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.

If you are a stock trader, you watch the market trends all day. If you are a pay per click marketer, you should be keeping up on keyword trends every day too. The keyword marketplace is always changing and new keywords are surging for different reasons. I have posted before how the savvy marketer can capitalize on surging keywords to make huge profits. Fortunately this data is readily available, and the best source is the Google Hot Trends feed. This is updated usually about 10 times a day so the info is very fresh. If I could keep only one feed in my reader this would be it. No other site has ever helped me make more money than this feed.

I guarantee this RSS feed will make you money!

Google Hot Keywords

Enjoy and good luck!

Ok, this title may be a little misleading. You aren’t really gaming the quality score by following these tips, you are just working with their system and giving Google what it wants. You may have heard some of these, or they may be new to you – but I can personally vouch for the fact that these methods work. Without further ado here are 4 techniques to acheive that high quality score:

1. The “player” approach. It’s hard to get a good CTR and quality score with low bids. So when you start a brand new campaign, come in with a high max CPC. Higher than you normally would run the campaign. It may cost you, but it should help your initial CTR and allow you to snag a good score. Then you can back the bids down slowly.

2. Adgroup structure. Put all your keywords into adgroups with common semantic meaning. Google will see this similarity and reward the group with a high QS. Don’t allow poorly related keywords to creep into your adgroups. Keep the number of keywords as low as possible in each adgroup.

3. Clearing bad results. Sometimes despite all your best efforts, you will experience the Google slap and your bids will shoot to $10. When this happens its time to clear these results away. Delete all keywords, ads, ad groups. Make a change to your landing page that the Google bot will see. Wait 20 minutes. Rebuild the campaign in the reverse order than you deleted. Hopefully, this will bring your bids back down.

4. Super relevant landing pages. This is probably the best way to affect QS. Make every landing page relevant to every keyword. Google loves to see the exact keyword used in the search on the landing page. There are several PHP based ways to capture the search and display it on the page. When Google sees super relevancy, they reward it with super quality score.

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!

As CPA affiliates, we often have to absorb the costs for wasted clicks of tons of traffic that we drive to advertisers sites. If fact the majority of traffic that we pay to send to an advertisers site doesn’t not convert for the specific action that we are contracted to be paid for. Of course, they are still getting the benefit of that traffic. It may convert for something else on their site, or after the cookie has expired. Even if the customer we sent doesn’t take an action, the advertiser still gets to build their brand and gain visitors. It’s kind of the forgotten element of the CPA model.

Well here’s an example of just how good it can be on the other side of the equation. We have had a PPA (Pay Per Action) campaign set up on Google for a while now, sending traffic to a customer site that we are managing in the Aviation market. (See our visual guide of setting up a PPA campaign) . This PPA campaign is mostly for testing purposes, and not our main driver of traffic at all. So anything we get from it is basically a bonus. As you can see from the screenshot below, it does not convert very well at all for the action that we have set up. However, the traffic does end up staying on the site and looking around, which is great.

For the 1,499 click of Google traffic, we have paid a whopping $9.00. That breaks out to a CPC of $ 0.0060 per click! Now do I feel guilty about all the Adsense advertisers on the content network sending me this traffic and for essentially free? Not at all! I am on that losing side of the equation most of the time, so it’s nice to be the one on the receiving side.

I’m sure all the savvy readers of this blog can think of some very “grayhat” ways to exploit this kind of thing. That’s not how we roll at CDF Networks, but rest assured we have thought of them too.