By now most people have heard of MSN rebranding their search to Bing. We have been playing around with the search engine, and are actually impressed with the features.  The left sidebar with topic categories, related searches and search history is very effective when searching.   I also like the pop up text preview of the organic listings.    When searching for people, Bing seems to heavily weigh social media results like Twitter accounts in their SERPS.

All this is great, but how can you use Bing to make more money as a marketer?   Timing for one thing.  Microsoft is throwing $100 million into a media blitz.   With this kind of hype, its a great time to take advantage of the increased traffic bump to the new service.

If you are using Adcenter, you are already on Bing.  Results from old PPC campaigns are shown automatically on Bing.  But you might want to check your Adcenter campaigns and see what this media push is doing to your campaigns.  Most of our campaigns are showing increased impressions and clicks.

Positioning has also changed a bit.   Some searches we have been testing show as many as 11 paid results on the first page.  They also display some highlighted main column listings at the bottom of the 1st results page.  That is a first for PPC.   With all these positions available, your campaigns could radically change as you ads shift around.  Again, its a good time to re-evaluate your current PPC ads to track the results of the Bing launch.

It’s still too early to tell how this will affect the bottom line of revenue, but so far results are promising.   What do you think of Bing?

One of the biggest gains you can make in the profits of your campaigns is to optimize the conversion process.  A great way to do this is by using conversion funnels in Google Analytics.  By setting this up, you can see exactly where visitors are being lost during the conversion process through a visual interface.

The process is fairly easy.  You log into your Google Analytics account and create a new goal.  That goal will usually be the URL of your thank you or success page.  Then you define the intermediate pages that lead up to that goal page.  The first page might be your landing page, then a payment page, then the thank you page.  This is your conversion funnel process.  You then install the tracking code on those pages and you are done.

Once the data is being gathered you can go into the Goals section and view the report Funnel Visualization.  This will show you exactly what is happening to your visitors at each step in the process.  By seeing how many are bouncing out on each step, you know just where to focus your efforts to increase conversions.  This combined with the Website Optimizer are the most powerful tools I have found for increasing profits of your landing pages.

Here’s a short overview of the process:

Over the weekend I was reminiscing about some of my earliest efforts to make money online. I tried a lot of strange things, most are long forgotten, but there are a few I remember. As I look back now, some of those ideas were surprisingly ahead of their time. I always had a full time job so these were just things I tried in my spare time for fun.

1997? - The first website I ever built was called The Downhill Scene. I was heavily into downhill mountain bike racing at the time so I learned HTML and made a really crude site. Compressed images, tables with borders, the works… I had no idea that monetizing a website even existed back then, but it was a fun site. I even had web 2.0 style user generated content with an HTML guestbook.

2001- I had an idea to write what is now known as an Ebook and sell it from a website. It was a 5 page PDF guide on how to secure your PC against spyware and viruses. I put the site up and waited around for traffic, and actually sold a few copies. I was an info product marketer without even knowing it. I even used Ebay auctions to sell it as well as drive traffic back the site to make sales there. I think that might have been against the rules.

2002 - I signed up for a weekly email from Dell computers that sent out coupon codes. I would take the coupon codes and buy notebook computers, usually at about 30% off, then sell them on Ebay. This actually worked for a while and I made about $100 profit on each computer. I would buy 10 or so at a time, store them, manage the auctions, deal with shipping, returns - it was a total nightmare. But I was pretty proud of myself to actually make money on my own.

2003 - This was a big breakthrough when I finally realized you didn’t actually have to have a product to make money online. So instead of managing all the headaches of the Ebay stuff I would try affiliate marketing. I made a website with the coupon codes then got in the Dell affiliate program. I even made a form on my site to collect email addresses to notify people when the codes were released. I pasted those email addresses manually into a spreadsheet and did the emailing manually as well in Outlook. I had no idea at the time, but I was a list building marketer! This was going pretty well, until Dell threatened to sue me for copyright infringement.

2005 - I learned about Adsense and started building all kinds of sites for that. Then I learned pay per click, tied it into affiliate marketing and the rest is history. I never really got serious about making my living online until 2005 , but after deciding thats what I wanted to do things really took off.

What crazy things did you try back in the day?

With so much interest in social network advertising lately, I thought it would be interesting to take a poll to see how affiliate marketers are using social networks these day. This will also help me with targeting new case studies and posts I am working on. Thanks for helping out with your answers!

