My friend Corey Bornmann from Affportal uses the phrase ‘trick to click’ to describe landing pages that look like this:
You might have seen variations on this type of landing page or banner and that’s because it can work great! Who can resist clicking that ‘play’ button?
The basic idea is to take a screen-shot or pic to use as the ‘video still’, then use Photoshop (or another graphics editor) to make it look like a video player.When selecting the picture to use, browse around Youtube and see what videos make you want to click on them. Usually you’ll find that the image is one that you want to see what happens next. For example, if I see a guy sitting there facing his webcam I am probably not going to be as inclined to click as I would if I saw a big shark just about to bite something (you get the idea!)
You can download the source files for the project above here
Getting creative with this style of LP is the key. The main thing that will influence your CTR isn’t the play button, or any of the video player effects…it’s the picture you use. It can get tricky because you don’t want to mis-represent what you are promoting, yet be provocative enough to get clicked.
One scenario I have seen a lot is using pictures of ‘hot girls’ in the video player frame to promote dating offers. This can be a little deceptive, and often traffic from such tactics doesn’t back out for the advertiser which can result in getting kicked off the offer….so use at your own risk.
Get creative with trick to click and try something that you haven’t seen before.
This is a guest post by Brian “browie”. He is a member of PPV Playbook forums and has a blog at Browie.com
This PPV trick and/or tip isn’t going to change your life but it sure could make that “loser campaign” into a relative golden nugget. I just started PPV marketing at the end of 2009. That is when I joined David Ford and his PPVPlaybook Forum. I was slow jumping on the bandwagon and I’m disappointed that I didn’t jump on earlier. So, what I’m saying is I am still new and this little tip bumped my campaigns across the board.
I have to give credit where it is due. I have private messaged this guy something to the effect of “you changed my life”. Well not quite but it was a great tip that I didn’t think about before or maybe i didn’t pay attention too it when I saw it. His name is Derek and he posts on the PPVPlaybook Forum. There was a thread he created by giving some random tips about keywords and url’s. Most of the stuff I had read before but this one just happened to catch my eye;
There is a difference, in some networks, between .com and .com/
There are 100′s of little case studies and tips and tricks on all of these internet marketing blogs and forums but I swear I had not read that before. I have been profiting on many campaigns since I started taking his advice and you can see why below. Here is one particular offer that has brought in 150% ROI everyday for over 2 weeks because of this tip. If I didn’t take his tip to heart I know for a fact I would have deleted this campaign because there is no way I would bid that high. Here is a screen shot.
As you can see people are bidding $0.60+ on the .com and I’m #1 for the .com/ at $0.034
Thank you Derek for that and I hope some one else or many of you find this post helpful and will take action on your PPV campaigns. The point to this post is that any little detail can bump your campaign from a loser to a winner.
Everyone wants to do paid traffic, and for some people that works out great. Paid traffic such as PPV, Facebook, PPC, etc. can get you a lot of traffic really quick but it also can require a substantial investment of time to keep those campaigns going. I think anyone who is interested in building a long term affiliate business needs to devote some time to SEO/Free traffic sources that can generate income for years on almost autopilot, hence this post.
This technique I am going to share is not something new at all, it’s not some big secret, but it has been forgotten by most fickle affiliates who jump from one traffic source to another thinking the grass is always greener. I am talking about Yahoo Answers
No…you didn’t just step out of a Delorian in 2007, Yahoo answers still works. I just completed a case study that shows the potential of this traffic source. The reason affiliates fail at it is because they go about it all wrong. In fact, I would go so far as to say that most affiliates have no idea how to properly monetize social media traffic like this. See, most affiliates want to spend hours automating, scraping, etc thinking that’s the way to do things. If they actually put a little quality into their work, they would reap the benefits for years down the road.
Here is how to make money from Yahoo answers;
Offers
Almost any niche is fair game but since answers can take time to rank, pick niches that will be around a while
Keywords/Questions
After you pick an offer, you need to research keywords. Use the Google keyword tool and find some good keyword phrases you could make into questions. Research your potential keywords to see what other types of sites are ranking for them, and how much competition there is.
