I recently did a post about ad qualifiers and how to filter your traffic. I basically stated getting a high CTR for the sake of CTR is not always a good thing. That being said, there are times when you may want to increase your CTR on some of your campaigns.

Shock Advertising

Believe it or not, there is a practice in the marketing world known as shock advertising.

Shock advertising is a type of advertising generally regarded as one that “deliberately, rather than inadvertently, startles and offends its audience by violating norms for social values and personal ideals.

Moving this to paid search, you just need to include some unusual or shocking words in your ad title or text to draw attention. How many times have you searched for something, only to see over half of the ads basically state the same thing? Boring. Having your ad stand out from the rest of the crowd can get you those extra clicks. Using uncommon words can sometimes do the trick.

Common Examples

Below are just some of the words that I’ve seen used. There is really an endless list to choose from, they don’t necessarily have to shock, it just has to be unusual and different.

• Exposed
• Scam
• Naughty
• Sneaky
• Secrets
• Wicked
• Yucky
• Disgusting
• Gruesome
• Fatal
• Jealous
• Traitor …

The trick is incorporating them into your ad text. I’ve really seen some off the wall ones, and don’t even want to put them up here. This is just to get your mind going, how you use them is up to you.

Caveats

Again, like I’ve said in the past if your pay per click CTR goes from 2% to 5% but your sales or leads don’t increase along with it, those are wasted clicks, assuming your adwords quality score stays the same.

Also, if you put words like scam or exposed in your ad title, your landing page better do a good job explaining this. If the visitor clicks and sees nothing related to a scam or exposed, they might get frustrated and leave your site. Something to keep in mind, before you start injecting shock words into your ads.

All in all, it couldn’t hurt to test this out. Setup a unique lander for some of the words you have in mind and turn them on. You could be in for quite a shock

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Just got back from Affiliate Summit in Boston. Great Experience and definitely glad that I went. If you’re new in the affiliate space, I’d highly recommend you try to attend at least 1 of these, if anything just for the networking.

The Summit

To be honest the exhibition and seminars were mediocre. It seemed the conference was more designed for the networks and the merchants. Maybe it was just me, I don’t know. I was able to speak to some of my affiliate managers which is great to put a face to the name. If I hadn’t already joined with a dozen or so networks, the exhibition floor would have been useful. I just didn’t want to sign up with anyone.

The Networking

This is what made the whole experience worth it. I’m not the most outgoing guy there is, but just to be able to talk to other affiliates was great. Here are just some of the people I got to talk, meet, and shake hands with:

• John Hasson
• Benny from GeekBlogger
• Zac Johnson
• The guys from Prosper 202
• Ian Fernando
• Eric Nagel
• Fellow Dallasite, Andrew Payne
• Wes from Masterless Samurai
• Charles from Art of Leads
• Jimmy Ramos from Somar Consulting
• and Paul from Uber Affiliate

I was looking for Jonathan Volk, but he seemed to be elusive. Anyways, being able to shoot the breeze and talk affiliate marketing was fantastic, can’t do that back home as I don’t know anyone who does this. Such a young and new industry. One thing I recognized is that most of the affiliates I met were either my age or younger. What does that mean? Cool though to see some very young and very successful guys.

Credit Card Roulette

On the last night at dinner, I introduced a game that I use to play when I was working (back in the day). Basically you just order whatever you want, and when it is time for the bill, everyone at the table takes out their credit card. Fan them like a deck of cards and then have the waitress pick one. The lucky card gets the bill. By the way … thanks for dinner Andrew Luckily there was only 4 of us…

All in all it was fun, good to be back though recharged to launch some new campaigns.

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Affiliate marketing first caught my eye back during the summer of 2005. Reading about driving traffic to websites for pennies on the dollar, I thought how hard can this be?? You know those ebooks that make it sound so easy … or maybe you don’t

My first campaign

Anyways, so I went over to clickbank to find a good product. (That was the only place I knew at the time, or so those ebooks told me). The first product I chose was Auto Lawn Sprinklers. Since it was the summer, I thought it was a good idea. (You can still promote this by the way, owner is a decent guy from what I remember).

After reading Perry Marshall’s adwords book, I gathered about 100 keywords, stuck them into some adgroups and turned it on. The impressions were coming but the CTR was abysmal, I think around 1%. I remember I thought I was a genius when I started placing question marks in my ad titles. This boosted my CTR to around 3-4% … I considered writing an ebook on that 1 trick alone but said “nah I’ll wait till I get some sales under my belt”

Not much luck

I made a handful of sales, but it was a slow bleed. I didn’t know about tracking or managing bids so I just stopped the campaign, one of my top 5 affiliate mistakes – not tracking. Anyways the rest of 2005 and 2006 I dabbled off and on promoting random clickbank products. Nothing really successful, but didn’t lose too much either. I couldn’t devote much time to affiliate marketing during these 2 years because I was finishing grad school, living in China, and preparing for my wedding in the fall of 2006.

My first Profitable campaign

In late 2006, I was now married, graduated, and living back in the good ole’ USA. I held off finding a job for the sole purpose of trying to earn a living from home. Affiliate marketing was actually a side project of mine, I was really wanting to trade the markets for a living.

How I got my first profits was really an epiphany. I had moved away from clickbank and was promoting more retail type products. This was new for me, so instead of bidding on the obvious core keywords I was bidding on their typos and phonetic misspellings. These clicks were extremely cheap .07-.08 a click. You can check out my keyword typo tool under the toolbox tab.

Paydirt!

1 keyword in particular was getting a nice return. I remember logging into my account 1 day, seeing $320 in commissions having only spent about $15! How’s that for a nice ROI?! This opened my eyes and I have been now doing it full-time for over 1 year. BTW, I still have that 1 keyword running, it’s not as cheap anymore because competitors have moved in, but it is still profitable.

It wasn’t until I moved away from clickbank and started developing my own landing pages that I began to see a good return in my pay per click campaigns.

After this, I began to join more affiliate programs, and test more offers. I currently have around 15 campaigns running, and now it seems it’s only a matter of testing around until you find something that works. You will lose money though, as risk is part of the game. Take it slow in the beginning, if you’re just starting out, don’t try to upload 10k keywords and let it loose in one shot, you’ll most likely quit in frustration. Build your campaigns out over time …

I hope this encourages you guys, just wanted to share my little story with you

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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 …

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Well my prize from Market Leverage arrived. It was from a recent contest I won over at Jonathan Volk’s blog. I got second place which landed me an Ipod Touch

They were also kind enough to send me a sports bag, 1 pullover shirt, 1 golf shirt, and a 2GB USB pen.

The Networks

Hmmm, I guess I should go and check them out, as I’ve yet to sign up for them. There is definitely no shortage of networks, offers, and affiliate programs that any person wanting to jump into ppc marketing can join. Some of the other networks that I’ve signed up with:

• Copeac
• NeverBlueads
• AzoogleAds
• Revenue Loop
• Xy7
• ModernClick
• Flux Ads

There are also a handful of smaller private networks as well as individual affiliate programs that I’ve joined with. I don’t recommend signing up for any and every network you see. That will add to the mass information overload, as everyday you will get new programs emailed to you, and the affiliate managers hounding you to promote their offers.

Start slow and start small, join 2-3 and check out their offers and pick 1-2 you like and go with it.

Incentives

I just got an email recently from FluxAds offering a $10,000 bonus if you can meet their criteria for 100 days. You might want to check that out. Also Zac Johnson, posted Market Leverage’s incentive this month as well, their double and triple play payout bonus.

So the networks are there, the incentives there, what else do you need?
Have a great weekend guys!!!