PayPerClickIQ

Atomic Mail Sender For Opt-In Promotions

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:39:50 -0700

Sometimes pay-per-click advertising just isn't enough.

Sometimes you need opt-in email software.

Enter Atomic Mail Sender from AtomPark. You might call it an Atomic Email Tracker.

Yes, spam is a terrible problem all over the World Wide Web.

But we're not talking about spam. We're talking about giving people the choice to opt in (or not) to a newsletter, mailing list or other form of communication.

Ever tried to send an email to a lot of people at once? Notice how difficult and time-consuming it is to personalize each message? Atomic Mail Sender can help. It allows you to create a personalized email for each recipient using a technology called mail merging.

Tired of keeping track of unsubscribe requests? Atomic Mail Sender will manage them automatically for you.

Not sure whether your email campaign was successful? AMS will track the effectiveness of your emails for you by tracking clickthroughs and other response data.

Why not give AtomPark Software a try? See if the email campaign results you've been waiting for are just a few clicks away.

Pay Per Click Advertising Means Online Timeshare Industry Success for SellMyTimeshareNOW.com

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:00:04 -0700

Pay per click advertising is one of the many ways that a relatively new company, SellMyTimeshareNOW.com, has achieved amazing growth in their business. A recent press release shows how the company increased their traffic from 30,000 visitors per month to about 1.97 million visitors per month. The website provides a way for timeshare sellers and buyers to effectively connect with each other.

First Time Using Conversion Rate Data

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 00:33:12 -0700

I have been following the $15k Challenge at 15kChallenge.com/blog it has been some great reading. Dan Raine has been very transparent but will probably lose the contest and be wearing some embarassing "clothing" soon.

The challenge involved Dan getting people to join his mailing list. The more I thought about it, I have never had a mailing list. I have forums that I send a newsletter type email to, but nothing that was purely a mailing list.

Maybe I missed the boat in the late 90's when everyone was pushing a mailing list, but I thought I would give it a go. I created a site with basically a name squeeze page in which I'm trying to get a name and email address.

I thought this could be a great way to spend some PPC money and set up my campaign. In my campaign I also set up conversion tracking on my "Thank You" page.

This has told me that each visitor that signs up from AdWords costs $1.72! Extremely expensive. Before setting up the campaign, I placed a value of about $.20 on each subscriber. $1.72 is a little more than 20 cents. Unless this campaign drops the cost real quick, real soon I'm going to have to put it on hold indefinitely.

I think the problem is that the niche is a medium paying niche. Costs in AdWords have been about $.18 per click. A little more than I was hoping to spend.

Before I shut it down, I'll rewrite the ads, test a new namesqueeze page and make sure my keywords are perfect. Needless to say this is going to be wasted energy. I know that I won't be able to get my CPC down from $1.72 to $.05.

eBay must have a horrible CTR!

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 03:59:20 -0700

I was out searching for something (can't remember now) that showed me one of those generic eBay ads that say things like:

Bad Breath
Looking for Bad Breath?
Find everything at eBay.com
http://www.ebay.com

Stupid obviously. eBay cannot sell an intangible item like "bad breath", we all know that. But it got me thinking. Who is going to click that ad? Another obvious answer, only people who want to screw eBay, and the 4 weirdos in the world who want to get bad breath.

Man that must turn into a horrible CTR for any eBay campaign. Does eBay (and Target, Shopping.com, etc) bid on all keywords at a set price or do they pay competitive prices for competitive keywords and dirt cheap per click on phrases that nobody else bids on?

Anyone know how a company as big as eBay or Shopping.com (read: spends millions a month on AdWords) pays for those keywords? Per click? I doubt it.

Anyone have the hard truth?

Pre-loading a Cookie

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:59:20 -0700

Ok, this is a very big affiliate secret, and I know I will receive a few hate filled emails from affiliate marketers who now hate me for spoiling their secret, but I have to share it.

