Biggest lessons learnt this year

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. This can lead to your cash flow evaporating over night if the affiliate or traffic network decides to pull the rug under you. By diversing yourself into other networks you won’t be so vulnerable.
2. Get out of your comfort zone. For example I got way too comfortable with one traffic source this year. It wasn’t until I decided to go back to an older traffic source that my conversions exploded.
3. Never give up. A few days later that same campaign no longer existed. I was booted from the offer and kicked out of the network. I could’ve just laid in my bed all day and mourn the loss but for some reason I knew I could get back to that level of sales again. So I busted my ass and put on my thinking cap. I don’t think I’ve worked that hard all year long and believe me I’ve worked hard. The next day I was back in business. I wasn’t pulling nearly as much sales and conversions but I was close.

These 3 hard lessons taught me a lot and going into 2012 I know I will be going in much stronger than ever.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned about affiliate marketing over the years it’s never put all your eggs in one basket.

I’ve learned this the hard way. Many times either the traffic network decides to suspend your account or your affiliate network bans your ass for suspicious activity that you have no control over.

It doesn’t even have to be that. You may be banking with one offer and then a week later the advertiser decides to close the offer down. Boom you’re back to the drawing board.

It’s no wonder 98% of affiliates fail.

For example today I’m totally killing it on this offer and in the past I would’ve taken the rest of the day off and do whatever I wanted. But now I know better. This offer won’t last. I need to be constantly on the hunt for offers to promote.

You get to a point where you start to really take a look at yourself and wonder if this is a sustainable business.

You also don’t really have any assets that grow in value over time.

Affiliate marketing is a cruel world and if you’re not on your toes you’ll get eatin up fast and furious. Seriously.

That’s why for now on I’m doing things differently.

I’m diversifying my affiliate business. No longer will I rely on one traffic source nor will I rely on just one affiliate network.

Diversifying is the key to the survival in this game. I’ve been told this many times before by a super affiliate and yet for some reason I never took it to heart until recently.

And to build some real assets I’m starting build email lists that will actually have some value. Building email lists take time and won’t make money right away but over the long haul it’ll be worth it.

Diversify and build assets my friends and you’ll be to survive a lot longer in this cruel affiliate game.

Rejoice! Today is the day Microsoft officially removes itself as the mediator on trademark terms. No longer will they dissaprove your keywords if they violate any trademark. Their updated Intellectual Property Guidelines state that if  the trademark owner has a fit about you bidding on their terms they’ll have to come you first.

Trademark owners can still file a complaint if your abusing their trademark so don’t think you can get away with misusing them.

Anywho, I love this new policy!

I’ve totally taken advantage of this and have uploaded some of my trademark terms that were dissaproved in the past and sure enough they’re up and running without any issues.

As a matter of fact just this past Monday a few of my competitor keywords were disapproved because of “trademark violations.” I contacted support and their solution was to wait until this Thursday when the new policy went into effect. LOL.

Time will tell how this new policy fares but in the mean time definitely take advantage of it while you can and especially when the clicks are cheap. The door has been opened my friends!

If you want to check out the new updated policy yourself you can do so here:

Microsoft adCenter Intellectual Property Guidelines

Looks like it’s doomsday for thin affiliate websites who currently rank high in Google search.

Adwords advertisers like myself have felt the wrath of Google’s ban on affiliates and now it looks like Google have finally decided to put an Ax to affiliates in search as well.

Google Ready For Action Against Content Farms

My foray into Microsoft adCenter has been challenging at first but I definitely feel now I’m starting to get the hang of it. My conversions are up and my traffic is steady.

One of my campaigns that I’m running was getting an average cost per click of 30 cents on Adwords and when I first ran it on adCenter it was getting 50 cents per click!

But for some odd reason after a month or so the clicks suddenly dipped down to 7 cents per click. Pretty sweet. Not sure why but my guess is that my account now has a history.

Its pretty awesome that Microsoft gives its advertisers access to a wealth of highly targeted demographic tools. But I’ll have to admit that I’m currently not trying it at the moment.

