I got this email yesterday from a reader: “I tried MySpace ads without any luck so far, but I am encouraged to continue
there. Do you feel that is the best place to start out for an AM beginner” This seems to be a common question so here is my take on where to start.

I know a lot of people who are coming up in affiliate marketing today are going the social network route. Social networks meaning mostly Facebook and Myspace. I can definitely see the appeal.  Tons of relatively cheap traffic, super easy to setup, and low learning curve.  But I would not recommend starting there.

I think paid search is still the best place to start, even for newbies. First of all paid search traffic converts better, plain and simple. By the very act of using paid search, people are already in buying mode and actively seeking your offer. They have taken the time and effort to seek out a keyword related to your niche, versus just seeing your ad passively on a website. Content advertising has its place for sure, but nothing can beat PPC search.

By starting with PPC, you are forced to learn the techniques that will make you successful in all types of advertising, including social networks. Those techniques aren’t so apparent just writing an ad and placing it on a social network. But once learned they will serve you well in all types of advertising.

So where to start specifically? I would recommend starting with Yahoo. Policies are still less strict that Adwords, competition lower, click prices are decent, and traffic is good. Then move on to MSN, Google, and social networks.

I already know some of you are thinking: “but so and so started on Facebook and is making $10k a day”. Of course there are many examples of people making thousands a day from their social campaigns alone who never used PPC. But I think if those people would have applied the same time and effort with paid search, they would be making even more now.

A friend pinged me this morning about the new Myspace ad platform beta going live. I’m not sure how long it has been around, but this was the first I had heard of it. As much as I dislike Myspace, its a new possible traffic source so I have to try it out. I headed over to check it out and uploaded a few test campaigns. It is an image ad serving system which essentially allows you to place media buys on Myspace from a self serve interface. You could do the same thing before, but this brings it to the masses and allows you to buy on a PPC basis. Since you are only running images, its a whole different ballgame than normal PPC ads and requires a whole different skillset. But if you are experienced with media buys or image advertising on the Google content network techniques, its the same thing.

First impressions:

• It is a lot like Facebook. The age/location/demographic targeting. The manual review of ads. The bid range estimates.
• They are pretty picky about destination URLs. They seem to have a filter in place for affiliate network jumplinks. I threw a few in to test and they don’t seem to be vaild.
• The minimum bid price is .25? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is what I was seeing.
• The interface is pretty slick.
• They actually have a contact form.
• Approval times are slow, about 3 hours on my first test. Probably because of high demand.

So have you guys tried it out yet? What do you think?

UPDATE direct from Myspace:

“Ads are reviewed in the order in which they are received. We appreciate your patience during the review process. During the beta test of this advertising platform we will have MySpace SSAP agents approving ads Monday thru Friday, from 10:30 AM to 6:30 PM (Pacific Standard/Daylight Time).”

I totally ignored Facebook ads for the longest time. I admit, I’m a bit of a PPC snob and don’t jump on new trends. First off, I don’t use Facebook. In fact the site really annoys me. From what I read, even though some people seemed to be making good money, it’s a really sketchy system as far as ads running then getting shut down for no reason. I tend to focus on more long term strategies. Also even though you can target demographically, it is still contextual advertising, which will almost always lead to lower conversions. With search, people are actively looking for your product and are in full buy mode. While with contextual ads like Facebook, they just see your ad and it may or may not appeal to them.

So I look at advertising on Facebook type systems as a more speculative activity to be done in your spare time. All that being said, I finally gave it a shot for the last 3 days. My initial impressions of Facebook ads:

• The approval process is not easy to work with. I managed to get about 50% of my ads approved, which I guess is ok. But it was strange because with 2 almost identical ads, 1 would make it and 1 would be rejected.
• The interface is terrible. No bulk upload, no CSV import, no adgroups. It’s about as basic as it gets.
• The reporting is also really bad.
• The bid prices seem a little steep and keep creeping up on me. I assume that if your CTR for the ad is low, they keep jacking up the bid prices. This keeps happening on many of my ads with bids in the $1 range.
• The budget limits are ridiculously low. $200 a day?? If people want to spend money, why not let them.
• The traffic does convert though.

So how did I do with my first few days? Here are the numbers.

Day 1: Spend $28.54 Gross $98.77 Profit = $70.23

Day 2: Spend $101.75 Gross $116.34 Profit = $14.59

I got a little overly aggressive with higher bid prices which killed the profit margin.

Day 3: Spend $109.32 Gross $213.89 Profit = $104.57

Facebook does have promise, but I would like to see their system mature some more. It’s pretty labor intensive getting ads online and then keeping them running. An upload system or API would be great, as well as a real reporting system. Until then,  I’ll throw my effort into Adcenter stuff which is really hot now.  But, I’ll definitely be back to FB as time allows.

I like to test every possible paid traffic source. It doesn’t matter if people say they work or not, I like to try it myself and get my own results. Like in the 13 PPC challenge, I am always testing new sources. This has led me to find some really good and cheap clicks. I have also lost a lot of money, but I think you have to commit yourself to losing money to be successful, especially in internet marketing. Even if a test is a total failure, the data and experience gained has some value.

