• Sign up a couple local businesses, charging $500 a month for advertising on Facebook. That will buy you enough traffic to dominate, Facebook for your client’s geography– more on that in a minute. Avoid folks who sell products– they must be local. Also avoid real estate, insurance or financial offers, where there is a lot of competition. You can only make money as an affiliate doing what others don’t do.
• Get the money up-front so you’re not having to front the cash– tell them you’re not a bank, if they complain. If you can take a credit card, even better– so you don’t have to chase them each month or play the “check is in the mail” game.
• Set up one campaign with 5-6 ads targeted to your city on users that are 23+ years old. College kids don’t spend money on professional services. You can try out a few ads that have interest targets– but odds are that this will restrict the available traffic down to almost nothing– but try it. Bid 20 cents a click– Facebook will suggest a dollar or so, but ignore that. Spammers are not targeting this finely, so you can get the traffic much cheaper than them, as well as much cheaper than Google PPC. Set up subids in your tracking urls so you know which ad drove the click and conversion in your Google Analytics (which you’ve installed on the client’s site).
• Set up a landing page just for the client– it can live on a subdomain of your site or the client’s site. If the client can’t get you access to their site or if it’s a pain, you just host the page yourself. Put the phone number HUGE on that landing page. If you don’t know how to do landing pages or are lazy, just send traffic to the client’s homepage– but it won’t convert as well or be as trackable.
• You must have an offer or phone number so you can track conversion. You can have a special with a coupon code of “FACEBOOK” or require that they mention they saw the ad on Facebook. Thus, when prospects call or come into the office, they are telling your client that your facebook advertising campaigns are effective. If you want to really hit a home run, get a phone number that is unique to the web– BlitzLocal does this, as does Google Voice, which is GrandCentral rebranded.
• Sit back and prepare to be amazed: There is so little competition on Facebook for legitimate ads that it’s easy to dominate for Denver liposuction or Boulder massage, even if you’re only targeting the city and age group. Your client will be calling you soon because his or her friends will be telling them that they see them all over Facebook– plus clients will be saying they saw them on Facebook!

If you want to learn more about local advertising on Facebook, see Dennis Yu,who is CEO of BlitzLocal.

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Let’s first start with what great leaders DON’T do– use filler words, passive language, and wishy-washy terminology. Um, ah, actually, you know, basically, and like are the most egregious violators. How can anyone take you seriously when you’re using those words in every sentence? “We’d, uh, like to, um, start this project, you know?” Sounds like they’re asking for permission, since every sentence ends up in pitch. You know those people I’m talking about, where every sentence sounds like it’s a question? Almost as bad are folks who end their sentences in “so….” They’re indicating they’re not done, yet don’t have a continuation to their thought.

Can you imagine if someone came up to you and said, “Uh, well like, I was thinking that perhaps we should like do this Facebook advertising platform that basically would, you know, let advertisers buy fans, so…..” Not exactly motivating, is it? Don’t laugh, since more people than you think– perhaps even yourself– talk like this. Try this wake-up exercise– listen to a friend and yourself in conversation. Watch how many times they, as well as yourself, use any of these words. You’ll likely find that it’s so subconscious, you don’t even notice how often you do it.

Leaders of all types, on the other hand, use definitive language. Most of their sentences, when talking to other people, start with verbs and imperatives– Let’s, now, today, we should, go, and so forth. This is not something learned in a ToastMasters Club, although I’d highly recommend that you join one to practice your impromptu speaking skills. Rather, it’s a reflection of a mind that is singularly driven towards a goal. You can tell– these folks get right to the point and use action words. The density of verbs in their language is far higher than others. They’re pushing to the next step. What’s next to do?

Joseph Schumpter coined the terms “entrepreneurship” in 1913, which literally means “creative destruction.” You have to actively be destroying something in the status quo, which draws emotional ire from whatever you’re destroying, yet recruits folks who believe in your cause. Are you an entrepreneur making things happen with your language? Or perhaps you want to but things just aren’t happening? Consider what your cause is and whether your every day words inspire folks into recruitment.