I’ll let my campaigns run for a while and then I’ll run some reports. I’m sure I’ll get more accurate data there for my own demographic targeting. Time will tell.

The adCenter and Yahoo Search Marketing merger is right around the corner. Seems like it’ll be more a challenge for Yahoo advertisers to do the transition since now it’ll all be run at adCenter. I just hope it doesn’t screw up any of my campaigns.

After much deliberating I have come the conclusion if that if you follow the methods that Amit Mehta teaches in PPC Classroom then its very likely that you will get your Google Adwords account banned.

I’m not saying that the material is bad. Just needs to be updated. In fact I have to give much credit to Amit’s PPC Classroom course for teaching me the ins and out of PPC marketing. I’m pretty sure without this course I’d be lost and broke trying to figure it out myself.

Your taught to test out an offer by direct linking first which is a great idea. Only problem is that sometimes you won’t know if an affiliate landing page has gotten slapped until you’ve promoted the offer. By then its too late.

I’m not just talking about landing pages that have very little content and no privacy policy, contact us, etc. I’m talking about landing pages that have good content the whole works and then turns out they’ve been slapped.

It wont be long before you wake up one day to find your Adwords account suspended.

Amit goes over a temporary method of using iframe redirects as a way of getting around the 1 url rule to test out an offer but it should also work for getting away with accidentally testing offers that have had their landing pages slapped. Believe it or not you can get your Adwords account reinstated. I’ll talk more about that in a future blog post.

I’ve actually been testing out Glenn Livingston’s Hyper Response club and I truly believe his methods will be the best way to get you on the ground running and profitable. Unlike PPC Classroom where you’ll lose money first before you become profitable, which of course isn’t a bad thing if your breaking even.

Mind you the Hyper Response club isn’t for beginners. They wont go over how to use Adwords and PPC marketing. You should be well versed in this before even joining the program. If not then stick with PPC Classroom before you start on this one.

Understand however that I’m not bashing on PPC Classroom. I just think they need to update their module on direct linking to test out offers because more than likely it’ll get your account banned.

For the past week I’ve been advertising on Microsoft’s adCenter. From what I’ve been told you can expect lower cost per click, less traffic and 6 times more conversions than on Google Adwords. Here’s a quick review of my findings so far.

Conversion tracking is as unreliable as Adwords. AdCenter has the annoying tendency to record more conversions then you’ve actually made.

I talked to a adCenter rep, yes you can call them, about this issue and they mentioned the reason behind this is that if a customer makes  a purchase and then comes back to the thank you page later then it’ll also record that as a conversion. If the customer refreshes that same page it’ll also count as a conversion. Yea, pretty unreliable.

Billing is pretty confusing as well. They have an invisible threshold that once you reach then they’ll automatically charge you. I’m still waiting for answers on this one.

Pausing your campaign doesn’t erase all the history you’ve built up like on Adwords. So you can easily resume a campaign anytime you want and the history stays intact. Pretty nice.

One annoynce I have with this however is that lets say you’ve set your  budget at $20 daily. When the $20 budget is met then adCenter automatically pauses your campaign for the day, however for some stupid reason it doesn’t pause completely. So expect it to run till at least $40. Manually pausing it yourself seems to do a better job of stopping the campaign.

Why can’t you view all keywords and all ad copy together? You have to individually go into an adgroup to see them.

AdCenter also has a desktop software like Adwords editor so its a pretty nice software to have if your uploading a big campaign. However as of this moment the the latest adCenter desktop updates are pretty buggy.

Its not all negative however. One powerful aspect of adCenter is the awesome targeting. They’ve got many tools that you can use to precisely target your customers and set incremental bidding. I’m still testing this out to see how reliable it is.

So far I haven’t seen 6 times more conversions and my cost per click is actually higher than it was on Google Adwords. However it seems like my average cost per click is dropping pretty fast. My conversions actually seem pretty normal as well.

I’ll let this run for another week and see how it performs. Be on the lookout for the continuation of this review.

I jotted these notes down recently while listening to Glen Livingston’s Adwords webinar on negative keywords. Its totally amazing how much negative keywords can have an impact on your Adwords campaign.

