Diorex

Read a great blog post from someone named PunditX that I found following one of my backlinks.

It was about how he made $95k in 2 months marketing a product all of us are aware of but few probably
knew it had an affiliate program - Adsense.

His post spells out just what he did and it seems perfectly reasonable to me. I can think of a dozen or more ways to market the product beyond what he did.

The ’secret’ to his success is that he did not assume “oh that must be saturated” or “that will not work”. he went out and made it work.

He even states he tested 35 different landing pages - which is probably a huge driver in his success. Not being lazy is a critical component to affiliate marketing success.

Too many in affiliate marketing assume that they have to follow the crowd or that their AM knows whats best - the entire time I was focused on affiliate marketing I never had an AM I spoke with regularly. There are some awesome deals on CJ noone has ever heard of and most of the CPA networks are in business for themselves first.

I know a guy who markets $.05 clicks to small niches that then turn into Ebay sales. I know another guy killing it in the Wal-mart affiliate program marketing just a few select products via PPC. There are a million things that are not dating or ringtones or <flavor of the month> that are both sustainable and scalable and that do not require super technical skills.

The best advice I can give anyone wanting to get into this space is to get outside the zone of the affiliate blogging ‘experts’ and start thinking for yourself. If you never read another blog post about affiliate marketing, you will probably be better off than if you read the top 50 affiliate bloggers religiously. The honest truth is that most affiliate blogs are full of junk and one hit wonders.

As I was reading through the SEC posting about the Google Yahoo search deal, (Nicely summarized at TechCrunch) I ran across one tidbit I find very interesting and something Google may not have thought all the way through.

This line in particular: “Yahoo! also has sole discretion to decide on which pages to display ads provided by Google”

Any advertiser with a grain of metrics turns off the Yahoo content network due to the huge volume of non-converting clicks.

Google is also known to allow partners to serve search ads in some really strange places as search not content.

So if Yahoo wanted to hurt Google - My quick read saw nothing that says Google has a buyout right - I would just serve search network ads to the Yahoo content network.

Advertisers would start seeing their Google returns diminish greatly, Google makes it almost impossible to opt-out of specific advertising partners, and most advertisers do not even know that the search network is an option that can be turned off. If in mass, advertisers lowered bids by even 5%, that would take a huge chunk out of Google’s revenue and stock price, almost certainly triggering some articles about how Yahoo seems to be a better ROI for advertisers etc.

Probably will not happen, but what if…

Cannot tell you how often I get a PM or email or AIM message from someone who says they just cannot figure out how to scale or make any money, that all the campaigns seem so saturated, <insert excuse here>.

First thing I always ask is what kinds of things they are they testing - not the offer, but rather A/B type tests? Invariably the answer is a variation of “I plan to start once I find something with a really good conversion rate.”

I am here to say that Conversion rate is not born, it is grown - very slowly over time, with hard work.

Lets take an example of how someone can make a difference by testing.

• Start with a 3% CR which is considered about the industry average…
• Assume $.60 CPC which seems absurdly low to me, but lots of you guys are paying a lot less…
• Assume a payout of $20 per sale - seems fairly generic, lots of products pay more, lots less…
• If these numbers seem totally wrong to you, just set something up at breakeven for what you are seeing and build a spreadsheet…

After 100 clicks, you would expect to have 3 sales with $60 in revenue and $60 in cost - a total waste of time, right? Just move on to the next thing is what almost all people would do.

But the affiliate who likes to test might try a new headline, maybe some new ad copy, different hero shot or calls to action or any of 100 other things…

Say that this affiliate was able to increase conversion through testing by just 5% each month. Just to show how possible this is, we are often looking for 10-15% increases and seem to find at least one if not several every month! So 5% seems like you are not really trying hard to me…

So the 2nd month, you would earn $3 more than you spend for each 100 clicks - a 3% ROI. Not going to quit the day job, but positive progress. At the end of the year, just finding one 5% increase each month the ROI on this “breakeven” campaign works out to be 42% which is almost certainly worth keeping.

This assumes that you do not manage to increase your CTR or quality score or otherwise lower your CPC which is very doable through testing.

Now say, we have a very clever affiliate who manages to find 10% conversion rate increases each month rather than 5%. At the end of the year, this guy has a 185% ROI from the campaign most of you would have walked away from.

Now if you are getting that kind of ROI, you have probably passed up the affiliate network and gone direct, which will be a free 10% lift, plus increased their payout above where they started, potentially significantly, which allows you to pay more, thus increasing your position, your test bandwidth and frequently your conversion rate in a beautiful cycle.

