I know I have taken longer than usual to post. I assure you I haven’t forgotten you. I don’t make regular posts usually like the other bloggers. I only write when I have nothing going on and lately I’ve been busy with lot of stuff and I need to put some time on my campigns as well now. I will make my 2nd post in the next week. So stay tuned.

Do you usually get discouraged seeing those nice graphic rich landing pages when you’re probably doing your keyword research or something? You probably say to yourself, “how the hell am I going to make those nice looking pages? There is no way I can compete with these guys with an ugly looking landing page that I have because I can’t never make a landing page as good as that“.

Wait! How do those top affiliates do it? They make their own landing pages? Are they really good at doing eveything?

How the big affiliates do it!

I’m sure you heard of the term “outsourcing” but have ever thought of outsourcing? You think these affiliates actually make their own pages? You would be surprised to know that most top affiliates are NOT tech savvy. What do is, outsource almost all their work to other people who specialize in their own field. They hire designers, programmers, SEO specialists, content writers, etc…basically a whole team of specialists to put together their website. All they are left to do at the end is to do the keyword research and launch their campaign and that is exactly what affiliate marketer should only be doing and that is why they’re are on top. They spend more time doing the real stuff while most other affiliates are scrambling to put together a half-assed looking landing page, scrappy content, incomplete keyword list and the same time worried about how much money they are going to spend this time around on PPC?

This is not how you do PPC. This is a real business. You need to start treating this as a real business, if you haven’t already. You need to start thinking big….yea, just like that guy in the picture here

Elance: The Outsourcing Portal

So you wonder now, where can I find graphic designers and programmers to make me those nice looking landing pages for cheap. The place is called elance.com.

Elance is a site where you find professionals like graphics designers, programmers, content writers and so on looking for work and buyers looking to hire these processional to do their work. Basically, Elance will manage your project and payments with the service provider. The process is simple.

The process in a nutshell…

1. First, you create a project (it’s free) in there, which is quite simple as writing a post.

2. Once the project is posted, people will start bidding on your project.

3. You then choose a bidder and award the project to your chosen bidder/professional.

4. They start the work.

5. When they are done they present the work to you.

6. If you’re satisfied, then you pay them through escrow.

The whole process is easy, safe and secure.

How cheap is outsourcing at Elance?

You can find professionals who will make a good landing page for about $100 or so dollars. This price is nothing compare to the headaches you will be saving. Moreover, you can easily find web content writers for $10 an article. Basically, you can have a landing page done for less than $200 and that my friend is a bargain because you know you would make that back very quickly.

If you don’t like the sound of that or if even that is too expensive for you, then I can suggest another place where you can actually buy already built landing pages. It’s called lptemplates.com. Landing pages here are as cheap as $10. The only trouble is, they are generic and you may end up with the same landing page as the next guy (edit: A single landing page is only sold 10 times and then replaced by another fresh one, which is good). It’s a still a good place if you don’t like to go with a custom solution.

At the end, the success of your campaign boils down to how much time you spent at doing the real stuff, that is, keyword research, niche research and later on tweaking your keywords and campaign for maximum profits. Isn’t that what the affiliate should be doing in the first place rather then spending countless hours learning how to make graphics or trying to understand CSS, PHP and other crap.

So, you are putting up campaigns after campaigns and can’t seem to generate a lead or more than few leads every time? One good rule of thumb is, you should do your keyword research before you do anything else…

These steps might help…

1. Compile a big list of what I call different “root” keywords. These root keywords are one to two words keywords from which you can compile a sub-list of 100s or possible even 1000s of more keywords.

Example: Say you are running a credit score/repair offer. You should have a list of all possible related and lateral “root” keywords like…

credit check
credit report
credit score
credit repair
credit help
credit fix
credit consulting
credit management
credit problems
no credit
poor credit
bad credit
etc

Amit Mehta of superaffiliatemindset.com has a more detailed process of how you can build this keyword list. Check it out here.

