PPC Fool » Pay Per Click Resources

So, what do you do …?

Dave — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:28:53 +0000

If you have been in this game for awhile, you will inevitably have to answer the question, what do you do for a living? I always kind of balk at this, because a majority of the time I will have to go down the path of explaining what affiliate marketing is, using google adwords, ‘how it works’, etc… and it gets kind of repetitive, especially when you get that stare like, that doesn’t make sense.

How easy it would be if I could say, a doctor, lawyer, engineer, IT consultant, architect, etc … but working as an affiliate is kind of vague isn’t it? When explaining it, I usually refer to amazon, as they were one of the pioneers of affiliate programs. I explain to them when they are surfing the web and they see an amazon book on a website, well if they click on that book it leads them to amazon, and if they buy, the website owner gets a commission etc… If that doesn’t work, then I will talk about one of the myriad of offline referral type companies and referral commissions, refer a friend to your bank = get $25, car insurance referral = get a free gas card, etc…

That being said, I still have to answer the question, What I do for a living. I’ve used the following in describing my profession:

I’m an affiliate marketer
I sell things online
I manage websites
I own an online media company
I own a home business
I’m an entrepreneur
I own an internet business

I’m ready for a new one now, so if you have any ideas, share.
(and no not a spammer )

In relation to the last post, google credited my account, THANK YOU!

From food stamps to 6 figures …

Dave — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:55:45 +0000

If you’ve never heard of Jeff Walker, his name is synonymous with very successful product launches. Anyways, he has a video out about a guy who went from food stamps to six figures with a tiny list in a very obscure product niche.

Interesting to say the least. If you have a list of your own, own a product, or are thinking of creating your own product, you should really check out this video. I’ve had a chance to look at some of his material and it’s pretty solid. Just wanted to throw this out there for you guys who are going down this path. Watch the video here

I have some plans to develop my own product …. someday, it’s just that I got a million other things to do before that

Don’t Launch a Campaign Late at Night

Dave — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:23:17 +0000

So I was up late last night working on a test campaign to get it going. As usual Adwords Editor was taking its sweet time to upload the campaign, after I had finished the keywords and ads. It was fairly late around 1am and I was sleepy, for some reason I get more done late at night

Well, I woke up this morning to find out I was over $700 in the hole! In my rush to finish I forgot to disable the search network as this was suppose to be a content only campaign. That little check box cost me a pretty penny. I hate to lose money, so any amount is not fun.

Yeah I could have had a lower budget, but content is usually slower to be approved so I figured by the time I wake up it would have just got going. Unlike search where it is usually pretty fast for me.

Moral of the story is don’t get sloppy when launching campaigns. I think I’m going to write up a pre-launch checklist just because of this as there are a handful of things that should be checked.

5 Things You Can Outsource Right Now!

Dave — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 18:01:35 +0000

With everything competing for your time, it can be smart to outsource your work. Especially those tasks which are tedious, time-consuming, and the ones that you are not very good at. Below are 5 things that can be outsourced with not too much effort. Remember, the whole purpose is to free your own time so you can be more effective…

1. Content, Copy, and Blog Posting

This is the easy one. Writing copy and content for your affiliate sites and blogs is something you should not be doing. (Except for your personal blogs of course ). Hire someone, at $5 – $10 a post or article, this is money well spent. Try elance, getafreelancer, or guru.

2. Graphics, Images, and, Design

Setting up your site or landing page is another good task to pass along. Let someone else fool with the CSS formatting, and finding the perfect image for your header. Apart from the previous 3 sites I mentioned, 99designs is another good resource.

3. Programming or Anything Excel/Data Related

Extracting keywords over the web, formatting them nice and pretty, or other excel macros or tools can save you boatloads of time. I have this one little tool built for me that takes all my keywords, ads, and text, and with the push of a button, makes them ‘upload ready’ for Adwords editor with split test ads and all.

4. Bookkeeping

Yes, this is sensitive data, but keeping track of your daily costs, revenues, profits, etc … can take up a lot of time. Choose a more reputable firm for this, I’ve heard good things about brickwork, personal friday, and tasks everyday. Or you can just hire your wife

5. Accountant/CPA

This is probably the most important hire you can make. Having a CPA to do your taxes is a huge load off your shoulders. Not to mention how much money they can save you. You will probably want to go local for this so you can visit and talk in person. Also, if they can help you setup your business entity, it makes it much easier for you come tax time.

Yes, with all outsourcing there is a learning curve, and you will probably hit and miss a few times. But taking this step can really cause your business to grow! Be interested to know what other crucial tasks you guys outsource …

Important Factor in a PPC Campaign?

