Category : PPV Affiliate Marketing
After my last post on the idea of using PPV for local affiliate marketing, I got some emails saying how it sounded like a good idea but wouldn’t work. I am not intending this as an ‘I told you so’ post but I did want to share some success I have had using PPV with local affiliate marketing.
The Client
I got into local marketing a short while ago. I started by asking a real estate agent I was working with at the time if she had ever purchased leads. She had several years experience purchasing leads from various sources and was nice enough to share her experiences with me. I got a crash course in how leads are marketed and sold to real estate agents, and how those brokers get the leads in the first place.
Initially I started off generating leads by doing PPC, SEO, and various other traffic generating methods. This was going well so I decided to try generating leads for her via PPV traffic.
The Landing Page
The client had a fairly basic real estate agents website with some listings, info about her, etc. I decided I was just going to use her website and send traffic to both her main page and contact page to see which one performed better.
The Targets
This was the fun part..getting to decide exactly what targets I would use to drive traffic to her site. If I was running a CPA offer for something in the real estate niche the obvious choice would be gathering a list of URL’s like real estate companies, etc. Targeting local affiliate marketing isobviously a little different..This client was only interested in getting leads from people in our local metro area. So, I had to decide how I was going to target sites that mostly people from our area (or wanting to move there) would be visiting. On PPV networks you don’t really have a way to target specific metro areas so the way to make it work is just to target sites people from those metro areas are going to visit. I came up with some possibilities like this:
- Other local real estate agent websites
- Local real estate agencies/offices
- local mortgage brokers/lenders
- local bank foreclosure/repo listings
And several more ideas I’m not quite ready to share yet.
The Results
The traffic was definitely there with these targets, and there was little competition. Most of the time I didn’t pay more than $0.03 per view. One could argue that this would work in a larger metro area but not a small one. The reality is that it’s going to be more difficult to drive traffic to a local business in a smaller town using any traffic source.
The quality of traffic was about on par with using PPV traffic for CPA offers. The conversion (getting someone to fill out the agent’s contact form) were fairly low but I have spent less than $100 to date and the leads are coming in. The end result is that I am making money by selling these leads, and the agent is happy with the quality of leads she is getting.
I have a lawyer client who I am doing a similar campaign for so maybe once I have more data I will post that case study. I don’t think you should only do PPV to drive leads for local clients. A better approach would be to use a combination of PPC, SEO, PPV, etc.
Hopefully this post has given you some good ideas for creative uses of PPV traffic.
One of the things I get asked about a lot is setting frequency caps in PPV campaigns. This is one thing that’s kind of specific to PPV and different from PPC campaigns. Frequency caps mean that you control how often your ad is shown to the same user. Depending on what network you are running on, you can set your frequency caps to anywhere from 1/12 (show your ad to an individual once every 12 hours) to 1/month+
With PPC traffic you have new visitors coming in every day, searching for keywords. With PPV traffic, there are only a certain number of users at any given time who have the adware installed on their computer, and who are visiting your targets, to view your ads. Because of this, you don’t want to keep showing your ad to the same people over and over.
For example…say you are promoting an offer on Media Traffic and have 100 targets. These 100 targets (or websites) have a certain number of people who visit them every day. So there might be a pool of say 5,000 (just for a round #) people visiting your targets every day. Many of these people will be returning visitors to your targets (websites) as well. If you set your frequency caps to 1/24 (once every 24 hours), all the visitors of your targets are going to see your ad several times over the course of a few days. The people who convert are going to convert right away, but if your frequency cap is set that low you will keep showing your ad to the people who have already converted.
This is one big reason that PPV campaigns can start off with a bang and then fizzle out. If you set your frequency caps further apart, you are allowing more time for new potential customers to download the adware and visit your targets. Think of it in terms of groups of people; You might convert a lot of the 5,000 potential targets right away, but once you exhaust that ‘pool’ of customers, you need to let a new group of people download the adware, and start visiting your targets before a new round of conversions can happen.
You want to set your frequency caps far enough apart so that there is enough time for new potential customers to come in. I usually set mine to a minimum of 1/72 to 1/month. The more targets I have, the further apart I set my frequency caps. With more targets, you can keep your traffic levels the same while spreading out your traffic enough so that conversions stay more consistent.
