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."

First off, we have the free $50 in clicks for Google Adwords (courtesy of the Volkswagen). This only works for new accounts, so make the most of it.

Second, we have the free $25 for Yahoo! Search Marketing. Again, this is only for new customers, so use it wisely.

Third, we've got the free $50 Microsoft Adcenter coupon for new customers only.

I just saved you $125 in ad spending. The least you can do is give affiliate marketing a try, now that it's free.

Don't worry, it won't bite. Not that hard.

But seriously, if you do use it, tell me how it goes. That would make an interesting follow-up post.

Scott

And in more ways than one. If you've been hiding under a rock this morning, you might not be aware of the fact that Microsoft is throwing a $44.6 BILLION dollar offer at Yahoo in hopes to acquire their search engine and all the benefits that go along with it, such as YSM (Yahoo! Search Marketing). Not to mention, with Yahoo in their pocket, Microsoft would now be an even more looming threat to the Google gods.

Besides the blow to the ego this must be for Yahoo, it's just another blow they've sustained since the recent downturn of the economy. Yahoo is reported to have said that they're going to lay off 7% of their work force (1,000 people). That spells trouble.

So why am I posting about this, you might wonder. Well, this will have a great impact on our beautiful little affiliate marketing industry. Now, instead of three big competitors and lots of little fish, there will be a big two.

While this might normally be good, I honestly doubt the battle will be between customer service departments (meaning, their customer service on both sides will still suck the big one). It will probably be some place on either platform that will annoy us all.

Of course, who knows, perhaps some good will come of this. Both services (Adwords and YSM) have no where to go but up in terms of interface, so maybe we'll see an improvement there. Still, I can't help but wonder where this will lead. Perhaps this will end up where everyone says it's going -- an all out war between Microsoft and Google. The rumored Google OS is a pending threat to the clunky Microsoft OS line and could strike a deadly blow to Gates's empire.

Maybe that's just what we need.

Free

It's a long shot, but hey, it's the perfect price. I believe that any software worth having should, at the very least, have a free package amongst its paid packages that doesn't limit you too much to use on a small-time basis but limits you just enough so that you eventually do have to upgrade if you become a more intense user. Oh and also, I don't mean a timed trial. When I say free, I mean free for the long-haul baby. Any perfect keyword tracking software would have to start out FREE.

Live Statistics

And I mean LIVE baby, like right now! This goes several ways, from spend sources to revenue stats to visitor stats. When I want to know what my spend stats are for a particular PPC source, like Adwords, I have to log in and run a report to get my most up-to-date spend stats for the day. When I want to see how much I've earned, I have to log in to my statistics application that I developed myself and when I want to see live visitor data--well--I can't ... yet. Having live statistics from all my sites would, in turn, allow me to have a central location for all my information and that's a beautiful thing. Any keyword tracking software worth its salt would need live statistics polled, say, every ten minutes or so. That way all my graphs would be up to date.

Graphs, Charts & Reports (Oh My)

What good are stats if I can't see them graphically? What if I'm a visual learner? I need graphs, baby! Pretty ones, too. If you're going to build that perfect keyword tracking system, it had better have graphs ("wow" looking ones). Then, what if, at the beginning of a new year, I need to print out all my data for tax purposes? I need exportable reports. Yeah, I'm talking about CSV, Excel and the like.

Easy-To-Implement Code For Landing Pages And Such

My biggest peeve with every keyword tracking system I've used so far, mainly affiliate radar, has been its implementation. Although it's not impossible to figure out, it lacks that ease of use that would take it to a godly status. Face it, most affiliate marketers aren't developers or even HTML jockeys to say the least, so the best bet would be to make something really easy to implement -- something like Google Adsense code. And the site would have to SHOW us how to place the code, preferably with videos!

Video Tutorials

How awesome are video tutorials? They make learning fun and easy. Hell, I love to make them in my spare time and post them up on Youtube (check them out here), so it can't be that difficult to make tutorials on the keyword tracking website and all the bullet point features. Also, it makes the site look less enormous and daunting if you see someone else actually using the site the way it's intended to be used.

