Paid traffic is great and it’s the majority of what I do. I like the fact that you can test things quickly and control the amount of traffic you get somewhat. But what about ‘free’ traffic? Does it have any place in the serious affiliate marketer’s business plan?
First, I want to talk about the term ‘free traffic’. No traffic is free, you are either going to pay for it with money, or time. For the purposes of this post, I am referring to ‘free’ traffic as traffic which you are not paying money for (PPV, PPC, etc). So what is free traffic anyway? You can get traffic without paying for it from a number of sources;
- SEO
- Twitter
- Facebook (not FB ads obviously)
- Youtube
- Article Marketing
- etc
Likewise you can get paid traffic from a number of sources:
- PPC (Adwords, etc)
- PPV
- Facebook
- Plenty Of Fish
- Media Buys
- etc
What are the pros and cons of free traffic?
This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a few ideas.
Pros
- It’s free. You don’t have to worry about ad spend, budget, etc.
- You feel better about leaving campaigns alone for a few days
- Traffic can continue to come for a long time after you stop working
Cons
- It can take a while to get a significant amount of traffic
- It’s often not as easy to scale
- If you are testing a new offer/niche you could spend a lot of time before discovering it was a dud
What are the pros and cons of paid traffic?
Pros
- You can get a lot of traffic very quickly
- You can test offers quickly to see if they will convert before spending too much time on them
- You can often be more targeted by bidding on terms/sites that you could not organically rank for
Cons
- You have to spend money to make money
- It’s easy to get limited by cash flow
- You often have to wait for payouts to run more traffic
Which is better?
Neither really. People have, and will continue to make a lot of money using both methods. There is really no good reason not to use both sources and get the best of both worlds though. I like testing offers with paid traffic because I can get data very quickly about the potential of an offer/niche. If a niche is converting well, then I will start doing some SEO, video marketing, etc to it. There really is no reason not to at that point. This way, I have traffic coming in whether I pay for it or not.
You also have to consider what your resources are. Paid traffic, in my opinion, is not the best for beginners to start with. It is also not a good idea if you have no extra cash to spend, are down to your last $100, or have a huge amount of debt you are trying to pay off. Some might not agree with that but I really think you need to have a solid foundation of marketing knowledge, and a decent amount of money for testing before you invest heavily in the paid traffic route.
I am still amazed at the number of people who are really struggling financially but won’t give free traffic a shot. With the right plan in place, you could fairly easily make $100k a year just through article marketing but most people just don’t want to sit and write articles all day. That’s fine, but sometimes you have to put in some grunt work so you can really succeed with paid traffic.
I wanted to talk about something that seems fairly simple but can have a really dramatic effect on your ROI. What if you could double your ROI with very little additional work when setting up your campaign? Sound too good to be true? Read on…
What I am talking about is adding variations of your targets. Most affiliates will add a URL target to their campaign like this:
walmart.com
A very generic example, but you get the idea. Now, that strategy is fine…you can make tons of money but if you are not bidding on all variations of your targets, you are leaving money on the table.
What do I mean by variations? This is going to vary depending on what PPV network you are running the campaign on so I will speak generally. One simple variation is adding a period to the beginning of your target like so:
.walmart.com
What you will find is that these targets often have as much traffic at 1/2 the bid price. In addition, this variation can often convert BETTER. I have seen conversion rates jump from less than 1% to over 30% just by adding a period to the target.
So what other variations can you do? Start by taking out the .com;
walmart
wal mart
Notice I am adding spaces also? You can add spaces to create tons of variations:
walmart .com
walmart com
OR remove periods, or spaces;
walmartcom
Not all of these variations are going to get traffic on all networks. It doesn’t hurt to add as many as you can though, you can delete the ones that aren’t getting traffic.
Play around with variations. It is a really simple yet effective technique to give your PPV campaigns a boost.
We all know how shady affiliates can be…cloaking, spamming, flogs, etc. But what about CPA networks? Yeah we know about the shaving/scrubbing.. blah, blah…how else do affiliates and advertisers get screwed by CPA networks?
