Comprehensive Research with Keyword Rockstar

Here is something I hear all the time; “The best keyword research tool is your brain“. Alright…yes, our brains are awesome. And we can think up tons of good and unusual ideas that no tool out there is gonna give you.

But when it comes down to it - our brains can only help to a certain extent with the creative side of keyword research. To really prepare well for a solid campaign, you will benefit from some help…

The best free keyword tool out there is still the one and only Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I still use it every week, but it still doesn’t meet all my needs when I wanna do some serious keyword research. Besides, it can get time-consuming to use if you wanna do several iterations of searches based on prior results.

So what do I do? I use a new and powerful tool called Keyword Rockstar.

The first version came out not too long ago, but it is already my favorite keyword tool for research.

Keyword Rockstar is…
- part keyword research (based on the Google Adwords tool)
- part campaign builder (kinda like “Speed PPC”, but for both search and content)
- part content placement finder (kinda like “Content Bully” but better)
- part competition landing page and ad analysis tool (kinda like “PPC Bully”)
- part competition keyword analysis tool (kinda like “KeywordSpy”)
- part image / banner ad generator (like nothing else out there!)

I’m not saying Keyword Rockstar will replace all those tools entirely (with the exception of “Content Bully”, lol). But if you don’t wanna fork out the money for a bunch of other tools - you will have most of your research needs covered, and then some, with this one.

Features

First, let’s take a bird’s eye overview of the Keyword Rockstar features. Now let it be said that this isn’t just your average keyword tool that simply gives you a bunch of keywords and their monthly volume.

• Always fresh keyword data. Not based on outdated sources or estimates.
• Advanced placement finder for content network or media buy campaigns
• Deep keyword research based on a set of root keywords, or a list of competitor URLs
• Built-in, multiple-format, image ad generator for content network campaigns
• Adwords Content network campaign builder
• View competitors’ ads for each keyword found
• Advanced filtering, sorting, and keyword grouping engine
• Proxy support with country filtering
• Extensive reporting system, allowing export to multiple formats including PDF, Excel, CSV, TXT and more.

One of the things that separates Keyword Rockstar from many well-known competitors, is that it’s NOT based on outdated databases or “estimates” from 2nd or 3rd tier search engines like so many other keyword tools. Keyword Rockstar gathers all its data in real-time from the best source available: the Google Adwords Keyword Tool itself.

Note: More data sources are planned for future releases, but Google is the default choice as of now.

What also separates it from the rest is that it obviously can do so much more (as you can see listed above).

Installation, Usability and Interface

Unlike many other keyword tools, Keyword Rockstar installs on your pc (or will run fine through VMware if you own a Mac). The installation procedure is easy, but slow. According to the developers, this is something they are working on and future versions are promised to install much faster.

When you first start up the program, you are welcomed with a screen showing the latest version/bugfix updates as well as a “Feature suggestion” feedback box. I really think more apps should have this as it’s a nice and quick way for you to tell the developers something you’d like to see changed or added.

The overall interface and navigation feels intuitive enough. Nothing jaw-dropping, but it doesn’t need to be either. It’s a keyword tool! Well, I take that back… there is one really awesome part of the user interface that I find very, very clever. More on that later though - in the section about their filtering and grouping engine.

Working with Keyword Rockstar

But let’s move on to the fun, shall we? Alright - so the first thing you wanna do is create a new project. Keyword Rockstar is project-based, which means you can create and work on several research projects simultaneously whenever you want.

For each new project, you tell the program what to (and what not to) search for, and what sort of data you want to gather for all of your results.

As input to the program, you can specify either of these or both:

• A seed list of root keywords
  For example, “weightloss, losing weight, fat loss diet, acai berry, lose weight fast”. Your seed list doesn’t need to be long but I usually input 10-15 words. These are the words Keyword Rockstar will go out and retrieve other relevant keywords for (for both broad, phrase and match)
• A seed list of URLs
  This is the equivalent of entering a URL in the Google Keyword Tool. The program will query Google’s tool with these URLs and return relevant keywords. This is great for getting an idea of what your competitors could be ranking for or bidding on. Google’s results aren’t always accurate of course, but like I said - this will give you tons of more ideas.