Experiment setting your frequency caps further apart and let me know!
Ok no secrets really but now that I have your attention…
I get a lot of questions about landing pages for PPV/CPV traffic. I hate telling people ‘just test’ but sometimes that’s the best approach. There are various types of pages that can work but the main idea is you want to keep things simple and grab the viewers attention.
Think about how these people are being served ad’s; They are surfing along visiting websites, and up pop’s and advertisement. This isn’t something they were actively seeking out so you need to offer them something that is really going to draw their interest.
Forget about a lot of text, forget about trying to ‘sell’ too much…you want to shock the viewer into clicking on your ad.
A common theme I like to use is a really attention grabbing picture. Say I was going to promote an auto insurance offer; I might find a picture of a crazy looking guy/girl saying something like “He saved $xxx on car insurance..why haven’t you?”.
The most common ‘problem’ I see with most landing pages is people are trying to be too…relevant for lack of a better word. I see a lot of landing pages like:
Want to save on car insurance?
<pic of car>
Click here
Now…would that make you want to click or something more like:
How does HE only pay $xx a month for car insurance!?
<pic of the weirdest looking guy you can find>
FIND OUT HOW
See what I’m getting at here? Stop trying to make these nice polite landing pages and really start having some fun with it.
Update on the Affiliate Summit PPV/CPV mastermind session –
Justin Dupre is going to be joining me and sharing some of his own tips, strategies, and insights. It’s going to be a great event and we still have a few spots left so let me know if your interested.
I will be doing a private PPV/CPV mastermind group at Affiliate Summit West. The date will be Sunday January 17th from 5pm-8pm in a private suite. This will be a closed door session where I will be discussing the latest PPV techniques in detail through examples. I will be offering individual help with your PPV campaigns if you are setting up your first campaign or need help scaling your current campaigns. I will also have a Q&A session where I will answer all of your questions.
The agenda will be as follows:
1. A quick overview of PPV marketing, PPV networks, & offers that work well on PPV
a. PPV marketing in a nutshell
b. What PPV networks to focus on
c. Types of niches & offers to focus on
2. A real life campaign study of one of my current campaigns.
a. Why I chose that offer
b. The landing page I used
c. How I researched and found targets to bid on
d. The steps I went through to optimize the campaign, manage bids, and deal with competitors
3. How to build a list & monetize it correctly
a. Niches that work well to build a list in
b. How to collect opt-ins and structure your auto responder campaign
c. Some more advanced techniques like pre-populating and a few tricks I don’t want to state publicly (I’ll be providing the code to make these things happen too)
4. Niches and Ideas on how to promote them
a. I have so many ideas and not enough time to test them all. I’m going to give you some really interesting strategies to try out.
5. Help with your campaigns
a. Ask or show me anything with your current campaigns. I will show you how to scale them and make more money.
6. Q&A
a. Ask away – this will be a group discussion where everyone shares what works, what doesn’t work, tips, strategies, and ideas.
In addition, I’m giving everyone who attends:
- A copy of the PPV Playbook Guide
- Lifetime access to the PPV Playbook coaching program & forum
The cost for the mastermind group will be $500. If you already own the PPV Playbook and are a member of the forums, the cost will be $450 (your current membership to the forums will be changed to a free membership). As soon as you reserve your spot you will get a copy of the PPV Playbook and access to the forums so you can study up, and get the most out of the mastermind group. There will snacks & drinks provided.
I already have a couple people signed up but I am going to limit the group to about 10 so we can all talk and get the most information from the session.
I’m not promising any overnight riches or super secrets but I think it will be a lot of fun and I know everyone who attends will learn a lot.
If you are interested in attending or have any questions please contact me
p. s. – I’m not so cool that you have to attend the session just to meet me. If you are going to ASW and would like to say hi, send me a message. It would be great to meet some readers of my blog!
Media buying has been a hot topic lately. It seems like everyone wants to get into media buys, even if they don’t know what that really means. I want to explain a little about media buying and show you how you can use PPV to get into some basic media buying.
Media buying is not new. In fact, this is one of the older online marketing methods. Media buying is essentially buying banner ad space on websites. There is nothing magical about media buying…it’s probably not going to make you rich, it’s not the answer to your Google account getting banned, and it’s not the latest and greatest marketing technique. Media buying on a large scale is fairly difficult and requires a lot of cash upfront.