Security

The last thing I need as an affiliate marketer is to worry about people stealing my keywords, looking at my landing pages and basically stealing my business model for the campaigns I run. Additionally, I don't want to have to worry about the people who run my site looking through my financial data or about the site being hacked and random people gaining access to my data. This means strong security measures have to be in place for data storage and the site owners would need some kind of absolute accountability to its public. How that would happen, I do not know.

One more note on security. At the landing page level, keywords would have to be encrypted as well so that random affiliates and affiliate managers will keep their grubby fingers away.

Customer Service

This kind of goes without saying, but I felt I should include it anyway. Customer service is always a must to at least provide some kind of sense of "I care"-edness to the service, even if they don't. It gives the customer the sense that they are actually helping to turn the gears of action to get them what they want, even if the customer service rep is merely a middle man between the person and a FAQ list and eventually, a trouble ticket form. Sometimes you just need a live person.

Web 2.0 Hotness

Is it too much to ask for the site to be strikingly handsome? That's right, if I'm going to be married to this site for the long haul, I want it to be pretty for as long as possible--just like my wife (thanks Sarah). That means, it has to not only look great but also carry web 2.0 functionality with it. Just enough, but don't get carried the *!#% away (Yahoo! Search Marketing, you know who I'm talking about). AJAX is a feature not the main show, baby. Just keep it fresh.

Auto Stop Losses

This is a feature I've been scheming up in my head since I started. I figure, since this dream keyword tracking software can already tap into the back-ends of my PPC sites (like Adwords, YSM and Adcenter), it should be able to turn my campaigns on and off based on my current profit standing. As affiliate marketers, we all have those days where a campaign that is normally doing great decides to put on its ugly face and turn on us. Not to mention when we were first starting out and didn't really know what the hell we were doing and lost $5,000 within the first month (sorry Sarah).

Just imagine-- if you could put in a "stop loss" amount of, for example, $50.00 and the system would constantly monitor your stats and automagically shut the proper campaign(s) down as soon as it noticed you were $50.00 into the negative. How cool would that be?

Of course, you wouldn't want to set some small number as your "stop loss" as there are times when campaigns that are breaking even temporarily dip into the negatives and then shoot into profit; however, you wouldn't want to set it to a number that is too high either as it can take search engines a while to stop showing ads even after you've turned them off. Overall, I think you get the point.

Auto Suggestions

With the right statistical data, this hypothetical system could make suggestions about whether or not to look for new keywords for the campaign, remove non-converting keywords, ditch the campaign, adjust spending on the campaign, try different ads on the campaign, etc. Not only would this be an insanely awesome tool for n00bs, it would help seasoned affiliates maximize their profits and learn new tricks here and there to apply to new campaigns.

Centralized Advertising System (CAS?)

Going back to the idea of a central location for live data, why stop there? While we're at it, we might as well allow affiliates to stop using the clunky interfaces of Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter and start using the ONE interface for the keyword tracking software. For what, you ask? Well, for creating/managing ads and keywords of course! How many times have you been inside your YSM Panel and thought "Dear god, what monkey built this thing?" You aren't alone.

Once and for all, there should be an intuitive system for adding keywords and distributing them across ad groups in such a way that maximizes efficiency. Also, as affiliate marketers, we use individual ads across multiple ad groups. Why not use one ad and apply it to multiple ad groups instead of creating the same ad over and over and over?

This would be the mother of all features but if done right, would revolutionize this business.

Email Collection (Aweber Style)

While it's in the business of hanging out on our landing pages, the software might as well have an option for collecting e-mails in an Aweber-like fashion. That is, it would pop up with a box or hang out somewhere on the landing page and ask people to sign up on the mailing list. Then it would have follow up messages and the ability to broadcast without being spammy. Don't get me wrong, I love Aweber but if some software could centralize all my affiliate tools, I'd be there in a heart beat.