Networks are middlemen between the advertiser and affiliate. As a result, their goal is to get as much volume as possible. Often, this is at the expense of the advertiser, the affiliate, or both. I didn’t know a lot about this until I met people working on both sides and saw the big picture. Now I see how they can afford the big parties.
CPA networks have ‘compliance’ departments. The stated goal of these departments is to keep affiliates in line with the networks rules, the FTC’s guidelines, and the advertisers rules or requests (no trademark bidding, etc). If you think about it, though, they really don’t have much incentive to monitor compliance all that closely.
Here’s an example:
An advertiser has a problem with the way an affiliate is promoting their offer. They have bits and pieces to demonstrate that the affiliate wasn’t in full compliance, but the network claims it’s not enough to reverse the leads. All the same, they remove the affiliate from the offer because they know the advertiser isn’t going to stand for it any longer.
Cut to a week or so later when the advertiser gets contacted directly by the very same affiliate. The affiliate is wondering why all his leads got charged back. The advertiser is confused and doesn’t remember this happening. It turns out the CPA network had charged back the leads but did not credit the advertiser back. The network says it’s all BS, and that they had already paid the affiliate. Who’s telling the truth here?
Now let’s talk about host and post. This cautionary tale is more for advertisers who put offers on CPA networks, but affiliates might be surprised to know how this works in some cases. A host and post offer means the affiliate or the network hosts the offer and collects the data that gets submitted (leads, etc.). The networks generally present this to advertisers as a way to do multi-variate split testing on the fly to maximize conversions.
This can be great, but what is the downside? Essentially, when the CPA network gets this data they can do whatever they want with it (unless explicitly stated otherwise by the advertiser in their agreement). So what do networks do with this data? They use it to promote offers of course! Some CPA networks run huge internal operations using this data. If you own a car insurance offer and allow the CPA network you use to host and post it, they can even use that data to fill out your competitor’s offers. Yep…your competitors can be getting the exact same leads as you. I’m sure you can guess what this does to the value of the leads the advertiser has just paid for…and the payouts they can afford to give affiliates…
And what about fraudulent affiliates? I know it’s not cool for affiliates to “out” other affiliates, but have you ever stopped to think about what shady affiliates are doing to your payouts? I don’t mean the weekend floggers or guys who fill out a test lead whenever they’re at a free wifi hotspot – I’m talking about the massive 3rd-world networks that make purchases with stolen credit cards or auto-generate thousands of leads with fake data. These guys are a major thorn in the side of advertisers, and the networks aren’t always doing everything in their power to stop it.
Take, for example, a case I recently heard about. An offer was getting slammed with phony leads and they had documented evidence. They passed it on to one network, and the network kicked the affiliate off the offer. Sounds good, right? On the contrary – an ethical network would have banned the affiliate and made the information available to the networks that run their offers under affiliate accounts there…this particular network did no such thing. The affiliate was still totally free to run offers on the network – even the very same offer, once they found another network’s affiliate ID to run it through. Nice to know the networks are doing their part to preserve value to the advertisers and keep the payouts high…
Keep in mind – these are limited cases. Not every network is guilty of these sins, but they definitely do happen.
The grass is always greener, or so it would seem. This is especially true in affiliate marketing where people are always looking for the next best thing. Where do so called ‘guru’s fit into the picture though? Are they the ones raking in all the money while affiliates are slaving away at campaigns? A common analogy I often hear is something to the effect that there is more money in selling supplies to the gold miners than there is mining for gold yourself. I actually think this is a useless analogy in affiliate marketing.
So who is really cashing in? Affiliates or guru’s?
Let’s look at some advantages and disadvantages of each.
Guru’s have the advantage of:
- Not babysitting campaigns all day long
Yep, when you have your own product there is less worrying about when a campaign or traffic source will dry up.
- Having a large pool of people who want to learn
There is and will always be a large number of people wanting to learn how to make money online.
