Make Money Online

Major retailers are re-evaluating their marketing strategies, with more and more opting to invest in Internet search ads, as this medium becomes mainstream. Indeed, Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, predicts a ‘double-digit’ increase in search ad spending this quarter, most notably from retail advertisers during the peak holiday online shopping season.

As this marketing medium becomes more popular, marketers are also becoming savvier. As a Wall Street Journal article reports, some of the new strategies include buying top ads tied to phrases consumers tend to search for when they are in the final stages of making a purchase decision. Being aware of how consumers search when they are ready to purchase, is critical to making your ROI as lucrative as possible.

With Halloween fast approaching, a good example of this might be using long-tail keywords like “buy a Spiderman Halloween costume” versus a more general search term like, “Halloween costume”. A consumer would be far more likely to use a long-tail keyword like the Spiderman example above when they are further down the sales channel, and are ready to buy.

When you do incorporate long-tail keywords in your search ads, make sure the landing page where you are sending the consumer truly matches their interest. Using the same Spiderman costume example, it would be wise to send the consumer to targeted page on your website. In this case, unless the landing page had a selection of Spiderman Halloween costumes, chances are that your ROI on this search ad would be less than attractive.

If you haven’t tried your hand in search ads, the holiday season is probably the best time of the year to give it a shot. Whether you choose to go with Google, or with Bing which increased its share of searches and search-ad dollars in Q3 (Source: PaidContent.org), Share Results is now offering its SEM services (contact Jamie [at] shareresults [dot] com), with a team of search engine experts, to get you going with what is now recognized as a very popular, and very savvy way of marketing.

See more here:
Search Ads Up, Marketers Savvier

When managing a pay per click campaign, monitoring click through rates is a good way to assess the effectiveness of your ads. Another important measure is conversion rate as it can be used to assess the effectiveness of your landing pages. Optimizing your landing pages is the best way to increase your conversion rates and lower your cost per acquisition. Here are a few tips to improve landing pages:

1. Relate the headline to your ad copy
   Something in the ad inspired the user to click on it. The landing page should convey to the user at first glance that they are in the right place.
2. Keep it simple
   Don’t try to impress anyone with fancy graphics all over the place. Keep the page as simple as possible so the user is not distracted from the call to action. Outline the value proposition in a few bullet points rather than in paragraph form.
3. Use buttons with a strong call to action
   Don’t use words like “Submit” on the action button. Instead make the button a call to action with a phrase like “Try It Now”.
4. TEST
   Don’t expect to launch the perfect landing page on the first try. Layout a few different versions with slightly different layouts, headlines, or calls to action. Test these landing pages using the same keywords and ad copy to see which one converts the best.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

A lot of you probably know Unique Blog Designs, they’ve designed the themes for me, John Chow, Shoemoney, Zac Johnson, and the likes.

They’ve been working for months and have finally launched their Affiliate Theme. There’s honestly not even that much I have to say, go to the site and check it out yourself. Aside from the awesome looking design of their sales page/site/whatever, the theme itself looks awesome.

I actually was in on producing this theme in the beginning, I told them what to include and gave ideas on what should be done. So this wasn’t developed purely by designers, she’s got some affiliate blood in her too.

The best thing about it is the customization and ease of customization. You’re paying $100-200 and getting unlimited landing pages for it. With a click of your mouse you can change the background, the layout of the page, the images, the buttons, the affiliate links, everything. It’s all so simple to use. Check out the test drive page and see for yourself what they can do with a basic Wordpress theme, pretty wild.

I’m not going to sit here and try to sell you on at least picking this up to have when you want to try a new niche or build a page of your own. Just go to the site and see it for yourself. I’d say it’s hands down worth it if you can front the $197 for the highest package, you get unlimited use, header graphics designed by them (huge perk), and a bigger affiliate commission.

Peace and love.