This secret tip should be used very carefully because some affiliate companies aren't too keen on the idea. Be warned, they may want their money back, even though you spent hard earned PPC money.

Just about every time you send a visitor to your affiliate link (example.com/product.html?affcode) they get redirected through your affiliate company to the landing page of the company paying for that visitor. During this unseen transaction a cookie is placed by your affiliate company so they can track your earnings through that customer. Pretty basic.

What happens when a customer comes to your website, sees your great review about widgets from widgets.com but doesn't click your affiliate link? The next day he remembers widgets.com and goes and buys the product. What happens then? You, my friend, get nothing.

However, if you were to preload that landing page in a 1px x 1px square (popup or iFrame) the customer would get the cookie without even clicking your link. If fact, if it worked, you wouldn't even need your spammy looking affiliate code to get credit for the sale!

I would recommend testing this, but in theory it works great and many of the worlds best affiliate marketers know this dirty little secret that you now know!

Try it out and leave some feedback on how it works for you!

Can I use PPC to promote a offline store?

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:42:48 -0700

Sahid asks, "Can I use PPC to promote a offline store?" Great question Sahid, unfortunately for me, it isn't an easy one to answer.

If I knew the market you were in, the demographic you sold to, and the product or service you sell, I might be able to give you a better answer, but for now, here is what you get: Yes and No.

Yes you can because any marketing on the internet can be converted to offline sales with the right pitch. If you don't have a website, you should get one immediately. If you have a website then you need to make sure it is converting at it's maximum potential. If you are, like one of my clients, looking to get the phone ringing, your need to make sure your phone number is everywhere on your site.

If you want to get people to walk into your store, you'll want to be geo-targetting your audience. Either way it is very possible to promote your offline business with PPC.

The other half of my answer is No. No you cannot because most people who are online prefer to buy online. If you aren't selling anything online then why would they want to get to your website then find out that your website won't meet their need, but they'll still come to your store, which may or may not meet their need?

If you want to convert this online shopper into an offline buyer you need one of the following, a 100% unique product that you and only you sell, a prodcut so expensive, confusing or difficult to use that they want to see someone face to face and have it demonstrated or explained, or a product so liquid that they will need to be buying it every week.

If you don't meet any of those criterion, make sure you set up your website to take orders and make some sales. After all, why not sell online through a website while that website is also promoting your offline business?

Thanks for the question Sahid, like always, I'll give you a free link if you email me the URL to your site!

Bad PPC Beats

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 13:58:21 -0700

For you poker players, you know what a bad beat is. For example, I play poker at PokerRoom.com. In the last year or so, my father and sister have both started playing as well.

My dad is on the road to Spain in a current tournament special they are running. For the current winners of tickets to this tournament, they had a $50k freeroll. Early in the game, my father had pocket queens. The flop came Queen, 10, Ace. He had a trips (3-of-a-kind). He bet big and his lone opponent went all in. With a nearly obvious winner hand (98% chance of winning) he called. His opponent shows a King, 8, offsuit. The turn card is no help. Then he gets rivered, a Jack. His opponent got the straight and he took a "bad beat".

For this part of PayPerClickIQ I'm looking to hear your bad beat stories. If you email me your story (brandonchopkins@gmail.com) and I publish it, I'll give you a free link to your website. Keep in mind, this is a free PR 5 link from a very popular blog. So popular in fact I guarantee the link will be worth the price you pay (free)!

So let's hear them, did you spend $1,200 on a campaign and send traffic to a bad url? Did your campaign spending go through the roof while you were on vacation?

Give me a bad beat and I'll give you a sweet link!

Email me a brandonchopkins@gmail.com with your first name and where you want your link.

Another Crack At Ringtones

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 10:40:12 -0700

Fraser (fraser.maclachlan@azoogleads.com), my AzoogleAds account manager, called me about 2 weeks ago and said he had a great opportunity for me. Whenever Fraser calls I listen because he always has good news and good ideas.

