Back on Feb 26th @affbuzz posted a link on Twitter to a post someone did about a new form style called mad libs. This is a conversational style, paragraph type form instead of the standard forms we are all used to. The post claimed these form styles increased conversions 25-50%.   Some pretty big car sites are running these types of forms, like KBB and Vast, you can see a live example here.

I was pretty shocked and skeptical with the claimed results, because you just never know with anything internet marketing related until you test it out for yourself.   The only source of information you can really count on is your own data.   So I called up my designer and with 4 hours had an A/B split test up and running.  The landing pages were to capture leads for a local/regional lead gen campaign I’m running in the financial services niche.   The only difference on the two pages was the form.  Here is what those forms looked like:

Test LP-A, regular form

Test LP-B, conversational style form

The results:

After running for 20 days, I finally have enough data to see the overall trend.

As you can see, there wasn’t exactly an earth shattering outcome, but surprising nevertheless.  The 10.49-11.79% change is actually a 12.4% increase for the mid-lib style form.  That’s 24 extra leads in this case.  It wasn’t the 25-50% increase the other study had shown, but to be honest I was just happy it didn’t lose money.

Bottom line:

Like every landing page element, form styles are a good thing to test.  Do conversational style forms always work better?  No.  I actually think I got lucky with this test.  The niche I used had a primarily older demographic which my instincts told me might respond to this style form.  There are a lot of niches where I think this form style would underperform regular styles.

Just another thing to add to the testing list!

I was thinking recently of all the steps that go into building a successful campaign. What is the most important? There are so many factors that can make or break a campaign and so many tools out there to help with each step.  But for me, the biggest impact on the success of a campaign is landing page optimization.

Why is landing page optimization in general so critical to every campaign? Most of your costs are relatively fixed: traffic costs, payouts, etc. But your conversion rate off the landing page is one variable that can skyrocket the profitability of a campaign. Imagine taking a 2% converting lander and with smart optimization bumping that up to 15%. What could that do to your bottom line? There is just no other factor that can make as big of a difference as your landing page conversion rate. Take any failed campaign, and I can almost guarantee the landing page wasn’t optimized and tested enough.

So what is the best tool out there?

The Google website optimizer. This is a tool that a private company could charge $100/mo for and it would be well worth it, but luckily it’s free. If you aren’t familiar with the tool, it’s basically allows you to create test scenarios on various sections of your landing page to see which combinations lead to better results.  There are basically 2 types of tests you can do

1.  A/B test is where you set up 2 completely different versions of a page and see which one performs better.  This is similar to testing 2 ads in your PPC campaign.

2.  The other test is multivariate, where you can test changes to multiple sections of your landing page simultaneously on higher traffic pages.   The results of these experiments are presented in statistically valid results.    I recommend multivariate for obtaining the fastest results.

Check out these videos or quick start guide for a good overview.

Learning this tool inside and out and committing to never-ending testing on landing pages has probably been one of the biggest factors in my successes online. Testing never stops, because as good as a page might be working, you never know which tweak will blow the previous versions away.   Simply put, if you aren’t optimizing your landing pages with a tool like the Google optimizer, you are losing money!

More and more people are experimenting with international affiliate offers every day. While its possible to focus only on US based traffic and offers and make a great living, a compelling case can be made for trying other countries.

Why run International?

Let’s look at Europe for example.

• With an estimated population of 830 million, that’s about 2.5x the size of the US.
• Internet penetration is growing at an extremely rapid pace.
• Paid traffic is generally cheaper than US traffic
• Conversion rates on average are higher.

So lets see, more eyeballs to reach with cheaper traffic that converts better.  Sounds like the biggest no brainer ever right?   Well, like everything in affiliate marketing, it’s not as easy as it sounds.  But it is something I recommend that everyone should test.

Some of the challenges:

Lets stick with the Europe example.

1.  That population is fragmented.  There isn’t just one big block of 830 million people you can target.  Its obviously spread over a large amount of countries, populations, and demographic groups.  All have their own unique characteristics that need to be addressed.

2.  Cultural differences between countries are huge and could sink a campaign.  You might think that you can just modify a successful campaign in the UK and run it in France, but you have to consider cultural differences that you might not be aware of as an outsider.  Lets say that successful UK offer was for mortgages and you tried to implement it in France.  On average people in France don’t get mortgages so much, while people in the UK do.  If you didn’t know about that difference you could beat your head against the wall forever and not get it to work in France.

