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.

Most PPC and affiliate guides recommend split testing. I agree split testing is one of the main keys to success. But the only thing they usually mention is split testing of ads. The truth is almost every aspect of a campaign can and should be split tested to optimize efficiency and profits. Testing is not just something you do at the start of a campaign, but a never ending process.

Here are some things I like to split test.

• Domains - I have talked before about the importance of testing multiple domains in your campaigns. The display URL is a critical part of your ad, and you never know what will convert better until you split test different domains.
• Offers/Networks- The same offers are usually found on several different affiliate networks. By split testing to the same offer on different networks you might find a higher conversion rate on a particular network.
• Account structure - Try taking the same set of keywords on 2 different accounts with a different adgroup structure to see which performs better.
• Keyword match type - Try testing all available match types to see what converts better.
• Landing Pages - Landing pages are critical to split test. You can almost always find a better converting landing page. You can split test any page change down to something as simple as button colors.
• Ads - Of course ads are the easiest thing to split test, and still one of the most effective ways t0 optimize your campaigns.

These are just a few, I’m sure there are a ton of other things to split test. What creative ways do you split test?

There was a lot of talk last week about the .ME land rush for new domains. I even tried to get a few, but ended up only getting one. There were plenty of good names available when I was looking, but I passed on most of them.

As far as affiliate marketing, I wouldn’t touch a .ME domain. Here is my reasoning:

99.9% of average people that would see an ad with a .ME ending would probably have no clue what it meant and would thing it was some weird country or scam domain. I would expect them to avoid clicking like the plaugue. .COM is king and probably always will be. Consumers feel comfortable when they see a .COM. In my own testing even with .NETs and .ORGs, nothing can touch the same domain with .COM for conversion rates.

So .ME might be cool for some other projects or for sites with geek audiences, but not for affiliate marketing.

What do you think?

One of the biggest transitions going from a employee to self employment is the tax issue. As a paid worker, taxes are a no brainer. Every paycheck they are automatically taken out and sometimes you even get a refund at the end of the year. What could be easier right?

It’s a huge mental transition going from that, to having to pay large sums of your hard earned profits to the government. You have to have the discipline to set aside money from your profits to pay your taxes. Usually, estimated taxes are paid 4 times or less per year. My accountant usually calls me and lets me know its time to bring in a check. Its always a depressing call, but you don’t really have a choice.

So how much should you set aside for taxes? A good rule of thumb is 30% of your net profits. That is a safe figure regardless of your tax status like sole proprietor, LLC, S-corp, etc. I recommend putting that money in a separate “tax” savings account. That way you never really feel a sense of ownership to that money, and therefore its easier to part with. For example, if you do $10k in profits, $3k goes right into the tax account.  Something like an HSBC savings account works great. At least you are earning decent interest on the money before you pay it. You never want to be caught in the situation where taxes are due and you don’t have the money because you spent it. Pay profits into your tax account first.

When I first started out in affiliate marketing, I was 100% focused on using PPC to drive traffic. Over the past couple years this has been a VERY successful strategy for me. But in the last year I began to shift my thinking and focus. With PPC, you have only 1 shot to get the customer to convert. If they don’t take that action, they are usually gone forever. Which requires you to pay more for new customers. Then when the PPC stops, the money stops. This is becoming more and more troubling to me. Especially as niche markets are constantly maturing, and margins decrease. You have to evolve with them, or die.

So my new focus has been to build more long lasting sites. Ideally the site will have content that will inspire customers to come back several times or even recommend the site to their friends. That is the key, to make these consumer sites actually have useful content and not just spammy affliliate junk on wordpress. When you have real content, SEO is a no brainer and organic (free) traffic will follow. I have always found organic converts even better than PPC, and when the PPC is turned off the customers will keep coming. The added benefit of building sites like this is that your PPC campaigns will do even better because quality score will be great. Its like a positive feedback loop. Also, the site will have residual value even if the marketing campaigns end.

In addition to trying to build these authority consumer sites, another big focus is building a database of customers for each niche. Using newsletters or coupon alert signups (hot!), you can get the customers’ email address for repeat sales down the line. This may be the most valuable purpose of building a real content site. A correctly opted in list can be gold.

It’s going to get harder and harder to make decent money with the straight PPC to landing page formula. Using all these strategies in addition to the normal PPC route is the way I am building affiliate income going forward. What do you think?

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.