When you are starting out it is not ridiculous to think you might get 20% or more lifts from some tests, and trust me when I say that front loading the conversion increases significantly improves the end results.

All of the above being said, I am not trying to say that any campaign can be a winner. Nor am I saying that you should stick with a loser. I am merely saying that most people fail because they do not test their way into being a winner ad discard lots of things that would have worked with a proper test plan.

In the comments of my Affiliate Playbook post, I posted a link to SEO Blackhat’s list of 140 popular niches, by the looks of my outbound traffic, you guys were very intrigued by this.

Wanted to re-link to it for those who might not have seen it and follow-up with some comments about things to avoid or look for in a new niche.

Avoid -

Stuff to look for:

I am going to leave you with this thought, I have shared many times before. If you are picking a niche because you hear “so and so” is making a killing in it without regard for any of the above factors then you are setting yourself up for failure. You should be entering a niche because you have some sort of advantage or knowledge rather than because you are following the pack.

I am sure there are lots more things others can add to these lists based upon personal experience - feel free to share em.

Paul at uberaffiliate posted his earnings today. Good start!

I hate checks like this…and Shoemoney’s and MArkus at PLentyoffish.

I personally know no less than 20 people/groups doing what Paul showed or more every month (some weekly some even daily!) from solely affiliate/lead gen type stuff. Cashing the check takes 10 minutes (these checks dont go into the ATM… the tellers gets to see them…you may even let people cut in line at the bank so you get to make your deposit at the hot teller…) earning them takes considerably more time…

The difference between good (most of the readers of these blogs) and great (where Paul is) and blow your freaking mind (where a few people I know are) is dedication to testing.

He probably lost $5k or more just to fine tune these accounts. He does not just throw a million keywords against the wall, he actually thinks things through and has a strategy.

People who achieve this are not doing so by the seat of their pants. They invested in infrastructure and programmers and design people and relationship building and most of all focus - I dont know a single successful super affiliate that is making 50-100k+ at IBM and doing this on the side - I cant say that I even know any that started as a part-timer.

Some got laid off, some dropped out of college, some stumbled into it while working on something else (me). None are idiots, none are not amongst the brightest people you have ever met, every single one of them works their butt off.

Some are one man shops, some are teams, some are Inc 500 companies destined to go public. The scale is different with each, but the bottom line with all of them is that they are not just dipping their toe in and seeing if they can make it work.

This is not Amway or Excel or some other Pyramid scheme marketing scam that we “hope” to get rich at. These people work damn hard. Paul is probably the most professional 19 year old I have met since I was 19 and he was 2!

Bottom line…checks like these are bad for the business, it draws a ton of new people in with the promise of riches which they believe to be real, it jacks up bids, it clogs blogs/forums with useless newbies posting how they figured out a way to earn $43.85 each day on zip submits or some such - To make Wicked Fire Jon happy, this kind of stuff probably makes ebook marketers a mint as those shysters sell the ’secret’ to the sheep.

Statements like these are also invaluable for those who are close to breaking through, they show people to persevere and encourage people to take chances (google should send him a commission check, they will make 10x the revenue he posted off his post) and some of those will work out and eventually post their own checks, repeating the entire cycle. I suspect a small part of Paul’s success was saying if that guy in Nebraska can make that much then imagine what I can do…

Stop freaking sitting around… dont look up in 5 years and realize if you had just done something back in the glory days, you could have made yourself $20 million.

I spent the weekend with 2 old friends… One who made a ton of money in the 1.0 and the other who is still talking about how he could have made money if only… One lives in the present and does really cool stuff, the other the past and is bitter as hell… Don’t be that Guy!

To follow-up on a recent post about domain and error page exclusion ability, we think we have a possible workaround that will enable us to bid on content, domain ads and error ads separately.

We have enough evidence to suggest that the conversion rate on these items are vastly different, and also are susceptible to fraud on different levels as well. As part of our philosophy we always want to bid on the lowest common denominator whenever possible. Match types are in different campaigns, almost all keywords are in their own adgroup etc.

We just put this live so I cannot guarantee that it works, and in fact am sure that Google’s screwy content system is likely to mess it up in some way, but in theory this will work.

We start with adwords editor and copy and paste the enitre content account into a spreadsheet. We then alter the URLs (that is our tracking mechanism) and upload the account twice into campaigns called error ads and domain ads. At this point we have 3 identical campaigns with same bids, ad copy etc.

We then turn off domain and error ads in the original campaign so that it is now content only. In the domain group we turn off error ads so that it is content and Domain ads. Similarly we turn off domain ads in the error ads group leaving it with just Error ads and content.