Enjoy!

THE WHAT AND WHY OF NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

• Keywords added at the ad group or campaign level that prevent impressions
• For search queries containing negative keyword term.
• Phrase and broad matches need negatives (exact keywords don’t)
• Negative keywords add control to your campaign.
• Exact match keyword’s CTR factors more into Quality Score than broad and phrase.

MATCH TYPES FOR NEGATIVES

Negative Broad – Default negative match type, usually just called “Negative Keywords” or sometimes “standard Negative keywords.” All individual words in
the negative keyword must be present in the search query for the negative
keyword to be activated as a filter. Google says it won’t prevent ads from
showing on variations of these terms, however we find that negative broad match
DOES cover misspellings.

Negative Phrase Match – The rule of phrase match apply to the search query for
the negative keyword to be activated as a filter.

Negative Exact Match – The keyword needs to appear exactly in the search query for the negative keyword to be activated as a filter.

• Example: [barbeque]. If someone types in barbeque then your ad won’t show up however if your keyword was “barbeque equipment” then it would show up.
• Best Practice: Apply Negatives as Broadly as You Confidently Can

A SPECIAL USE FOR NEGATIVE EXACT MATCH

If your CTR is high enough for a broad match keyword, Google will drop individual words out of your query.

If this generalization doesn’t work in your favor, counter it with a negative exact match.

• Example: You make a lot of conversions on the keyword security guard uniforms and your successful ad has a high CTR. Google broad match will start showing you for the more general search terms such as “security guard” which no longer is relevant to your keywords and ad copy.

• Solution: Add security guard and security guards as a negative exact match keywords in your adgroup, i.e.,  -[security guard], -[security guards]

3 CATEGORIES OF NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

1. Filtering for Ambiguity – The keyword has more than one meaning & I don’t want traffic that isn’t applicable.

• Example: I sell Baseball caps and don’t want traffic from nutritional supplements because of the keyword caps. U would then put the following keywords into negative: capsule, liquidcap, prohormone, veterinary

• Example: I sell baseball caps and don’t want traffic from pop cap because of the keyword caps. U would then put the following keywords into negative: bejeweled, tutorial, game, flash

• Example: I sell Baseball caps and don’t want traffic from bottle cap because of the keyword caps. U would then put the following keywords into negative: recycle, collection, price guide, crown cap

• Bottom Line: Filtering for ambiguity stop unprofitable traffic.

• Where to find: Dictionary definitions, wiki entries, titles ofunrelated books, songs, movies, TV shows, words related to online gaming, and monitoring your existing traffic.

2. Filtering for Relevancy – It’s the right definition for the keyword, but the particular keyword though related to the general subject matter is not relevant to my business.

• Example: Caps. If I sell baseball caps, but I don’t sell Baltimore Orioles Caps. You would then negative the following keywords: oriole, orioles, Baltimore, os caps.

• If I sell baseball caps, but I don’t sell Collectible Caps. You would then negative the following keywords: signed, autographed, autograph, ichiro

• If I sell baseball caps, but I only sell active teams. You would then negative the following keywords: senators, pilots, expos, colt 45s

• Bottom Line: Filtering for relevancy stops unprofitable traffic.

While it’s possible someone looking to buy a Washington Senators cap (team no longer exists) also happens to want a baseball cap from an active team (after all, the searcher is interested in baseball), it’s extremely unlikely you can turn a profit on these words.

Why?

Because you can’t fill the need in the “inner conversation” of the searcher.

• Put into Practice: Find as many of these negatives as you can. Maintain a list of common ones, i.e., image, free, lyrics, mp3 and jpg.

• Where to Find: Mine the search query reports within Adwords, explore what people often Google related to your high traffic keywords, i.e.,  if you’re in retail, find related products that u don’t sell, as often those make good negatives.

• Competitor names are almost always negatives of this sort, too.

3. Filtering for Profit – It’s the right definition for the keyword and it’s relevant to what I sell, but I can’t be profitable with it.