Click Tracking (CrazyEgg Style)

Although CrazyEgg does an incredible job, live click tracking is just a cool feature to have. Google Analytics is also a great tool for this kind of thing, I know but wouldn't it be cool (once again) to be able to manage all of your affiliate-related tools in one place? On top of that, the software could suggest strategic placement based on clicking hotspots to maximize revenue. Just a thought.

Conclusion

I know there are POS's (pieces of software) out there that already do some of the things I mentioned but I have yet to find one that does all of them or even most of them. Someone out there has to be willing to build such a monster and when they do -- game over. I will be MAD RICH. Until then, I am just making a decent living.

But I can dream.

Essentially, the Volk touches on how he's kept campaigns in profit with Microsoft AdCenter while he's tried to figure them out on AdWords and the like:

You’ll see my posts on Adcenter on Digitalpoint have always been in favor that Adcenter’s conversions were always par or better. In fact I used Adcenter to keep some campaigns going in the profit while I tried to figure out how to make the adwords campaign profitable.

Overall, I generally use the same keywords from my other campaigns and just transfer them over to adcenter. It seems to work well enough.

None the less, my experience has been different and I still haven't experienced any real turnaround from AdCenter. In my opinion, they still suck eggs.

Well fast forward to now where it takes about 12-24 hours to get your keywords and junk approved, I must say I am thoroughly disappointed.

It's not that I'm surprised about this being a Microsoft product, but more-so that the third runner in the PPC Search Engine battle would be so careless about their service. I mean, seriously, AdCenter has gotten worse rather than better. As Google and Yahoo strive to improve their service, make it faster, make the user experience better for the customers and the seller, Microsoft doesn't seem to give two shits either way. Just check out this graph from QuantCast:

As you can see, all three seem to be maintaining a steady flow of visitors. But if you look closely, Yahoo is slightly losing traffic; Google is slightly gaining and Microsoft has a slow but steady drift down, down, down.

Is this any real surprise to me? No! Because they are sucking harder than a dyson (as stated in my clever title). If they're so terrible on the advertising side, it's no wonder they're sucking eggs on the search side.

I don't have much more to rant about other than to say: MICROSOFT, for the love of all that is holy, STOP SUCKING.

Thank You,

Scott Weaver

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)

• Choosing Offers
• Landing Pages
• Mailing Lists
• Advertising
• Funding
• Conclusion

First off, you should register with AzoogleAds if you haven't already. Next, you should get very familiar with the interface. Once you've checked both these things off your list, it's time to choose your offer(s).

Choosing Offers

Choosing the right product is probably the second hardest part of affiliate marketing, next to advertising. There's definitely no right answer when it comes to choosing products, and in general, I like to test every product I come across. Honestly, that's the best way to determine which products actually work for you to sell. Just think, if you could test every product you saw, you might find just 5 that convert profitably and you'd already be in business.

The downside to this way of choosing is that it requires a decent investment. There's no way you can do a good job of testing a few hundred offers without spending at least a few hundred per day and the sad part is that it's just not realistic for most people who are just starting out, unless you've got ungodly amounts of free traffic. Most people will be using PPC (Pay Per Click) to generate their traffic, which makes this idea very difficult.

So instead of choosing all products at once, you should start from the top and work your way down. That's right, even if the payout on the offer is $1.00, you should test it. I can tell you from experience that you really will never know unless you try. Some of my best campaigns running right now are for offers that pay less than $2.00 per lead. Not all will convert profitably, but some will and those are the ones we're counting on.

On the other side of the token are the more expensive offers. You might think it's best to just run the expensive offers, but then, so does everyone else. So this automatically creates a very high-competition environment and therefore, increases minimum bid prices tremendously for PPC. What that means is that searches that would normally require a $0.10 minimum bid to stay active are more likely to cost upwards of $1.00 (MINIMUM) to stay active. Some bids are set at $5 and higher for the top positions, so you have to really know what you're doing to make these work. Or you have to be really lucky. Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do ya? Most people aren't, so I advise you to wait until you get much better at what you're doing until you think about attacking the offers that pay $50+/lead. Everything else is fair game.

