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.

The name is William. I've known Scott for awhile now and I love his blog, so I thought I'd ask him to let me do a guest post because I used to own a blog long ago but sold it for quick cash. I've been trying to get my new blog set up but every coder I've tried to hire ran off and I've never heard from them again, so I miss writing to the masses.

Anyway, here's what I want to talk about today: with my recent success at Affiliate Marketing (which you can read about on the forums here "Killafawks Journey"), everyone was interested in how I did it and really how I started killing it over night.

Well, I'm going to tell you how I set up my campaigns and how I went about turning profits over night.

But first we've got to clear some things up...

Affiliate marketing is a tricky business and can be rough to break into but it's not impossible. If you're going to tell yourself that you can't do it then you probably shouldn't be in the field. I used to tell myself that affiliate marketing was too "big" for me and that it was already saturated. I blew it off for years and spent most of my time trying to make that next big hit website. While I read stories of people making $100, $500, $1000 a day doing affiliate marketing, in most cases within months, this amazed me. So of course I wanted to know how to do it.

I finally gave it a go and failed at it and lost a good $100 or so. I left affiliate marketing never giving it a second thought. I went back to Adsense and was fighting just to reach $10 a day. Still, people where showing up every day on forums like Digital Point and writing out their success stories all over the forum, and it wasn't long before I saw Scott's success story on there. Scott and I used to share website ideas and whatnot months before and to see Scott now take a huge step up the ladder with affiliate marketing really intrigued me. Scott was in a similar boat as me not to long ago trying to make money through Adsense and to sustain a suitable income online and now he's posting about making $1,000 a day with affiliate marketing. That just told me that this stuff is real and possible. I gave it a second chance and with the help of Scott starting me off on the right path I was on my way to where I am right now.

Anyway, I am carrying on way too long. The point is - we live in the technology age and since the internet is still young in terms of the possibilities it holds, RIGHT NOW is your only shot to make it big unless you plan on going to college for 4-6 years and trying to secure a high paying job cutting people open. Even then, some 17-18 year olds make more money than some of the best doctors in the world.

Let me repeat again - most likely, never again will you get an opportunity like the present to take a chance and make money from the internet. They may say the markets are saturated and from an online marketers view, some markets are. But not in terms of how many people are actually in them. Right now I would guess the number of online individual marketers is insanely low in terms of how much money can be made from it. The rest of the offline world thinks making money off the internet is a ridiculous idea; most still think it's either from porn or you've gotta own something like YouTube to make money. We are fine with that because there is more money than anyone could imagine and we don't need any more people trying to mine from the money pit. This is a once in a life time chance to make it big, GO FOR IT.

You can't do this half-assed. Dedicate yourself to it. Once you have gotten yourself motivated and dedicated to do this, hold to it. The money is real and the possibility of living in that dream house could be a couple days or months down the road. Not 4-6 years.

Let the Journey Begin

Once you are ready to start this exciting adventure, there are some things we are going to need to make you successful.

1. Website (in this post we will be using ringtones).
2. Affiliate Network (I suggest AzoogleAds or NeverblueAds).
3. Advertising Network (Google or Yahoo; I suggest Yahoo because of its ease of use and it's not as strict as Google).
4. Advertising Budget (I know everyone wants free free free. Sorry, no free lunches. You either fork up money to spend or you can sit at your computer desk for 5 hours a day writing articles to drive traffic to your website. Either way, time is money. Is your time justified by writing 10 articles a day to only get 1-2 sales a day or would you rather fork up $50 and make $100-150 back in 1-2 hours of setting up and testing?).

Now I am going to run through the steps one by one on how to get you up and running for Ringtones (which we will be covering in this topic, you can use the method for any niche just make sure you test).

1. Website / Domain - You're gonna want to register a domain at your favorite domain registry. We all know how to do this I hope but make sure when you register a domain to make it related to your niche. Since we're doing ring tones, do something with ringtones in the domain.

2. Affiliate Network - Azoogle has the best offers for ring tones and Neverblue has its own strong points. I suggest you sign up with both just so you can switch whenever you feel like it and test offers from both networks.

