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.

Pre populating an offer is when you send someone to a form (in this case an email submit) with their email address already filled out on the forum. All they have to do is hit submit! There are a few reasons I like pre-pop so much:

• The offers usually convert much higher (they’re already filled out, duh!)
• You can keep the email address yourself and pre-pop so you get the best of both worlds

Below is a case study of promoting an email submit.

Step 1 – Offer Selection

Ok so obviously we need to pick an offer that can be pre-populated. Most of the time, your CPA network will have a way to search which offers can be pre-populated. The way the offer is pre-populated is by adding something at the end of your affiliate link. For this campaign I chose the BrandGiveawayCentre – Free $500 Grocery Gift Card offer from Neverblue.

I know this can be pre-populated and find out how to do it by looking at the campaign details:

This offer is pre-poppable! Please add &em=test@aol.com to the end of the link.
For example: http://adserve.brandgivewaycentre.com/DefaultPage.aspx?c=5811&em=test@aol.com

If you load that URL you will see that whatever you add at the end – &em=enteremailhere gets pre-populated.

Step 2 – The Landing Page

For this strategy we need a landing page. Just like the offer page, ours should be simple and have a clear form to enter their email on. I’m not going to get into all the technical specifics of setting this up because 1) It would be beyond the scope of this blog post and 2) There would be a lot of question and I spend a lot of time answering questions in the forum already lol

If you have some PHP skills you can do this yourself, or hire a programmer to do this for you for a minimal cost. What you need to do is build a landing page with an opt-in form on it that collects the email into your autoresponder (like Aweber) and then sends them to the affiliate offer with their email pre-populated. This way you get to collect their email which you can market to over and over, and possibly get a commission also.

Step 3 – Collect Targets

For targets I chose keywords and URL’s. Some of the areas I focused on were:

• Recipe sites
• Parenting/baby sites
• Food stamps/aid sites

I started with about 300 sites but only kept the ones that I needed a very minimal bid on.

Results

Without any optimizing:

$250 adspend

$165 in conversions

about 315 email addresses collected

So on the surface this campaign doesn’t look profitable. That’s ok though because I look at any conversions I got as just offsetting the cost of collecting email addresses. For this campaign I collected email addresses for about $0.27. 315 email addresses is a REALLY small list but I can market to them over and over, and with much higher paying offers. With only a few commissions from marketing to my list, I could be in positive territory on this campaign.

So instead of just promoting email submits for a $1.25 commission, get a little creative with pre-populating and see what you can do!

The offer I ran was a popular IQ quiz offer. Those are hot right? People are killing it right?

I started off direct linking and came up with a few angles to target:

• Quiz sites
• Cheap targets with a young demographic
• Music sites

For each idea I scraped together a hundred or so targets (URL’s and keywords).

I ran this offer on Lead Impact, Media Traffic, Traffic Vance, and Adon. After about $200 spent total and 1 conversion I knew I had to change something.

Next, I decided to build a simple landing page. I picked a couple more angles to target and removed the targets that I had spent a conversion or two on. I let this run for about $100 more in traffic with zero conversions and finally pulled the plug.

So what did I do wrong? IMHO nothing really…I believe it was the offer. Why? Because even on campaigns where I have the worst targets, or a really bad LP, if the offer has some potential I will at least get a few conversions.

I know a lot of people say to push IQ quizzes on PPV traffic but I have seen a lot of people in the PPV Playbook forum as well as other affiliates I know try and bomb with those offers. If you can get it to work more power to you but I’ll stick with the types of offers I know work well.

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.

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!

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.

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!

Most of the talk about PPV traffic focuses around sending the traffic to a CPA offer through a landing page or direct linking. I do this, it’s great, and you can make a lot of money this way…but that is not the best use for this type of traffic. The real power of PPV traffic is using it to build an email list. Let’s think about this for a second…you can get visitors for as low as $0.01 per click and either 1) send them to an affiliate offer hoping they convert and losing the chance to market to them again or 2) collect their email list and market to them over and over. Which sounds better to you? I’m not saying you shouldn’t do straight traffic to a landing page/direct link…that can work really good..but if you really want to make a lot of money, building an email list is the way to go. You can literally get thousands and thousands of subscribers in a few days with minimal cost.

In a future post in this series I am going to get into the technical aspect of  setting this all up. In this post I wanted to give you a few things to think about to help you build your lists.