The easiest and best way to do media buying for most affiliates is going to be simply finding sites you want to advertise on and sending them an email. If you get really good at this, you can find sites that currently don’t even have advertising and get some really dirt cheap clicks. So how do you find these sites? This is where PPV comes in!
1. Take one of your current PPV campaigns, and find a URL target that is generating conversions.
2. Email the site owner directly and negotiate to buy some advertising on their site.
3. Rinse and repeat.
Easy right? See, some things don’t need to be that complicated to make work. It just requires some effort and creativity on your part.
I have been getting some questions about local marketing with PPV. Local affiliate marketing is a hot topic right now and a great way to take your income to the next level beyond what you can do through CPA networks. I wanted to give some basic tips about how this could work with PPV. For some great info about this topic check out these posts on local affiliate marketing
Let me start by saying that PPV isn’t ideally suited to local marketing. You can’t geo target as narrowly as you can on Google. Also, a lot of businesses you might approach will actually want to see their ad on Google , and won’t really understand what PPV is.
There are a couple ways to make this work:
Say you were hired to do some marketing/lead generation for a local car dealer who only wanted leads from the city they were in. One possibility for you is to set up geo targeting on your LP so that only visitors from that city were shown the car dealers ads. All other traffic could be diverted to a related offer on a CPA network (like a new car quote). If you wanted to go one step further, you could contact car dealers in other states/cities and see if they wanted to buy your leads.
Another way you could tackle local lead gen with PPV is by bidding only on URL’s/keywords that were location specific. So if you were generating leads for a car dealer in Los Angeles, your URL targets could be all other Los Angeles area car dealers, etc.
So as you can see…PPV isn’t ideally suited to local lead generation but there are a few ways to try and make it work. Give it a shot and you might be pleased with the results.
It seems like a lot of affiliates (even a lot of experienced ones) are still looking for some secret, that one missing piece of the puzzle, that is going to skyrocket their income. I think the IM/Guru community is largely to blame for this. Would be affiliates see promises of easy money with little work and campaigns that produce $10k per day all if they could figure out just a few things about what that person is doing. I have been an affiliate for nearly 8 years now and have seen a lot of affiliates (and Guru’s ) come and go.
I want to talk about some of the fantasies of marketing online, and what the reality (at least as I see it) is.
Fantasy
As an affiliate I need to hit it big with one campaign that will net me thousands of dollars per day.
Reality
Yes, most of the affiliates you see boasting about huge numbers have hit on a niche that really takes off. Suddenly they are an expert because they hit $300k in a month. In reality, many of these affiliates (I have known quite a few) can never reproduce that success on that type of level. Hitting a big campaign in affiliate marketing is not that hard but doing it for years is very hard. I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to go for the big money but of the affiliates I have helped….almost all the very successful ones (successful meaning longevity) don’t put all their eggs into one basket.
Fantasy
If I buy this tool, system, or coaching program it’s sure to make me successful.
Reality
I’m not one of those people who think all ebooks or products are evil. I definitely think some are overpriced and some are garbage but spending $50-100 on a reputable course can give you some ideas you may have never thought of before. The problem is, people buy these products and tools and NEVER do anything with them. They get caught up in the endless cycle of buying the next latest and greatest information. I personally know 2 people who have spent $90k and $200k respectively on IM courses and tools. Between them, they have probably done a total of 2-3 campaigns. Buying courses is fine IF you are willing to put in the time to actually apply what they are teaching you. You aren’t going to learn some ‘secret’ in the next course you buy or the one after that. You will learn that the real secret is when you go through a course and then do some work building campaigns with that information.
Fantasy
If I can perfect this system, I can only work a few hours a day and have my income on auto pilot.
Reality
I think it’s great that bloggers are starting to admit a little more how much hard work affiliate marketing can be. Sure, you can go through periods where everything is running fine, there isn’t a lot of work, and the money seems stable. Unfortunately these periods of time don’t last too long and if you get too complacent, you’ll wake up one morning and your business will be dead.
Most people (not just in IM) don’t want to work hard. If you really want to make a lot of money you are going to have to put in a lot of hours. I know some really successful affiliates who put in 10-15 hours a day regularly. I don’t want to scare anybody off, because you can still make a really good living working less hours. I’m just saying the really high earners you read about are working really hard.