Continued here:
Affiliate Blog Theme

A recent survey from MarketingSherpa shows that adding certain things to an ad increases user responsiveness. One of the things that the survey covered was video, and it showed that featuring a video in an ad can increase responsiveness by 49.5%. This, I think, underscores the potential there is for video to increase conversions on affiliate landing/product pages.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that affiliate marketers have to become part-time video producers. Consider that 10 hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Chances are there’s some kind of content on the video sharing site that can be used to promote product. After all, seeing another every day person interact with a product is something that can really influence a user’s mindset. Not only does this give the user a chance to see the product in action, but it bolsters a site’s credibility because it provides a richer user-experience.

Simply search YouTube for a video that’s appropriate for you landing pages, and embed them below the product or in the sidebar (hint: you can fit a YouTube video into a side bar by editing the width and height parameters in the embed code). Even if you can’t find a video of that specific product, embedding video that is related can put the consumer in a purchasing mood. For example, if you can’t find a video about ringtones, specifically, then see what there is in the way of music videos for whatever ringtones are most popular at that moment.

In fact, many affiliates already use YouTube as a resource for landing page content. Take Mark from 45n5: he uses mashup scripts that pull relevant content from YouTube and displays it on his product pages. All he does is input a couple of keywords into the script, and it finds and embeds relevantly tagged video content.

Alternatively, you can also just get a handy cam and shoot a quick video of yourself using the product. That way, you not only get complete control over the video’s content, but you never have to worry about that video getting deleted. As John Kerr, Director – Southeast Asia for Edelman, once pointed out, “the shaky cam is now seem as the most trusted form of media.”

Overall, videos are great way to increase conversions. They (1) let the consumers see the products (or lifestyles) in action, and (2) create a richer user-experience on your product pages, which increases the perceived credibility of your site. So whether you get some professional grade videos made, use other people’s uploaded content, or simply make your own pro-amateur clips, sourcing video content for your landing pages is so easy that you shouldn’t overlook it as a way to increas conversions.

Continued here:
Using Video to Increase Conversions

Ask me questions by posting a comment, then I’ll answer them.

Let’s do it.

See the original post here:
Questions – Fire Away

When it comes to converting a click into a lead or sale, the importance of the quality of your landing pages can’t be overestimated. Your landings should tell the people who arrive there you and your offers can be trusted and the quality of the offer is guaranteed, ideally in a single glance.

Read more:
Tip for Beginners #24 : Tips for creating landing pages

Now that you’ve focused on finding the right keywords, setting up your Adwords campaigns, and choosing your bids, it’s time to divert your attention toward landing pages. Internet marketers have proven that a change in landing pages, to accommodate your specific keyword groupings, can have a positive impact on results.

We all know landing pages are important and A/B testing is a common phrase among search marketers, but are we as an industry taking landing pages to the next level? Search engine marketing traffic is highly engaged and quite honestly, different from other online media. So, why do we direct this traffic to the same generic landing pages?

There is a new movement that centers Web design around search intent. Strong keyword groupings that in the past didn’t have a good “home” will now get a custom built landing page with tailored content. For instance, for a travel client, we created new landing pages with content specific to the psychographic intent of the search phrase or phrases.

Landing pages like this take time and effort to brainstorm and build, but the rewards are worth it if thought out. These custom landing pages are also lead generation forms. They created a great experience with tailored content for the consumer and also increased conversions by 25% when compared to the previous destination pages.

In another instance, we built out landing pages for certain geographic based terms that were important to our client, as it was a service offering that had not been hitting our online metrics. When a new landing page was created around the context of the keyword groupings, the cost per lead dropped significantly (think hundreds of percentage points).

The moral of the story is that search marketers should think more strategically in their landing page decisions. It is more than A/B testing these days. Work with your client and creative teams to enhance the full search experience from start to finish.

by Lindsay Blankenship of AvenueA-Razorfish.com

Read the original post:
Search Marketing Soars: Focus on Landing Pages

One good thing that every affiliate marketer does is test. We test landing pages, keywords, ad copy, offers, everything that can possibly make us more money. I always talk about how dropping a lot of money testing is the real way to hit it big in a niche. But just because I suggest to start with a decent budget, doesn’t mean you have to utilize it poorly. Here are a few different tips when starting to test a campaign to help manage your cash flow and cut losses down.