What niches does this work well for?

This can work well in almost any niche. The key is that you need to separate your lists for different demographics. Don’t just have one email form you use for all your campaigns. Set up different email lists for each niche or offer you run and you can better target what other offers you send to that list. One of the most popular niches to collect an email list in is the ‘work from home’ niche. If you do any kind of spying on your competition you will see this all over the place. One of the reasons this works so well is that people who buy internet marketing products usually don’t just buy one thing. That’s a great opportunity to sell them lots of products. Some other niches this can work well for are:

• Any type of loan/hardship niche
• Dating
• Health
• Products that are specific to a certain demographic

Basically any niche you can think of where people are likely to buy multiple products or always have the need for some type of services (ie people who always need cash, loans, etc). I would stay away from Zip/Email submits for PPV traffic all together. Yes, they can convert ok but the low payouts and scrubbing makes them a real pain. The real money is in higher payout offers and building your list.

How do I get people to sign up for my list?

This is an important question to think about. Just because you have an opt-in form on your landing page doesn’t mean you are going to collect an email address from every person who visits it. The trick is to offer them something for ‘free’ in exchange for their email. This could be a simple report your wrote, etc. This is how I would do it:

If I was promoting a work at home product I might offer them something like “Learn the 10 bets and worst ways to make money from home. Download my free report”. You could do better than that obviously, but that should give you some ideas. Once you give them your report, your auto responder would follow that up with related offers. More on that later in this series.

For now, start making a list of some niches you think could work well for collecting an opt-in email list, and what you could offer those people in exchange for their email. In the next post in this series I am going to get into the more technical aspects of setting this up.

First, if you don’t know what PPV traffic is let me give you a brief explination:

One of the PPV networks I use  is Traffic Vance. Traffic Vance gets its traffic from users who have downloaded and played games on Gamevance.com. Once users have installed the Gamevance software, they are served ads from the Traffic Vance system when they visit a URL or search a keyword you are bidding on. So, if you are promoting a dating offer you might bid on a URL like singlesnet.com. When a surfer who has the Gamevance software installed visits singlesnet.com, your ad will be popped up.

There is a common misconception that this type of traffic comes is spyware. This is simply not true. The people who have this software installed on their PC have agreed to install the software which enables them to play games, get screensavers, etc. in exchange for viewing ads. The correct term for this software is called adware. Another misconception is that these ads won’t show due to pop up blockers. Through the technology used, these ads will show regardless of whether the user has a pop up blocker installed or not.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way I am going to break down a profitable PPV campaign I ran.

Step 1 – Offer Selection

I wanted to select an offer that had a short lead form. You can promote different types of offers with PPV traffic but to get per sale offers to work you have to use a couple tricks of the trade (which I’ll cover in later posts). I like lead offers because they don’t require the surfer to do much (like pull out a credit card). Remember, we are interrupting their normal surfing and they aren’t actively seeking our offer. Because of this, we have to hit them with something that is easy to complete.

With that in mind, I went to Neverblue and selected their “Quote Wizard – Auto Insurance” offer. I know this offers accepts PPV traffic because under ‘promotion allowed’ they list ‘DLS’ which is their name for this kind of traffic.

Step 2 – Landing Page or Direct Link?

After visiting the offer page I decided I was going to direct link. I liked this offer because because it required only minimal information from the surfer. With PPV networks there are no duplicate destination URL rules, quality score issues, etc. so direct linking is not a problem. I do like to use landing pages for more advanced techniques, to collect emails, etc. but for this campaign, I thought direct linking would work best. I will do a future post specifically about landing pages for PPV traffic.

Step 3 – Collecting URL’s

This is where the fun begins. With PPV networks you can (most of the time) bid on site URL’s or keywords. Then when someone visits that URL, or searches a keyword your ad is shown. Most of the time I like to start by targeting URL’s because they usually convert better. I add keywords only when I have a profitable campaign I want to scale. I’m not saying that the right or wrong way to do it, that’s just my personal style.