3./4. Advertising Networks / Advertising Budget - I suggest you set up a Yahoo Search Marketing account for this experiment. Go search online for the free $100 Yahoo voucher. There are higher ones I think but you might have to pay to buy those off of someone. I wouldn't suggest it because of the amount of scamming that goes around from this kind of thing. Just pay the 30$ sign up and get $130 in your account and move on to the next step.

Get Your Campaign Going

1. The first thing is to get your website content. What you're gonna want for this test is a Ringtone Carrier Page. You can either get one professionally designed for about $80 or make your own... or if you're feeling bastardly you can look at other landing pages and copy their templates from their own site and change it up enough to not seem obvious.

Once you've got your template set up, make sure you have buttons for all major carriers. Just look at other landing pages to get an idea of what the top carriers are and model it off that. Get everything set up and when your template is complete with buttons and everything is looking good, head over to your affiliate network (in this case, Azoogle).

2. Once you're in Azoogle, look up ring tones in the offers page. Now you will notice there are all kinds of offers for ringtones. Personally, I've had good success with Thumbplay and Dada Mobile. So go ahead and look up those offers and click "promote these offers by search," the little blue button on the bottom of the offer page.

*Important* This is one thing I overlooked when I first started: For most offers you will notice that they have more than just one landing page. I never noticed this since the landing page changer was a drop down menu and it's on the very bottom!

Also Remember that not every offer accepts all carriers. The top paying offers only accept the top tier carriers like Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc. So pick a high paying offer like Thumbplay for your top tier sites and Dada Mobile or another offer for your low tier offers.

Once you have looked through both offers' landing pages and you've got the two landing pages you want to use for your top tier and bottom tier, save the affiliate links and put them in their corresponding places in your landing page (Example: For the Sprint button, put the top tier offer jump link so when they click, they get sent to the top tier offer).

Once you have sorted out all the links to each button you can go ahead and close up your template and you're finished with it, unless you want to add some things to it like click tracking software (I'll cover this later on down the line).

(Optional) iFraming. Personally, I just started using this method not too long ago and it's shown some great results. iFraming will basically make it look as if the affiliate landing page is part of your site, which is great way to improve trust and conversions among visitors and it hides your affiliate link at the same time. I highly recommend it but iFraming doesn't work too well with a lot of offers, so test test test.

Here's some example code for iFrames:

<html><head>

<title>Sprint Ringtones - Step 1</title>

<script>window.status = ' ';</script></head>

<frameset rows="100%,*" frameborder="0" border="0">

<frame src="affiliate link" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="auto" noresize>

<frame src="UntitledFrame-2">

</frameset>

<noframes><p>Sorry, but it appears you are using a Web browser that does not support frames.<br></p></noframes>

</html>

Let's say your site is coolringtonesdude.com. Make a carrier for each sub page, like "Sprint, Verizon etc." so it will look like this: coolringtonesdude.com/sprint.html. In your button links, point your jump link to that page so when they land there you can put something like "Sprint Ringtones" as your title and if they see the address bar, it looks legit.

Do this for each carrier and watch your conversions increase!

3. Next let's get your Yahoo campaign going. First thing you're going to want to do is get some keywords for your campaign. Since we are doing ringtones, you want something related to ringtones.

Now for keywords. If you have a Wordze subscription that would be great but I actually like to use Google Keyword Tool more; it displays search volume along with advertiser volume.

For this experiment, we want ringtone-related keywords, but don't aim for the high volume ringtone keywords. They are way too saturated with other advertisers and it's very easy to lose money with them. Let's try getting keywords for popular artists and songs. Start typing artist names in and download the 150-keyword-return list and save the keywords. Get about 15-20 of these going. Now once you have 15-20 groups of different keyword groups for different artists or songs, we can set up the campaigns.

Go back to Yahoo and set up a campaign and ad groups within for each artist. Input the keywords and bid anywhere from 10-30 cents (whatever you feel safe with). For me, it's about 15-25 cents depending on the volume of the searches Yahoo predicts. If it's low, I'll bid higher to secure top position, so when ever it does get searched I can get top 3 spots. If it's a lot of clicks I can lower it and get a good amount of clicks still.

Once you have set up all your campaigns, talk to your affiliate manager over at Azoogle and go into your Yahoo account and get your tracking code. This is where my click tracking comes in handy. They can place the tracking code in the actual landing page you are sending people to so you can find out exactly what keyword was it that converted for you! This is all I use to track keywords.