Here’s an example to illustrate my point;
It would be relatively simple to make $100k a year through article marketing. That’s a lot better salary than many people will make in their day jobs. Nobody wants to do this though because it would essentially mean sitting down at the computer and writing all day (ie ‘work’). Everyone is looking for the magical key to quit their job and sometimes a way they could do this would be fairly simple. What most people don’t realize is that affiliate marketing is not all that glamorous. It can be very repetitive, monotonous, and generally not too exciting.
If you can take a step back and look at affiliate marketing more objectively as a business you will have a lot more success (longevity) as the result of your efforts.
Many affiliates who were doing PPC have been moving over to PPV. AdWords bans, rising click prices, and more competition are leading affiliates to seek other traffic sources. Affiliates are finding the ease of setting up PPV campaigns and the volume of traffic available appealing. But PPV isn’t necessarily better than PPC. Each traffic source strengths and weaknesses.
PPC
Pros:
High quality traffic. Customers are actively seeking out your keywords which can lead to very high conversion rates.
Ability to target narrowly. You can target by more specifically by location with PPC than you can PPV.
Stability. This depends on the niches you are running but PPC campaigns can be built to be fairly stable.
Cons
- Quality score issues. It’s no secret that Google seems to have it out for affiliates. This recent round of bannings has shown us they don’t really care what you are running, or how much quality content your site has on it. Yahoo isn’t quite as strict but adCenter has been much stricter recently and that trend will continue.
- Click prices. I never really care what my CPC is as long as I have a positive ROI. It’s getting harder with PPC though, as more advertisers and companies with larger budgets move their advertising online. As a single affiliate it is very difficult to compete with a company with a large budget.
- Limited reach. I know this might sound crazy to you but Google, Yahoo, and Bing do not own all the traffic on the internet.
PPV
Pros
- Cheap traffic and lots of it. With minimum bids starting at $0.01 you can get a lot of traffic for not much money.
- Ability to target certain sites. This is kind of like trademark bidding with PPC except you’ll never get your keywords disapproved for it.
- Ability to do (mostly) whatever you want with landing pages and direct linking. With no quality score issues it’s easy to run whatever you want.
Cons:
- People don’t want to see your ad. Face it; this is a form of pop-up advertising. Have you ever met anyone that says “I love those pop-ups I get on my computer”. This is why you really have to offer them something of value.
- Bidding wars. These can be brutal sometimes. PPV campaigns can require a lot of babysitting. Unlike PPC where you can influence your CPC by getting a higher quality score, higher CTR, etc…with PPV all that matters is who is bidding the most to be in position 1. This is good because we can always be in position 1 but bad because everyone else can too.
- Limited reach. At any given time, there are only so many people who have these adware programs installed. Because of this campaigns can die off quicker than PPC campaigns.
I believe that PPV is generally a little easier than PPC but the point of this post isn’t to say PPV is better than PPC or vice versa, but rather bring to light that no traffic source is perfect. Ultimately, you should be diversified at least a little in your traffic sources so if you get the AdWords ban hammer, your affiliate income doesn’t totally disappear.
Many affiliates start running PPV campaigns after they have already done PPC campaigns for a while. One thing I see people doing is trying to apply the same logic and techniques to PPV campaigns that they would their PPC campaigns. While there are some universal practices that can be similar (picking a good offer, etc) there are a lot of differences. As a result, I see a lot of affiliates making some big mistakes when it comes to their PPV campaigns. In this post I want to talk about some of the mistakes I see people making with their PPV campaigns.
Mistake #1
Trying to calculate how much you will make by running ‘x’ amount of campaigns or converting at ‘x’ %. At one point in your affiliate marketing career you’ve probably said something like “Hmm…If I have these 2 campaigns going and they each make $20 a day…all I need is 50 more campaigns and I’ll be doing great!” Don’t worry, I’ve done (and still have to stop myself from doing) the same thing.
Solution
Trying to calculate things out like this never works out. Take the approach that every campaign producing a positive ROI is a good one, and keep cranking out campaigns. If you have a campaign with a positive ROI, that’s great but make sure you don’t spend all your time on this campaign. Split your time between scaling that campaign and adding new ones. I would not suggest trying to have 1-2 really large campaigns making all your income. You need to spread it out to as many campaigns as you can comfortably run. That way, if an offer gets pulled or a niche starts to not perform as well your income doesn’t get hit as hard.
