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.

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.

My last post with landing page examples was very popular, so I thought I would review some more pages in a different niche. By critiquing these landing pages, hopefully you will get a better idea of what works for PPC affiliate marketing. My apologies if you are the owner of any of these pages that I selected.

To find these landing pages, I did a Google search for college scholarship. This seems to be a popular niche with CPA networks, although I am not personally involved in these offers.

Landing page 1

This page drops the user off on a cluttered mass of text with no discernable direction to go or path to follow. This would be a great page for quality score which is probably why it was at the top of the paid search results. Perhaps this site just wants visitors, or RSS subscribers to later sell them with an email. If that is the case, they should have made the subscribe button much more visible.

Landing page 2

This page has potential, but falls short. The smiling graduates are good, the short testimonials are good. But the page is oddly spaced and leaves a large blank area at the bottom left. The biggest problem is that the spacing of the page leaves the “next step” button a little low which can place it below the fold of some browsers. (reminder: always test your landing pages is several of the most common resolutions - the resolutions that us tech geeks use is NOT the resolution most of our customers use!)

Landing page 3

This page had the potential to be my favorite of the bunch, but had a fatal flaw. The good parts - the simple bulleted list of highlights, the prominent privacy guarantee, the trust building corporate logos, and the clear actionable path the follow. All killer components of a high converting landing page. But the fatal flaw is the page is too long, putting the submit button below the fold. This will cost conversions.

Landing page 4

This last landing page was my favorite of the bunch. First of all, everything is above the fold and nicely spaced. On the left side were extra links to content rich sections of the site. Even if visitors didn’t convert on this page, there were several opportunities on those pages for conversion. There were 5 bulleted points (which seem to be the magic number of bullets on an LP). The “start now” button was in the center of the page in perfect position for the eye to hit. Lastly, the smiling graduates is a great image to make the visitor feel good about the page. All in all a winner in my book.

I have mentioned in a few other posts how a big percentage of our income is from private offers. Some people are wondering what this means so I thought I would give an example of one of our biggest money makers.

How it came about:

A friend of mine from I.T. days went to work last year for a mid sized investment services firm as a network admin. This company does a lot of business all across the U.S., but is still mostly old school offline with it’s marketing. They were looking to increase their online presence and my friend gave me a call to see if I would be interested in helping. I had a few calls with their marketing department to find out their goals and what I could help them doing with paid search and lead generation. Basically, the main goal they wanted was to get customers into their sales funnel via their qualified investment lead form.

The setup:

I helped them setup a backend system to track the leads coming in through the page. We both (myself and the company’s accounting dept) have access to the stats for the leads. It’s a simple script that were able to have a php developer build in only 3 hours. But it works great, and lets me track down to the sub id. I then consulted with their web designer to totally re-do the form page and make a few landing pages for my campaigns.

The payment:

We then worked out a payment plan where I am paid a CPA action for each lead, as well as a percentage of any final sale that is derived from that lead. The CPA part is important because it helps by set bid prices and know my profit margins. The secondary payment is key because it gives me an incentive to find better leads, and makes the client feel like its more of a partnership. Not to mention a great money maker for me

I run PPC campaigns on all the networks as well as now some media buys for this offer, and the traffic just keeps increasing. A great benefit is that I am the only person running ads for the company. Obviously there is other competition in the investment services niche, but not for this specific company and group of services they provide.

Replication:

This kind of setup and arrangement could be duplicated in almost any niche. It’s a pretty easy sell to the small to medium sized business that doesn’t have an internet marketing team in house and doesn’t wand to hire someone. The benefit to the company is that you front all the advertising costs and risk. They only get the benefit of a performance based system that delivers leads or sales. The possibilities are really endless.

You can even be proactive and sell yourself to companies that you know you could drive leads to with existing campaigns and keyword lists. The best deals and partnerships are not always going to fall into your lap, or be offered on your favorite affiliate network. Sometimes you have to work for them. You could research a list of companies in a niche you are good at then send an email to their marketing department. Tell them you are an established online lead generator, and can provide them with risk free leads. Throw in a bunch of impressive RIO stats from your previous efforts, and you would be surprised at the response you get.

It’s just another way of thinking about applying skills you have learned with CPA networks to more profitable relationships and campaigns. I see this as a much more stable and long lasting income source than network based offers.

I think a lot of us affiliates tend to think too small. Even if we are doing well, we often have a narrow scope and stay in our comfort zone. For most of us that comfort zone is PPC, social traffic, or SEO and that’s it. I know I am guilty of this thinking too. But as large as the Internet is, there is only so much traffic you can get especially from PPC.

So here is an example of thinking really big. I’m sure most people have seen the catchy TV commercials for Freecreditreport.com. This company is spending millions of dollars per month on a multi TV network ad blitz. The commercials are even getting a secondary boost as a viral hits on Youtube. Basically a marketers dream come true!