Start WIth Yahoo/MSN, Move To Google

You’re most likely going to get cheaper clicks with Yahoo than you will with Google. So use Yahoo as your building block to find the profitable keywords. Add a ton of keywords into Yahoo and make sure you’re tracking everything. Let it run for a few days and then pause the campaign. Find all the keywords that are profiting (or breaking even), and put them in a new, more targeted campaign in Yahoo. From there, work on optimizing the landing page, ad copy, and offer for the highest possible profit.

Now simply just take this campaign and import it into Google. You’ll get a ton more volume but eliminate the high deficits that come with it.

Budget Yourself Accordingly

Just because you have a $5,000 budget doesn’t mean you have to spend $5,000/day and blow through it all in a day or two. Set $250 daily budgets and tweak a little each day, and really draw out the time-frame in which you have to test.

Get That Higher Payout NOW

Don’t wait until you’re doing 100 leads/day on the offer to ask for a payout increase. You can ALWAYS get a bump before you even start running the offer, usually a pretty good bump. I just recently got a $4.50 bump on an offer before I even send a dimes worth of traffic. That really helps cut my losses down when I’m initially testing out the offer. So don’t wait for it, tell your affiliate manager you need a higher payout to start testing or you have to look elsewhere.

Track, Track, Track

The best possible way you can make the best out of your testing money is by tracking everything. If you get a ton of data out of your tests, it is well worth the investment you make. You don’t have to pay thousands for the “latest ppc software” out there either, there’s plenty of free affiliate tracking tools out there like P202.

This is basically a no-brainer. Test out keywords and weed out the ones that aren’t profiting. Test different landing pages and send the most possible clicks to the offer. Test similar offers and see which ones have the highest conversion rate. Just don’t stop testing.

Use PPC Coupons

There’s always a YSM coupon floating around there somewhere, sometimes they can be great (highest I’ve gotten was $200 in free clicks). These things are great for testing because you don’t really care what happens with the money as you didn’t actually buy the clicks in the first place and everything is profit. People tend to be a lot more conservative when it’s their own money, and naturally so. Having a $200 free budget one day can make you just go all-out, and then you’ll realize how valuable doing that was; as long as you tracked properly.

Alright just a couple random tips that came to mind, hope you enjoyed.

Credit:
Making The Best Of Your Testing Money

It’s Friday, the last day to apply to Uber Camp. After Friday, all applications will be put on a waiting list and not looked at until the next round of applications (not sure when that will be, at least a month).

Originally I was just going to collect all the applications and approve them next week, but I wanted to get things rolling so I started accepting them already. If you applied Monday-Wednesday and haven’t heard back with an invite code, I’m sorry and you didn’t get in this round. Keep working at it, get some experience under your belt, and reapply later down the road when you’re ready. Trust me it was so hard turning down applications. The first two days I got around 150 applications, and sent out invites to less than ~80-90 people. That’s a lot of money I could have made, and most of the ones I denied were poor newbies who would have paid too.

There were a ton of great people to apply though, guys with 8 years experience in programming and SEO and a couple years of AM. In the past couple days we’ve been up, the forum already has 277 quality posts. I’ve given out more information than I ever have on this blog, and other people are doing the same. The group I’ve chosen that have come in are all awesome, and there’s a crapload of knowledge floating around already. I can’t wait to see how it pans out down the road.

First case study is underway as well. I’ve picked out the offers, and devised my game plan for everything. Right now I’m getting a domain and starting to build the first landing page.

Anyways, just wanted to post a reminder to everybody who thought about applying, do it now before time runs out. Click here to apply.

Originally posted here:
UberCamp – Last Day To Apply!

One thing you may not be doing with your campaigns is demographic targeting. Demographic targeting allows you to target whichever audience you want to push your product too.

A few months ago Adwords released demographic targeting for content campaigns. You can also target by demographics in MSN adCenter, and with traffic sources like Facebook.

Why target by demographic?

The answer here is pretty simple…because your traffic can be much more targeted and convert much higher. You’ll see a volume decrease as you won’t be targeting everybody, but being able to hand pick who sees your ad can put you at a big advantage. You’ll be able to push your bid prices up and get on top of the competition while still profiting.

