Sorry for the lack of posting lately guys. I am in the middle of a pretty long business/pleasure trip. Most of the business stuff is done, now I am taking a few days off. Right now I am sitting on a dock on a lake typing this. Doing a lot of wakeboarding, waterskiing, dirt biking, etc. I have some great posts lined up for next week. Until then here are a few random items that people sent me to check out.

7 search is really stepping up its game to become a big player in the growing second tier PPC service market. They are now offering Geo targeting, conversion tracking, and type in traffic (which converts great). I’ll definitely be checking this out more when I get home. Press release here.

TinyMassive is a cool new site with shopping widgets for publishers and advertisers.

Happy 4th of July to everyone! Look for a huge tip post next week.

One of the main reasons we get into affiliate marketing is to get away from the rigid structure of a day job.  The last thing we want is to be tied to our campaigns like a normal job.  But how can you leave your campaigns running when you are not around to watch them?

There is no question that when you are first bringing a campaign up to speed, it needs a lot of frequent attention.  But once you have a good campaign dialed in, you should have some room to breathe.  This topic came to me, because as I write this I am traveling in pretty remote areas and have not had internet access for over 2 days.   Am I worried about my campaigns with huge daily spends running all alone?  Well, to be honest a little, but not too much.  I have a few systems in place that allow me to leave things alone when I have to.

Budget Limits -  Many of my campaigns run without budgets or ridiculously high budgets that could never be reached.  But before I left, I switched on budgets just above the average daily spend.   That way if something crazy happens while I’m gone, it should top out if it hits the cap.

Server Monitors – Hosting outages are really the Achilles heel of affiliate campaigns.  Sending huge PPC spends to a landing page that’s down is death.   Although you can’t really prevent it, you can monitor the servers and be paged if there is an outage.  There are tons of free and paid server monitoring systems out there.  In my opinion landing page uptime alerts are critical to every campaign.

Affiliate managers – I suggest having your account manager’s numbers in your phone at all times.  If something important were to happen either your end or theirs, you can be reached by phone.   I also like to ping them to give them a heads up if I will away.

If you take these steps, you should at least be able to forget about your campaigns for a while without panicking every 10 minutes.

The following post is completely unsolicited, unpaid, and unaffiliated. I don’t know Jeremy Palmer, outside of exchanging a few Twitters here and there.

I recently stumbled across his Black Ink Project. This is a super ambitious 5 week course in affiliate marketing. Looking through the 20 sessions, I was blown away by the content. He literally has the whole playbook on affiliate marketing. I have only had a chance to listen to parts of a few sessions so far, but I have downloaded the whole series and plan to start listening when I am traveling.

If you are serious about learning affiliate marketing, there is no better guide I have seen, period. If you were to follow through on all the steps in the guide you will be ahead of 99.9% of the people out there. I wish I would have had something like this when I was starting out, because it took me a lot of frustration and money to learn some of the info in this course. The amazing part is that this course is totally free. All you have to provide is your email address to sign up. I think Jeremy could easily charge thousands for this course and it would be worth it. If you really want to learn affiliate marketing the right way, the Black Ink Project is the real deal.

You may have seen these new ad formats show up in your account recently. They are not in full release yet, but many advertisers are now able to run them after the latest Adwords maintenance last Sunday. These template ads, or rich media ads are for the Google content network only. The are much more content heavy ads than a standard text or image ad that you could previously run on the content network. These type of rich media ads can also be run on third party networks, but now Adwords is fully in the game.

One of the main benefits of these ads is the interaction tracking. This lets you see statistics of things like user mouseovers of images, and clicks on various ad components like next, previous, poll results etc… Which really helps you optimize your ads based on the interaction data. The interactions that you can track vary based on the ad type.

There are 7 different types of template ads that you can build:

• Showcase Template Ad
• Slideshow Template Ad
• Quiz Template Ad
• Business Locator Template Ad
• Photo Gallery Template Ad
• Site Search Template Ad
• Coupon Template Ad

These ads are easy to create, just plug your info and images into the template.

I have testing some of these ads for 3 weeks with mixed results. The formats I have tried are the Showcase, Quiz, and Coupons templates. I am having trouble getting decent volume with the ads, which is not surprising due to the early stage of the rollout. Once the formats become more widely accepted and the publisher base expands a bit more with Adsense publishers, I see this being a very good opportunity for marketers. Conversion rates have been strong with the low volume.

I am curious to hear if other people are testing these with good results.  Anyone want to share there experiences?