Another example of a cultural difference is with email.  Its generally thought that email is much more tolerated in Europe vs the US.  Open rates and clicks on emails are often higher, so a campaign that was dead using that method in the US might work great in the UK.   All due to a cultural difference.  This is why you need to research international offers more and get local help to review your campaign for any red flags.

3.  Language barriers. Getting the language of you ad copy, landing page, and keywords correct is a huge consideration.  A lot of times free online translator tools will give a bad translation of what you want to say.  You know when you read something translated to your language and it just feels wrong, even though the meaning is right?  The only way to really get the language correct is to work with an actual person who is a native speaker.   Even if you just outsource them to proofread and correct your online translations, its worth the effort.

4. Finding offers and networks is harder.  Some of the big US based affiliate networks have limited international reach.  Its a good idea to find affiliate networks in the country you are going to be promoting offers.  They can make you jump through hoops to join and get everything setup like payments and tax issues.  But there out plenty out there.

The bottom line with international offers is that while they can be profitable, one size does not fit all.  You can’t simply take a offer that is running great in the US, translate everything, and run it in Germany.  You really need to do your research to set everything up right, and continue to test everything.  Don’t forget to get local help!

Internet marketing is full of repetitive tasks.  One of my 2010 goals was to automate as many things as possible.   Some things you can outsource to contractors or employees, some things its quicker to slog through on your own. But as a general rule any task that you can automate is a good thing. I am always looking for tools to save me time and few months ago I came across a tool that is a serious time saver.  It’s a visual scripting language editor called Ubot that allows you to build automation programs (or bots) with almost no programming knowledge.  This is stuff that could be done before if you were or knew a really good programmer, but now you can do yourself in almost a WYSIWYG like environment.

The possibilities for this software are endless.  Its basically a blank canvas.   So far I have build a few bots for Mysql maintenance tasks, some keyword list building and refining, and even to simplify some accounting tasks.   I have a list of at least 10 more things I plan to automate with the tool.   The nice thing about the software is that it creates an .exe file that you can send to contractors or employees for them to use.

As most of my readers know, I don’t do paid reviews or endorsements.  But I do like to share products that I personally use on a regular basis.   So I contacted the owner of the software to see if they were able to give a deal to visitors of my blog.   He agreed to cut $50 off the one time purchase price (this is not a rebill product).  You can buy it here for $199 instead of $249, be sure to use the coupon code cdfnet to get that discount.  That $199 will pay for itself in one saved outsourcing project.

I have always thought Pay Per Call is a potentially game changing technology for our industry.  I am investing a lot of my company’s resources going forward in testing Pay Per Call offers and marketing techniques.  Today I was lucky enough to interview Jason Spievak, the CEO of Ring Revenue.  His company has developed the groundbreaking call tracking platform that is in use on several affiliate networks.

Here is the basic outline of how it works:

I asked Jason many questions about using Pay Per Call, mainly from the perspective of the affiliate marketer.  This is a must listen for anyone looking to get into this emerging field of marketing!   Please click the player below to hear to the full 14 minute interview.

To download the MP3 right-click save as

Also, if you would like to see the slides from their recent Affiliate Summit West presentation you can find them here.

After you listen, feel free to leave a comment about your thoughts on PPcall.  Are you currently testing with it or do you plan in the future?

Another Affiliate Summit is now history. This was my 3rd one in Vegas and I can honestly say they keep getting better every year. My compliments to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for putting on such a well run show.

Its incredible how popular these events are getting.  The hallways, sessions and exhibit halls were just packed all the time with affiliates, merchants, agencies etc.  I got to the meet market late on Sunday but it was still overflowing with people were trying to secure their party invitations for later and grab some early freebies.

I ended up going to 2 sessions while I was there.  The first was the Facebook Tactics which is always popular.  There was a lot of interest in the mass upload tool that Facebook reserves for high volume users ($30k per month spend).  They plan on releasing it to everyone eventually, but for now its reserved for high volume users.  Many of the questions from the audience were about what can get approved and what doesn’t.  There were not any big tips dropped that I remember.  I think the main takeaway was that Facebook ads is still growing rapidly and there are dedicated reps that can help you.   If you are a legitimate affiliate and want to work with Facebook, they want to work with you.  If you are going to push the envelope too hard and endlessly submit rejected ads, they have no problem banning you for life.