This offer was brand new, something that literally had 1 person bidding in AdWords. An offer so great that I was sure to make some huge money. The only downside? It was a ringtone offer.

Don't get me wrong, I love ringtones. I'm a fan of the classics, some Alice Deejay "Better Off Alone", "Lowrider", MC Hammer's "Too Legit 2 Quit" (Is that a classic yet?).

However, making money with ringtones has never worked for me. I've tried the high paying offers, I tried the low paying offers. I bought ads with PPC through Y!SM, AdWords, AdBrite and still lost money. But for Fraser I was going to give it another chance. Maybe at least I could break even.

About a week into my campaign I wasn't getting the amount of clicks I had hoped for so I upped my bids. Then I increased my keywords. Then I rewrote my ads and deleted the ones with the worst CTR's. None of it seemed to matter, I was at a standstill.

Spend $10 make $10. Spend $50 make $50. Now take into consideration my 25% tax bracket and I'm losing money, AGAIN!

I don't know how you guys do it with ringtones, but I can't seem to steal any marketshare so I'm going to let you have it all back again.

No more keyword bidding and now more break even days. I'm going to spend my time where I know it makes a difference in my monthly paycheck!

Since I know some big players read this blog, how about leaving a comment and letting me know what I did wrong, or what I could have tried differently, maybe it will help one of my niches.

Blogtipping mid-month

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 01:02:09 -0700

Well, guess who forgot to blog tip this month?

Here we go:

1. Dan Raines $15,000 challenge
I'm all over this thing. So all over it that I read it about 5 times a day. Great thing is, there is always new content, even 5 times somedays. Dan is giving out some sweet advice, some free scripts and other stuff you don't want to miss.
Advice for Dan: Get back in the action man! No more breaks, who cares that Prague wants you to visit, we want updates!

2. Jim Boykin's Affiliate Blog
I'm a sucker for a good SEO read. In this case, I would use the word 'Great'. Jim is a master at the art of SEO and making money online. His advice is timeless and his knowledge about Google's inner workings would lead you to believe that he is really WMW's AdsenseAdvisor.
Advice: Give more information about your link building staff. That is extremely interesting, but we don't hear much about how they work and stay motivated.

3. Shoemoney's Blog
Don't remember if I blogtipped Shoe last month, but Jeremy's blog is always worth a good blogtipping. Sometimes controversial (like the time he accused someone of being a fraud), but always respectful (like when he was shown the actual affilaite check and then apologized and had the dude on his podcast!), and always current with his tips. I love a blogger that gives insider secrets like Shoemoney does.
Advice: Give us some of those secrets more than once a month!

How's that for mid-month blogtipping? Look for another blogtipping extravanganza at the beginning of next month.

Have a blog you read constantly, drop me a line and let me know - brandonchopkins@gmail.com

Who Said PPC Was Easy? Not Me!

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 10:31:12 -0700

Ok, so I was on vacation recently and I did something I usually don't do, talk about my websites and online business. However, I was with family and it kinda just slipped. Someone said something about a niche that I'm very familar with (read: wrote 60 articles about) and I gave them some advice. This prompted the question, "How do you know so much about it?" To which my sister replied, "He has a website about it."

That is where the snowball started. The next question was of course, "Why do you have a website about widgets (my secret niche)?" The obvious answer was because it is a huge arbitrage market for me, but the right answer was simpler. I said, "It makes me a little money (read: $xxx monthly)."

To this my uncle said, (here it comes) "Maybe you can show me how to do that. I have a lot of free time and I want to convert it into money. Time is money right?" To which my answer was a quick, "Time is definitely not money. Skill and hard work is what brings in the money. Sometimes it takes my time, sometimes it just takes money and someone elses time."

He laughed but still wanted to know more about it. Whenever hounded by a good friend of family member about making money online, I never turn them down. First however, they must, MUST, absolutely MUST, read Brett Tabke's 26 Steps to a Successful Website (s). I always recommend them read it a few times. After that I have never, NEVER had someone say they are ready to start.