Thanks very much to all that entered and to MarketLeverage for providing the prizes! I dumped all the entries into a spreadsheet based on the number of points, giving each entry a number. Then I picked the winners using the random number picker here.

Without further ado, the winners are:

$200 Amex card = Dave

Flip Ultra Camera = Dotdriven

Ipod Nano = Luke

2GB USB Pen = Matt Larson

Thanks again to everyone! I’ll contact the winners via email to get your shipping info.

Once you have a successful campaign running, you always want to increase the traffic. After you have done all normal methods such as optimization of everything and buying all the traffic you can on every network, then what? It might be time for a little self-competition. This is a fairly advanced technique that works great for expanding the reach of an offer.

Competing with yourself is a way of capturing a larger percentage of the paid traffic for a given search result by having more than one ad for a given search query.

You may have seen someone owning all the spots on Google for a given keyword. They have the exact same ad copy and even destination URL. But that is way too obvious, not very effective, and not self sustaining. The PPC network will catch on and shut you down. You can take a more subtle approach for better and long lasting results.

The approach

The approach is to have the competing ads and landing pages be completely different in every way to the main campaigns. Different ad copy, different domains, different landing pages etc. The only thing that stays the same is the keyword and offer. Someone looking at the search results and even clicking through to the landing pages should have no idea they are owned by the same person. The plus side to this, besides the extra market share you are grabbing, is that the competing campaign is essentially a split test of your main campaign. You can use it as a testbed for new ideas without upsetting the main stable campaign.

Different accounts

It’s debatable whether or not using multiple accounts is allowed with different PPC networks. It might work, and it might not. So if you want to be really sure you won’t be hassled you can follow these steps. You don’t want to sign up for another account with the exact same info as your main account. If you have a secondary credit card and alternate address, use that info.

Different Domains

You want completely different domains to send competing ads to. Ideally, they are totally different sounding than your main domain. Also I would use a different landing page and coding structure from the main campaign.

Different Webhosts

Google has ways of seeing all the domains you own under a given webhosting account. Don’t ask me how, but they do. So if you really want to keep everything separate and not draw attention to yourself, get a new hosting account for your new domain.

Different Campaigns

This is really where self competition comes through. You want to write ads completely different than your main account on your competing account. Play off the other ad. Go opposite of the ad text. Remember you are trying to catch a different customer than would click on your main ad, so get creative. If your main ad is playing to an emotional buying response, try a more analytical stat based selling technique on the competing ad. Capture the right brain and left brain people in the same search result.

If used correctly this technique can add a lot of revenue along with providing you more and more data about your niche. Have fun with it!

Disclaimer:  Many PPC networks (like big G) don’t like this technique, so use at your own risk.

I’m sure everyone has read about the Google/Yahoo ad sharing deal. If not here’s the whole thing in a nutshell:

“The agreement will enable Yahoo! to run ads supplied by Google’s AdSense™ for Search and AdSense™ for Content services next to Yahoo!’s internally generated paid search and algorithmic search results. Yahoo may also run Google-supplied ads on non-search Yahoo web properties, as well as on current members of its partner network.”

My take:

To me this is just another example of Google getting stronger and Yahoo getting weaker. It’s pretty disappointing really because it there going to be fewer and fewer alternatives to Google.  I have always pulled for Yahoo to hold their own and provide a real alternative to Google.

All this deal really does is makes Google’s content network bigger, as paid search ads will now spill over to Yahoo results and sites. So to you and me that means, we better be good at running Google content campaigns. My only question is, will Google let you specifically site target Yahoo properties? We’ll have to see.

I have been wanting to run another contest lately for all the great readers of the blog, and MarketLeverage really stepped up to donate all the prizes. Here is what 4 lucky winners will receive:

• $200 ML Amex Rewards Card - Preloaded with $200 to spend on whatever you want.

• Flip Ultra Video Camera - Perfect camera for video blogging.

• Ipod Nano - Engraved with CDF Networks and MarketLeverage on the back.

• USB Pen - Superslick pen with a built in 2 GB USB drive.

There are 5 simple ways to enter the contest. Just leave a comment to this post with the option that you choose. For example if you Stumbled just reply with “Stumbled”.

1 pt - Comment on this post

3 pts - Stumble CDF networks, then comment

3 pts -Technorati Favorite CDF Networks, then comment

5 pts - Link back to this post from your blog, I’ll see the trackback

5 pts - Sign up for MarketLeverage, then comment

The entries are weighted so for example if you choose an option with 5 points, your name will be entered 5 times. The max number of points for each person is 5. The winners will be randomly selected on Jun 18th. Good luck!

UPDATE: Contest closed!