Here are some examples of things I have read, that are just plain wrong.

• x traffic source sucks, no conversions.  Insert whatever traffic source you want here, and someone is out there saying it is terrible and doesn’t work.  While it is terrible for some, another person is making a killing with it at the same time.  The truth is many do work for certain cases, and you never know until you test for yourself.

• X niche is dead. Again, insert whatever niche you want here and there are people saying its too crowded, not crowded enough, not converting anymore.  The truth is, its probably working great for some people.

• You have to push rebills to make money in this industry. False. I don’t do any rebills and know plenty of other people doing really well that have nothing to do with rebilled offers.  Rebills are only a tiny fraction of the available offers.   There is a whole universe of offers out their besides the “hot” offers.

• You can’t do lead gen on facebook and social sites.  I actually saw someone stating this argument as a fact.  The fact is, when done right, social networks work extremely well for lead gen campaigns.  Whether that be local, regional, or national campaigns.

The bottom line is, you just can’t make generalizations about making money online because they don’t hold up.  The only constant I have found in the years spent doing this is:

Do research, pick a niche, set up some campaigns, test, track, optimize, test new traffic sources and repeat.

So don’t believe everything you read or hear.  Don’t even believe me :)  Just keep your head down and keep working.  You will succeed eventually.

Lead scrubbing is an important step to maintain the integrity of any offer or lead generation campaign.  It basically just means removing leads or sales that contain bogus, inaccurate, or incorrect information.  These leads are useless and kill the ROI for any campaign. There seems to be a lot of confusion over lead scrubbing.  Some affiliates think that it involves a network stealing leads from them after they have been reported,  but that is usually called lead shaving.  Lead scrubbing is a necessary step to make sure all leads or sales going to the advertiser or client are valid.   Without valid leads the advertisers doesn’t make money and closes the offer, and everyone loses.

Typical scrub rates vary for certain industries.  Mortgage leads usually average about a 15% scrub rate, while certain free offers can run 50% or more. Everyone wants to keep scrubbed lead rates as low as possible.  So how can you reduce the percent of leads scrubbed?

From the perspective of the affiliate:

Much of the lead scrubbing is done on the actual offer page, which is out of the hands of the affiliate.  But there are several things you can control to affect scrub rates of your traffic.

1.  Pre-qualifying your clicks is very important to weed out random clicks.

2.  Accurate demographic targeting is another.  By closely matching the  demographic of the person to the offer, you increase the chances of valid information.

3.  Correct GEO targeting.  If you send traffic from outside the accepted geographic area, the leads will be scrubbed.

4.  Using quality traffic sources.   Pay per click traffic will always yield lower scrub rates than un-targeted display traffic.

From the perspective of the advertiser or local lead gen:

If you are running a local lead gen or private affiliate offer, you want scrub rates as low as possible since you are paying for each lost lead.

Form validation is your first line of defence against bad leads.  There are 2 basic methods of form validation: client side (Javascript) and server side (PHP).  I prefer to use a mix of both.  The key is to validate every field as much as possible to not leave anything to chance for the user.  Check for blank fields, invalid entries, phone numbers, credit cards, invalid email addresses, URLs, invalid field lengths, numbers only, etc.  Basically you need to think of every possible way someone could mess up a form and get them to enter it correctly before they hit submit.   Proper form validation can make the difference between a successful offer and and failure.  It really is that important.   If you are running your own lead gen campaign, you also need to look at your traffic sources, as discussed above, to reduce scrub rates.

You can never get rid of scrubbed leads completely, but by setting up the forms correctly and sending quality traffic, you can greatly decrease scrub rates.

Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas is only 3 months away. This is the best Internet Marketing conference of them all. If you only go to one show per year, I would suggest choosing Affiliate Summit West.

You can use this exclusive code to get 10% off any registration: ASW10CDF10

Sign up early, because this show usually sells out. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone there.   I may even do some kind of informal meetup for readers of this blog.  (more on that later)

I also found this tip on twitter, where people are scoring rooms at the RIO for around $50/nite, instead of the standard $170/nite rate.

10% off registration, super cheap room: now you have no excuses!

Local lead generation can be great, but the biggest problem is that local can mean small markets and limited profits.  What really kicked my company into high gear was what I call direct lead generation. This is basically local lead gen on a national level.   To do this, we seek out companies that have a large regional or national footprint to partner with on private affiliate offers.   This allows the company to have a much larger advertising/marketing budget than a local mom and pop type business.

The ideal company to find would be a smaller national company with a limited online presence and no affiliate marketing program.  There are actually still a lot of companies like this out there.   Most of the time they are new to the whole performance based advertising concept.  It could be product based CPS, CPA, or straight lead gen, depending on the company.   You approach them just as you would a local business, but just on a larger scale.  It’s best to have proven case studies and a solid track record before approaching a large company.   They tend to go for hard data, not promises and hype.

Here’s a tip:  If you aren’t good at sales or just don’t like it (me), consider hiring a sales person to contact companies that you have targeted.   If you outsource design, coding, accounting etc, why not contract a sales guy?   A good sales person can be a huge asset to your business.  All you need is that one large account to take off.

There are obvious benefits to having an exclusive affiliate contract with a national company:  large budgets, national advertising reach for targeting, big volume, total freedom of advertising, etc.  The downside is that they are hard to find and take a lot of up front legwork to get established.    Up front work that you are not getting paid for…

But the rewards can far outweigh the risks and time investment.