Now that you got all your campaigns up and your landing page perfect, go pass some time, watch a movie or if it's late go to bed early and pray for good stats in the morning to look over.

4. The big day! When you wake up, it's always exciting to see where you are in your daily earnings. Here are things to look out for:

a. Total spending vs Earnings - If you're in the red, don't worry it's normal. Don't get mad and quit. Getting profit the very first day is pretty damn rare. If you're converting, that's the best thing you can hope for at this point. If you had your tracking code installed, check which keywords converted and write them down. Typically I will only let a keyword rack up to around the amount of a payout before I trash it. So if there are high volume keywords that haven't converted for one payout yet trash it and repeat step 3 (keyword part) again. The point here is to eliminate needless spending and get converting keywords.

b. Your Bounce Rate and eCPC - Look back at Scott's bidding calculator and find out what you should be bidding and go back and tune your campaigns to match it. Not exactly but roughly.

c. Delete the 100 or so keywords you know didn't convert well and add more keywords and repeat the process. You might be thinking: how am I going to get rich over night doing this? This is gonna take forever! Well, you aren't going to get rich over night and you won't get rich at all unless you do this, so no excuses. This is how people generate keyword lists that convert at 1:10 and they've got hundreds and thousands of them so do the math.

5. If you're a total control freak, you can even make sub pages for each keyword group with detailed content for each ad group. This is recommended to improve conversions. It can be tedious work but it could pay off in the end. It's worked so-so for me but I no longer do it. You should test it though as it's highly recommended but honestly I hate dealing with anything website-related so I tend to stay away from it.

6. Remember, try testing out new ads. Higher CTR is good because it means you get more clicks and if those clicks are converting keywords it's just more money every day. Never stop testing and this goes for your landing pages, too. Add some nice little tricks to your landing page, like putting high trusting logos with text related to your site on there, like a Forbes logo that says something like "ring tones are a new way to express yourself." People who will notice the logo will think your site is trustworthy and will feel safer putting in their cell numbers.

That's it.

Just test new keywords every day and delete ones that don't work and next thing you know, you've got 20-50 keywords in a week that convert and you're making 2-3X the money you put into it. It's really that simple. The same method can be applied to any niche. It's really all about a decent landing page and good converting keywords. Once you reach a certain point like $100 a day pure profit from ringtones, you can go into the dating market with the same approach and work till you get it right. Next thing you know, you've got ten offers that bring in $100 a day each and you're earning $1,000 a day profit.

What are you waiting for? Go test!

Hope you enjoyed the long article and I hope it helps everyone who's new and wants to get into the field.

Well, now you have no excuse NOT to. Aweber is offering everyone a free test drive just to get people to sign up.

Not only are they handing out free trials, but I just found a nice little section for affiliates you might be interested in called Aweber Affiliate Tips where you'll find great advice on how to word your broadcasts, how to write more convincing sales letters and just a ton of great information.

Here's a clipping from one of their articles entitled "Affiliate Tip: Writing Long Copy":

Pull the Reader in
No one reads everything they come across. To convince your audience that your text is worth reading, make your first sentence or two very interesting. Make a bold statement, say something seemingly ridiculous, or appeal to your prospect's emotional side. Then, tie this grabber in with the rest of your copy, and you'll have a reader for life, (or at least to the end of your text).

So you can see what kind of information the site has to offer. If you're looking for actual tutorials, give the video tutorial section a try. They have everything you need to get you started with email marketing, from their How To Get Started video to their Add a Web Form Opt-in to Your Website video.

I highly recommend you take advantage of what they have to offer if you're serious about affiliate marketing.

The problem that people have that made this post necessary is losing the keyword when someone comes in either from a different page or visits the page, leaves and then comes back. Without knowing which keyword got the person there in the first place, marketers like you and me are lost on how to properly spend our money and on which keywords are terrible at converting. We definitely need that information, so we must make sure to do our best to track it.

Now going into this post, I have to assume three things: you can follow instructions, you are using one of the major search engines for your CPC ads and you are using PHP for your web pages. With that out of the way, let's proceed..

In the header of your PHP files, you'll want to include the following code-

keyword_tracking_php.txt

Once you've placed your keyword tracking code in your header(s), you'll need code in place to pass the captured keyword to your hop-link. If you aren't familiar with hop links and passing information using them, please read How To Put Tracking Code On Your Landing Page.