Demographic targeting examples…

In it’s simplest form, the best example is that most offers you’ll want to limit to everybody over the age of 18. Most offers (aside from ringtones, etc.) require some sort of credit card, or require the person to be 18 years old. Right here we’re chopping away clicks from little kids that are useless.

Now let’s think of another easy product like wrinkle-cream, I’ve seen offers for this. An 18 year old girl probably isn’t going to be that interested in getting rid of wrinkles, but maybe she’d do some research on it for her mom or something. I’d target everybody 30 and up for a campaign like this.

How about ringtones? Older people aren’t as likely to go through with the purchase, so you may want to set your campaigns and target everybody 25 and under.

One thing you can do is talk to your affiliate networks and try to gather data on the offer you’re running. See if the advertiser has any sort of demographic reports that you can look over and apply to your campaigns.

Just something to think about, hopefully it can give you a little better ROI.

Credit:
Demographic Targeting

So it’s time to announce my big project that I’ve been working on for a long time now. I welcome you to UberCamp.

What is UberCamp? In essence it’s a paid private affiliate marketing forum, but the additions and extra value will make it appear as much more then just that. You can just visit the site and read the about page, but I’ll give a quick overview of the main features here.

1) The first point I want to make here is that this is an INVITE ONLY forum. This place is for serious affiliate marketers, and the only way you’ll get in is either through your friend that’s a serious marketer, or through an application process.

Applications will only be taken in June 2-6, that’s this Monday through Friday. After that, your application will be put on a waiting list and won’t be accepted until the next round. My goal here is to build a very smart and tight community, and the way NOT to do that is by accepting everyone and anyone.

2) You’ll have access to me. I’ll be there to answer your questions ’round the clock, my goal is to give you the best service possible. I already have accepted some of my close affiliate marketing friends such as Wes Mahler and Jonathan Volk and we have some discussions/tips going.

3) Uber Case Studies will be conducted all the time. I’ll share all my keywords, landing pages, promotion types, and research used on a campaign. You’ll be able to make suggestions and ask why I did certain things. You can even copy the campaign if you want; or just copy the techniques.

4) Offer Watch. One of my goals is to provide tools and services that I would use, since I’m a full-time affiliate marketer. One of these tools is Offer Watch. Almost all of the major affiliate networks are sending me data files with EPCs, Conversion Rates, sample URLs, etc. I’m combining them all into one tool, where you can search the top offers across networks by any criteria you want. To read more about it and to see a screen shot, go here.

5) The option for a private 1-on-1 mentorship. You get your own forum that only you and I can read. You can grill me all month long and I’ll personally help you build your current campaigns up and scale them out. You tell me as much as you want, and I take that info and help you improve what you have.

6) Other services and tools to make this forum worth WAY more than the fee you pay to be a member. I have some other good ideas that would really help you guys out and make your lives easier in regards to affiliate marketing.

Go check out the site and let me know what you think. You can all register for a public account and ask questions in the Pre-Sale forum, but you’ll see that to be a paying member you need an invite code. If you have any questions just holler and I’m really excited to get this thing rolling!

Source:
UberCamp – Apply Now!

Alright so after people bugging nonstop to see the house, here’s a video. Still messing around with getting the Flip to show the best quality on Youtube, so it’s gettin’ there.

Source:
UberCribs : My House

Alright yeah yeah it’s a little play on words, but 202 is the place to be in you’re an affiliate marketer. If you remember a while ago I posted about the launch of Tracking202.

Tracking202 is 100% FREE affiliate marketing tracking software. If you read my post there’s a ton of useful features for us affiliate marketers…keyword tracking, EPC monitoring, graphs, gizmos, and tons more. The one thing that was bad about it was that T202 hosted everything themselves, meaning that if they were really shady (which they’re not, but I myself go with the trust nobody philosophy), they have access to your data. I told Wes that he should make it self hosted and sell it for like $500+/copy.