After reading Brett's wonderful article, they realize that this isn't easy money and the fire dies down. Not with my uncle.

For the entire week we were there he kept hounding me. He had questions about: Acronyms, various niches, combining offline marketing with websites, using his existing knowledge of a particular unprofitable niche, and on and on.

After two full days of talking about sites and making money, he said he wanted to it.

With that I agreed to get his feet wet with one site. A very small niche but he happened to know all about it. It was a perfect fit.

I set him up with a HostGator hosting account, bought a domain at NameCheap, waited for the DNS to resolve, then the next day we installed Wordpress.

I wanted to give him an idea of how to write for the internet since you can't understand it unless you've done it, and so I wrote his first article for him. It was a generic introduction to his niche, something good for the front page of his site.

Then I had to leave, my vacation was over. He was extremely excited about this wonderful opportunity to make money and he got some great tips and advice all at no charge. I held nothing back, literally nothing. Spent 8+ total hours working with him, writing documentation on how to buy a domain, where to buy it, setting up an addon domain, getting a static unique IP for the site, etc.

Now, 2 months later he still has the generic Wordpress template on his site and the article I wrote is nowhere to be seen.

What is the point of the story? I want you to know that what you do every day is difficult. The learning curve is steep. It is a rocky slope that can't be climbed without an experienced guide or a LOT of ambition.

What you do every day is not a game, it is a job. A well paying, respect worthy, difficult job. Not many people can do the job you and I do.

Keep that in mind when you get discouraged, you are a rare breed and deserve to get well compensated for the hard work you do even though you are just "playing on the computer all day"!

PPC and Mailing Lists

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 13:54:03 -0700

I have a new website that is completely different than all of my other websites. This site does not contain Adsense, nor does it have any affiliate links on it. You might think me mad, but that's because you don't hear the wonderful music of mailing lists!

When bet that he couldn't make $15,000 in one month with only $150 of startup capital, Dan Raine took the bet. If he loses he is going to do some rather embarrassing things so he had better hope he wins.

What is even more interesting is that in order to make $15k in one month you need a pretty good plan. You can't just throw up a content site and hope is soars to a #1 position in Google, you can't start a forum and hope it gets to 100,000 users in a month. How do you do it? Dan decided to use a mailing list.

This mailing list isn't your average mailing list. He has been working the niche soil getting it ready to debut his mailing list. With only $150 he can't afford much PPC so he has to find other promotion methods.

Let's assume you and I have more than $150 for marketing. Most of us can come up with considerably more if we knew the site would be a sure hit and the money would be just an investment like we always hope and plan for. What would you do? Mailing lists wouldn't be high on my priority list.

With Dan's expertise though, I'm beginning to think different.

Is it possible to make $15k in a month? For me I doubt it is. I don't have Dan's kind of time, I have a full time job, wife, new house, lawn to mow, car to wash, sprinklers to put in, etc.

However, with 1/3 of the time Dan is spending, can I make $5k in a month with one site and say, $500 for marketing? I don't know, but I'm sure going to try! For my test, I think I can trade money for time by using PPC to grow my subscriber list.

Depending on how well it works, I'll drop a link to this site but for now I don't need the extra competition! We saw what competition did to another PPC test (site is now offline), his keywords doubled in price through AdWords.

Can this work? We'll see!

4 Tips to Evaluating Affiliate Campaigns

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:27:54 -0700

I have a publisher account with a few different affiliate companies. My favorites, as I've talked about before, are AzoogleAds, ClickBank (for eBooks) and ShareASale.

When I run out of ideas for websites I will log into my affiliate accounts and instead of checking stats and earnings I will check the new affiliate programs, or the latest offers. Some offers change their payouts regularly so it is a good reminder for me to check them out every few months.

How do you know what affiliate you should be promoting? Is there a clear cut way of defining profitability? For me there isn't.

I look at a few things when trying to determine if I want to promote a certain affiliate or product.