That being said, a couple weeks ago I tested a new source for me, Casale Media. This is one of the larger media networks, that a lot of the high traffic sites are publishers on. If you aren’t familiar with media buying, it’s basically a banner campaign that you can run on a CPC basis rather than CPM (usually). Essentially its content advertising. I have had hit and miss results with buying media. This type of advertising is LOT different than PPC, but I had a rock solid converting campaign that I wanted to try pushing some serious traffic to.

Setup

There is a lot of front end setup with this type of campaign. First, you don’t just sign up self serve style like PPC. You have to contact them, get an account manager and an ad setup person. Then you have to supply them with at least 4 different sized creatives, and they prefer to have 3-4 sets of each of these. So if you aren’t good with graphics, you have the expense of having someone make 16 creatives for you. You also “negotiate” a CPC rate that you will pay with your account manager. Then before they will even start uploading your campaign you have to send in a $5,000 minimum deposit. Once they receive your $5k, it usually takes about another week to get your campaign uploaded and running. During this time you have to place pixels on your primary, and final landing pages for tracking.

Results

This test had disappointing results. As I said, the landing page/offer I sent this traffic to converted very well on PPC, but I actually had 0 conversions on Casale. Of course I expected and planned for a lower conversion rate than PPC, but it was clear this wasn’t going to work on my campaign. I only needed to let the test run a 1 day to get a statistically valid sample size. The troubling part to me was that people were abandoning the initial landing page, before even clicking through to the offer page.

This type of adverting isn’t for the faint of heart. The setup time is long, you have a lot less control than PPC (you can’t even pause or resume your campaign, your account rep has to), the deposits can be large, and the traffic can come fast and furious. I have had success and failures with media buys, so I thinks its definitely worth continued testing. Obviously, your results will vary with any network, but for this particular test it didn’t work out for me.

This one is for all the publishers running Adsense out there. Ever wanted to know who your competitors were in your niche, and the approximate volume they are doing compared to you? Well, that info can be easily found, courtesy of Google itself using Adwords.

Here’s how to do it: (click to enlarge images)

1. Log into your Adwords account.

2. Click “New Placement Targeted Campaign”

3. Enter a bogus campaign and adgroup names (you will just be deleting this). Add the countries where you want to check your competition and where your site is targeted.

4. Enter a fake ad, and continue.

5. Here is where you want to be: “Target your Ad“. Now click the “List URLs” button, and enter your URL in the box. Click “get available placements”. In this example, the niche we would be checking out is cars and our site is cars.com.

Google will then display your competitors under “Placements” with their average daily impressions. Sweet huh?

After you are done checking out all the data don’t save any of this, or you will start a new placement targeted campaign. If you share this tip, a link back would be appreciated!

Conventional wisdom is usually not wise. That’s why thinking outside the box is so important in PPC affiliate marketing. Take for instance, the content network. I don’t know how many times I have heard “experts” say don’t use it whatever you do. The fact is, the content network can and does work.

Case in point:

I have an education offer that I have been experimenting with for about 3 months now. I have 2 identical campaigns running on Google; same keywords, adgroups, and ads. All is the same except 1 campaign is on the search network and 1 is on the content network. The results are surprising.

Search 3 Month Conversion Rate = 8.23%

Content 3 Month Conversion Rate = 13.87%

The content network sends about same volume as the search network. But the content network is converting 5.6% better than the search network. That’s right, content is converting better than search! Plus my bid prices are about 40% less for the content network. Of course every single offer and campaign is different, which is why testing is key. If I would have paid attention to the “experts” I never would have found this little goldmine. In this particular case, my results clearly disprove the notion that the content network doesn’t work for affiliate campaigns.

This is a first for CDF networks - we have been banned from something! I received the following email from Yahoo publisher network (YPN) last week.

I have never used YPN much due to their poor ad targeting, but I had tested it on a few sites and even on a few client sites that we are doing some work with. Nothing shady at all, these are legitimate business sites. So I am guess the “suspicious click activity” reason does not apply. According to the form letter, “poor traffic quality” is the reason they axed us. Unfortunately my email to YPN for further explanation has gone unanswered so all I can do is speculate. I’m not terribly upset either way, because I have never been a huge fan of YPN and even contextual advertising in general (from the publisher side that is). We will see if they ever respond and provide an exact reason.

Has anyone else been banned from YPN?

It seems everyone and their brother has a content network now. After MSN’s launch a few weeks ago, now Ask.com is about to join in the context game. Here is what they have to say about it:

“On May 14^th, The Ask Sponsored Listings Team will roll-out an exciting new feature – contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, you can seamlessly extend your pay-per-click search campaigns to sites in our content network.
Reaching over 34 million unique users each month, the ASL content network includes premium content sites such as Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and Ticketmaster and more. Ads are targeted to publishers’ web pages by matching ad content and keywords to page content so the ads displayed are highly targeted to the reader’s interests.”

It should be interesting to see how these sites convert for affiliates. I’m willing to test anything once. Look for a review in the future from me….