Well it doesn’t surprise me in the poll most important factor in a PPC campaign that keywords was voted the most important.

Research came in second, which should tell you guys who are just starting out how important the research step is. What did surprise me was to not see bid/keyword management with more votes. I would rank that up there with the others.

Weakest Link?

Anyways, now that you see all the components of a campaign. Asking a different type of question is what is your weakest link?

Look at each component of the campaign as a part of a whole process:

In manufacturing, the production runs as smooth, fast, and efficient, as the slowest part of the whole process or the weakest link in the chain. Something I learned in B School

I think it is similar with a pay per click campaign. Your campaign is as strong as its weakest link.

Did you do the research and compile a solid list of keywords but drop the ball on the landing page? Your campaign will show that. Or maybe you spend all the time on your landing page and ad copy but fail to do any research?

Something to think about …

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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:

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!

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Affiliate marketing can sometimes be a tough nut to crack. I know there are times when I get frustrated and a little down. So where do I look to for a little guidance? Yep, monkeys. Monkeys apparently have high IQ’s, so here are a few ppc tips that us humans can learn (This post is part of a group writing project put on by problogger.)

1. Start Small
If you are just starting out, don’t expect to become the 800 pound gorilla in your niche the first week. I’d suggest picking a smaller niche and getting a profitable campaign under your belt first. Then you can tackle the ringtones, dating, and financial offers. Also, build your campaigns out over time, add a few hundred keywords a day, to get the feel of how to manage the offer. Dumping 20,000 keywords into a campaign will just get you frustrated, not to mention a huge CC bill.

2. Do Your Research
I think one of the most overlooked keys to being a successful affiliate is the research. The niche, competition, offers, keywords, landing pages, etc… This can really make or break you. Spend some time going over each component of the offer. As you get more experience this step gets easier and quicker.

3. Split Test
You’d be amazed at how just the smallest changes can bring a losing campaign into a profitable one. Be sure to split test, if you’re not you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. I’ve literally seen conversions double from just 1 tweak. Test the ad copy, headlines, images, landing page copy, call to action etc… This is just part of the optimizing.

4. Use the Technology Given
Their are a handful of extremely useful tools that are available to the affiliate, lots of them free. Use them. Things like adwords editor, prosper202, keyword discovery, wordze, aweber, typo tool, etc. Take full advantage of these tools. They will not only make your life much simpler but can speed up the process of cranking out campaigns and better optimizing them.

5. Speak Their Language
It’s important on your landing page to speak the visitor’s language. Is your target customer young, old, mothers, dog owners, webmasters, etc … The more your landing page copy sounds like them the more they will listen. Also, pulling your keywords into your lander can really give conversions a nice boost.

6. Outsource
Being a one-man business can get overwhelming very quick. Easy to burnout. Two basic things you can outsource are web design and content. Most of my content and some design work as well as some keyword research I outsource. Plan out a campaign from start to finish and break it up into smaller tasks. This may give you some ideas at other areas you can possibly outsource. It’s helpful to focus on your strengths and hire someone else do the work in areas your weakest in. Use sites like elance, getafreelancer, and odesk.

7. Take the Plunge
You will never get anywhere if you don’t take any action. There will never be a perfect time when all the stars line up for you to start. You have to be willing to risk in order to succeed in this business. Don’t wait until tomorrow start TODAY!

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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…

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Google continues to hone in on Quality Score and just recently announced some changes coming in the next few weeks. Below are the three main changes that they plan to incorporate:

• Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query
• ‘Inactive for Search’ will no longer be used for keywords
• ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’

It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality score particularly the real-time calculation. It now seems Google will determine the right at the time of search if your ad is worthy enough to be displayed. Hmmmm …

Inactive for search disappearing is just another way of saying be prepared to pay a pretty penny if your want your ad to show. Doing away with the minimum bids is a smart thing. I never found that particularly useful. Moving to a first page bid can give you a better idea of what kind of competition you’re dealing with.

What does this mean?

All in all, if you have a solid site & landing page with relevant keywords and ads, business show continue as normal. Clicks may get even cheaper as some of your competitors drop off. Just hope that it’s not you Love to hear your thoughts on this, just thought I’d post this as the news came in …