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Affiliates frequently ask me how I became a super affiliate at 15 years old, given that I’m not a programmer and have plenty of free time for hobbies and travel. At Affiliate Convention, I’m going to show you what it takes, and it’s probably not what you think. I’ve been where you are and I can show you the way out. Hint: it has more to do with your relationships and ability to execute than it does your programming expertise (you can hire that) or how many great ideas you have (if you implement none of them, so what).

I’ll give you just one tip of the dozen that I’ve prepared, as a teaser to my full presentation in 2 months– having real world clients through your own Internet marketing company gives you access to more data and insights that you’d ever get through your own campaigns, plus, you can use their budget to develop tools you can use on your own stuff. When you are the agency of record, you become the exclusive advertiser, no other affiliates get to compete with you! You don’t have to worry about others stealing your ads or bidding against you. You have full control over the landing pages and even negotiate the payout. And, you have greater consistency of earnings, since you own that relationship, instead of trying to beg for a nickel payout bump among the thousands of others doing so, too.

So come join me and 1,000 other affiliates in Denver in a couple months and we can all learn from each other. If you have any particular questions you’d like to have answered, just post them right here and I will do my best to respond to every one of them.

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I’ll keep writing tomorrow. My new sleep schedule is regular, asleep early and awake early :p!

Harrison

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We’re going to visit his offices and spend a few days seeing the sights in Mumbai, Goa, Bangalore, and New Delhi. I was just in India a few months ago. Earning and burning some miles, baby!

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Tim (consultant): We have a direct relationship with Google and will get you traffic on Google via SEO and PPC.
Me: How do you do that? And what is SEO?
Tim: Well, we have a direct relationship with Google. We create articles and get them certified by Google.
Me: Certified articles? Do you pay for that and how does work?
Tim: When Google comes to your site, they see that we are optimizing it and that we are certified. We have to pay Google for that.
Me: So forgive my ignorance, since I’m not that technical– is that like AdWords? I didn’t know you could pay for natural results.
Tim: Let’s do a search on “web design”– those spots on the right are PPC, while the natural search results are on the left. Google sees what pages are ours and gives us priority.
Me: Really– so that wikipedia result in the first natural spot– how much are they paying to get certified?
Tim: Wikipedia doesn’t have to pay.
Me: Really? How do I know what is certified or not– can you show me examples? Can I pay Google more to have our articles certified faster?
Tim: Well we have a lot of clients, so what we’d do for you may be different. We’re not able to pay for expedited certification.
Me: Isn’t your practice of buying links considered “black hat”? I don’t want to get banned or anything.
Tim: We are completely ethical. Only experts in SEO are allowed to work at {SEO_company} and all are certified.
Me: Whew– because I’ve heard some horror stories from SEO companies that flat out lie to clients. And who am I to know what’s true or not?
Tim: Happy to educate you on these issues– I know they’re complicated, but you’re learning quickly.
Me: Great– please send me a proposal covering what you guys can do for us.

After the call, the “SEO expert” sent me a couple canned proposals– both reflecting ZERO thought or customization, except for a find/replace on prospect name. This guy spend ZERO effort on tailoring the documents to the site I mentioned. There are a lot of good search engine optimization companies out there, and it’s charlatans like these that give the rest of us a bad name. How can we help clients see the real, earnest folks from the total fakers? The company that called me (name withheld) is a major agency, by the way.

Harrison

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With vastly more information being available to advertisers for targeting, the advertising platforms that rule in 5 years from now will not the ones that dominate today. Search will be more than showing results based only on what someone has just typed into a box– it will encompass who they are, their preferences, what their friends like, and what people like them like. Socially-aware search is still a pipe dream, but we’re starting to see examples of it in early social advertising platforms, however crude the earliest examples are.