Landing Page, Frames and Redirects, Oh My

Choosing whether to use landing pages or another method depends solely on the product itself. There are some products that work very well just being framed, but keep in mind you have to make sure the company you're selling the product for allows framing. As a general rule, if you don't see it stated on the website, you should definitely ask directly and only set up a framed page if they allow it.

Redirects would be great in a world where search engines didn't care how a customer gets to the product they like, but unfortunately they do. You can try redirects out for a while but as sure as the sky is blue, the search engines will check each link you have over time and eventually, you'll see your bids sky rocket. What they're great for is short-term testing of offers before you get an actual landing page.

Landing pages are generally your best bet for increasing your chances of making a sale (in most cases). The reason for this is that they allow you to pre-sell the product from a personal perspective and add information you think is vital for the sale, vs. just having the potential customer wander around aimlessly. You can tell them exactly what to do to get what they need. True, it takes time to make landing pages and if you aren't particularly gifted at it, it can get expensive to have other people make them for you, but for $50 you can get a decent landing page that will most likely earn that much back within a few days. Of course, if you don't feel like shelling out $50 for a landing page, you can always "borrow" other peoples' landing pages but you should only do this short-term while you're modifying it to look unique. People don't like duplicates and neither do search engines. One thing I like to tell people is that they can always use software like WordPress to create their landing pages, especially if they're doing something like a review site where there are multiple reviews. Each review can be its own post and that way, you don't have to do all the messy coding.

One word to the wise- Azoogle generally doesn't like websites with free hosting. The idea behind this notion is that free websites are generally supported with ads and provide a bad end-user experience and our goal as affiliate marketers is to provide the best experience for the end-user as possible so that they're more likely to complete a sale and stay happy with it.

Mailing Lists

Another benefit to having a landing page is being able to collect opt-in emails from your visitors. Using a service like AWeber (www.aweber.com), you don't have to come up with any coding (they provide it for you) and you can send out mail blasts that don't take up any of your server resources. That and everything is handled for you as far as opt-outs and things of that nature. Personally, I use AWeber for all my mailing lists because their service is second to none.

To set up email collection on AWeber, just set your mailing list up (give it a name and a reply email) and then go to 'Get HTML' for that particular mailing list. You can choose from a hover-over form, a pop-up form or an inline form (one you can just place anywhere you want on your landing page). On this blog, I've placed just such a form on the top right so I can keep people updated on the latest and greatest on Affiliate Marketing, but you might do the same thing to keep people posted on (for instance) Christmas Tree products.

So why would you want to collect emails? Well, just think-- if you spend $0.25/click getting people to your site, would you rather settle for one sale or would you rather have the chance to sell to them twice, three times or more? Exactly. If you collect emails from your visitors, that means they are obviously interested in what your landing page has to say and they will most likely be interested in similar offers. If you were to get, for example, 1000 emails and you have a 1% conversion rate per broadcast that means a $10 product will get you $100 for.. wait for it.. FREE! That's right, if you aren't collecting emails, you are losing business, period.

Additionally, with AWeber you can set up what are called Follow Up Messages. Essentially what these are are pre-written messages that go out on specific intervals after the sign up of each person. Put simply, when a person signs up they would get an email right away (the first follow up message), then maybe 5 days later they'd get another message from you, and another 5 days after that. You specify the wait in between messages.

One more thing AWeber allows you to do is create dynamic messages. All that means is that instead of writing one person's name, you'd put in a place-holder for their first name and AWeber will automatically fill it in for you when it sends out each message.

Sure, there are other services like AWeber but I've tried several and none of them compared to it. So my advice to you is to go get your account right now.

Advertising

If you have little to no experience with advertising, it can all seem very daunting at first. True, there are a lot of parts to get used to but once you're familiar with the general process, you'll find it's really easy. In general, search engines are the best place to advertise, so I'll cover the basics here. When people talk about PPC (Pay Per Click) they're most likely referring to search engine traffic that you pay for.

For those just getting started, I recommend steering clear of Google AdWords as it is very easy to spend a lot of money there without getting much in return. Instead, I tell people to try Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft AdCenter. What they lack in traffic, they make up for in consistency. It's far easier to keep your ads up and running with YSM and AdCenter than with AdWords.

