This is a guest post by Amin who was the winner of Nickycakes’ Xbox 360. It’s not about how he won the contest, since he already posted about that on his blog, however, he decided to write about how he makes bank in another, area. Def some good ideas. Thanks dude.
I wrote a post on how I came first in Nickycakes contest by running debt relief offers on Facebook, which you can read on my blog. I eventually stopped the campaign because profit margins were shrinking, so instead of making that post here I decided to write a new guest post on one of my more preferred methods of making money through PPC.
It’s worth starting off by saying that I am much more of a product peddling affiliate than one who promotes the kind of offers found on CPA networks. I make most of my money through Clickbank, which offers a HUGE number of products across various different niches you can promote. If you thought the only way to make money through Clickbank was by promoting crappy ‘get rich quick’ eBooks, the kind of stuff that Nickycakes vomits over, then your dead wrong. When it comes to Clickbank, you’ve got to be creative and not just look at the top performing ‘high gravity’ products.
Now the idea here is to produce a number of different content based ‘review’ sites promoting the same products in a small niche of your choice. You would then advertise each review website on Google through a separate Adwords account via the Adwords MCC (My Client Centre), allowing you to have all your review sites displayed for the exact same identical keyword search terms you are targeting in your campaigns.
If you target the same keywords in multiple campaigns within a single Adwords account, only the ads from one of your campaigns will be displayed at any one time to a user searching for one of your keywords. However, by creating new accounts through the Adwords’ MCC, you will be able to create a new campaign in each account and have all your ads in all your campaigns displayed for the same keyword search terms.
While I have personally not had any problems with Adwords for doing this, I’m assuming this really depends on how you go about implementing this method. If for example, your review sites all use the same content, are all under one domain through sub domains, and are blatantly there to promote one product, then don’t be surprised if Adwords comes down on you with a ban hammer.
Take note of the following if you are particularly worried about having your Adwords account banned:
- Make your content high quality – the higher the quality, the stronger the pre-sell
- Use separate domains – a no brainer, you MUST have a separate domain for each site
- Have new content written for each site – that means new reviews for the same products
- Use a new Clickbank account for each site – so you aren’t caught out by savvy competitors
- Cloak all your affiliate links – you should always do this anyway for obvious reasons
I normally outsource all of my reviews to inexpensive ghost writers. I then check over all the content written for me by my writers and I always end up making changes to the content so it actually functions like a good sales copy. For the actual sites, I use Wordpress with a free theme slapped on. There are tons of themes to choose from, and you can easily have it modified into a review style site. If you can’t modify themes on your own or don’t want to hire someone to do it for you, there are a few review style themes you can choose from as well. Google it.
Three final points worth considering:
- I use this particular strategy to promote paid products as an affiliate. I’ve always been more comfortable investing my time and money into developing content rich review sites for products which don’t have an expiry date. This allows me to optimise my sites for the search engines without worrying about the offer expiring, in addition to gaining a large share of PPC traffic which would otherwise have gone to my competitors. Having said that, there is no reason you can’t use this method to promote CPA offers via the PPC > landing page > offer approach.
- This strategy works best for smaller niches which aren’t madly saturated with competition. Dominating small niches in the sponsored links section of the Google SERPs through multiple placements is far easier and more effective than to attempt to do the same for a much larger and more competitive niche.
- Don’t start all your campaigns at once. I had one campaign running for months before I started a new campaign advertising a new site on a new Adwords account. That put aside, you want to know your first campaign is generating a solid profit before you go onto expanding, otherwise you will feel like an idiot if your three new campaigns on your three different accounts fail en masse.
The main point of this post was to make you aware of how you can put your Adwords MCC to good use. I also spend as much time and money on PPC as I do on building links to my site and developing site content for SEO purposes. There is nothing better than having your websites listed at the top of Google’s organic AND paid listings, no matter how small the niche is. In fact, the smaller the niche, the easier it is for you to dominate it.
I didn’t really get into any real depth here, mostly because I’m lazy, but hopefully you should have gained several ideas from this post.
Cheers,
Amin
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on April 25th, 2008 in PPC Search
Several months ago the guys from Tracking202 let Nickycakes beta test their ppc campaign tracking service. It was pretty sweet. It let you monitor everything down to the keyword level in terms of traffic, conversions, ROI, etc. Pretty much everything you need to track and optimize your campaign. It even had a sweet realtime ajax traffic monitor that let you see the clicks coming in.
But when they asked Nickycakes if he thought the service would be popular, he had a few problems with it. Most importantly, it wasn’t self-hosted. It was hosted on the Tracking202 servers. People would obviously be skeptical of any ppc tracking platform that wasn’t self-hosted because it would allow the admins of the service to view anyone’s campaign data and easily duplicate profitable campaigns for themselves. They assured the Cakes that they wouldn’t be stealing anyone’s data and that the service was meant to help people and build traffic for their site. While this explanation was good enough for Nickycakes, he told them that it would NOT be good enough for the general public. Because of this, Nicky decided not to make a post about it. As predicted, the public release of Tracking202 met with mediocre results. The guys were even banned from Wickedfire forums for advertising it, just due to the possibility that they could use it to steal peoples keyword data.