At this stage we need to eliminate the possibility of content ads showing in the 2 new adgroups. The way we accomplish this is by running a performance placement report and then negative matching every domain that shows up in both the error and domain groups.

This leaves us with 3 campaigns, one that is content only, another that is Domain ads only and a 3rd that is Error ads only. I can now adjust bids and monitor performance for each type of ad and bid according to the return I am seeing from these different tranches of content.

LIke I said it just went live and is not fully battle tested, but on paper it should work.

So early this week, we noticed on a few of our most profitable terms that our impression volume went through the roof. Like 10x the average daily volume and 8x the highest daily volume in the last 6 months.

On these keywords our clicks went up by approximately 50% of previous levels and our sales volume did not move one iota. Meaning that on 1/3 of our clicks we were getting zero conversion!

So we call up our friendly Yahoo account rep. Who is in an ‘important meeting’ but breaks away to say “fluctuations can and will occur” then says she will look into it. 6 hours later (after we have essentially turned off our account because cost per sale is higher than our total revenue) she dashes off a quick one line email to the tune of “I am having our click quality team (just try and get any of your account reps to say the word fraud, honestly try) look into the matter and they will have an answer within 5-10 days, but our click detection algorithms are the best in the business (another good one, that is like being the best looking girl at the over 300 pound Weight Watcher session).”

Whoa…I was not even terribly concerned with the fraud, I will take the refund, but I just wanted to alert them to the problem of someone figuring out a way of their best in class system.

The next morning we call Yahoo again and get sent directly to voice mail, we then go to her manager who will “call you back as soon as possible”. Finally come late afternoon we call the standard 888-Yahoo-SM phone number and finally speak to someone on our 3rd call who apologizes profusely and goes and gets the manager to call back. The 2nd person we spoke with actually said “that is not my problem” the 1st person said she would get it fixed in 15 minutes and call us back, an hour later the extension she gave us is a dialtone and noone has even heard of her. (Seems like the penalty for trying to help someone out at Yahoo is pretty severe).

So I finally get the manager on the phone. He of course apologizes and says this is not how customer service is supposed to work and that this will be used as a training example, blah blah. Yet he actually says that 5-10 days our rep quoted us is probably the low end of the scale and that with the holiday coming up next week that we probably will not hear anything until afterwards.

He then goes so far as to say, it is funny none of the other ”major” accounts in your vertical have noticed anything. I am tempted to explain why, but decide it does not matter and is not worth the efffort.

The bottom line is that he is totally unable to help us. He is apologetic, but really does not seem to care.

So we are left to our own devices. We ended up putting their Yahoo analytics on a single high volume keyword to track referrers. We accidentally forgot to properly install the conversion pixel, because that is none of their business. Less than an hour later, we had a single referrer that had more than double the volume from Yahoo itself, without so much as a click through on that page.

That does not seem like something that should have actually been rocket science for Yahoo to figure out. 10x impressions was the first start, how hard is it to isolate impression volume by IP and flag suspicious volume, especially when an advertiser brings your attention to it.

So based upon our experience with Yahoo who did not think there was a problem, we decided not to alert them to the non-problem url, we figure in a few days the ‘major players’ who don’t monitor their account nearly as closely as we do will see the decrease in conversion and raise bloody hell. Our result was almost immediate, conversion rate recovered and impressions fell back to normal levels. Problem solved, except for the problem.

Paul at Uber Affiliate shared a tip with me about GeoTargeting at Ad:tech and then blogged about it today.

We had tested this in the past and our results were that our CTR went down significantly and our CR also declined slightly. One thought for the change, is that we are selling national products that people probably do not think of as state specific. I was more profitable even with the non-targeted out of zone clicks (which was less than 5% of total click volume) so since my primary goal is total profit, I preferred to do without the Geo-Targeting.

A second thing is that Google’s geo-targeting is screwy. For a long time our search results at the office thought we were in a city and state more than 1000 miles from our actual location. I have spoken with other industry Pro’s who also have similar problems. Also dont forget about the school district that sued Google because it showed ads for another country. I don’t exactly get a warm fuzzy when an advertisers tells me I can get a great deal 4 states away - their credibility (courtesy of Google) is shot from the start.

I think Paul’s idea of testing this is very valid and will probably work for some verticals. The problem is that lots of people will just read and implement without testing. Anything you read on my blog or any other should be taken with a grain of salt and only implemented if it makes sense for your business, as well as actually performs better than what you have now. The only way you will figure it out is by testing.