With that said, there are several key points you should know before you sign up with any of these search engines:

• They take your money up front, which means you need a funding source before you've made any money. This can be the downfall of your business if you don't do it right (more on this later).
• If you don't maintain a high CTR (Click Through Ratio) on your ads, they will show less and less often until they stop getting displayed, so it's important that you watch this.
• They aren't something you can set-and-forget; ads and keywords take finesse and tweaking and interests change over time, so don't get locked into the mindset that you can just let them run forever.

Besides that, there are some basics you should know about their systems. The grouping hierarchy of these ad networks goes like this:

Campaign > Ad Groups > Ads & Keywords

That is to say, each campaign can have many ad groups and each ad group can have many ads and keywords. Simple enough, right? Right.

Ads are triggered when people type the keywords (e.g. 'christmas trees') into search engines. Ad Groups exist to group specific keywords that will display the same set of ads. Campaigns exist (in general) to group Ad Groups and to set a daily/monthly spending limit for that group of ads. That's basically all there is to it.

Here's an example of a way you could organize a campaign for Summer.

Say you want to limit the campaign to $50/day. You would create a campaign called 'Summer Sales' and set the spending limit to either $50/day or $1500/mo.

Then you might create an ad group for 'swimming pool quotes' that would house all your ads that are specific to quotes for swimming pools and in that same group, you would add different variations on keywords that you think people would type into search engines to find swimming pool quotes (e.g. 'swimming pool quotes', 'pool quotes', 'new swimming pool', 'inground swimming pool', etc.).

The next thing you would do is set a maximum default bid for the keyword group (say $0.10/click), which means that the maximum you are willing to spend on any given click is $0.10. Additionally, you can set individual bid prices on keywords to anything you want. The idea here is that the more you spend, the closer to the first ad position for a given search your ad will be. You should be aware that the higher your CTR (Click Through Ratio) is, the higher your quality score will be and the higher your quality score, the less you have to pay to stay in any given ad position for a search term. Always keep this in mind when creating your ads: the more people click, the less you pay in the long run.

One last thing you should be highly aware of when creating ads is that there are two different types of traffic you can get from a given search engine: content and search. The content side of the network is made up of thousands of websites and in general, this is poor quality traffic. The reason for this is that a lot of clicks on these types of ads are accidental and so you will pay for them but they will most likely not lead to sales. My advice to you is to only use the content network when necessary. However, the search network is great for targeted traffic. People go to search engines when they're interested in finding something to buy and that's exactly where you want to be.

Funding

Where you get your money to pay for advertising is completely up to you and far be it from me to interfere, but should you use credit to pay for your affiliate marketing business, I have a couple of tips for you.

First and foremost, make sure you have enough money to cover your advertising expenses times two. So if you are planning on spending $3000 in a month, make sure your credit can handle $6000 or more. The reason for this is that services like Yahoo! Search Marketing will pad how much they charge you to cover your money. Essentially, they want 3X your daily spend in your account at all times. So if you are averaging $100/day, they are going to want $300 in your account at all times so any time your account dips below that much, they will charge you until they're back above that point. That's just how they roll, so be prepared.

Secondly, hammer your affiliate manager until they give you net 15 payments (payments every 15 days). The official way to do this is to write them an email requesting net 15 payments so that your business can thrive and you can drive even more sales for them. As long as you've actually done some sales, they will usually allow it and you can pay your credit card off.

Also, make sure you pay attention to your ending balance for the payment period on your credit card. THAT is the amount you should pay off when you do get paid from Azoogle, not the whole balance. To the best of my knowledge, you won't get charged if you pay that amount off before the due date.

Conclusion

When you put it all together, you will start to see the dead presidents piling up (mostly George Washington at first). Now that you're armed with the knowledge and a starting point, go out there and kick the tires and light the fires, baby. Remember, you should never stop researching and you definitely need to go deeper than I've gone here to really understand the process.

I hope you put this knowledge to work for you. Let me know when you start earning the money. I'd love to hear about it.

- Scott