Landing Pages
Depending on the offer, you can iframe the offer page or make a page that looks like a great resource. Forget the LP’s you use for PPV or media buys…you want to make landing pages that actually offer good info or resources. If you were doing an education offer, you could have a site that listed all the colleges the user could request free information from (and you get a commission for). Don’t make this look like a sales page – that’s the trick.
Questions and Answers
This is going to be what separates the people who make money with this, from the people that don’t. Most people want to outsource this part, or simply write some lame answer with a big ‘click here’ type of sales pitch. This will not work. The outsourcing part can be done if you can find someone who can do what you would do. Don’t outsource this until you find a formula that works yourself.
You will want to ask AND answer your own questions. Why? This gives you the ability to chose the best answer (all other answers are being hidden now). You can also phrase your questions in a more search engine friendly way. Obviously for this you are going to need multiple accounts. You don’t want to answer your own question right away (that doesn’t look natural), and you don’t want to select your answer as the best answer until you get a few other responses. You won’t always get your question answered by other people but give it a little time to see if you do.
Answer your questions in a conversational tone. This isn’t the place to sell. Offer real, useful advice and give them a resource (your link) they can get more information. I really want to stress this point – you have to give useful answers. Not just a sentence or two. Pretend a friend just asked you this question and you are giving them real advice.
With your different accounts, answer some random questions once in a while to make your account look more ‘normal’.
Based on some campaigns I have been doing, just putting in 5 hours a month would result in thousands of dollars of income per month once you got the ball rolling. You probably aren’t going to break 6 figures a month with this technique but I can guarantee you will be getting conversions for a LONG time down the road on campaigns you haven’t touched in months. Give it a shot!
Ghetto cats be stealing my Affbuzz hats
Multiple choice landing pages can work really well for promoting email/zip submits. In the forum most of the time when I see email submits being promoted, affiliates are just using basic landing pages. While this can work, there is a lot more you can do to increase conversions.
I want to show you a way to use multiple choice landing pages. There are a couple ways you can do this – using a regular multiple choice landing page or one that pre-populates the offers. First I will show you the regular multiple choice LP
The way this works is the user selects which offer they want and are directed to it. In the source files (included in the bottom of this post) you would need to do is open the .php file in your favorite editor and edit this part
Putting in your own affiliate links. Simple right?
There is also something cool we can do by pre-populating these offers. What that means is that we will have someone check a radio button to pick their offer and fill out their email address on our landing page and then send them to the offer with their email address filled out. This is what that landing page looks like:
You edit this file the same way, but you need to make sure the offers you are running are able to be pre populated (either look in the offer description[ption or ask your affiliate manager).
You can download the templates here
Play around with multiple choice landing pages and see how creative you can get!
There are a lot of great blogs focusing on affiliate marketing. If you haven’t already, visit Affbuzz on a regular basis to see what people are talking about. I wanted to share some other blogs that aren’t necessarily focused on affiliate marketing, but have useful information for affiliate marketers. I usually email my forum members on Sunday with good threads or posts from the week so I thought I would also make a blog post highlighting some good blogs posts from the week that you might not have seen otherwise.
So, without further ado here are some good blog posts from the last week you should check out:
A landing page makeover
How to sell products with direct mail inserts
If Abraham Lincoln taught affiliate marketing
What to do on the slow days
Using Social Media to Help Launch Your New Business
International SEO strategies
Forget multitasking, try unitasking
How to find energy for more than your day job
Bing the default search engine for the Iphone?
How search engines value links
People with jobs have a fantasy about…
Business ideas for musicians and their fans
12 useful ways to get out of ruts
Dealing with the haters
Block distracting sites and get more done
The #1 habit of highly creative people
I hope you find some of those links useful!
I am a big Chuck Palahniuk fan. Well, maybe not so much his last couple books but that’s a topic for another post on another blog. Many of you are familiar with the book or movie version of Fight Club. In the story, the narrator is basically working a dead end job, going through the motions of life until he meets Tyler Durden who is the exact opposite. Durden has no appreciation for ‘following the rules’ and basically does whatever he wants. I thought this was a good example of an alpha and beta male. But what is an alpha or beta affiliate?
