So you want to start making over $1,000.00 per day?

Not a day goes by that I don't get asked how to scale a campaign to $1,000.00/day and beyond. In fact, not only do I get asked but I read the question being asked elsewhere on a daily basis. Put simply, the people want to know! That's why I'm putting this post together to give you fine people a compilation of information on how to do just that. It's not as easy as 1-2-3, but it's not completely out of your grasp either.

Funding

First and foremost, you need to know that funding an expansion on your campaign isn't cheap. Not only do you need enough money to pay for the advertising, but you need to be able to eat your losses and not go into debt. If you're rocking $1,000.00 in your bank account, that's not going to cut it. You need to either use a credit card with a decent limit or start with at least $5,000.00. Personally, I started with $5,000.00 and then moved over to a credit card once I was profitable for about a reasonable period of time. This is key to ensuring you can pay your balance off on a monthly/bimonthly/weekly basis.

Research

I'll give you as much information as I can in one post, but in the end, no single person knows all there is to know about scaling. That's why you have to bust your ass researching as much as you can. You've got to read, read, read. Read forums, read super affiliate blogs, read e-books and anything else you can get your hands on. People aren't going to spoon feed you the information; it's highly coveted. Make yourself an expert and you'll be much less likely to squander your investment bankroll.

Campaign

If you aren't running a profitable campaign as we speak, there's probably some good information in here for you, but in general, if you scale at this point, you're just going to scale your debt right along with your revenue. It's not pretty, so focus on getting into profit, then come back and read this bad boy. Additionally, if your payout is anything less than $10.00 per lead/sale, scaling is going to be much more difficult for you, so keep that in mind. Scaling works best with more breathing room.

Volume

Now here is where it gets interesting. Volume is at the very heart of scaling. You can increase volume in any of several ways: keyword volume, search engine volume or overall spending volume.

Increasing keyword volume just means using more keywords in general, but before you go dumping tons of keywords into your campaign, let me clarify. I've run campaigns that have done $5,000.00 and more off of just ONE keyword. The trick here is to use broad match short-tail keywords that fit your niche really well. For instance, if you were selling potato chips, it's time to work on going for the gusto with short-tail keywords like 'chip', 'pringles', 'lays', etc. Make no mistake, these are highly competitive keywords but if your keywords are highly (and I mean as much as possible) relevant to your ads and your landing page text, you can avoid paying super high bid prices on these. In fact, over time you can get your minimum bids down to $0.05 and below. Aside from adding high volume short tail keywords, you can also work on adding a lot more short tail keywords that don't necessarily have high volume individually, but together, they'll add up to one short-tail.

What I mean by increasing search engine volume is simply using more sources for traffic. For instance, if you're using Yahoo for all your PPC, try jumping into Google Adwords. You'll see your traffic double, triple or even quadruple for the same keywords. Don't stop there though, you can join networks like MSN Adcenter, Ask.com, etc. Also, if you're running solely 'search network' traffic, try split testing the content network to see if you can get increased traffic that way.

To increase your spending volume, you can do a few things. First of all, you can increase your daily budget in general. That's a given, but you can also test increasing your max bid per keyword. It might be counter-intuitive to you now, but even though you're converting at X% now, you might be able to double that with an ad in a higher position for a particular keyword. You'll also be increasing your CTR (Click-through ratio) for that particular ad, which as you know, decreases your average cost per click. That means you're paying less per click to stay in that higher position. On a side-note, being at the top of the page has another benefit people don't often discuss- you're one of the first clicks (hopefully the last) a user makes for a particular search and that means you don't get disgruntled clicks from people who have visited other sites and have less patience for yours.

Payout

Next in line in terms of importance to scaling is your payout. Payout is the amount of money you get paid for each sale/lead you generate and for high volume campaigns, a few cents can be the difference between life and death. Guess who stands in the way of you and a higher payout? Two people: your affiliate manager and yourself. Your affiliate manager will almost never start you out on a payout that is as high as s/he can go. Therefore, if you don't have a higher payout, it's because you didn't ask for it. Of course, there may be some negotiation involved (you might have to show them you mean business with some initial volume or hitting a particular goal), but in the end, you should end up with a decently higher payout and thus, a higher profit margin. It doesn't end there though.

I say you stand in your own way because you can never let yourself become lazy when it comes to your payout. Remember, this is business and you need to treat it like one. If you get $X amount with one affiliate network, check at least five other ones. Some sites offer tools that allow you to cross-compare offers from multiple networks all at once. For instance, OfferVault.com has a free service that does this for you. Keep in mind, these types of services will only compare the default payout on offers. It's up to you to talk to your affiliate managers and use leverage to negotiate the highest payout possible.