1. Have I promoted this product or niche before? Was it successful or a failure? If it was a failure, do I have anything new to bring to that offer?

2. Do I have a domain that fits the keywords? I have around 100 domains, some of which aren't developed yet. If I have a domain that fits the offer, that is perfect!

3. How much competition is there? For this I usually check Google and view the paid ads. If my keyword is "spy removal software" I know that I am going to be facing a lot of stiff competition. Some of this competition will be from vendors and directly from manufacturers, both of which make more money per sale that I can make.

4. What is the payout in comparison to the marketing costs? For me, I usually look at marketing costs from the PPC angle. Are my keywords going to cost me $1.50 per click, or $.15 per click. A $30 CPA payout with a $8 CPC isn't my cup of tea. However a $13 payout with a $.10 CPC is right up my alley.

Next time you think about an affiliate campaign, use these 4 quick tips to immediately know whether you should promote it, or drop it!

Starting Out Slowly...

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 22:15:33 -0700

With recommendations of a few people in the last post I have decided to start spending my PPC campaign budget slowly. For me, this is better than spending as much as my budget allows because the money lost (if any) will be minor.

For example, consider the following:

In my current campaign I spent $68. I had two campaigns in AdWords and one Ad Group in each campaign.

In the first campaign after about a day I had spent $14. In the second campaign I spent about $6. $20 total for both campaigns.

I checked my affiliate account and saw that I had one sale for $10. Not very good, but it was still early. I decided to check out which keywords were getting the clicks when I noticed something odd.

For my second campaign, I typed the wrong website into the landing url! Lucky for me I was starting slow and lost $6. Had I have had my full budget in there I would have lost at least $100 before I noticed.

Safe to say that just this one example has taught me my lesson, check, double-check then start slow just incase the double-check missed something!

Start Slow Or Full Steam Ahead?

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 10:46:48 -0700

Here is my current dilemma. I'm getting closer to being ready to start my new campaign and don't know which way to go.

Option 1 - Start with a full daily budget.
The benefit of this is that I have full stats immediately. That allows me to tweak the campaign on the fly and get better results faster. Obviously that has it's downsides as well. I can spend a lot of money and find out $300 later that my landing page isn't converting well, or I have 10,000 clicks and a .01% CTR. Both would be very bad.

Option 2 - Spend 1/4 daily budget and increase accordingly.
This option keeps my mistakes from becoming extremely expensive. Since I'm not a rich man, money does indeed matter to me. I'm not just doing this for your enjoyment, but also to make some money! However, with this option I won't have daily stats that are actually what I'll be receiving. I won't be able to approximate how much money I'll really need to spend to have my ads shown all day and I won't know my real CPC because my CTR won't be exact.

What I need from you is a recommendation!

Should I choose option 1 or option 2. Give me a vote and a reason behind that vote!

APIlitAx 1.0.1 Released: AJAX GUI for AdWords

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 03:54:47 -0700

Well to be honest I stole that headline straight from the AdWords official blog. There wasn't really a way to spin that title to make it more exciting. It has the key exciting words, API, AJAX, GUI and AdWords.

APIlitAx is an open-source GUI for the AdWords API. You can view the Sourceforge page here. And you can download it here. I did just that, downloaded something I didn't understand.

I'll admit, I've never used the API, don't really know how to use the API and don't really know enough about PHP to be able to use the API. However, I thought maybe downloading this little app would help. Wrong.

I opened it up and it was just a collection of files. I expected an actual program. Then I opened the documentation. Bad idea. That just confused me enough to realize that I am in over my head and should signal for help while I'm still treading water.

Here is where you come in. I want someone to explain the API, what it does, why it is a benefit and how it helps you make more money with AdWords.

If you can do that in a clear, concise manner, please contact me and we'll talk a little about compensating you for your services...if you get my drift.

Don't understand the API, stick around and we'll learn together, until then, stay away from this app because you'll be as confused as I am!