So if you ready to take local lead gen to the next level, think national and go after some big fish!

Localization

It is said that all real estate is local.  I think the same will become the true for Internet Marketing.  I see pay per click, organic search, and social advertising all continue to focus more an more on local results.   Even national offers will be focused on individual local levels.  As competition increases for everything, the more local the results for the particular end user, the better.

Vertical specific networks

I see general affiliate networks being less and less relevant as time goes on, due to their obvious challenges.   On the other hand, vertical specific networks are on the upswing.   These networks are tightly focused on one niche or demographic and therefore able to serve that niche more efficiently and thoroughly.   By focusing on one market segment, you can usually dominate your competitors who have limited knowledge of your niche and these types of networks are proving that.

Mobile space + Pay per call

I am really bullish on this concept.  With the current and projected explosion of commerce in the mobile space, and the recent advances in pay per call tracking and processing, this is going to be huge.   Just imagine the benefits of being able to integrate an affiliate or lead gen offer on a mobile with a pay per call solution (rather than a bulky web based transaction) .  You as the marketer, get the super high conversion rate of a 1 touch action.  The advertiser gets the hugely increased back end conversion from their human sales force.  This is still in the very earliest stages, but I am putting significant resources into this concept.

These are just a few examples, there are many many more.   What trends do you see emerging for Internet Marketing in the future?

The conversions optimizer

If you run conversion tracking and have had 15 conversions in the last 30 days, you are eligible to turn this feature on. Once enabled, it allows you to bid at the adgroup level on a per action basis. You are still paying CPC, but behind the scenes Google is working its magic to combine your target CPA with quality score, and predicted conversion rate. Instead of simple bid management, like we are all used to, the optimizer is running mulit-dimensional bidding to squeeze a higher ROI from your campaign. The beauty of the system is, all you have to do is turn it on.

Google says the average user increases conversions by 21% increase, and decreases their CPA cost by 14%. That is a phenomenal result which can really take your campaign to the next level. I have seen results even better in my own campaigns using this feature. It literally takes about 60 seconds to make this change.  Just go to the settings tab, bidding and budget, then click edit bidding option.  Accept the proposed bid amounts, and your done.

Opportunities

The Opportunities tab is the central place for keyword and budget optimization ideas generated by Google. These ideas are automated by Adwords based in your campaign performance data and trends. They are usually updated weekly depending on the volume of your campaigns. Adwords has done all the work, so all you have to do to implement the ideas is check a box and hit apply. The ideas proposed are pretty accurate and relevant whenever I have used them. I check this tab all the time for new changes. This optimization also takes about 60 seconds.

If you haven’t tried these simple steps, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.   With only a 2 minute time investment, they are worth checking out.

That being said, all you can really do is look at real data gathered from certain tests to make the best determination possible.  So here is one case study of nearly identical campaigns running on the big 3 PPC networks.

The campaign is for a company in the travel industry and has been running for 6 months with good volume so the data is statistically valid.  It’s a relatively simple campaign going after mostly short tail keywords.  About 15 adgroups with 10 keywords each.  The landing pages and conversion processes are exactly the same for all.

For this particular niche, Yahoo has been out-converting the other networks.  It was 14.8% higher than Bing, and 60% higher than Google.  It also has the lowest cost per conversion.   Google had the highest volume, followed by Yahoo and Bing.

As I said before, this is just one case study,  but I have seen similar results with other campaigns.   Sometimes Bing comes out higher, but either Bing or Yahoo will usually convert better than Google.

Are you seeing similar trends? Which of the big 3 convert best for your campaigns?

Some large companies are interested in brand building and just want to get the maximum traffic to their sites.  They might not care about pre-qualifying clicks because they just want the visitors.  But most of us are only concerned with the bottom line, which is conversions.

The Challenge

The downside of pre-qualifying clicks with your ad copy, is that it usually decreases CTR.  You are purposely weeding out potential customers who won’t convert before clicking, so by design your CTR will be lower.  Its a very fine line to walk between catchy headlines and ads that grab attention and boost CTR, and pre-qualifying information that lowers CTRs but boosts conversion.   Finding that line is a major part of running a successful campaign.

What are some signs you need to pre-qualify?

If you are testing an campaign that is receiving hundreds of clicks but no conversions, it might be a sign you need to pre-qualify in your ad copy.   Your ad may be attracting a lot of interest, but doesn’t related exactly to the offer.   This is true with PPC or with social media.  You may have a flashy picture in your Facebook ad that is  grabbing clicks and a high CTR, but no one is buying after that.

What are some examples?

There are many ways to weed out non-converting clicks.

1.  You can add a geographic area to narrow down unwanted clicks.  Showing an exact city or state can discourage clicks from outside of your targeting zone.

2.  Describe the offer as much as you can in the 3 or 4 lines you have.  The more real info you give, then less likely they are to be wasted clicks.

3.  Use a relevant picture in social media ads.   Of course certain pictures will get a lot of attention and clicks, but most likely they wont convert and kill you profits.  Keep it relevant.

4.  Include the price right in the ad copy.  This one is probably the most powerful pre-qualifying technique.  It will drop you CTR for sure, but it will also send very serious customers to your landing page.  They already know the price and still clicked, so they are ready to convert.

Pre-qualifying with your ad copy is just one of a ton of things you need to test in order to optimize your campaign.  As always, split testing is the key.