The second session I went to was CPA opportunities in Europe.  This was a very low key session but I found it interesting.  Not so much in actual content delivered but some ideas that it gave me to for my European campaigns.  I will be doing a full post on Europe offers in a week or so.    In a nutshell there are 2.5 times as many people than the US, traffic is cheaper, sometimes converts better, and Internet penetration is increasing exponentially.   The main lesson from the session was basically there are so many opportunities in this emerging market, everyone really should check it out.

I really wanted to also hit the Pay Per Call session but I ended up getting to Vegas too late Sunday so I missed it.

I walked through the expo area and talked to a few new companies I had never seen before.  The booths actually seemed a little toned down from previous years, nothing really over the top.  I didn’t pick up any schwag this year, which was a first for me.  The only thing that really looked cool that I wanted was some company that was giving away skateboard decks.  I never found the booth where they came from though (if that’s your company, please feel free to mail me one!)

The real networking was done at all the great parties and off site events.   This is the chance to meet all your online friends and people you have read about in a relaxed setting.  There were so many excellent parties and dinners this year as always.   I had a great time talking to everyone and hearing about what people are doing.   I’m just amazed at the quality of people that were there.  You may think you know someone from their online persona but when you meet them in real life its usually much different than you would expect.

If you are on the fence about going to a conference, you should definitely make plans to attend.  I don’t go to a huge number of conferences, but I will keep coming back to the Affiliate Summit event every year.  Hope to see you at the next one.

One the most common questions I continue to be asked is “should I use the Google content network?”

The Google content network is still one of the most misunderstood forms of online advertising. The confusion is understandable.  At first all the experts and gurus said to “just turn it off”. It was thought that it didn’t convert for CPA offers. After a while people started realizing that it does in fact work quite well, it just requires a different skill set than normal pay per click advertising on Google.  So where does the content network stand today at the start of 2010?

The content network on Google is alive and kicking and stronger than ever.  Although things like PPV are getting a lot of press these days for cheap clicks, I still believe the content network is one of the best sources for cheap clicks.   I am talking really cheap like .01 to .02 cents a click.    Here are the some stats for a campaign we have running strictly on the content network.

For this one campaign Google delivered over 54,000 clicks for about $1,000.   That’s among the cheapest paid traffic you can to buy.   This example is obviously on the lowest end of the scale, there are other campaigns we pay up to $1.00 per click on content.  But the clicks are usually much lower than you would pay for Google PPC.

Content traffic does convert as well.   It’s just a matter of tracking everything, finding the converting sites that your ads are displayed on, and focusing your optimization on those sites.  There are no specific rules for which sites to exclude from displaying your ads.  For example, a lot of people say to exclude gmail.com, but I have seen conversions come from there.  Just like everything else, you have to test for your specific niche.

Quality score is important on the content network, although I have found not as strict as normal Google Pay Per Click.  So if you have a campaign that just won’t run on the PPC network, its possible Google will allow it for content.  As you can see by the example stats, a .09% CTR would be horrible on PPC but runs fine on content in the 3-4 ad position range.

So as 2010 starts, I’d say the content network is still an excellent source of cheaper traffic and should continue to be for the foreseeable future.   It doesn’t work for every niche and offer, but definitely should be tested to find out.

You’ve probably heard the famous line “coffee is for closers” from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. While I’m not into the whole high pressure sales vibe of the film, that line does ring true in many ways. How much time do we waste while there is still work to be done? It got me thinking how that relates to the self employed Internet marketer.

For our industry, Twitter is for closers. Not just Twitter but forums, blogs, Facebook etc… How much time do you spend a day on this stuff? 1-2 hours a day maybe? That might not sound like much but when you add it up, even an hour a day over a year is 365 hours. Given a standard 40 hour work week that 9.1 weeks of work. Think of all the projects that could be accomplished in 9 straight weeks of work. Whole businesses could be made in that time.

One of my biggest goals of the new year is efficient time management. I’m cutting out as much of these time-sinks as possible. No forums, minimal RSS, and Twitter – maybe 5-10 minutes a day to keep up with the news. How much time can you afford?

This year if you see me tweeting, you’ll know I’m “closing”.