So where do we find sites (URL’s) to target? Basically anywhere we can find a website or ad is fair game. Let’s start by gong to Google, Yahoo, and Bing and typing in our search terms then collecting URL’s to bid on. Your probably asking yourself what keywords we are going to search for by now right? Most everything you read about PPV will tell you to search terms directly related to your offer. If we followed that advice we would search Google for “car insurance” and come up with a list of URL’s like this:

progressive.com
geico.com
etc

Now that seems all well and good but I am here to tell you that it NOT the best way to do it. See…that’s what everyone else is doing. If you were to bid on geico.com you would end up paying a high CPV (cost per view) and when you think about it…geico isn’t really all that targeted. Why? Well think about this…someone clicking on the Geico website is looking to get a Geico can insurance quote right? Do you think they are going to appreciate getting a Quote Wizard pop up? They are either going to close your window or get frustrated at which lead form to fill out (yours or Geico’s) and close both windows.

We need a better strategy than this, so I thought for a minute….What types of people need car insurance? After thinking about it, I came up with a cool idea…people shopping for new cars. People buying new (or used) cars always need new insurance or to make changes to their existing policy right?

With this idea in mind I went to Google and typed in the phrase “Ford cars” and came up with a list like this:

fordvehicles.com
ford.com
ford.reply.com
harrold-ford.net
etc

You want to take URL’s from the natural search engine results as well as the AdWords results. You can repeat this search on Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine. Our goal is to find a bunch of different URL’s. I’m going to do a future blog post about all the other places to find URL’s but for the sake of this case study I just used the search engines. You’ll notice I didn’t include any ‘http://www.’ in my collected URL’s. This is because on PPV engines they usually just want the domain and .com, .net, etc.

I started out with 50 URL targets. Why that number? Basically I knew that would be enough to get some traffic and see if this campaign had some potential. Once I get a campaign near break even or profitable I will add as many URL’s as I can find in batches of 50-100, weeding out the ones that don’t convert.

Step 4 – Time To Launch

Now that I have a direct linking strategy in mind, and have collected some URL targets..it’s time to make my campaign live. I launched this on Traffic Vance and Media Traffic but you could run this anywhere. Setting up a PPV campaign is very simple; you simply add your destination URL, keyword or URL targets, and launch. I always make sure I am in position 1 with my bids. This isn’t like PPC where you can still get good traffic being in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th position. On PPV networks the highest bid will get the vast majority of the traffic. This is good news and bad news. It enables us to see other bids and be in first position just by bidding higher, but of course that leads to bidding wars. It’s not uncommon to log in and raise your bids multiple times per day when you have a PPV campaign running where there is lots of competition. In this campaign I was bidding anywhere from $0.01-0.08 to be in position 1.

I’m going to get into tracking in a later post but you basically have a couple options when it comes to tracking PPV traffic. Use Prosper (you will need a dedicated server just because of the sheer amount of volume PPV traffic can bring), or simply use your affiliate link with a sub id appended to it to. I will get into this more in depth in another post.

Results

I let this campaign run 1 week and along the way added some URL’s (I searched for more car dealers, car review sites, etc). I also kept raising my bid on keywords to be in position 1 as often as possible.

At the end of the week I had spent roughly $140 in traffic which resulted in 37 leads @ $12.75 per lead for a total of $471.75 leaving me with a profit of  roughly $331.

I was pretty happy with that this campaign but I can think of a few ways it could be improved:

• Using dynamic keyword insertion and a landing page so I could say “Attention Ford.com (or whatever URL I was targeting) Customers, Get a free insurance quote today”
• Expanding my URL target list by searching for more car dealer sites, used and new car review sites, car magazine sites, etc.

I hope this gives you a good idea of how to put together a profitable PPV campaign. I really only scratched the surface in this post to give you an idea what is possible. In future posts I want to cover topics like landing pages, tracking, other places to find URL targets, and how to automate a lot of this.

Let me know what you think!

The answer is really simple – simply install the software the PPV traffic source uses to serve their ads. For example:

Traffic Vance serves ads to people who have installed their Game Vance software

Media Traffic gets their traffic from people who have installed their Vomba Screensavers

So what you would do is install one of the above software and then start visiting URL’s you are targeting or URL’s that you see a lot of competition on. You will get served the ads that are targeting those URL’s. Easy right? I would do this one at a time (install one software, then completely uninstall it before installing the other) so you know where the ad came from.

One note – I would recommend doing this on a computer that’s not your main computer. You can remove these programs, but sometimes it can be tricky so it’s best not to do it on your main work PC.

This is a great technique to see what your competition is up to. It also helps to understand what software people are installing to get served these ads. For example, if we can figure out the demographic of people who install Game Vance, we have a lot better chance at picking successful offers to run.