Additionally, if you'd like to learn about cloaking your hop links, please read How To Cloak Your Affiliate Links.

Now to extend the post on cloaking, you can modify your jump.php file with the following code-

jump_php2.txt

It's really as simple as that. The first page captures the keywords and feeds them into the jump.php for Azoogle (or whichever network you're using) to track. What's more is that you can track additional information just by doing the same thing with other information you pass (such as the name of the ad group, specific ad, etc.) in other cookies. Then, you can just append that to the actual jump link's 'sub' tracking variable using a pipe (|) to separate the different variables, respectively.

So there you have it, proper keyword/ad tracking with cloaked links.

For affiliate marketers, an integral part of the business is advertising in general and if you're wondering the same thing I was at the time that inspired the thread, it's probably "can I write advertising off as an expense?" The short answer is yes, but the good news doesn't end there. You can also deduct any expenses that went into your affiliate marketing business, such as domain fees, hosting fees, paypal fees, software purchase fees, book/ebook purchase fees, phone fees, internet service fees, computers, office furniture, etc. Essentially, everything you spend money on that has to do with your business becomes a write-off. Or to put it simply, you are only taxed on your actual profit. The less profit you make it seem you have, the less you'll be taxed on (tax 101, I know).

One thing I'm definitely doing this tax season is hiring my own tax guy. It's not that there are piles and piles of paperwork to go through. Instead, I want to ensure I'm writing off everything possible to keep as much of my earnings as possible and to decrease the overall taxable amount. I recommend you do this as well.

Now one thing I've heard people recommend is to incorporate. While this might be a great idea once you're in the multi-thousand-per-day boat, you aren't going to save much money by incorporating before-hand. In fact, you might lose more money by qualifying for double-taxation (ouch).

Overall, I recommend that you just keep monthly records of your profits (and losses) to show your tax guy. My past accountants have told me they just want totals, but in this case, I think it's best if you go over everything.

• No Tangible Products

  In general, I like to steer clear of any offers that require anything tangible. When you start to involve the post office or USPS, you are putting the life of the sale in their hands and.. let's just say, keep it to as few points of failure as possible.

• Ringtones

  No, it's not a dead niche yet but if you're starting out in affiliate marketing, this is not your cup of tea. PPC networks are bitch-slapping the ring tone industry with guidelines that have cornered the whole market into a very competitive arena. Not only that, but the nice people who provide ring tones are testing out a new regulation that will go into hardcore effect soon: instead of the customer simply replying with an SMS confirmation, the user must now text 'YES' back to the provider after being blatantly informed that they're going to be charged somewhere in the neighborhood of $9.99/mo. In short, conversion rates will start to drop tremendously, which means much lower profit margins (if any), which means you'll either have to bid lower or kick the bucket. And since the PPC networks have forced everyone to start competing over the same keywords, I'm guessing most will opt for the latter. Which brings me to my next point.

• The Less Keywords To Profit, The Better

  Do yourself a favor and stay away from any offers that require an entire account to hold keyword lists for, ring tones included! Game rentals, DVD rentals, nada. Save it for when you've got the money and experience to back it up (or when you can hire someone else to do it).

• Research, Research, Research

  If you aren't going to TRY every offer you see, at least RESEARCH every offer you see. I don't mean in-depth research as there are literally thousands of offers to look through, but definitely check on the related search terms (keywords) for the offer. Check on AdWords and YSM to see how people are marketing the product (whether they're using landing pages, what their landing pages say, etc.). Also check to see which big players in that category are advertising right along side with you; remember, you don't want to go up against too many Goliaths since you're only one David. Chances are, you're going to find a product that isn't so difficult to market and you'll get a good idea of how you can start to market it. If nothing else, look for domains in your area of interest; if it's highly saturated, you'll know by how few domain names there are available.

• Experience Is Wisdom

  Use your experiences to your advantage. If you've ever been an avid biker, gamer, cross dresser, ANYTHING., use this to your advantage. The odds are in your favor that you'll find an offer that is somehow related to what you want to do. Anything you have an opinion about is generally going to flow out of you much more easily.