Similar Offers

Sure, you may have negotiated the highest payout possible for the particular offer you're running, but have you split tested other offers that are very similar to yours? This doesn't always work but the only way to know for sure is to try. You just might find an offer that converts even better than the one you have now (even if it pays less, you might profit more overall) OR it might have a higher payout but slightly lower conversion rate but end up paying you more in the long run. Again, the only way you can know for sure is to try it out.

Bounce Rate

Right along with disinterested clicks, bounce rate is one of the biggest enemies of an affiliate marketer. Bounce rate can be defined as the percentage of clicks for a given period that don't result in clicks through to your hop links. That means clicks you pay for end up either clicking the "back" button or unique users click multiple times on your ad as they aren't sure what they want or even accidental clicks (they happen). In any case, they are clicks you pay for that don't pay you back. So the solution is to decrease your bounce rate as much as is humanly possible. That means grabbing the user with some call to action right off the bat, just like your teachers told you to do on your essays. Personally, I like short, easy-to-fill-out forms that kind of pull the user along. Hopefully they think "well, I've gone this far, I might as well finish." Basically, you want to do anything short of forwarding the customer to your hop link. But a word to the wise: Never *annoy* your customers.

When you're scaling, you want to decrease your overall bounce rate because you'll really start to notice a 50-60% bounce rate when you're dealing with thousands of dollars. Ideally, you want your bounce rate below 40% on most campaigns. Of course, there will always be some campaigns where a higher bounce rate is inevitable but that doesn't mean you should settle for it.

Tracking

A large part of decreasing your bounce rate and increasing sales is determining which combination of ads, keywords and landing pages convert as efficiently as possible. If you aren't tracking keywords on an individual level, you won't survive scaling. For those of you that don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars per month for trackers, you can use Tracking202.com, a free keyword tracking service. I've been using them for a couple weeks now and even on my smaller campaigns, they've helped increase my ROI.

The Next Level

Once you start getting into $1,000+/day territory, you'll start to get noticed. Trust me. Not only will you get noticed by your affiliate manager, but also the advertiser (the one you're generating sales for) will most likely start to notice you. Assuming, that is, you aren't in a highly saturated market where you're still a small fish. At this point, you'll start to have more leverage for higher payouts and you might even be able to contact your advertiser directly and you can start talking about a whitelabel relationship. As UberAffiliate puts it:

The ultimate method of scaling…The Whitelabel. Once you’ve optimized, tested, and scaled your campaign using all the methods above, it’s time to contact the advertiser and negotiate a direct relationship. You’ll be able to host the offer on your domain and it will be a fully built site (which means a higher quality score). Conversion rates are generally higher and the biggest plus is the huge payout bump. A lot of networks take around 20% on certain offers, some even more. That’s 20% added to your revenue that again, is pure profit.

Without a doubt, your goal should be to negotiate this direct relationship with the advertiser. With another 20% added to your revenue stream, you can bid higher and get better ad positioning. That means other affiliates with lower payout will have no chance to compete with you. And that, as they say, is money.

Conclusion

Just remember, if you aren't willing to put in the time reading the breadth of information there is on the subject already, you won't get very far. You've got to research your ass off and only then will you have what it takes to manage such large campaigns. Oh and one more thing: I gave this information out for free, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. Don't take it for granted.

Popularity: 52% [?]

Click Here To Download

As promised, here is the new e-book for all those people who want to get started affiliate marketing. This is the first version, so if you find any errors or have any suggestions, please let me know.

I tried to be thorough without being too verbose, so hopefully that's how it comes off. I made sure to keep it to just ten chapters.

Hope you like it.

Thanks,
Scott

Popularity: 33% [?]

This Friday -- March 8th, 2008 -- I'm going to release my latest creation as a dessert item on the blog.  It's my guide to getting started with affiliate marketing and it will be FREE.

I started writing the guide when I realized people were coming to the blog and asking the same questions I created the blog to answer! So the e-book will be an introduction to affiliate marketing, featuring some of the posts you'd find here, as well as a sort of introduction to this blog and all it has to offer.

As always, my intention is to put out information for free that you'd normally have to pay for. This e-book will be no exception to the rule. Just like I normally do, I'm just going to put my referral links in the book and hope people enjoy it enough to pass it along and I'll consider that payment enough.

So definitely keep an eye out. For all those getting started with affiliate marketing, this should give you a decent advantage in the game. I'm writing it just like I like to read things.