Where are you advertising? Mostly Pay Per Click Mostly Social Networks Both about the same View Results At which social network do you spend the most? Facebook Myspace Other View Results Which interface or ad creation process is better? Facebook Myspace View Results What is your favorite targeting technique on Facebook? Location Age Sex Keyword Education Companies Relationship View Results What percentage of ads get accepted on Facebook Under 10% 10-30% 30-50% 50-80% Almost all get accepted View Results Do you have a Facebook account manager? Yes No View Results In 2009, do you estimate you will spend? More on social network advertsing Less on social network advertsing View Results

We are making a big push around here in 2009 to automate as many things as possible and make life easier. To that end, we have been testing a lot of new tools lately. Not sales letter page things, but actual tools that I think show some promise. Although most end up not working as advertised, some are actually turning out to be worth using.

With all the emphasis we are putting on building our landing sites for SEO as well as PPC, we needed a fast way to build up links. This technique helps with quality score, bid prices, and eventually free traffic to affiliate sites. One tool we tested that does work as promised is Social Submitter. The software automates the submitting of links to social bookmarking sites. It can submit to 160 social bookmarking sites and is a very advanced program. You can create filters for your submissions, use proxies, and see the status of your bookmark submissions all within the program.

I almost hesitate to blog about this one, because I think its a great advantage to have. This could be used to promote straight affiliate sites, or just bookmark your blog entries to get more exposure for your site.  But with a price tag of $150, most people will pass this one up. As far as I’m concerned though, any tool that helps make money is always worth the price. They have a demo you can use to try the program to a limited number of sites for 3 days, if you want to test drive it. Is anyone else using this software to boost affiliate sites yet?

Let’s face it, Google pretty much knows all.  Sometimes its in your best interest to keep them from knowing all they can.  Say you were to have certain solid Adwords campaigns that are running well in an account, but wanted to maybe try some other ideas with landing pages that are thin with no quality score.  If you wanted to prevent that main account from being tied to the “experimental” account, here are a few suggestions for the test account:

• Don’t use Google conversion tracking
• Don’t use Google analytics
• Never accept data sharing
• Spread the affiliate domains on different hosts, IP ranges, and DNS servers.
• Always use whois protection.

If you did this, the campaigns should be isolated from Google’s reach.

Back in June 07 I wrote a post about how to set up a campaign on Google’s pay per action (PPA) beta network. There wasn’t much interest in the post and the service in general, but I saw this as a huge opportunity. I have been running many PPA campaigns every day since then and making solid money off of the program. Unfortunately the service is ended in August, but it was great while it lasted. Here’s what I did, and hopefully it provides a concrete example of thinking outside the box.

Since you can arbitrage anything I got to thinking why not do an offer to offer arbitrage. The idea was basically a PPA to CPA arbitrage, essentially just CPA to CPA. The beauty of the PPA/CPA system is that it puts the burden of advertising on the publishers, in this case Adsense publishers. You set your conversion action amount you are willing to pay that publisher for brining you the sale. The number of clicks are irrelevant because you don’t pay for them (but more on that later).

So in this example I had a CPA offer that paid $12 per lead. I set the PPA action amount for $7. So for each completed lead I netted $5 after giving $7 to the adsense publisher. The high payout generated a lot of action for publishers, I tried lower amounts but that led to less interest by publishers.

Now the big problem with this type of setup is technical. You have to have a white label or self hosted offer, because the action confirmation code Google used need to be a static and final confirmation page. The dynamic pages that most affilite networks use to place normal Google tracking code or other pixels did not work for the PPA network code. Luckily I had an offer I could have total control over, so this worked.

So how did it go? Very well. Once publishers started running the ad the clicks started pouring in. Since the action amount was higher than most, a lot of people tried it. The conversion rate was low, but that wasn’t where the majority of the money was made. Which brings us to the part about the free clicks. Finding a way to monetize the free (non converting) traffic is the key to the whole thing.

The defined action was not the only exit point on the landing page. There was a small email signup link to grab double opted in emails for future selling. There were thousands of clicks coming into that page that didn’t convert well on the primary action, but did sign up for the email. Then I was able to convert these free clicks into sales via newsletters. In fact, when I calculated a CPC cost, using the paid out actions I was charged for against the free clicks - I was effectively paying .002 a click. That’s over 100,000 Google clicks for $200

Even though the Google PPA network is gone, there are lots of similar things you can do like this (not the Google Conversion Optimizer though, because that does charge you for all clicks). Hopefully lightbulbs are going off in your head as you read this

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.