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.

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…

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!

So what is an aspiring PPV’er to do? Start with the smaller up and coming networks. Now these networks don’t convert quite as well and they don’t always have as much traffic as the big boys but I can still turn a nice ROI. These networks would be a great place to get your feet wet and test out some techniques before investing in larger account deposits.

A couple networks that would be great to start out on are:

Direct CPV

Addon Network

They have low deposit minimums, and enough traffic that you can start to see some positive returns. Once you feel more comfortable running PPV campaigns, I would definitley invest in some of the larger networks where there is more traffic.

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.

The test:

I ran 4 offers on each of these networks. Actually it was 2 separate offers but one campaign used a landing page, and one direct linked. I promoted pretty basic lead generation offers. I kept all the URL/keyword targets the same, and tried to be in the same as position on each network. For the sake of simplicity I am calling these ‘PPV networks’ even though that’s not the technically correct term for some of them. Basically, they are all serving ads in the form of a pop-up or pop-under window.

Scoring:

For scoring, I used traffic volume, conversion rate,  and click/impression pricing broken down like this:

• Traffic Volume (Most traffic= 10, least traffic = 1)
• Conversion Rate (Highest Conversions= 10, least conversions = 1)
• Click Pricing ( lowest click/impressions cost = 10)

So basically a perfect score would be 30.

Here are the results:

Results

The overall winner was Traffic Vance which won’t come as a surprise to most of you. Megaclick has a lot of traffic but it was very expensive.

Conversion Rate:

Both Traffic Vance and Media Traffic had a high conversion rate. The one thing missing from Media Traffic is more volume.

Recommended:

• Traffic Vance
• Media Traffic
• Lead Impact
• Addon Network
• Direct CPV

Might be worth a small test:

• CPV Marketplace
• Megaclick

Stay away:

• Adbrite
• Clicksor

I want to stress that different PPV/CPV networks can perform better/worse for different offers. Your results could vary based on the offers you promote.

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