Popularity: 29% [?]

I started affiliate marketing at the beginning of 2007 but it didn't really take off until I started pushing, as you might guess, ring tones. It took me from a few sales a day totaling about $50-60 on Clickbank to a couple hundred per day on Azoogle.

Starting ring tones wasn't my idea. It was my friend Paul's idea and one of the things he told me he'd done to be successful with ring tones was to stay away from the content network as the conversion rates were extremely low. At the time, I had very little experience so I wasn't about to test the waters against the good advice of an established marketer. Well, needless to say, I started to do very well and here I am.

But, what I've learned lately is that I should have taken the affiliate marketer philosophy a little more seriously. When we say split test everything, we mean split test everything. Everything you can, anyway. The content network (Google, Yahoo or otherwise) is definitely one of those things you should split test on every offer.

The stigma with content matching fall along the lines of:

• Publishers trick users into clicking, which wastes your money
• People aren't technically searching for something when they click, so they're theoretically less interested
• It's difficult to track which keywords or sites convert using the content network

So it's not difficult to see why people would steer their campaigns away from content-based ads, but along with the bad, you should always consider the good:

• The content network is cheaper to place ads on
• You can use site-targeted ads right down to a specific ad placement, which also makes conversion tracking easier
• You can use text, banners and more to advertise to people
• Sometimes you'll receive a larger volume of traffic on the content network

Aside from the good and the bad, there's the reality of the situation. Until recently, I honestly hadn't even touched the content network. Crazy, I know. That was until I found out that the mega affiliates are doing tons of business there and preaching about how it's a terrible place to convert. A-ha! It was a classic "IIIIII'm dumb" moment but a welcomed one.

My advice to you is that you should take nothing for granted when it comes to your business. Split test the search network and the content network. Learn how to track specific sites/ads and you'll be fine. Also, check out Google Lady's post "Adwords Content Network Tip."

Popularity: 53% [?]

Lately, I've been experimenting with both single-page landing pages as well as mini sites. A single-page landing page, as you might imagine, is a landing page that links to no other sites but the jump/hop links. Mini sites are an extension of single-page landing pages in that they have other pages, such as the "about us" page, the "contact" page, and the like.

What I've discovered is that for some offers, mini sites seem to do four good things:

1. The site looks like a legitimate website vs. just a sales pitch, so people are less likely to leave right away (increases stickiness).
2. Because they look like actual websites, they increase the trust factor and therefore, increase conversions for some offers (decreases skepticism).
3. Provides a site people can actually look to and gives the search engines something to index, so your chances of getting free sales go up (increases organic traffic).
4. Search engines like sites with multiple pages as they provide a better end-user experience (increases search engine friendliness).

All these things contribute to an overall increased profit margin. However, there are a few drawbacks to mini sites:

1. They give the user a distraction from the sales pitch. Landing pages are built to be a funnel to the end goal: a sale.
2. They take longer to build. Not everyone is going to want to build a whole website for each offer they run.
3. They're harder to change for split testing. Basically, you have to adapt the whole site to a split testing environment in order to make this feasible.

So, where landing pages are a quick pitch and a quick build, mini sites are a bit more complicated to implement. And keep in mind, they don't always lead to better conversions but, of course, you know to split test everything you do. In general, mini sites lead to a better user experience and are much easier for search engines to index. And I'm a firm believer in organic traffic as it it leads to free conversions in the long-run.

One little trick I've been doing lately is making an HTML-based landing page with links to a Wordpress blog on the back-end. So if my site is http://www.awesomelandingpage.com/awesome_item.php, then it contains several links to very contextual information I post in the site's blog, located (hypothetically) at http://www.awesomelandingpage.com/blog and that does a couple of cool things. First off, it automatically gives search engines something to spider and secondly, it also does a ping-back to sites like Technorati and the like, which provides even more traffic.

Overall, my results have been positive. Just make sure you clear up any out-going links on your blog. Your site should be a funnel to the hop-link, as that's where the sale occurs.

Popularity: 29% [?]

As of this morning, I received an email from the people at Affiliate Radar, announcing that Offer Vault is now free. Yeah, that's right. You can now cross-compare offers from multiple affiliate networks for free.

Here's the email they sent out:

Dear Scott Weaver,

After much heated debate between my partner, Raakesh, and I, we have
decided to allow free access to OfferVault.

In case you are not aware, OfferVault is a research tool for
affiliate marketers that contains a database of over 10,000 offers
from the top CPA and affiliate networks, updated daily.

