If you are interested in following along you are welcome to do so. You can grab the book on amazon at the link and picture below:

Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions

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Will The Answer Be P90x

Only difference is that P90x has helped some friends of mine get into some serious shape. Crazy right. Plus it’s doing a huge 2010 media push which will help sell the offer.

It will be interested to see the CPA world get cleaned up a bit. Maybe we can even start using the term long-term and mean something longer than 2 months. If not there is always Cash4Bling

Also on Monday I’ll be presenting at Think Tank Live a Milwaukee Search Engine Marketing & Social Media Summit 2010 . I’ll be speaking on PPC. Stop on by.

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1. What makes a good ad network?

• Getting The Right Keywords
• Landing Pages That Ruthlessly Convert
• Great Account Structure
• Ruling The Content Network
• Knowing and Tracking What Works

Getting The Right Keywords

I’m going to make a hard and fast rule for you right now. Only 10 keywords are to be added to your search campaign a day. That means day one you can have 10. And they better be at least 80% exact match and no broad match. So if you want to add more you need to log in a new day and put them in.

This keep the “Massive Keyword Dump” to a minimum. Google doesn’t like the massive keyword dump so with this rule you can’t do it.

The following days you can add more keywords that are relevant to new adgroups or you can start to add a broad match of exact match keywords that are doing well. I’ll explain more about this in match type madness below. This is going to be a huge key to your adwords management success.

For the content network you can add two add groups of up to 30 keywords a day. It’s ok if they overlap in keywords but you only get two ad groups a day.

Landing Pages The Don’t Convert

The page you send traffic to has one goal. And that is to get the user to do what you want them to do. That can be visiting another page on your site and spending X amount of time on your site, it can be giving you their email address, it can be calling you, it can be buying something or possibly something else. That is the goal and I’d prefer if you would think of it more as your ruthless goal.

So that mean you aren’t going to send them to you homepage probably ever. Besides bidding on your company name which you can send to your home page you will never do this. You will create a specific page for each keyword if necessary and decide for that keyword exactly what you want them to do to achieve your conversion. This is your ruthless goal. Get to it.

Great Account Structure

Ad groups need to never start off with more than 3 highly focused keywords. This rule isn’t some magic trick it just is a great rule of thumb to keep you from doing something bad.

You separate broad, phrase and exact because you have to. Don’t’ fight it just do it.

Cat Food, Dog Food and Parrot food don’t get in the same adgroup

Buy Cat Food, Purchase Cat Food, and Buy Premium Cat Food do go in the same adgroup

Ruling The Content Network

The Content Network is a tricky beast. It’s also the most largest ads network in the planet. And compared to other networks out there it’s super easy to get on. You can be serving ads on it in 30 minutes. Try that with any of the larger networks (to be far MSN and Yahoo aren’t too bad for speed).

So with that in mind we have to figure out this best. First thing to keep in mind is that the content network is “interruption marketing”. It’s a “HEY YOU! I know you are reading about mountain climbing in Europe but take a break and visit my mountain climbing store that sells climbing great. BTW DO THAT NOW!” So keep that in mind. We will talk more about Content Network success more in another post but one last thing before we go.

You need to do placement reports and kill placements or lower your bids. I can almost certainly say that you should start off MySpace with $.05 or less bids. Otherwise you will be paying $.47 a click to have 13 year olds come and look at your site. NOT WORTH IT. So every few days look at the placement reports and just start weeding out the poor performing locations.

Knowing and Tracking What Works

Above I talked about your ruthless goal. You have to track this ruthless goal. Google Adwords and Analytics offers conversion tracking so dig into that help and figure out how to use it.

It’s so clutch to this process. You need to know the RIO on adwords. It’s huge for adwords management success.

Wrapping This All Up.

Adwords is truly a cost effective medium to advertise your business. If done well it can make you a small fortune. If done poorly it will loose you a house. Now for the pitch! If you don’t want to do this yourself. Let’s talk! I do all of the above and more. I’m good at it so you don’t have to be. I understand and love going after the ruthless goal. So if you are ready to grow your business online file out the form below and I’ll be in touch ASAP.

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There is one in particular that has done some huge media buys and is still going strong with some very large ad networks. Seemingly they don’t mind the flogs or maybe they were fooled also. Depending on their floggers interpretation of the FTC ruling I wouldn’t be worried either. If you think the worse you can get is a $13,000 fine or whatever it’s up to now then who would care. They guys are making more than that a day.

To me what is really interesting and what I think a lot of people can learn is that “bridge” pages often can work better than direct linking to an affiliate offer. In this case they promote two products saying that it’s the secret sauce. Good idea. So even if you lose a hypothetical 20% of conversions by not direct linking you can possibly make more (and I’m sure they are) by getting commissions on both. Congrats to them.

End the end it’s about affiliate advertisers, publishers, and networks ethics. Something I’ll try to write about in the coming weeks.

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So far it’s been really good. One of the best parts of the book is each chapter starts off with 50 Cent paraphrasing the chapter. They are all quite amazing. I wanted to provide one of my favorite taken from Robert Greene’s Blog, here.

Chapter 2
Make Everything Your Own – Self-Reliance

When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every maneuver in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose – you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.

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Experiences I have liked:

• Getting a nice intro auto responder that was nice, gave me some tips for using there system and encouraged me to ask questions.
• Even better – Actually answering my email when I did get in touch. Thank you for that.

Experiences I haven’t liked:

• Getting a 20% CTR on a contextual text ad and none of it converts on an offer that historically converted like gangbusters before. IE your traffic is crap or more than likely fake.
• Telling me you will have your “campaign optimizers” look into the campaign. Then they adjust my campaign in which I then get NO MORE IMPRESSIONS. When I get back to you a week later you have no recollection of speaking with me and tell me that I need to just bid on more categories.
• Not having an automated system. Do we really have to really solely on the old media buy system. I really don’t want to call on a rep and have a long drawn out process to run an ad on your network.

This isn’t all there is to a good and bad ad network. It’s just what I’ve been thinking lately. I’ll hopefully be writing more soon.

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Prepare your fake testimonials, flogs, farticles and other coined term landing pages for tomorrow! The FTC’s new guidelines on advertising (specifically more appointed towards bloggers, celebrity endorsements, reviews, testimonials, etc) goes in to effect and you’d be smart to follow the rules with them. You can read more about the new rules here.

So for any of you shaddy affiliates out there my question to you is: Is anything changing for you?

I’ve scene some of the HUGE ad networks still doing allowing some FLOG men’s acia and colon cleanse. They affiliates seem to need mind the risk. Is anything really changing.

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This is just absolutely hilarious. I think it highlights pretty well the situation that is silly ass CPA offers. Even though if we could melt gold and make real live kitties that would be sorta awesome.

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