2. Take each keyword in the list (as your root keyword) and generate a list of keywords off of each keyword. Now each sub-list becomes a separate ad group in your campaign.

Hint: No, you don’t need any paid keyword tools for this. The free Google keyword tool should be enough for now.

3. Now create your customized landing pages related to you adgroups you created.

4. Create at least 2 ads for each adgroup.

5. Plug your keywords and ads in adwords or YSM.

6. Important: Set your bids higher than normal. Depending on the niche, when starting out always set your bids high.

If you don’t set you bids high then most likely half or even more than half of your keywords will NEVER show up on the first page, resulting in low impressions, low clicks and eventually poor quality score.

By bidding high, you are knocking off all the people on high positions. This gives you room to test your keywords, ad copies and landing pages. You accumulate enough data quickly to know what combination of keywords, adcopies ad landing pages are working. And that’s name of the game. Test Test Test. If you don’t bid high and lose money initially, you’ll never be able to figure out why things didn’t work.

7. Once everything is setup, let your campaign run for few days.

Advice: Stop checking your stats every 5 minutes. Forget about your campaign for few hours and find something else to do. When you check your stats every 5 mins. you are setting up yourself for disaster. Every time you see yourself losing money, you’re going to let your emotions/fear take over your brain. STOP altering your campaign like lowering your bids, deleting keywords or adgroups all together and messing up everything before you even have any stats to analyze the results. So let your campaign run for 4-5 hours on the first day before checking in. It is better to actually let it run at least 2 days before start altering anything.

8. Once you have enough data, clicks, leads, etc. go though each ad group one at a time. Look at the keywords that are costing you money. Do you think those keywords belong to another adgroup, may be those keywords need a separate ad group and separate landing pages. Try doing this before deleting those keywords.

9. Now look at the keywords that are making you money. Do what with them? NOTHING. Just leave them. With the combination of your ads and landing pages, they made you money for the first 2 days, chances are if you leave them they will stay keep making you profits. So you don’t have to do anything with the “good” keywords. What you should do is, compile more keywords similar to your winning keywords, create separate ad groups for them and test them the same way.

Final words…

So, now you tweak your campaign one adgroup at a time, weeding out bad keywords and expanding on winning keywords and keep testing. The whole process may take you one month, 3 months or more. My advice never, never rest, keep improving and expanding. Think of ways you can get your ROI higher. Nothing is instant, everything needs time so have be patient and do things the right way form the start and you’ll do fine.

Hope this was helpful.

How many times have you started a campaign just to see it fail in few days?

You may ask yourself - Now, why do my campaigns fail in the first place? The answer is simple. It’s a combination of fear of losing money, fear of failing and matter of giving up quickly before realizing its full potential.

The recipe of creating successful campaigns in any niche is basically the same when you look at it from the outside. Yes, every niche is different but the process of creating your PPC campaigns in adwords, Yahoo or MSN for almost every niche and offer is the same. Here’s what I mean….

Steps to take before launching a campaign:

1. Research Stage

Before blindly hammering keywords in adwords, research and compile a big list of ALL possible related and lateral keywords to your offer or niche. For more information, check out Amit’s post on keyword research.

2. Setting up adgroups

• Split your keywords into logical groupings/ad-groups - It doesn’t matter how many keywords you have in your ad group. Forget what you read on the internet about “only keep few keywords in your adgroups”. You just need to make your ad groups as tight as possible. It could mean 150+ keywords or 5 keywords. I have adgroups with 150 keywords and with as low as 5 keywords. It all depends on you niche and offer.
• Test all match types - Add broad, phrase and exact types in your adgroup. You need to test all match types. Broad match type will give you tons of traffic and in some cases it may also turn out to be more profitable as well. I have few adgroups where broad keywords are the lifelines of my campaign.

3. Keyword Tracking (most important step)

Before running your campaign, setup some kind of conversion tacking on your keywords. Yes, you need this. Don’t even think about it. Just do it!