- Not having to deal with annoying affiliate managers, networks that don’t pay, cash flow, offers getting pulled, campaign slaps, etc, etc.
Basically, a lot of the stuff CPA affiliates deal with all the time.
Sounds great right?
Here are some disadvantages:
- Getting bombarded with people who have a very unrealistic expectation
Ironically, this situation is actually in large part created by the guru’s who promote how ‘easy’ it is to make money through affiliate marketing. Now, a lot of guru’s do not answer personal email (which I think is a big mistake) but the ones that do, have to deal with a lot of people who really don’t have realistic expectations. Often it is much harder to get students to change their views on making money online than it is to actually teach them marketing.
- Having to hear about some unfortunate circumstances
Getting lot’s of email about children who are sick, relatives who are homeless, jobs that have been lost, savings that is down to their last $200 and wanting to know if you can help them make a small profit. Often these aren’t dumb people by any means, nor are they trying to get a free handout. They really want to work, they just aren’t in a good situation to do so. If you are down to your last $200, paid traffic is NOT something you should be looking into IMHO. If your kids are sick, you need to get the first paying job you can find and work on affiliate marketing when you have money coming in. Now as I said, most of these emails are ignored by guru’s but I try to answer every one I get (usually my response is steering them away from internet marketing).
IM products have a pretty large refund %. There is not much you can do about it, it’s just the nature of the business.
- Having products that flop
A lot of guru’s are not as successful as they portray. I know, shocking right? Most of us know that but there are actually several well known people who you would be surprised to hear don’t make all that much money. You can fail just as easy, if not easier as a guru than an affiliate.
So what are some advantage of being an affiliate?
- Getting to interact as little as you want
As an affiliate, you can keep to yourself quite easily which is great for some people.
- Having a variety of ways to make money
As an affiliate you can do SO many things…PPC, PPV, SEO, offline, blogs, etc, etc, etc. The smart affiliates diversify their income between traffic sources.
- Having a large pool of traffic
You have a lot of way’s to reach your audience as an affiliate. As a guru, you have those traffic sources available but more often than not, they are unsuitable for your product. Remember the IM niche is pretty small in comparison to what we can market as an affiliate.
Ok so who really banks harder? To be honest, based on what I have seen the advantage goes to the affiliate marketer. In both circles, there is a small number of people who are really ‘at the top’. The reason that affiliates win, is because of how they can diversify. Guru’s (for our discussion purposes) promote one thing – making money online. When I say affiliates most people think of people promoting CPA offers, but there is so much more being an affiliate can mean.
Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on the subject.
I hate zip/email submits…there I said it. I know some people who have done really well with them but I hardly ever run them, there are just better campaigns to focus on. I do have one exception to this rule though and that is when you can pre-pop an email submit.
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!
Hmm..ok now I have to think of one!
Ad Tech is over and I am exhausted! I live pretty close to San Francisco so it was a short drive down. The exhibit hall was a lot bigger than Affiliate Summit and there were some pretty interesting companies to talk to. One thing that really stood out is how many booth’s gave no clear indication of what they actually did. Some I even stopped to read about and still wasn’t clear. These were more companies looking to help people with branding, etc but their marketing was pretty bad. If I had a booth (wasn’t that a Dr Seuss Book?) I would make it VERY clear what I did, and how it could benefit you in a way that people could understand in about 5 seconds.I did run into Matthew Lesko on the floor and got a cool pic.
I met with a couple newer CPV type traffic sources that I am curious to check out and test. I also got some great ideas for new niches/verticals to run offers in.
The Affbuzz lunch meetup was great! There was a huge turnout and everyone had fun eating cake. I got to meet the elusive Mr Green finally! I also got to meet some people I talk to online all the time but had never met in person. I saw a number of people there I wanted to say hi to but had to leave for a meeting so I apologize if I missed anyone!