Now we need to specify what we want Keyword Rockstar to return for each keyword. This is done under a pane called “Stats to Collect”. The options here are pretty impressive. Remember; you can gather all these stats for EACH keyword…

• Adwords stats
  Such as approx. avg. search volume, level of advertiser competition, estimated average cpc, estimated ad position, estimated clicks per day, search volume trends, and highest volume month.
• Current 1st Page Ads & Total Ad Count
  Pretty self explanatory.. It will retrieve the number of competing ads AND the ads themselves! This is really neat, as you can copy/paste from these later to get ideas for your own variations (hey - don’t be a douche and blatantly copy ads word for word, lol).
• Placements Available
  Awesome if you ask me. This feature alone adds a lot of value to Keyword Rockstar in my opinion. In fact, this feature does what “Content Bully” does (a paid tool from the PPC Bully guys). So why pay for Content Bully, when you can use Keyword Rockstar’s built-in functionality?
• Competing Page Count
  This is particularly helpful if you’re doing SEO research as well. It basically returns the number of indexed pages for the keyword / keyphrase in question.
• AllInTitle Count
  Another useful SEO statistic. Anyone with basic SEO knowledge will tell you the importance of keywords contained in a page title tag. With this , you can get a full overview of this number for all the words in your list.
• Online Commercial Intent
  One of my favorites! This data is gathered from MSN Adlab’s excellent tool. It will give you an idea of how commercially viable each keyword possibly is. TIP: By sorting or grouping the list by this data later on, you have a great way of grouping your keywords - perfect for dividing your list to different visitors and their buying modes. In other words: Perfect for the stuff I was talking about here.
• PPC & SEO Rockstar rank
  This is their own proprietary score given to each keyword based on the variables above. To be honest, I have yet to use this option so I can’t tell you too much about it.

It’s up to you if you want to gather all the detailed data upfront, if you don’t want or need too many details, or if you wanna get the basics first and then come back to the project later to get the deep details just for the keywords you need. I usually do the latter.

I find that running a heavily detailed search initially slows down processing time tremendously. This because Keyword Rockstar will then retrieve all kinds of details from different sources - for EACH keyword in your list (even iteratively on its own results if you let it). This obviously can become an ambitious task.

So I prefer to first only gather relevant keywords along with search volumes, and then later filter the results. From the resulting list, I then start up a new data collection process on only the keywords I found interesting.

Performance and Proxy Support

The last (optional) step you can do before you tell Keyword Rockstar to start retrieval, is to specify any proxies you want to use. The main benefit to using proxies is increased retrieval speed. Without proxies, you can only retrieve results at a certain pace. (You can actually tell the program to retrieve faster - but you you will then quickly run into temporary IP bans from Google or MSN). So the lack of proxy use can sometimes mean having to type in captchas every once in a while.

(For some strange reason, they don’t like it when people try to scrape thousands of keyword data from their tools in a short time….dunno why..

So my recommendation is to use proxies. As a member of Keyword Rockstar, you also get access to updated proxy lists that you can copy and paste right into the tool. I sometimes get my own proxy lists around the web, but it doesn’t hurt to have this option.

Adding these to the project setting is a breeze. You can also filter them based on the country you want to retrieve keyword data for.

With proxies in place, retrieveal can be set to move faster. There is a speedometer-looking dial that you can move with your mouse to set the speed. I’ve never pushed it to the max but let it run on around 50%. For a medium-sized project (15-30 root keywords), expect Keyword Rockstar to be working for a good couple of hours.

I sometimes leave it sitting overnight while I sleep, as retrieval time can stretch out for many hours if you have or want lots of data.

Interpreting the Results

You can stop retrieval at any time of course, or wait for it to be done (which I recommend) on its own. Results are presented in their own tab window named (surprise!)….”Results” . Here is where you will be spending most of your time checking out all the information Keyword Rockstar found for you.