4. Last Step - Running your campaign

Run your campaign for at least a week before you have substantial amount of data to analyze the results. Look at the keywords/adgroups that are costing you money. Take those out immediately. Keep the ones that are making profit and then compile even more keywords related to the winning keywords. Now just keep tweaking your campaign until you are satisfied with the return.

So, there you have it, a successful recipe in a nutshell for creating profitable campaigns from the get-go. Let me know your thoughts?

I’m going to talk about 2 easy ways you can track your keywords with Google Adwords and Yahoo’s YSM.

When I first started PPC marketing, I didn’t understand the power of tracking keywords, which is why I never got any campaigns off the ground. Tracking your keywords is a must or else you might as well just stop your campaign. Because ultimately without any keyword conversions data, you will not know what keywords are profitable and which ones are not. You need to weed out the ones that are costing you money and expand on the ones that are making you profit. It’s that simple.

Tracking Your Keywords for Ultimate Profits

Now, let’s talk about how to track your keywords. There are two ways:

Method 1: Placing your pixel code on conversion page - The simple and efficient way

Placing your Google or Yahoo tracking pixel code requires you to contact your affiliate manager or the advertiser asking them to place the code on the conversion page of the offer.

Where to get the pixel code:

Adwords: Login-> Campaign Summary -> Conversion Tracking -> Create New Action -> pick Lead or Purchase from drop down, name your action, enter the commission amount on the offer -> click Save Action and Get Code .

Once the code is placed on the conversion page of the offer, you will start seeing conversion data beside your keywords in Adwords. Now you will know what keywords are converting and which ones are eating up money.

Pros: I like this method better since its easier to setup and involves almost no work on my part. The conversion data you get back is accurate and easy to track.

Cons: It requires to have your AM your place your code on the offer page. If you work with networks like clickbank, you are required contact advertiser directly and not all advertisers will do that for you.

Method 2: Capturing search keywords using PHP code and subids - The Coding way

You can write simple PHP code to capture the exact search keywords people typed when they clicked on your ads.

The idea is to put the code in your landing pages, capture the search keyword and append the keyword as a subid to your affiliate URL.

Now let me show you the code and see how we set this up with both Adwords and YSM.

Tracking keywords using PHP code with Google Adwords:

1. In the destination URL of your ad copies, append the following text in red

http://www.your-landing-page-domain.come/?kw={keywords}

You’re telling Google to get the keyword user types and append that at the end like this…

http://www.your-landing-page-domain.come/?kw=blue+widgets

2. Now, we just use the follwing PHP code in our landing page to capture this keywords and append it as subid to out affiliate URL. <?php $kw = $_GET["kw"]; //get the search keyword user typed ?> <html> <body> <a href=’<?php echo “http://your-affiliate-url?sub=$kw”?>’ >Get Free Widgets Here</a> </body> </html>

Tracking keywords using PHP code with YSM:

YSM is bit different from Adwords. You don’t need to modify you ad destination URL like in Adwords. Yahoo will append the search keywords to your landing page URL itself as long as your have Tracking URLs on.

Turn on Tracking URLs in YSM:

YSM: Log into your YSM account -> Administration -> Tracking URLs -> Select Tracking URLs on -> Click Save Changes.

Yahoo now will append ?OVRAW=<search+keyword> query string to your landing page url containing the search keywords user typed when they clicked you ad. You can learn more about it here on Yahoo help pages
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/sps/screenref/16897.html

The PHP code for tracking keywords with Yahoo: <?php $kw = $_GET["OVRAW"]; //get the search keyword user typed ?> <html> <body> <a href=’<?php echo “http://your-affiliate-url?sub=$kw”?>’ >Get Free Widgets Here</a> </body> </html>

Pros: With this method you don’t need to run around after your AM or the advertiser to place your pixel code. You can basically track keywords on your end in your advertising network account. Your keywords will showup as subids. For example in your Azoogle affiliate account, you can pull up the sub id report to see the keywords.

Cons: Requires basic understanding of PHP coding on your part.