• Profit Is King

  An offer is nothing unless it's profitable, so do your proper research in this regard as well! Search all affiliate networks for offers and compare similar offers across networks. I've heard rumors that AffiliateRadar can do just this (compare offers across networks), but if you don't have access to such a beast, just do it manually. Sign up to all your token affiliate networks (AzoogleAds, Clickbank, Commission Junction, Copeac, Neverblue, etc.) and find the top paying offer among the bunch. Then, once you've found the top paying offer, ask your affiliate managers to give you their best price on it.

• Managing Affiliate Managers

  Use your affiliate managers to your advantage. That's what they're there for. Remember, affiliate marketing is a business and you're essentially working with suppliers when you're talking to your affiliate managers. Wal-mart wouldn't be where it is today if it didn't apply necessary pressure on the supplier end. If one of your affiliate managers gives you a price on an offer, allow your other affiliate managers the chance to beat it. All is fair in internet marketing, as long as you maintain good relations with your managers. Often, I use the argument that I can't push as much traffic to an offer unless I get a higher payout and that's always true -- the more money I get for completing a sale, the more money I can afford to use getting people there.

• Start Medium

  When you're starting out, your affiliate managers will most likely tell you to start small. They'll tell you to start with offers that are generally in the neighborhood of $1.00 and that would be fine if the profit margins weren't so low. Although it might work for some, you probably aren't going to profit on this type of campaign. In fact, you might just end up losing a few hundred and calling it quits. We definitely don't want that, so instead, try looking for offers that are more in the neighborhood of $5-$10 when you are starting out. This way, you have a little breathing room.

• Avoid Credit Cards

  Look for offers that don't require any type of monetary transactions (no credit cards). Aside from ring tones, there are still plenty of offers out there that don't require any credit card payments. Dating offers are a good example as they are usually free or just require a simple text message to confirm payment.

• It's Business Time

  Stop looking at this like it's temporary. You may not know it, but you probably are. If that's the case, you'll spend minimal up-front investment and expect either a rainfall of money or an immediate failure. Like anything worthwhile, this business definitely takes time to build and a lifetime to master. If you aren't willing to lose $500-1,000 in the process of learning, you might want to try something else. In a business where you can make millions, it's definitely worth it to approach it as if you were starting any other business. In fact, you should take that approach with the added idea in mind that you're going to win a game. Treat it that way and you will succeed.

Of course, if I think of anything else, I will be sure to add it but these are the guidelines I use when choosing offers. As always, I hope it helps you with your success and if you do achieve it, please let me know! Success stories are inspiring to those just starting out.

Good luck,

Scott

Method #1 - Deleting Keywords

Each time I talk to people about how they trim their keywords, they usually don't think twice before saying they just delete the ones that don't convert or those that generate a low CTR (Click-Through Ratio) after about a week to a month. While this might work initially, it does two things:

1. Removes the chance to see whether those deleted keywords will convert in the future or with some adjusting.
2. Sets your profit-bearing keywords in stone and they might not convert forever.

This is bad for anyone who wants to scale their business in the future. The logic is sound -- better CTR leads to lower bids and more clicks and therefore, more profit. But an alternative method is to create a different ad group to hold those keywords that you would've deleted. We'll talk more about that in the next method.

Method #2 - Creating Ad Groups For Failing Keywords

Right off the bat, this system makes more sense. This way, you aren't removing your potential for profit-generating keywords. Instead, you can place your keywords with a low CTR or those that don't convert well into one or more separate ad groups where you can try different ad copies and bid amounts to test whether the keywords work.

The drawback to this method is that you might end up keeping keywords that will eat your profit up and never convert. Additionally, keeping keywords that generate a lower CTR will decrease the overall CTR of your campaign and therefore, decrease your QS (quality scores). On Google AdWords, the QS of one ad group in a campaign apparently affects those ad groups in the same campaign (so I've read, correct me if I'm wrong). A solution to this might be placing those keywords in another ad group in another campaign and decreasing their bids down to the minimums. You might also put a lower spending limit on that campaign in order to prevent it from eating up your profits.

Method #3 - Keyword Graduation

So far, this is the best method I've heard of and used. It involves some work in order to maintain properly but the idea is simple and effective.