An alpha affiliate has these characteristics:
- Develops their own unique strategies and techniques to build and test campaigns
- Asks for a pay increase on an offer and plays the networks against each other for highest payout
- Not afraid to go direct with advertisers
- Not afraid to test anything
- Uses their knowledge of real world testing when taking about affiliate marketing
A beta affiliate would look more like this:
- Uses strategies copied from a book or website to build campaigns
- Takes whatever payout the networks gives him
- Sticks with the CPA network
- Waits to hear what the latest hot trend is in all the forums and blogs before promoting it
- Uses their theoretical knowledge from something they have read when talking about affiliate marketing
The affiliates who are successful, or are going to be successful, are the ones who come up with their own system for doing things. They don’t blindly follow ‘the rules’, they make their own.
Posted in PPC on 18. May, 2010
Once upon a time, not so long ago actually, affiliates were into this thing called ‘PPC’ – That’s pay per click in ‘old affiliate speak’. Affiliates made money, a lot of money and a fun time was had by all. So what happened? Well, a few things really;
- Affiliates started getting interested in other traffic sources like media buys, PPV, etc. and a lot of newer affiliates went directly to these sources.
- Affiliates started getting banned by the PPC engines for violating terms or promoting certain offers and moved on to other traffic sources.
Lately you don’t hear anyone talking about PPC. Affiliates are still cashing in, but this business is so geared towards the latest and hottest traffic source or promotion method that you don’t hear much about the ‘older’ methods.
PPC has changed a lot over the last year. Where once it was a playground for affiliates, now you have to be very careful not only about what you promote, but how you promote it. So what works in 2010?
Google Adwords
People do still run CPA offers, and yes you can even see rebills running. My advice is to stick with something that works and has very little chance of getting you banned. This means promoting physical products. Stick with merchants such as Shareasale, Linkshare, etc. Physical products are a bit different from lead gen or most CPA offers so if that’s what you are used to running, expect to have a slight learning curve. The bidding is different, the keyword selection is different, and the volume is usually a bit lower. In addition, the landing pages that work well for physical products are a bit different from what you are used to making for CPA offers (Hint – think blog).
In terms of what to promote, that will be what stops a lot of people from promoting physical products. There are so many products and merchants to chose from it can be intimidating to know where to start. My advice is to not think about it too much. Pick some merchants that have some higher priced products so you can get a decent commission and just start building campaigns.
Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo still converts very well. The problem is, it is being absorbed by Microsoft adCenter which will serve as the campaign management platform. Physical products can work on Yahoo also, but there just isn’t always enough volume. Lead generation offers work great. As far as quality score goes, you don’t need content on your LP…the main thing is CTR and deleting keywords racking up impressions but not getting clicked. Because of this, you can throw up campaigns pretty quickly. Clickbank products also work well on Yahoo. Clickbank!? Yep, you can have some pretty solid campaigns promoting CB products.
Bing/MSN adCenter
There was a period of time, before Google banned tons of affiliates, and when Bing has just started making a push to be a dominant player that this traffic was the best quality you could get (for my anyway). Alas, more and more affiliates have moved over to Bing, increasing bid prices and competition. Bing has also been a little screwy with quality score/guidelines lately. I think some of this has to do with the growth, and not having all employees on the same page. I’ve been on lengthy phone calls with adCenter which basically result in them not being able to find a reason a LP was disapproved. I expect to see some of these glitches ironed out soon but I do think quality score is going to get stricter. The main thing with your LP on Bing is that you want to be as relevant and transparent as possible. This means having at least the keyword you are bidding on somewhere on the page and a privacy policy. I would go a step beyond that and include terms and conditions, about us, contact, basically go overboard on that stuff.
Now as far as what to promote, that is a bit more difficult. Bing just doesn’t have the traffic yet to make promoting physical products worthwhile. CPA offers can work great but the quality score issues can make these difficult. Landing pages that convert well won’t always get through the editorial process, and those that do don’t always convert well. What has been working great for me lately is direct linking to CPA offers. My ads almost always get through and I have no problems with quality score. I would suggest to keep promoting lead generation offers here, direct linking when possible.
PPC is still a viable traffic source and there is a ton of money to be made there. One thing I love about PPC campaigns is that they can be very stable. I have one campaign that has been running almost untouched (except for swapping out offers) on Yahoo for over 2 years now. If you left PPC for greener pastures, or have never attempted it, there is still money to be made there.