You can sign-up at http://www.offervault.com

With this powerful tool you can:

Compare offers and payouts between networks

Research niches

Receive optional email alerts based on your own search criteria to
stay on top of new offers as they come out

Preview landing pages (this is huge!)

Quickly sign up for new networks

This tool was formerly available only as a component of our paid
membership site, Affiliate Radar. Now you have the opportunity to
access it free at www.offervault.com, so don't pass it up!

Get your free membership now at http://www.offervault.com

What does that mean for you? It means you no longer have to log into each different network to see where the highest payout is. What it also means is that yet again, I've increased your profit margin. But hey, that's what I'm here for.

Now you can see what networks are offering before you even bother signing up. Apparently, all that OfferVault is asking in return is that, much like on my blog, you sign up using their referral links to new networks you join.

Just this morning, I've found several higher paying offers than the ones I'm currently running and those are the default prices. Not even the negotiated prices.

If you're worried about a product monopoly (even though it's free), don't worry. I'm aware of another site that is whispered to have a similar product coming out soon.

For now, Offer Vault takes the cake as the cat's pajamas. Incidentally, if you want to go right to registration, click here.

You're welcome.

Popularity: 52% [?]

When you're first starting out with affiliate marketing, you probably glean over blogs like mine and think "OK, noted. I'll get back to that." Well, it's time to get back to that. As the theme of this blog is generally to save you money and increase your overall profit margin, it's my job to make sure you're informed about the best techniques for saving every last penny. One huge way that will improve the over all ROI of all of your campaigns is to use negative keywords.

What Are Negative Keywords?

Negative keywords are the same as regular keywords, except they tell the search engine when NOT to show your ads. For example, if you have a campaign that is focused on (for example) jobs, you'll want to get rid of a lot of obvious keywords: blow, hand, steve, rim, etc. You get the idea. That way, people searching for things like "gay blow jobs" (not that there's anything wrong with that) or "rim jobs' or even "steve jobs" won't pull your ads up and you won't get disinterested clicks.

What Are Disinterested Clicks?

Disinterested clicks are clicks you don't want. They're from people looking for something you aren't offering. In short, they are clicks that drive up your ad spend without increasing your revenue at all.

On the flip side, interested clicks are the ones you want. Even if someone is not looking specifically for your product, an interested click is from someone who is interested in your topic in general.

So How Do I Implement Them?

Different search engines allow you to implement them different ways. For Adwords, it's as simple as putting a dash in front of each keyword, like so:

-rim
-blow
-steve

With YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing), it's a bit different. When you create an ad group, there's a specific box you put the negative keywords into. As far as other search engines go, it's pretty straight forward and similar to what I just described.

Conclusion

Any time you can make your ad group more focused and relevant to the ad text and your landing page text, do it! It will decrease the amount you have to spend each time someone clicks your ads as well as increase interested clicks. That means less money spent and more money made. Hence, profit.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Lately I've been getting a lot of questions revolving around keyword tracking. Apparently, people still don't think it's very important to track which keywords convert into sales. Apparently, the mindset is that as long as you're in profit, that's all that matters.

WRONG.

If you aren't taking advantage of tracking individual keywords, you're losing money, period.

How do I know this? Well, I've done it both ways -- with and without keyword tracking and I must say, the method speaks for itself. If you don't do it automagically with a service like Tracking202 or the like, you can always do it manually until it gets out of hand. I've created an example of just how that might look for you if you were to run a campaign on potato chips-

As you can see, the campaign is in profit overall at $140.50 net. But what you might notice are the numberes in red (negatives). These are the keywords we should pay special attention to after a period of about a week. You'll also notice the profit margin - 15.45%. Some companies run smoothly on less but their volume is exponentially larger. For smaller volume you'll want to increase your profit margin, unless you plan on creating tons of similar campaigns (not realistic).

So what can one do to increase profit margin? Well, just take a look at this updated chart-

Notice, I've gotten rid of the "Google - chips" and "Yahoo - chips" keywords. Right away, you see the net profit has jumped up to $390.90. The profit margin has jumped way up to 137.59% and my total spent has gone all the way down to $284.10. Wow! I've more than doubled the amount of money I get to keep just by removing two keywords from the mix.

Now of course I don't expect you to completely ditch the higher-volume keywords. In fact, I expect you to work harder to get those into the green to increase your overall profit. But I wanted to drive home a point: Without tracking your individual keywords, you are losing money. Without fail, there are always going to be keywords that outperform others and there will always be keywords that drag your bottom line down.