Who are they:

Freecreditreport.com or consumerinfo.com is Experian’s own affiliate to drive traffic to the Triple Advantage subscription service. (Subscription services are king for money makers). So even though you can get an actual free credit report by law every year, people are signing up for this subscription service for credit monitoring. This is the exact same service on Commision Junction’s network that you can promote to earn $12-24 per signup.

Their site is another example of a super clean landing page with a single clear call to action:

You and I could do this!

Freecreditreport.com is essentially a real world blueprint of how to scale an affiliate campaign to an extremely large level. They aren’t doing anything that all affiliates couldn’t do. Now obviously you don’t jump straight into a mulit-million dollar TV campaign. But if you have a successful campaign running and you know it could appeal to people offline as well, this is a great way to start thinking. With disciplined savings of PPC profits over time, you could eventually invest in this kind of big time advertising. Then the sky really is the limit.

I know this is the route I hope to take eventually with the affiliate business. How about you!

These are are the top 5 things I look for when picking new offers to test out and run.

1. The offer landing page. To me this is by far the most important consideration when picking a new offer. You can have the best campaign setup, keyword selection, pre-sell landing page, etc, but if the final offer landing page is bad the campaign will never be a success. I look for a page with a good call to action, uncluttered style, and a easy payout action.

2. Traffic volume. The amount of traffic in a certain niche is critical to my decision to run an offer. Sure a micro niche might have great conversion rates, but without a decent volume its just not worth the time it takes to develop a campaign. I like to use tools like Google trends and MSN adlabs, to find current traffic levels and future trends.

3. The eCPC. By checking the overall network eCPC for the offer, you can get a good general idea of what your bids will need to be. If you know you can pay significantly less for clicks than the eCPC, its usually a good sign of profitability.

4. The offer terms. Yes, I actually read the terms of the offer. This will tell you how restrictive the merchant is regarding keyword terms and trademarks. The more open the merchant is, the easier it will be to build out the campaign.

5. The network. Of course you want to work with a reputable network that will pay you for your leads.

Things I don’t care about when picking an offer.

1. The CPA payout. This is really not important to me. You can make just as much total profit with an offer that pays $2 versus and offer that pays $60.

2. Competition. Ok, maybe this is a small consideration, but I know that any niche can be cracked no matter what the level of competition. Its just a matter of working smarter and harder than the competition, which is usually not that difficult. I find that 90% of the people in an niche are pretty sloppy with their approach, so you can leapfrog past them right away. Then, will determination you can work your way through the top 10%.

So, what else do you look for in a good offer?

I was recently taking stock of my current inventory of made for PPC sites. I looked at old sites, what we are currently working on, and what we have planned for the future. As far as sites created for the sole purpose of capturing PPC traffic to affiliate offers, I can honestly say the mini-sites we know and love are dead.

History

First a little PPC history. In 2005 and before you actually could slap up a single page landing page and do well with PPC to affiliate offers. Then when quality score started really developing and being enforced in early 2006, everyone started making the typical 5 page mini site with an article page, contact page, about page, privacy policy, and site map. These “mini-sites” as we called them we basically just an attempt to boost quality scores. They worked great for a while too. The problem is, they don’t work anymore. Google, and now even Yahoo and MSN can see right through these sites. Based on the quality scores they are assigning to this type of content, they seem to classify them as thin affiliate site. You may have some mini-sites still running and doing well (I know I do, knock on wood), but eventually their days are numbered. And going forward, I wouldn’t even try building a new mini-site for PPC purposes.

Destination sites

So where I do I see the current/future status of PPC landing sites? All of the new offers that we have been trying this year are built around what I call full destination sites. Basically you can think of the standard mini site described above, but increase that about 10 times. Articles, interactive content, dynamic content, and video even are now on these sites. This is in addition to the actual landing pages of course (that content is not on the LP). I’m also talking real unique content, not scraped wikipedia junk. Ideally, I also like to have most of the site indexed on all 3 search engines before starting the PPC campaigns for good quality score.

Negatives

The downside of course, is the time, effort and money it takes to build out these sites. You have to plan ahead to put real work into building a solid site.

Positives

The added benefit of building these destination sites, is that you are setting yourself up well for organic traffic down the road. This is a huge benefit when the offer eventually expires. You can also use the non-landing page sections of the site for extra revenue with other related offers, email/newsletter list building, or even things like Ebay affiliate or Chitika stuff. The site also builds residual value as a standalone website, unlike single landing pages which are pretty much worthless when the traffic stops flowing.

So beware when you read some of these older guides or ebooks telling you to build a mini site for PPC. To me, that is a 2006 idea and it usually won’t cut it in mid 2008.