If you selected additional data to gather before you started, you will now have all that available here as well. Things like competitors’ ads, content network placements, etc, etc. Everything is laid out pretty logical. This is also where you can view the ads & placements for a keyword by clicking a small “+” plus-sign next to the keyword:

Competitor PPC Ads (for a given keyword)

(I blurred out URLs in this screenshot as not to be outing anyone’s landing pages. )

Content Network Placements (for a given keyword)

For each different project, you can customize the view and what columns you’re interested in for the time being:

Now remember I mentioned earlier how I really liked one part of the user interface? I was referring to the way you can sort and filter your keyword list. Sorting is self-explanatory. Clicking on a column header alternates between ascending/descending sort.

Filtering works sort of like filters in Excel and if you like advanced control, you can even build out your own custom filtering using the built-in Filter Builder. Pretty cool!

Not to mention how you can group or theme all the thousands of keywords together in more logical subsets..

For example - let’s say I wanna break the entire list up into groups depending on commercial intent (think visitor buying mode). The benefit to this is obvious: to be able to create different adgroups (and landing pages) for different sets of my keywords.

So I simply drag the “Commercial Intent Value” column up to the main header of the result screen, and voila - Keyword Rockstar has now grouped the list based on this value instantly. Any of the data columns can be dragged and dropped this way - and moved around in any grouping order:

All of this makes keyword research a lot more manageable. Can you do all this using Notepad and a spreadsheet app like Excel? Sure - but it would take you way, way more time to accomplish the same structured and usable lists for use in your campaigns.

Keyword Rockstar as a Campaign Builder

Speaking of which… Ever seen a keyword research tool with a built-in, full-fledged campaign builder?

Keyword Rockstar will generate your campaigns for you, ready to import into the Google Adwords Editor (or ready to convert to MSN and Yahoo by using Export202).

I’d have to say that this is another area where Keyword Rockstar really shines. It actually gives Speed PPC a run for its money (or this free ppc campaign builder for that matter). And to boot it has the best content and placement campaign builder I have seen. Speed PPC on the other hand is only search-focused.

Basically, you start by selecting multiple (or all) keywords from your main results list, and right-clicking the mouse. This brings up the contextual menu:

From here you simply choose what sort of campaign you want to generate; Search, Placement, or Content.

I’m not gonna go into all the details on how you use the campaign creator because it’s fairly self-explanatory - especially if you have used campaign builders before.

Some of the features:

• Full fledged token system (e.g. {Keyword}for capitalized keyword insertion)
• Grouping by keyword / final mix / expansion
• Individual bids for broad/phrase/match
• Option to specify a pairing keyword list to pair with root words (instead of mix)
• Database with lots of words for prefix / postfix expansions*
• Text ad generator
• Option to limit the # of keywords per adgroup, and the # of adgroups per campaign
• Tracking support, including T202 or Tracking202 Pro query string support

* This includes quite the selection of various action words, US/Canada/UK/Germany city names, states, regions, buy words, colors, descriptive words, price keywords, car models, pet breeds, brand names, and more.

For content campaigns, you can even choose how you want to break up your image ads and text ads. Do you want them all in separate campaigns (recommended), same campaigns but different adgroups, or same campaigns and adgroups?

Note: Keep in mind which keywords you select for a content network campaign. Preferably, your content campaign should be set up like I discussed in this post. Just apply those tips and use some common sense when you pick your keywords here.

Text ad generator

Straightforward stuff. Works just like in Speed PPC or Derek Beau’s free ppc campaign builder:

Image ad generator

I love this part. Keyword Rockstar is the first image ad generator I have seen that can generate image ads for all 9 standard Adwords formats AND is integrated with a campaign builder.

Now granted, the version I have been using (up and until June 21st) only has a limited style of banner design. It’s basically based on one template - one that looks like a text ad, but has “hand drawn” red arrows and circles on it. So the ads will look something like this:

However - I contacted the developers about this, and was told that they are actually working in more templates in upcoming versions. Even a template builder is in the works, so that you can blend in your own style of graphics, layout, and colors. Can’t wait to see what they will come up with!