Dave — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 06:09:43 +0000

Ok guys I wanted to do another poll that I thought would be interesting. What would you say is the most important factor in a successful PPC Campaign?

Please vote below:

Most Important Factor in a Successful PPC Campaign ( polls)

Apart from the individual, everything should have been covered, but if I blatantly left something out, just let me know, and I’ll add it in there so vote!

7 Useful Firefox Plugins for the Affiliate

Dave — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 17:41:28 +0000

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you most likely use Firefox. Along with using firefox comes all these neat little extensions that you can “plugin” to make your life easier and hopefully more productive. Below are just 7 of the most useful extensions I’ve found that help make our jobs as affiliates easier. I’m sure there’s dozens more, but this is just a start…

IE View
Haha, to start off, you should at least have the option of viewing your landing pages or sites in IE. This simple tool allows you to do that. Great for cross-browser testing. Not all sites look the same in Firefox vs. IE as you may have found out.

Going Global
Kudos to Dave over at Redfly Marketing for this handy plugin. Let’s you view google ads from anywhere in the world. Fully Customizable too. No more finding proxies on your own to view that ad running in Australia.

Web Developer Tool
This tool helps in building web pages and sites. Allows you to view source, CSS, as well as other useful tools.

Azoogle Toolbar
This is for you Azoogle lovers out there. You will need an account first (obviously). Just look under the tab Tools and you will see it. Allows you to view alerts, news and real-time stats of your account from a nifty little toolbar.

Screen Grab
Build up your swipe file of headlines and landing pages with this tool. Allows you to save a webpage as an image very easily.

SEO for Firefox
If you do any SEO, this tool can make your life much simpler. Includes a handful of parameters to display that are also customizable. Go ahead and test it out…

Live HTTP Headers
Shows you whats going on with your web browser behind the scenes.

These are just some I think are most useful. Would love to hear if you use any others that have helped you as an affiliate. I’m sure I missed some good ones…

What’s your Load Time?

Dave — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 05:09:36 +0000

For those of you who don’t know, just recently Google announced that Load Time would now be factored in to your landing page quality score. This is good for us who take action, as most people won’t bother doing anything. Check out what Google says about this:

* If graded Page loads slowly -> Quality Score = negatively affected.

* If graded No problems found -> Quality Score = not affected.

* If graded No problems found and marked Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region -> Quality score maybe positively affected.

See that? If your site loads above average, you may get a quality score boost! You can find this info on your keyword analysis page, the magnifying glass next to your keyword. Here’s a screenshot of one of my quality scores with load time included:

Not Just Quality Score

Having a speedy load time can also help your conversions. Yes, you may be blazing along the internet with your T4 connection, but not everyone is like you. When someone lands on your site and has to wait more than a few seconds to load, I can guarantee you will lose some visitors. Even I do this. If your site takes too long to load, bam I’m outta there. You can see how load time is evaluated here.

What causes slow load time?

Multiple redirects, multi-second meta refreshes, and large images/animation are the main culprits. Get rid of any redirects you may have pointing to your lander as well as those meta refreshes.

New Tool on PPCfool

AS for the large images you can check out my new tool. It’s under the tab Toolbox called the Load Time Analyzer. Just enter the URL and it analyzes your site for speed and tells you how big your images are.

Take those large images and shrink the size down. There are a handful of image shrinkers out there, I’ve been using this one. Let me know what you guys think …

Learn the lingo – Pay Per Click Glossary

Dave — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:42:49 +0000

Confused with all the terms that are thrown around with affiliate marketing or pay per click? What about the acronyms: CPC, CTR, CPA, etc …

Google adwords has their own Adwords Glossary and it can be helpful if you’re new to affiliate marketing.

Consider the terms:

Double Serving – Displaying more than one ad for the same company or person at a time.

CPM – This stands for cost-per-thousand impressions. A CPM pricing model means advertisers pay for impressions received

Opening Image – The opening image is the static image that will be displayed on your video ad before the user initiates the video. When a user clicks the opening image or the play button, the video component of the ad will be played.

Here are some other glossary lists you may want to check out:

Just a helpful resource …

CPC (Cost per click) Trends by Category

Dave — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:59:39 +0000

The chart below represents different verticals and their average cost per click from December to May of 2008. This data was provided by Efficient Frontier and was taken across multiple advertisers.

You can see that the CPC has risen for every category except for automotive. Surprise surprise … and that the biggest increases were in auto finance and the mortgage industry. Given the economy and the US appetite for debt it makes sense that the home and auto loan industries are getting more competitive. Efficient frontier states this is most likely due to seasonality …

I guess you could say there is no season for dating, since the CPC has stayed virtually flat across the 6 months listed.