To clear up any misconceptions, the guys immediately started working on a solution. A self-hosted solution. A FREE self-hosted solution. So it’s pretty much the exact same service now, except you install it and host it yourself, ridding yourself of the possibility that your keyword data can be jacked. Good deal.
As mentioned earlier, Nickycakes did have a chance to try Tracking202 out when it was hosted on their servers, and was really impressed, to be honest. He gave it a trial run with one of his own small campaigns and was really happy with the tracking. It basically lets you see graphs of each keyword and ad copy, and its profitability. So you can basically set up a campaign with a couple thousand keywords, dump a decent amount of money into it for traffic, look at which keywords converted into profit, and delete the rest, and you have a completely profitable campaign. Doesn’t get much easier than that.
Anyway they just released it so go check it out at http://www.prosper202.com. Leave a comment here and let everyone know what you think.
Published by nickycakes //
Nicky has spent a little time writing up a short internet marketing newbie guide to help new people to the industry and answer a lot of common questions. It’s going to be permanently linked right at the top of the page here, so feel free to flame any morons who post questions answered in that guide without reading it first. Please check it out and post in the comments here what you think, and if you have any suggestions on information that may have been left out:
Newbie Guide
Published by nickycakes //
The following is a guest post by XMCP of SlightlyShadySEO - the debatably Blackhat SEO and marketing blog.
The PPC market is becoming saturated. There is little doubt of this. Where initially the promise of local search results and adwords gave us the promise of an expanded market, even that is slowly filling up with advertisers. So when it comes to marketing, how do we go about cashing in on previously untouched niches?
Simple. We break the rules.
Note: Be smart about which account you use, and where. And how they’re connected. What I talk about here may lead to an adwords/superpages/msn/yahoo/whatever ban. Don’t bitch at me about it. Get a fresh account before trying this.
There’s a few ways to go about this, largely dependent on the review process that the companies put our ads through, and their level of advancement. Some methods are only available to people with programming knowledge, some are easy.
The Artistry of the Ambiguous Ad
While we normally concentrate on trying to tell the user at least what our product IS in our 2 magical lines, this approach requires more tact. Trying to sell viagra(depending on local legalities)? It’s not viagra, it’s “Give Her A Night She’ll Never Forget” “Just because you’re not ‘gifted’ doesn’t mean you can WOW her”. Remember that if we do successfully get our ad listed in a vertical that is normally banned, there should be little competition, so the clicks are cheap, and we can afford to lose a few users that are not getting exactly what it is they’d look for.
Dealing with Banned Keywords
Outright banned keywords, not subject to manual review, are the greatest issue when trying to get these ads in. We’re forced to go for more “related” terms. Selling bongs? Try “munchies”,”dugout”, or “roller”. You can send them to the “rollers” page, just make the bong page evident. Will CTR blow? Yeah. But you’re reaching your target audience. Beyond that, go for brand names. While a lot of things are banned as a product name (bongs on adwords), you stand an infinitely higher chance of cashing in on words like “roor” (a brand name) or “green star” (another brand). Will your ad stand up to manual review? Nah. But really, that can be handled in…the NEXT section. Oh yeah, and I’m not sure if “roor” or “green star” are banned, but know this trick works in at least 3 other topics.
Now to get a little technical….
Dealing With Human Reviewers - No matter what Mahalo says, manual reviewers are SO much easier to fool than automatic reviewers. They generally will come from the same IPs, occasionally have referrers, and normally it’s a 1-time review. Better yet, the companies doing it normally have shiite practices to prevent you from coming back after an initial account ban. At most, a new credit card and a new IP, and you’re on your way.
- Bait And Switch - Code up a quick, shitty lander for an alternate, more permissible option of your “ambiguous ad text”. “Give her a night she’ll Never Forget” could go to a site that shows how to plan the perfect date. A “bong” ad might go to something about the deep and sinister story of Mary Jane, and how she’ll make you drown your baby(aka anti-drug site). Then once it’s approved, just change it. Or if they also have bots coming in, combine it with the external JS trick in the next section to rewrite your page.
- Cloaking vs. Humans - If the bait and switch seems to risky, submit a few normal ads to gather up the first IP or two that visits. Notice who owns the given IP block. Disallow the JS rewrite if it’s one you’ve seen before. If you’re especially paranoid, make it so any repeat IP sees your angelic alternate page. Works especially great if they’re behind a corporate proxy.
Dealing with Automatic Approvals - Gotta love these, don’t we
- Cloaking - If there’s a keyword bot involved(or even if there’s only a “quality score” like bot involved), it’s time to go Harry Potter on their ass, and cloak like crazy. If you’re unfamiliar with cloaking, it’s just the process of showing search engine bots a different page than real people. It’s normally a bannable offense, but can be fantastic for income. User-agent cloaking(the old form of it) is out, but IP based is in, and couldn’t be easier.