Seriously…this image ad generator is pretty damn powerful. I have spent countless hours in the past creating image ads manually and it can be an extremely time-consuming task with all the formats needed. Not to mention if you want different ad descriptions written into each image.

You could outsource this job of course - but it still means it’s gonna take some guy or gal a few days of work to deliver all the ads you request. Keyword Rockstar’s image ad generator is a HUGE time-saver. Especially if you wanna get an image ad campaign up and running quickly to test out a new offer.

Of course - you can also choose to include any other image ads or network creatives you may have. I never use the default affiliate network creatives by the way because I think they usually suck, lol. Traditionally I have made my own creatives using Adobe Photoshop but I can save that for another “How To…” blog post.

Other Features

Time to wrap this review up. Before I finish, I should mention that you also have a few more functions available in Keyword Rockstar’s right-click context menu. I showed you this earlier, but here it is again:

As you can see, there’s immediate access to do quick lookup on more data for your keyword:

• View Google Trends (opens a new window showing the volume and geographical trends from Google)
• Keyword Spy lookup
• SpyFu lookup
• View the given keyword’s 1st page search results in the 3 major search engines
• Domain checker (e.g. if you wanna see if the longtail www.iwannamakemoniesonlineinmyboxers.com is available)

It’s nice to have access to some of these handy. I have also been told more lookup otions will be added here in the future.

Lastly - you can export your findings as reports into formats like Excel (csv or xls), Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, PDF, Text, print, or as images. The PDF and HTML I would imagine would really only be useful if you’re doing reporting for company SEM work. I have really only found the TXT and CSV export useful myself but - each to their own.

Price, Support and Conclusion

At the current price of $97/month, Keyword Rockstar is not a free tool - but honestly it shouldn’t be either. The guys behind it have put a lot of work into making this a quality product. It still has some minor flaws (being somewhat system resource heavy) but these are being ironed out.

Response time from contacting support has been excellent for me. The founder of Keyword Rockstar, Jon Shugart, has been an affiliate for a long time himself and seem to know exactly what we as affiliate marketers need and want in a tool that can contribute more towards a profitable business.

I recommend this program to both beginners and experienced affiliate marketers. The newbies will find it useful for getting new niches researched quickly and get campaigns up and running for testing offers. The seasoned guys will love it for its deep research abilities and image ad builder for massive campaigns.

PROS:
- Lots of them.
- Efficient keyword research NOT based around months-old data. Uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for iterative retrieval
- A very good keyword grouping engine allowing you to theme your campaigns, ads and landing pages much more in tune to what each visitor would want to see
- Proxy support for heavy duty mass retrieval
- Competitor research on ads and landing pages. Granted, it does NOT do analysis over time (like PPC Bully does) and so what you see is not necessarily competitors’ profitable ads or landing pages. Just what is currently found.
- Solid campaign builder rivaling other tools that cost way more
- Overall a great money- and time-saving “jack of all trades and master of a few” tool
- The price

CONS:
- Somewhat slow installation time (this is being worked on according to developers)
- Occasionally slows down my system (my desktop pc is also 5 years old so that could be my problem, lol)
- Image ad generator still limited to one template (but lots more templates as well as a custom template builder is being worked on for an upcoming release).

You can read more about it on their official website by clicking here. And yes, that is obviously my affiliate link but if you rather not sign up under me just go to KeyworRockstar.com

Aahh yeah, this business is awesome.

But to be doing well, you of course need to do your “homework” and make sure you have a revenue stream to keep those sweet weekly payout wires from all the networks coming in. This simply means staying on top of things and diversifying.

I’m always on the lookout for new markets and verticals to try out. And the one phase you can’t avoid, is research. Research is crucial from the moment you think of trying out a new offer or niche. If you do a half-assed job during this stage, you can (and will) be losing out on a LOT of potential income. Even worse - you may end up failing the niche altogether and decide to drop it completely, based on the negative ROI you ended up with and go “meh…that niche just didn’t work out for me and I don’t understand how people are making money with it“.