Beyond advertising, social data can answer questions such as “Do you know a reputable dentist in Santa Barbara?”, “What political blogs do you think I’d enjoy reading?,” or “Where can I find a cool fedora hat?”– questions that search engines cannot answer properly today.

So how do brands and direct marketers take advantage of the wealth of social data that is now available? How can that drive smarter ads and new forms of interaction? I need some clever examples to demonstrate how social media is changing the face of advertising. Send me your examples— they can be something currently being done or ideas for things that could be possible.

A couple examples I intend to use are from Me.dium, a client of mine that is a social search engine>— plus SparkPeople.com, a community for weight-loss that relies heavily on points-based interaction. Tell me what you think and you could win one of 5 LeaderClicks T-shirts!

Deadline for submission is October 2nd– just a few days away. Post your responses here or send to harrison@gevirtzmedia.com

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The folks who left comments were from broad walks of life– from running a site for chiropractors (charging up to $550 CPM rates– that is not a typo), to a work at home mom, to affiliate managers, to our buddy Daehee who coached the team that won the Google Online Marketing Challenge last year. There were the typical range of comments from folks who don’t know what PPC stands for, folks who noticed how long the post was, to folks who got some value.

But the most interesting thing is not one of these comments, but what WASN’T said. I didn’t see anyone from the ad networks or any ad serving engineers post comments. The truth about scrubbing is something that large affiliates keep to themselves. Same is true for ad networks that employ a form of “boost” to favor low performing ads on the network– great for the advertiser, but a penalty paid for by publishers who make less money. We could spend hours on the tricks that are employed by ad networks, in a sort of Mason’s handshake for the uninitiated. Do most ad networks scrub? Yes. Is this a legitimate practice? Yes. But do most ad and affiliate networks also scrub in unethical ways? Yes.

A lot of affiliates were asking about a more in-depth post on scrubbing. Rather than go into all the ways– which is something I couldn’t do, because there are so many that I don’t know, too– it’s better to just say that you should look at your earnings. So what if they take 30% out? Perhaps they are paying you 50% more per lead so it backs out better than the other offer. Sure, you could ask that the advertiser place your pixel on the page– close to their pixel (since position on page matters). And you could get your AM to swear that you aren’t getting scrubbed– yeah, the check is in the mail.

So the answer? Just look at eCPM. Don’t worry about payouts (that’s a sucker play) or other metrics. Understand that CTR x eCPC = eCPM. And with CTR holding equal, then you want maximum eCPC, which is the payout times the conversion rate. So if the conversion rates are the same for an offer across two networks, you’d take the one that has the higher payout. But often the same campaigns sending traffic to the same offer page will convert differently between networks. Scrubbing is not the only reason, but the primary one. So choose according to what makes you the most– run a primary network for the offer, but reserve a small portion to run on the other network, so you can check for discrepancies between the two. If you have a lot of traffic, it’s only smart to do that.

I believe that smarter pubs will join LeaderClicks. If you believe that eCPM is the true measure of earnings, then sign up. If you think that lead payout or eCPC is what to shop for, then join another network. We’ll be releasing a series of tools to let you rotate ads between us and the other guys to keep us honest. Or write your own script– it will only take you 20 minutes. Most of the networks who run social inventory are absolutely fleecing publishers. I won’t mention names, but these folks know who they are and what margins are set for the street payouts. We could play that game, too, but think that in the long run (and in internet time, that’s 6 months), the market will eventually figure it out. I want to be ready for that shake-out now— I want publishers to ask the right questions of their ad networks, so they can make informed choices about who really does pay better– not who says they pay better.

I am 16 years old and though I enjoy a decent standard of living, you won’t see me renting office space on Madison Avenue, hiring a bunch of empty suits, or holding contests with glamorous prizes— these are all things for show that actually eat into both network profits and publisher payouts. The pie must add up to 100%, so you do the math on how that dollar of gross revenue is allocated. We have a small team of less than 20 people, primarily engineers who work on ad serving, plus a few analysts. We’re self-funded, but have more money than the average start-up, since we’ve made a fair bit doing affiliate marketing ourselves. I’d like to think that this gives us a better understanding of the publisher point of view.