Mistake #2
One thing you have probably noticed about PPV Campaigns is that they can die off after a certain time. There are a couple reasons for this. First, we have to understand about frequency caps. On most PPV networks you have the ability to specify how often you ad is shown to each unique visitor. For example if you set your cap to 1/24, your ad will only be displayed to a unique visitor once every 24 hours. Meaning if I visit one of your URL targets several times in one day, I will only see your ad once. See the screenshot below from Traffic Vance:
Traffic Vance
Many affiliates make the mistake of setting their cap too frequent. If you are showing it every 24 hours, you will get more traffic right away but your campaign will die off sooner. Why? Simply because every visitor to your target is going to see your ad more often and just start closing it. They are only going to convert once right? So why keep showing them the same ad over and over.
Solution
What you need to do is set your caps closer to 72 hours- 1 week. I know that sounds kinda crazy but your campaigns will be much more stable. You also need to keep adding URL’s at this time to keep up your conversions.
Mistake #3
Too much ‘set and forget’. With PPC campaigns there is always some tweaking involved but in PPV campaigns there is a lot more. Things like bidding wars, frequency caps, etc. all mean that we need to monitor and tweak our campaigns more often.
Solution
There are several things you need to do consistently to keep your PPV campaigns running profitable:
- Keep bidding into position 1 on converting URL targets. This might require you to log in and change your bids several times per day but it is a necessity.
- Keep adding new URL targets & Keywords. Unlike PPC where there are constantly new people searching for a keyword, we have a limited pool of people to draw from. Yes, people are downloading the software that serves these ads all the time but it is not enough to have a massive influx of new visitors each day. For this reason we need to constantly expand our targeting.
- Rotate your landing pages. Eventually your landing pages will stop being as effective once they have been viewed over and over. When you see a decline in conversions with no other explanation, it might be time to start rotating in different landing pages.
If you keep these things in mind, and realize that PPV campaigns need to have their own special strategy and way of maintaining, you will see success a lot faster!
In Part 1 we learned how building an email list with PPV traffic is one of the most powerful techniques for this traffic source. Now that we have some theory to work with I want to go into some more technical details.
Mailing Software
Depending on how large you want to scale your email list, there are two good options for collecting and mailing your list:
Aweber.com
Constantcontact.com
Both can manage your lists and email your subscribers. They are both well documented and easy to set up. You simply place a snippet of code in your landing page where you want your opt-in form to be.
Landing Pages To Collect Opt-Ins
Like your regular landing pages for PPV campaigns, your landing pages to collect opt-ins should be simple. Your page doesn’t need to be fancy, have lot of images, etc. What you DO need is really compelling copy on your page. Remember, people don’t always like giving out their email address….give them a good reason to. Don’t say something like ‘Learn how to get a quick loan”. You need to really spice it up like “Let me show you how to borrow cash in 24 hours or less”. Have some copy on your page explaining what they are getting in exchange for their email. Keep it short but make it compelling. Make sure that your page is small enough so that everything shows when your ad is served.
Mailing Strategy
The great thing about an autoresponder like Aweber or Constant Contact is that you set this up once and it does all the work for you. Once a person subscribes to your email list you want your first email to be a link to download your free report, or whatever you are offering. Your next email should be fairy soon after that, either 6-8 hours or the net day. Start out by saying something like ‘I hope you liked my report on x’ here is something else I thought you might be interested in”. Then, depending on the niche, you can email them every 1-2 days. Make sure not to ‘sell’ them something in every email. Make every other email you send some good, useful content like an article, link to a useful website, etc. You don’t always have to mail offers that are directly related to the niche. Test some unrelated offers after the first few related offers you send, and see how it converts.
Advanced Strategies
I decided this deserved it’s own post so I will write in detail about this later. One of the cool things you can do when collecting email is to collect their email then use that pre-populate and immediately send them to an offer. So, someone that see’s your ad might enter their email (which would go to your autoresponder) and immediately be sent to an offer with the fields the submitted on your opt-in form already filled out (name, email, etc) on the offer form. All they have to do is hit a button and that lead is a commission for you. This is going to require a longer post so stay tuned…
