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.

A get asked quite a bit why I don’t show screenshots of earnings or talk about income reports like most other blogs. Long time readers of the blog know that I only actually showed 1 screenshot of a 4 hour period about a year and a half ago, but nothing since.  Not to knock anyone at all who posts earnings or screenshots, but these are my own personal reasons for avoiding the subject.

• I don’t think earnings claims alone provide any credibility. That comes from the quality of your posts and the depth of the information you provide. I would much rather have a reader subscribe to my blog because they think I provide useful information every week, rather than because I make $X amount of money everyday. Telling people how much I make does them no benefit.

• I’m a pretty private guy. I was raised that you never discuss your income, even with your own family. I am certainly not going to post it on the Internet

• I was advised against it by my business lawyer. He recommends against any public posting of income by private individuals or companies. “Unless you are publicly traded company and are required to, don’t do it”, he said.

• I have nothing to prove or impress on anyone. I don’t rely on this blog for income, so I’m not trying to sell myself to anyone. My company is doing well, and that’s good enough for me! Hopefully that provides the same inspiration or motivation that a screenshot would.

Again, not faulting anyone else for showing earnings, almost all my online friends do it. But its just not for me.

It’s pretty well known that the 4 main categories of quality score elements that you can control are:

• Keywords
• Ad copy
• Account Structure
• Landing pages

Volumes of information have been written about each one of these topics. But many people are not aware that there are other factors to your quality score that you have little to no control over at all.

1. First of all, the niche you are in affects your quality score. By just entering the niches, certain factors are applied to your score at the account level.

2. Your business model affects your quality score. Adwords looks at the way you are driving leads to a landing page and assigns a business model rating to your account. If they think your business model is based on affiliate sales they probably have a rating that dings your whole account.

3. Lastly, your competitors afffect YOUR quality score. This is probably the most frustrating thing to learn, but yes the competitors around you affect the score in your account in a negative way. Is this fair? I don’t think so, but that’s how Adwords rolls.

source: Adwords employees

We all know that MSN adcenter has a horrible interface. But the traffic from the network is conversion gold. This paradox sets up an excellent opportunity for the hard working search marketer. Most people are understandably frustrated with the interface, therefore don’t put a lot of effort into their campaingns. So I have always seen this a benefit. You have this great traffic source that is difficult to use, so if you are willing to put the time into it you can dominate your niche. If it were slick and easy like Adwords, everyone would be using it.

That being said, there are ways to make it a little easier to work the current interface. First of all the import tool works fairly well. You can directly import a campaign that you exported from Adwords or YSM. Also for repetitive edits like changing bid prices on adgroups, you can automate the task using a program like imacros with firefox. This can really speed up campaign changes.

The window of opportunity is closing though. Their new offline editor currently being tested is going to rewrite the MSN playbook, making it extremely easy to upload ads, make changes, monitor reports and do everything it takes to make a successful campaign. (I don’t have a copy yet but I have seen advanced screenshots – it looks awesome). When this becomes available to the general pubic, I predict a huge rush of competition to MSN which should drive up bid prices and lower ad posistions. Thus ending the competitive advantage to be exploited now.

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.

Everyone’s goal is to quit their day job. I know that was mine. A few people of have asked me in emails if I think they should quit. Well, these were my recommendations.

1. First and most important is establish an earings track record. Demonstrate to yourself that you can consistently generate income for at least 6 months to a year. Anyone can have an early success making money online, but it’s the ability to do it over and over in different niches that is key. Offers get shut down, accounts get Google slapped, and earnings dry up. If you aren’t able to keep it going and repeat the process, don’t quit yet. You need to be diversified in your online income, just like the golden rule of investing.

2. Get rid of debt. If you are going to be self employed, you can’t live like the typical consumer with a mountain of debt. Pay off all credit card debt, student loans, car payments or any other consumer debt. Most people will still have some form of housing payment like rent or a mortgage, but that is the bare minimum debt I would carry. Ideally, you want to be completely debt free before quitting.

3. Build up your savings. You simply can’t live paycheck to paycheck with affiliate marketing. I might be conservative, but I wouldn’t recommend quitting a day job until you have at least 1 years living expenses in the bank.

4. Figure out your health insurance situation. If you have a spouse that will continue working that has insurance, that is great. Otherwise check out premiums for yourself. They aren’t that expensive, probably a couple hundred bucks a month, but much more than you paid as an employee.

For me, the time leading up to quitting my job was the hardest I have probably ever worked in my life, but it can be done. And now (knock on wood) I will hopefully never have to work for anyone again. But it all comes from laying the groundwork before you give that final notice and walk out the door.

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?