I always do thorough research when I enter a new vertical I’m unfamiliar with. Not so much when I just wanna test out a low-paying lead based offer of course - but more so for higher-paying CPA/rebill or sale offers where I’m gonna build out a landing site.

This may sound like a lot of work at first, but with the right tools - it really isn’t!
I always research;

The Keywords
- What is the core set of obvious, short-tail keywords for the niche? (usually a root set of 10-50 words to start with)
- What common long-tail keywords are found off of each of these? (100 - 1000++ keywords)
- What other keywords are used by my competitors that I may have missed?
- What are the different “buckets” or groups/themes that these words could be categorized into?

The Offer / Product & Market
- Is there a potential for good traffic volume and revenue from this offer?
- Who is the average customer or core demographic? (ages, gender, level of education, etc.)

The Competition
- Who are the top 3-5 big players in the niche?
- How are they promoting it? (ad styles, landing page styles, copy style, targeting)
- Which offers are they promoting?
- Where are they promoting it the most? (ppc search or content, media buys, ppv, social media)
- When are they promoting it? (finding a common dayparting pattern among the competitors, seasonality)

In the next few posts, I’m gonna take a look at a few research tools that I personally use. Some are free and some are not. But they all make this job a WHOLE lot easier. Not to mention more profitable.

First up: My Keyword Rockstar Review. Stay tuned!

Every so many months, a new network pops up on the horizon. The last year and a half we have seen the emergence of great new networks ran by former affiliates, such as Convert2Media, Ads4Dough and Firelead. I’m a publisher with all of them, and they take very good care of their affiliates! Along with YEP Revenue, those guys are among my top favorite CPA networks to deal with.

But today I would like to bring attention to a lesser known network: Profit Kings Media.

This network really goes the extra mile to make sure you’re making bank:

• Weekly payouts regardless of volume (where else can you get that?)
• Seriously good payouts (yeah yeah, I know what you’re thinking - all the networks have “the best payouts”. These guys really can beat pretty much any payout)
• Affiliate Managers devoted to making you cash
• Running only converting offers that are tested in-house for ROI before they’re made available (quality vs. quantity)

My affiliate manager Yousif has shown me the utmost dedication to help with anything I need. And I’m not just talking about getting me offers or payout increases. They’re still a fairly new network but I think we will be hearing a lot more buzz about Profit Kings Media in the time to come.

Give PKM a try and I doubt you’ll be disappointed!

Read an interview Yousif did recently over at MadPPC here.

Disclaimer: If you’re making your own landing pages, you need some basic PHP knowledge to do this. If you’re having your landing pages outsourced however, just show this post to your designer and he will know what to do.

The Goal: To create dynamic landing pages that show different images to the visitor depending on what they searched for, what was shown in the ad, or where they come from.

What could we use this for?
The possibilities are endless actually, but here are ideas to get you started:

• A ringtone campaign. You could have many different ads targeted to an artist, or a cellphone brand. Your ringtone landing page would show a picture of that particular artist or a picture of the cellphone you were advertising it with.
• Insurance campaign. Each visitor to your landing page is presented with not only text tailored to his/her whereabouts (like city, zipcode, state) - but also with a small image of their state flag, a clipart state map, or similar. This will make your landing page instantly more appealing to visitors no matter from what city or state they are searching from.
• Dog accessories campaign. One visitor searches for “portable kennel for german shepherd” and is taken to your landing page where there happens to be a picture of a german shepherd right alongside your general content about portable kennels. Another visitor searched for “labrador dog car kennel”and is shown that very same page - only now with a picture of a labrador instead of the german shepherd.

In this post, you will learn:

• Basic php keyword insertion
• Method #1 - Dynamic image insertion using a static image library
• Method #2 - Dynamic image insertion using Yahoo Images

The Basics: Standard keyword insertion

Alright, I’m sure you’re familiar with dynamic keyword insertion on landing pages. Essentially, you can pass along a variable to your PHP landing page, and have that variable inserted anywhere (visible or non-visible) on your page.