In a future post, I’ll talk about some of the things that our ad server does, such as Dynamic Social Ads, where we personalize ads on the fly based on user profile information. And there are cool statistical techniques where we match offers against groups of people with common traits. We could go on and on crowing about how we have “proprietary” black box voodoo magic Google SocialAdFriendPageRank secret sauce– but really, it’s just about who pays you more money, pays on time, and is fun to work with.

So sign up for our social ad network (or if you have other inventory, that’s fine, too), use promo code “HARRISONSENTME” and I’ll send you a free LeaderClicks T-shirt when you do at least $100 in earnings. Oh, and the shirts are PIMP!

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Bounce rate is governed by a combination of these factors:

* nature of the term itself: you are trying to sell “raspberries”, so you buy that term as well as “fruit”– in this case, “fruit” is broader than “raspberry” but has more volume. So you have a trade-off with volume and relevancy, as well as synonyms– for example, “apple” can be a fruit and cool electronics manufacturer.
* your ads: you might have bought relevant terms, but your ad is misleading– promising something that doesn’t exist. Maybe the product isn’t free.
* relevancy of the landing page: you’re sending people to pages that don’t speak directly to the term folks are looking for. Perhaps your keywords, ads, and content don’t match tightly.

If you have a multi-page or multiple visit conversion, then bounce rate is a great early indicator of traffic quality. In you are converting on a single page, then bounce rate is not meaningful. That said, while using eCPM and other ROI-based metrics to govern bidding overall, you can use bounce rate in several ways:

* if the bounce rate is over 70%, turn the term off. If the term is bad enough, you may even want to delete the term and also add it as a negative keyword. For example, we sell franchises for a major fast food chain and discovered that any keywords with “home” were of ultra low quality. So “work from home” and “make money from home” are horrible– these are not people who have $150k in cash to open a franchise. Having “home” as a negative keyword also improves traffic for “business opportunity” on broad match.
* if the bounce rate is less than 30%, then something is probably working with the connection between your terms, ads, and landing pages. If that term has high volume, place it in it’s own ad group and spin out more related terms. If your keywords are tightly grouped by theme (every term in that ad group means the same thing), then you should see bounce rate to be similar. Ignore bounce rates on low volume keywords, since you’ll see a lot of noise.
* if the bounce rate is medium (30%-70%), then you can use that as a quasi-lead. For example, if term A has a bounce rate of 40% has 60% of folks making it past the first page. And term B with a 70% bounce rate has only 30% of folks making it off the page. Thus, term A is delivering twice as many visitors per click as term B– and could be bid up twice as much, all else equal. You’re still going to manage to a CPA, but if don’t have many conversions or a low budget, this is a great early metric on whether that person will become a lead.

Our lead gen consulting company manages PPC campaigns for clients who have at least $10k per month to spend. keep reading my blog for more articles on maximizing online performance. Hope this was helpful to you.

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This blog could have a pink background with bunny rabbits, gold chains, and hundred dollar bills. Would that make this blog worth reading? I don’t know about many of you, but I read blogs to learn what’s going on in the industry and there are some folks who come here in the hopes of gaining some tips to help grow their affiliate earnings. My goal is to be helpful voice in a sea of a babblers, who bring down the conversation to useless forum chatter. I’m not a god by any means, (hey– I’m only 16) but at least I’m striving to share useful tips. So don’t come here to hate and basically dumb down the conversation. Reading the comments here often makes me feel like a full-grown adult– you lurkers know what I’m talking about.

You’re going to see a lot more articles here– on more than just affiliate marketing networks, and I welcome feedback on whatever you think I should write about. I’m not the “last word” on affiliate marketing, but at least you’ll get a thoughtful answer.

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