1. Create three campaigns (Level 1, Level 2, Level 3)
2. Start all ad groups off on Level 1 with your bids set large enough to generate clicks but not big enough to lead to profit consumption
3. As keywords begin to convert, copy their ad groups (just the ads) to Level 2 and move those keywords that convert. In those ad groups, set the maximum bids to a few more cents than you had them set for at Level 1.
4. As Level 2 keywords continue to convert, monitor their CTR. As CTR stays above 1%, begin duplicating the process for Level 3 (so that your top converting keywords with the highest CTR end up at the top): copy the ad groups (just the ads) to Level 3 and move those keywords that continue to convert with a high CTR as well.
5. As time passes, you'll monitor all three groups for these changes. Keywords from Level 3 might begin to drag the CTR of their ad groups down and you'll want to move these into Level 2 for adjustment. Keywords from Level 2 might begin to generate a higher CTR and you'll want to move them up to Level 3. Those keywords that stop converting altogether, you'll want to move down to Level 1 and start the process all over again.
6. Additionally, you can maximize profit by putting a step-system on campaign budgets for all three levels. For example, you might make the daily budget for the Level 1 Campaign set to $100, Level 2 to $1000 and Level 3 to no budget at all. This way, your Level 1 keywords will never get out of hand on a daily basis, your Level 2 will have room to generate profits but won't get out of hand if things go south and Level 3 has as much room to grow as it needs.

As you can see, it does require some seriously involved work but you'll end up with an amazingly efficient Level 3 group and an official process for "trimming the fat" and "tweaking" your keywords and ad copies.

Conclusion

Although I'm sure there are many other methods that work, these are the methods I've heard of/read about and had the chance to test on my own. As I mentioned, if I hear about additional methods, I will place them here so check back every now and then if you're interested in maximizing your profit.

Here's to millions.

Scott

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Thanks,
Scott

In general, the formula I use for determining max bid is basically this:

((ecpc * (1 - bounce rate)) - 0.01)

So if your ecpc is $0.75 and your bounce rate is 40%, that means you really generate $0.45 ecpc. Subtract $0.01 from that ($0.44 ecpc) and you'll have a very safe maximum to set your keyword bids at.

Just so everything is clear for you, here are some definitions for the above terms:

ECPC (Estimated Cost Per Click) - This is the estimated dollar amount you receive per click. Essentially, it's [Revenue] / [Clicks]. Although it can seem tempting to just use this number when determining your max spend, it's dangerous as this number can often be wrong due to a high bounce rate.

Bounce Rate - Put simply, this is how many people visit your landing page but don't click on your affiliate links. In general, this probably doesn't apply to forwarded links or framed pages but it's still good to figure out. To figure out what your bounce rate is for a given landing page, just look at how many clicks you've paid for vs. how many your ad network (Azoogle, Neverblue, Copeac, etc.) tells you you've received. For example, if you're using AdWords and Azoogle together, AdWords might tell you you've paid for 100 clicks while Azoogle will tell you it's registered 60. If this is the case, your bounce rate would be 40%.

Of course, this isn't the only method to use when setting bid prices but it's what I use in general. I hope it helps.

Scott

Maximum Bid Calculator

eCPC:

Bounce Rate:
Max Bid: $0.00

Bounce Rate Calculator

PPC Clicks:
(how many clicks you paid for)
Network Clicks:
(how many clicks Azoogle, Neverblue, CJ, etc. show)

Requirements

• PHP
• Apache
• Affiliate Link

Description

What you're going to do is create a couple of lines (if they don't exist already) in your .htaccess file. Then you're going to create a PHP file that the lines will point to and then you'll create your links. Easy as pie.

Step 1

Create a file called jump.php (located in your root web folder) and place the following code inside-

jump_php.txt

Step 2

Open or create and then open your .htaccess file (located in your root web folder). Once you have it open, place the following code inside-

jump_htaccess.txt

Once you've done that, save the file to your website and close it.

Step 3

Wherever you'd like your cloaked affiliate links to be, you can code them like this:

<a href="/jump/growersflowers.com">GrowersFlowers.com</a>

o

<a href="/jump/christmas_trees">Christmas Trees</a>

And they will end up looking like this:

GrowersFlowers.com

Christmas Trees

So there you go. Your links are cloaked and no one will be the wiser!

Good luck.

-Scott