Later that day was the Facebook/PPV session I did with Jonathan Volk. We had a great turnout and some well known affiliates came. I thought the session went really well and I picked up some great tips myself. Jonathan brought his wife Maria who seemed to really enjoy the session. Jonathan and Maria are two of the nicest people you could meet in the industry and we had a really great time hanging out with him. Jonathan also brought Jacob who works for his company and knows a lot about Facebook marketing.
Wes Mahler also came to the mastermind and it was great to finally meet him!
It was a great show but I am glad it’s over and I can get back to work now!
You can find out where I will be here http://twitter.com/ppvaffiliate
Come say hi!
I apologize for not posting more! Between nearly 800 forum members, my own campaigns/projects, and getting ready for ad:tech I haven’t had much time for anything else. I will get back to regular posting after ad:tech for sure.
I just wanted to do a kind of random post on things I have been thinking about & working on.
Stuff Worth Mentioning
Even though I have never met or exchanged so much as an email with him, I have been a reader of Chad from CDF network’s since his blog started. He recently released a local lead generation guide which has a lot of people talking. Check it out here local lead plan
I have dabbled in local lead gen a bit and I do think there is some good opportunity there if you have the personality for it. The part I hated about it was actually dealing with the clients. I am going to pick up a copy of Chad’s guide though because I’m sure I could improve on that.
My friend Mr. Green runs the best affiliate marketing blog (In New Zeland anyway) and is always full of useful posts. Check out his posts for some great insight.
Corey and I get questions about tracking when doing pre-pop submits. Corey wrote a great post about it here Simple subID tracking for PrePop email submits
Corey and I also just finished our 8 week webinar series PPV 123. It went really well and we had a lot of happy students. We have another course coming out soon that is something all internet marketers can relate to so stay tuned!
Jonathan Volk & I will be doing a Facebook & PPV Mastermind session at ad:tech Tue April 20th. I’m really excited about that and for hearing Jonathan’s insights into Facebook.
Really Random
In an effort to break out of the work from home rut where you stay in all day I have been trying to get a little more adventerous.Recently my adventures have got me into:
- My first hangliding lesson (awesome!)
- A Trapeze lesson (terrifying!)
- Indoor Skydiving (fun!)
- and a contortion class at the San Francisco Circus school (painful!)
What I am finding is the busier I make myself the more productive I am. The days where I have all day free to work are usually when I get the least done. The days where I am really busy and have to sit down and focus to get things done I end up getting a lot more accomplished.
Ok, back to work on my presentation for ad:tech!
I will be doing another mastermind session at ad:tech San Francisco 2010. I am really excited because Jonathan Volk will be joining me to do a session on Facebook ads! The session is set up so that 1/2 is dedicated to PPV and 1/2 to Facebook advertising. We will have a lengthy Q&A session plus time at the end to visit/hang out with Jonathan, myself, and others at the session.
The mastermind I did at Affiliate Summit West in Vegas went well, and I have even more goodies to share this time. I can’t wait to hear Jonathan’s insights on Facebook marketing too!
The session will be held on Tuesday April 20th at 6pm. If you are interested you can read more detail and sign up here
If you have any questions about the session please contact me
For PPV Traffic you have the big players like Traffic Vance, Lead Impact, etc. but one network a lot of PPV marketers overlook is Adon Network.
Adon network get’s some of it’s traffic from an older application called the My Geek shopping toolbar. Adon has a lot less traffic that other PPV networks but what little traffic it does have converts very well. It’s going to be tough to get enough volume to scale a campaign to any great degree so you want to take the approach of having LOTS of campaigns.
You have several different options to show your ads;
- Banner ad
- Full page ad
- Pop-Under
- Search Listing
The most popular are the pop-unders which actually convert very well.
Some of the options you have when setting up your campaign include;
- Setting your ads to show at certain times of the day
- Setting a frequency cap from 5 minutes up to one month
- Target keywords/url’s or target by users browsing behavior
Adon is often overlooked because they don’t have a lot of traffic but it’s a great place to start with PPV or build tons of small, profitable campaigns.