Filtering for profit with negatives is a measure of last resort. Monitor and test!

Bid management, landing page adjustments, ad copy changes, Perry Marshall’s peel and stick, and adding negatives based on relevancy and ambiguity should be tried first.

Let traffic and potential revenue and proximity to profit determine when to try harder on a keyword or deploy this tactic instead.

• Example: Caps. If I sell baseball caps including Yankee caps, but there are so many competitors selling Yankee caps, I can’t get traffic at a profitable cost per accusation. You would then negative out: New York, Yankee, New York, Yankees

• Bottom Line: Now Enough of the traffic these negative keywords stop is profitable traffic. You wouldn’t turn away this business, but you’re better off not advertising for it.

• Put Into Practice: If you give up on a specific term because you can’t make that keyword profitable, consider making it a negative keyword. This works with words that represent specific products or services, not general keywords.

• Example: If the specific term flexi kit baseball cap rarely converted but costed money, turn it off and and see if you’re better off with it as a negative.

• Example: If the general term baseball dragged in lots of clicks but very low conversions, you wouldn’t make that a negative because it would eliminate lots of profitable traffic.

• Sometimes even general keywords make sense to use as negatives, e.g., Rob’s window repair example.

WHERE TO FIND NEGATIVE KEYWORDS

1. “That’s SO NOT what I meant”

Use these tools to filter for ambiguity BEFORE you launch campaigns.

• Wikipedia: Disambiguation
• Use amazon.com in the music category, books, etc
• iTunes store search
• Emusic
• Library of congress
• Megavideo
• YouTube
• idmb
• World of warcraft

2. “Own the language around your business”

Use these tools to know the keyword traffic around your advertising.

Google Web Search/Keyword Tools:

• Google adwords search query report
• Google.com, .uk, .ca, .au, etc.
• Google keyword tool (also use the url keyword search)
• Google search based keyword tool
• Google Insights for search
• Google  sponsored links

Beyond Google:

• Trellian
• AdIntelligence
• Reference.com
• Affiliate Elite
• Keycompete
• Ispionage
• Compete.com

Blogs and Tweets:

• Google blog searh
• Technorai
• Google Reader
• Search twitter
• Tweetgrid

Analytics Tracking Systems:

• Google Analytics
• Web trends
• Omniture
• Web analytics
• Propriety back end software

Hopefully you guys find my notes as useful as I did. Let me know what you guys think.

Some quick notes on Peter Dunbars own twist on Perry Marshall’s peel and stick strategy.

1) Take high performing keywords and put them into their own Adwords campaign.
- improves impression share
- campaign starts out with a great history

2) Keep old campaign running.

3) Enter the keywords you’ve “peeled and sticked” as exact negative keywords in the old adgroup so that it doesn’t trigger that ad group.

4) keep match types separate. One adgroup will contain just broad, another just phrase and another just exact. Only one keyword per adgroup.

5) Use broad and phrase keywords as a breeding ground for highly relevant match
keywords.

6) Example in Peter’s own words: “If I have a broad match keyword “cocker spaniel collar” and a phrase match “cocker spaniel collar” and pulled a search query report, and saw I received a conversion on “blue cocker spaniel collar” I would add [blue cocker spaniel collar] to my exact match campaign, and add -[blue cocker spaniel collar] to both the phrase and broad at the adgroup level.”

I’ve heard of this method before from some of the other PPC gurus so I’ll definitely have to try it soon.

Here’s the original blog post if anyone wants to check it out:

Peter Dunbar – Peel and Stick

My apologies.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything up. I’ve been pretty much focusing 100% of my efforts on Adwords campaigns.

I’ll be honest with you. I’ve created several posts recently and have made them only visible to myself. However I am considering making them visible to everyone so that we can all benefit from the trials and errors that I’m putting myself through.

It’s been a very expensive learning experience. There have been many ups and downs but at the end of the day your always one step closer to the ultimate goal.

I’ll also be posting up a lot of other non-Adwords notes that I’ve been jotting down since last year as well. Consider these the cliff notes of internet marketing.

Stay tuned…