic with zero conversions and finally pulled the plug.

So what did I do wrong? IMHO nothing really…I believe it was the offer. Why? Because even on campaigns where I have the worst targets, or a really bad LP, if the offer has some potential I will at least get a few conversions.

I know a lot of people say to push IQ quizzes on PPV traffic but I have seen a lot of people in the PPV Playbook forum as well as other affiliates I know try and bomb with those offers. If you can get it to work more power to you but I’ll stick with the types of offers I know work well.

The Client

I got into local marketing a short while ago. I started by asking a real estate agent I was working with at the time if she had ever purchased leads. She had several years experience purchasing leads from various sources and was nice enough to share her experiences with me. I got a crash course in how leads are marketed and sold to real estate agents, and how those brokers get the leads in the first place.

Initially I started off generating leads by doing PPC, SEO, and various other traffic generating methods. This was going well so I decided to try generating leads for her via PPV traffic.

The Landing Page

The client had a fairly basic real estate agents website with some listings, info about her, etc. I decided I was just going to use her website and send traffic to both her main page and contact page to see which one performed better.

The Targets

This was the fun part..getting to decide exactly what targets I would use to drive traffic to her site. If I was running a CPA offer for something in the real estate niche the obvious choice would be gathering a list of URL’s like real estate companies, etc. Targeting local affiliate marketing isobviously a little different..This client was only interested in getting leads from people in our local metro area. So, I had to decide how I was going to target sites that mostly people from our area (or wanting to move there) would be visiting. On PPV networks you don’t really have a way to target specific metro areas so the way to make it work is just to target sites people from those metro areas are going to visit. I came up with some possibilities like this:

• Other local real estate agent websites
• Local real estate agencies/offices
• local mortgage brokers/lenders
• local bank foreclosure/repo listings

And several more ideas I’m not quite ready to share yet.

The Results

The traffic was definitely there with these targets, and there was little competition. Most of the time I didn’t pay more than $0.03 per view. One could argue that this would work in a larger metro area but not a small one. The reality is that it’s going to be more difficult to drive traffic to a local business in a smaller town using any traffic source.

The quality of traffic was about on par with using PPV traffic for CPA offers. The conversion (getting someone to fill out the agent’s contact form) were fairly low but I have spent less than $100 to date and the leads are coming in. The end result is that I am making money by selling these leads, and the agent is happy with the quality of leads she is getting.

I have a lawyer client who I am doing a similar campaign for so maybe once I have more data I will post that case study. I don’t think you should only do PPV to drive leads for local clients. A better approach would be to use a combination of PPC, SEO, PPV, etc.

Hopefully this post has given you some good ideas for creative uses of PPV traffic.

With PPC traffic you have new visitors coming in every day, searching for keywords. With PPV traffic, there are only a certain number of users at any given time who have the adware installed on their computer, and who are visiting your targets,  to view your ads. Because of this, you don’t want to keep showing your ad to the same people over and over.

For example…say you are promoting an offer on Media Traffic and have 100 targets. These 100 targets (or websites) have a certain number of people who visit them every day. So there might be a pool of say 5,000 (just for a round #) people visiting your targets every day. Many of these people will be returning visitors to your targets (websites) as well. If you set your frequency caps to 1/24 (once every 24 hours), all the visitors of your targets are going to see your ad several times over the course of a few days. The people who convert are going to convert right away, but if your frequency cap is set that low you will keep showing your ad to the people who have already converted.

This is one big reason that PPV campaigns can start off with a bang and then fizzle out. If you set your frequency caps further apart, you are allowing more time for new potential customers to download the adware and visit your targets. Think of it in terms of groups of people; You might convert a lot of the 5,000 potential targets right away, but once you exhaust that ‘pool’ of customers, you need to let a new group of people download the adware, and start visiting your targets before a new round of conversions can happen.

You want to set your frequency caps far enough apart so that there is enough time for new potential customers to come in. I usually set mine to a minimum of 1/72 to 1/month. The more targets I have, the further apart I set my frequency caps. With more targets, you can keep your traffic levels the same while spreading out your traffic enough so that conversions stay more consistent.

Experiment setting your frequency caps further apart and let me know!

I get a lot of questions about landing pages for PPV/CPV traffic. I hate telling people ‘just test’ but sometimes that’s the best approach. There are various types of pages that can work but the main idea is you want to keep things simple and grab the viewers attention.

Think about how these people are being served ad’s; They are surfing along visiting websites, and up pop’s and advertisement. This isn’t something they were actively seeking out so you need to offer them something that is really going to draw their interest.

Forget about a lot of text, forget about trying to ‘sell’ too much…you want to shock the viewer into clicking on your ad.

A common theme I like to use is a really attention grabbing picture. Say I was going to promote an auto insurance offer; I might find a picture of a crazy looking guy/girl saying something like “He saved $xxx on car insurance..why haven’t you?”.

The most common ‘problem’ I see with most landing pages is people are trying to be too…relevant for lack of a better word. I see a lot of landing pages like:

Want to save on car insurance?

<pic of car>

Click here

Now…would that make you want to click or something more like:

How does HE only pay $xx a month for car insurance!?

<pic of the weirdest looking guy you can find>

FIND OUT HOW

See what I’m getting at here? Stop trying to make these nice polite landing pages and really start having some fun with it.

Update on the Affiliate Summit PPV/CPV mastermind session –

Justin Dupre is going to be joining me and sharing some of his own tips, strategies, and insights. It’s going to be a great event and we still have a few spots left so let me know if your interested.