- Did you keep all your logs from previous projects? I hope so! Pull out all the records you have of computers that hit your ads multiple times, with no referrer.
- To be sure, run them through some reverse DNS queries or whois queries to figure out the owner. An easy way to get the reverse DNS entry is to download a copy of the charon proxy checker, append a :80 onto all of your IPs in excel, then just paste em in. Charon can be set to reverse DNS all of the IPs in it. Remove the residential computers(IPs that contain the company name in the reverse dns, or don’t resolve to anything w/ reverse dns are likely bots), copy the remainder, then put them into your database or text file or whatever it is you’re using as your cloaking IP db.
- If you’re good at coding, you can set something to reverse DNS all inbound IPs to check for new bots.
- If you’re not confident, find an alternate program more in tune to what the company would want to be seeing based on your ad/keywords, and send the bots there. This way, you can also send anyone without a referrer to that aff program, and not lose the traffic, while remaining safe.
- Breaking Up The Keywords - If the company happens to scan for naughty keywords in your landing page text, break it up with invisible elements. Yeah, cloaking year 2000 style. b<div id=”invisible”>woot!</div>ongs for example. Set anything to hide way off in an external CSS file, denied by robots.txt.
- Who Loves Javascript? I don’t. But that doesn’t change the fact you can completely re-write a landing page with a layer created by external Javascript call. addChild(element); is an excellent command indeed. Also lookup createElement() and innerhtml. As always, deny via robots.txt
Cautions, Failures, and some Closing Notes
Some ads and keywords are not good for this. They simply cannot convert over because it’s too hard to demonstrate what it is they’re buying, without alerting the bot/reviewer as to what it is you’re selling. Experiment, separate out your subids, and do not hesitate to can an ad that isn’t performing. Ideally, you’ll be the only advertiser in a given niche (at least the only one using PPC) so the clicks will be cheap enough they don’t necessarily have to convert over fantastic.
And I will repeat: This will probably lead to an account ban if caught. If you have multiple accounts, for gods sakes keep them separated in as many respects as you can. IPs, Names, emails, you name it. Oh yeah, and comply with your local laws.
-XMCP
Published by SlightlyShadySEO //
Ok, so Nickycakes doesn’t mind being contacted on aim/msn/whatever, otherwise he wouldn’t put his contact information on this site. But sometimes, things get a little out of hand. It’s really hard to walk every newb through step by step how to make money with PPC. Some people even go so far as to offer half of the profits from whatever campaigns the Cakes helps out with, which is generous, but honestly, there’s not enough time in the day. And Nicky could just make the campaigns himself and keep all the profits.
So where can you get started with learning the ins and outs of the PPC affiliate marketing game?
Let me first say that Nickycakes will never even talk about a network/service/whatever unless it’s something he’s personally used and found to be good, unlike other bloggers who promote worthless crap like affspy.
Anyway, at the end of January, Nickycakes was chattin with Ruck from CashTactics about adwords. More specifically, ways the Cakes could suck less at it. Ruck was like…look, go check out this site called PPC Coach run by this dude from WickedFire forums. Let’s just say that Nicky hates paying for anything, especially services that sound like a subscription to a big e-book, but whatever. If it sucked, then it would be fun to post about what a crappy service it was anyway.
PPC Coach is basically a forum, tools, and videos about affiliate marketing with search engine ppc. As far as the forums go, you start out with access to the general forum, and the Month 1 section which teaches you how to do basic stuff like google content network to zip submits. Every month after that, a newer, more advanced section is opened for you, giving you time to get a full grasp of the basics before trying to move on to harder stuff and potentially losing a lot of money.
Another benefit of that incremental system is account history. A month is plenty of time to build up a good account history with adwords so you won’t be paying out the ass when starting your big money campaigns.
The videos were pretty helpful too. They’re basically just vids of the dude running the website showing you how to set up campaigns and use different tools to get keywords, build landing pages for good quality score, and other stuff like that.
The real good part of the site, though, is the tools section. Even for someone with a lot of experience with adwords, it would be worth the money to sign up just for the tools. Seriously. Want to build a 5k keyword campaign without garbage keywords in like 15 minutes, complete with ads, bids, destination urls, and everything else? Yeah, they got a tool for that.
There are a few things they probably should have included on the site that Nickycakes thinks were missing. One of the biggest things new affiliates miss when getting started with PPC is good tracking and testing software. It’s SOOO important to be able to track down to the keyword, location, time of day, etc, how well your traffic is converting. When you start getting to the point where you’re spending thousands a day on traffic, this can mean the difference between making 300% back on what you spend, or having a mediocre campaign where you make less in profit than what you spend.
Anyway, it’s worth checking out if you’re struggling to get into affiliate marketing. Here’s the link again: PPC Coach.
If you know of any other good resources for newbs getting started, send em along to Nickycakes so he can take a look. There may be a newbie resource guide in the works or something, who knows.
Edit: If you’ve used this service, or signed up through this post, please leave a comment about how you like it.
Published by nickycakes //
« Previous Entries / Home