You might imagine that when you get into the big dog arena (dealing with multiple thousands of dollars daily) this becomes immensely more important. You'd be right. For now, master the art of tracking your keywords and bidding accordingly and you'll get there.

Popularity: 23% [?]

One of the best pieces of advice my dad ever gave me, I think, was "compete with yourself." While it's counter-intuitive to focus solely on yourself vs looking at how other people are doing and trying to top them, it's generally a better method for getting ahead.

I say this because I've done both and my method with this blog has generally been to keep to myself. I've noticed that once I start looking at what other people are doing here and there, I tend to want to gravitate toward what they're doing. You might even steal an idea once in a while and that is exactly where the problem comes in.

Whether you know it or not, you steal information. Be it in the form of ideas or content, stealing is happening. The more you focus on what other people are doing, the more you do the deed in a more noticeable way. In an effort to avoid this, I recommend that you focus more on carving out your own path.

Now don't get me wrong, I know there are several details about this site that are obviously taken from other, more successful sites. But those are a given. In order for your site to generate more visibility for certain aspects (recent posts, ads, referral links, etc.), you want them front and center. It's the meat of the site I'm talking about -- the content. That's where originality comes into play. Remember that extra something I wrote about? Make it your own. Sure, people are bound to copy what you do, but that's inevitable. People sense originality really well and that will stand out in their minds when you provide something that they can't get anywhere else.

This applies to your websites, your blogs, your landing pages, your ad text, everything. Be different (within reason) and not only will people appreciate it but it will draw their attention. For instance, I remember when I read the Rich Jerk e-book on money making back when I was getting started and it talked about writing ads. It said something to the effect of "insult the customer." If you're selling anything. Say you're selling carpets, tell them that their carpet sucks:

Your Carpet is Ugly
Our rugs are awesome and
cheap. Don't be ugly.
www.DontBeUglyRugs.com

Dumb but you get the idea. Once I read that, I started to get a much firmer grasp on what great marketing is compared to good marketing. But again, this ties back into stealing. Don't steal Rich Jerk's idea, steal the notion that you should be different and it will be less detectable and therefore, you will stand out more.  This is just one idea, but I wanted to convey how adding your own little twist to things will make you more interesting.

I am in no way saying that you shouldn't keep an eye on your competition. You definitely should or you will fail. Sun Tzu said something along the lines of - know yourself AND know your enemy, you will win every battle. If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will lose every battle. So it's imperative to keep a watchful eye but just don't get too wrapped up in what they're doing. In the end, people will respect you more if you are unique and they will recognize those who copy you as a flattering imitation.

Popularity: 16% [?]

As you know, I love to read and for this Valentine's day, my wonderful wife got me a new book by one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin. It's called Free Prize Inside and so far, it's been a fantastic book. This one book alone has given me tons of new ideas of how to use new angles on what I'm already doing in order to increase conversions and, in some cases, tap into whole new markets.

I'm not completely plugging the book for this post. What I am doing is talking about how you can apply the basic idea of this book to any of your campaigns. The gist of the book is something along the lines of: "when your product is exactly like everyone else's, why would someone choose yours over another company's?" The answer, of course, is the title of the book and how this applies to your business is no stretch.

When you are selling the same product, what makes your sales pitch better than the next guy's? Either you are using different sales text or using a completely different angle. But alas, you are still selling the same product. What can you do to spice things up? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Do you want to go through page A that has the product they're looking for or do you want to go through page B that has the product you're looking for but a free e-book (or something similar) to boot?

Make no mistake, customers do their research. It's a big part of the reason your bounce rate is so high. Customers click back and forth on ads looking for the best deal or the exact information they want. Chances are, they've seen the same pitch several times before they decide to go through your (or someone else's) link. If you aren't setting yourself apart, your conversion rate is probably lower than it could be.

The other day, I was watching In Good Company, that movie where Topher Grace takes over ad sales for a magazine and uses "synergy" to re-invigorate the company. If you'll notice, he gives you the same gist in his synergy speech. Their company has several sister companies, including a cereal company. Although they're aware that their cereal is virtually the same exact cereal as several others, Topher points out what will make "Joe Couch Potato" choose their brand over another: sports factoids on the backs of the boxes. Cereal makes a great analogy here because that's where we get our "free prize inside" mentality. As a kid, you want the cereal with the prize inside over the other prize less cereal, even if it tastes better.

So don't let these small gems of wisdom pass you by. Every little bit helps you increase your profits and sales in general. It's all about your bottom line and what helps that most: customer satisfaction. Give them a reason to go to you instead of someone else and you've won.

Popularity: 14% [?]