Just read about how Google is allowing advertisers to exclude different types of traffic such as Error Page or Domain Ads, as well as social networking, tragedy, gross-out and other pages.

I applaud that they are finally allowing advertisers more control over where there ads might show. I am frustrated that the additions are all or nothing.

If Google really wanted to let me have control they would let me run all of this stuff independently with bids and tracking for each. Say I just wanted to bid on error page ads, why not let me. As it is set-up now, I cannot put different bids on error page ads than I have on search ads.

When they let me do this in Content, my spending for that segment went from $0 to several million a year.

I suspect that domain ads convert really well (ok I know they do, but not all of them - negative site match domainsponsor.com and enjoy the increase in conversion) and might even be willing to pay more for them than I do for search…

What about the search network? I want to buy AOL traffic - I am lukewarm about Ask - I want to avoid Iwon and Lycos like the Plague. My search network bids end up being an amalgam of conversion. Say 80% of the traffic and 90% of the conversion comes from Google. I end up bidding less in Google in order to offset the lower conversion elsewhere. So I end up paying Google less for the clicks where they get 100% of the revenue.

Bottom line - the more segmentation and options you give sophisticated buyers, the more they will spend with you. I will spend it in different ways and in different places within the network based upon my conversions, but in the long run it will help Google earn more from me. (A scary thought…)

While I am just starting to get into the domain game with some personal investments, I am a sizable buyer of this traffic through various search engines and other products. Earlier this week Frank Schilling wrote about traffic quality. For those of you who do not know Frank, he is very insightful and his blog is well worth your time and effort.

In this post he talks about how the potential for good traffic sources to have their CPCs adjusted lower because they are lumped in with lots of poor quality traffic.

I am in the process of buying lots of names and parking them while I wait to either develop or sell them. I do not have much traffic, but most of the niches are of high enough quality as to be able to pay the annual domain bill with just one or two clicks.

I have now tried 3 different services and am finding the value of similar clicks varies wildly. I am not a large enough traffic volume to get in to any of the “elite” programs so I am just left with what will take me.

As a sizable buyer of this traffic, I noticed one of the better known and I assume well respected players in parking start to show up in my Google content reports no longer as Parked Pages, but actually start to show up as their own name. Not sure why this happened, but it did happen about 3 weeks back.

Assuming that most parked traffic is valuable, I asked one of my analysts to take a close look at conversion rate with my eye on trying to site target or otherwise increase my volume from this player. What we learned shocked me. The CR from this one traffic partner which was 5% of that accounts traffic, was 0.6% at a CPC almost 30% higher than my average.

The traffic quality was horrible and it was expensive as well. I would have found this in our end of month report, but I was so excited at finding the potential ability to exploit an opportunity that I expedited the process. Turns out this one partner was creating a drag of about $1200 a day in profit from this poor traffic quality. I quickly checked out the data on my other content accounts and learned that this was not an isolated event. I was losing money on this parking company on every single account I have, even some of my personal stuff.

Now finding poor converting partners and turning them off is not that unusual. What is unusual is that this particular parking company not only took the initiative to make sure that Google reports broke out their traffic, but they did not seem to care that they were mostly representing junk traffic. My conversion rate was so radically different (and the traffic volume pretty high) that this was very likely click fraud on some level.

If you are a legitimate domain owner and just happened to have one of your domains sending me traffic, you have just lost out on about 3 of the top 7 names in that industry, to be replaced with much lower paying arbitrage type traffic. Their was obviously some legitimate traffic that if isolated would probably be profitable to us, but when surrounded by all of the bad company we cannot afford to buy your traffic any longer.

I am sure some domain parking companies are very vigilant about traffic quality and very protective of their reputations, those should allow Google to isolate them so sophisticated traffic buyers can find and bid directly at your high quality traffic. While others seem to sell my Google ad results to any 2 bit punk with a dial-up connection that thinks they can have friends click on them and make some money.

This is a 2 way street and I now find myself to be standing in the middle of it. I am willing to pay a very high and fair wage to traffic sellers of good quality, while I am unwilling to even think about bidding on poor quality traffic. At the same time, I have found a few domains that get enough traffic to be worth parking them, the traffic is typed in generics so likely decent quality since that person has just stated that they are looking for that service by typing it in. Yet I wonder if I am hanging out in a bad neighborhood without even knowing it.

In the future I expect to see far more visibility from all major sellers of traffic which will allow buyers to pick and choose based upon quality.

As an advertiser, are you buying quality traffic and not buying bad traffic? Do you take the time to find out?

As a domainer, are you making sure to surround yourself with only other quality sites? The kicker here is how can you even tell?