Well Wes has taken my advice…almost. He made Tracking202 self-hosted, but the fool made it free! He calls it Prosper 202. It has everything Tracking202 has, but you host it privately on your own servers…and it’s free…crazy! Prosper202 also comes with a self-hosted Export202, which will convert your Adwords campaigns into Yahoo campaigns and vice versa, instantly. The dude is insane, I have no idea why he’s making it all free.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t stop here either. Wes has recently created WorldProxy202, which isn’t a revolutionary tool but it is a time-saving one that I use myself. Say I want to run a UK offer and I want to test out the affiliate link. If I just go and enter it in the address bar, it’ll say “Offer not available in your area” and redirect me. To be able to see the offer, you need to go through a UK proxy. Usually I’d just use proxy.org and search through to try and find a working UK proxy, but now I have WP202. I just go there, plug in the link, and bing bang boom.

So pretty much, you’re a fool if you’re not taking advantage of all these FREE products. No this isn’t a paid review either, Wes is an awesome guy and he works hard as hell.

See the rest here:
202 Ways To Make More Money

Time for this months newsletter. I interviewed popular blogger and super affiliate Jonathan Volk. For those curious here are the questions I asked him :

• For my readers here who aren’t familiar with your blog, who are you and what makes you so special?
• You’re another young affiliate like myself making ends meet here, why do you think we became so successful?
• Let’s skip over the newbies, if you could give a short message to advanced affiliates who want to grow even more, what would you say?
• How many offers are you currently promoting that are making over $5,000/month?
• How does Jonathan Volk go about picking an offer?
• How much time do you spend on your biggest campaigns every day? Hours of tweaking and testing, or do they run pretty smoothing with less than an hour of work per day?
• Why do you blog?

If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter, you can do so at the top of this page. I was a nice guy last month and posted the interview with Fraser for everyone to see, but this month I’m going to be a meanie and not post it.

View post:
The MMN – Issue #2

So power goes a long way in affiliate marketing, and in any industry for that matter. But for the sake of this blog, we’re going to stick with affiliate marketing. Why does power go such a long way?

a) Connections. If you’re powerful, you’ll have good connections that can hook you up when you need something. Get you a whitelabel direct with a major advertiser, set you up with a programming genius, etc.

b) Connections with affiliate networks. Having power means having networks want you, bad. Exclusive offers, exclusive payouts, whitelabels, tracking, you name it.

c) Control. Build a following in an industry, tell it how it is, and band together to beat the man.

How do we attain such power?

• Start a blog. One way to start a solid following is through a blog…true story. Affiliate networks know I’m powerful because of this blog and my loyal readers. I’ll be honest about anything that happens to me, and if something is very sour I’ll be sure to let you guys know so the same doesn’t happen to you.
• Create a very useful product or service. It may be something like a subscription based affiliate tool or consulting business. Either will give you more power in this industry, because you’re controlling part of an affiliate user base. You’re creating a crowd that will listen to what you have to say and take your advice…that’s a powerful thing.
• Become a super affiliate. This one’s pretty simple and not as easy as it sounds. There’s PLENTY of millionaire affiliates out there who have no blog or product, and they’re powerful as hell. Do major volume with networks and you’ll have major power.
• Cut margins. Cutting margins means bidding more, seeing higher revenue but a lower profit margin. This will cut away at your profits, but may quadruple your revenue with the affiliate network. You’ll become more powerful and receive more benefits. Is it worth it? Well it depends on the situation, it’s a risk. Sometimes you’ll be better just sitting with the nice ROI, but sometimes it’s better to get the power, and then use those benefits to make even more profit.
• Attend events. Going to events like Affiliate Summit means meeting people, networking, and establishing connections. You can stumble upon some connections in high places and gain more power as a result. You don’t even have to be a super affiliate, you can make yourself seem like one without saying a word about it; just by how you act and talk to other people.
• Talk your way to the top. One way people get power is just by literally talking their way to the top. They can be some horrible affiliate that tells people they make $200k/month on their own private built offers that they’re “secretive” about, and people will think they’re powerful. This is a pretty retarded way to do business and I wouldn’t advice it, but trust me there’s a lot of bullshitters out there.

Alright enough of this jazz, go out there and be the king baby.

Go here to read the rest:
How To Become Powerful In This Industry