This serves two purposes:
1) To get better Quality Score due to increased keyword relevancy
2) To increase visitor interest and conversions

To do this, just insert the following string anywhere in your landing page code where you would like the keyword to appear:

<?php echo ucwords(str_replace("-"," ",$_GET["keyword"])); ?>

So let’s say you have a landing page called lander.php. You would then call the landing page like this:

http://www.example.com/lander.php?keyword=fleshlight-video-tutorial

Now the keyword “Fleshlight Video Tutorial” would show up wherever you wanted it to on the page. Remember, the php string could be placed anywhere in the code. I usually try to include it in a combination of the following:

Meta tags (description, keywords)
Title
Headline
Image alt tags
Href title tags
Within the landing page copy
As a link anchor tag to another internal site page

Use your imagination! And actually - that is what brings me to the core part of this post…

Method #1 - Dynamc image insertion based on a static image library
Now, onto the fun part… Because we can also use the passed variable as part of filenames in the landing page code. On a regular page, you would normally show static images with the HTML img tag like this:
<img src="images/dog.jpg”>

It would result in a page like this:

…and that image would be the same for every visitor, no matter what dog breed or keyword they had searched for.

But instead of that, we wanna spice it up a little and present our visitors with a picture of his/her dog breed. Think that will bring up your conversions and ROI? You bet!

We can then have custom destination URLs from our ads pointing to:
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=cocker-spaniel
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=golden-retriever
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=german-shepherd
(Of course, the ads themselves should also have the keyword in them)

And we can have all kinds of variations of the same landing page:

We accomplish this by simply replacing the static image filename with the keyword string from the URL, like this:
<img src="images/<?php echo $_GET["keyword"]; ?>.jpg">

This obviously also requires you to actually have image files with these names stored in your /images folder. These aren’t hard to come by though. For a small project requiring a dozen or so images, you can get them yourself from Google images (always make sure not to violate copyrights). If you need more - let’s say for a list of 100 dog breeds, you can outsource the image retrieval to someone from eLance, Odesk, or even the Sell&Buy section at Wickedfire.com.

It’s highly recommended to ensure that all the images are the of the same dimension so you don’t risk messing with the page layout. You could do this quickly for a batch of images using a tool like IrfanView. And the filenames should be similar to your expansion keywords. In the example above, we had these images sitting in our images folder:

/images/cocker-spaniel.jpg
/images/golden-retriever.jpg
/images/german-shepherd.jpg

So when the landing page is called, along with the keyword “cocker-spaniel”, the proper filename is chosen because we ask php to grab the keyword and use it as the image filename.

Important note: You need to make sure that the keyword is passed exactly matching the filename for this to work. So if you’re passing along your keywords with dashes (-) between each word, your filenames also must contain that character. To play it safe, you could have duplicate sets of all the images, some with dashes and some without. Or you can play around with the PHP str_replace function to replace spaces with dashes for example.

This may all sound like a lot of work, but it really isn’t once you’ve done it a time or two. For a real powerful campaign, build out your campaign using the free DerekPPC (SpeedPPC clone), and use the expansion keywords to call images. You can still pass along the seed keywords and the final, mixed keywords along to the landing page for other uses.

Method #2 - Dynamc image insertion using Yahoo images
This next method doesn’t rely on having images stored on your server. It’s more suitable if you need a huge variety of images (e.g. for thousands of expansion keywords) and can’t or don’t want to retrieve specific images ahead of time.

It’s also prone to give you some less relevant images since you’re not in direct control of what images will show up. This because we are retrieving images on the fly from Yahoo images through their API. We’re relying on Yahoo to find the most relevant image for us based on a keyword.

The script you will need to do this is here: DOWNLOAD (Right click and Save As…)
Upload the yahooimages.php file to the root of your website.

And for wherever you want to insert an image into your landing page, add this line:
<?php include("yahooimages.php"); ?>

We can use the same destination URL as before to call the page:
http://www.example.com/kennel.php?keyword=german-shepherd

However - the image will now be the first image Yahoo finds relevant enough for our keyword… This could be of a german shepherd dog - or if we’re less lucky: a picture of a german flag - or a shepherd with his sheep.

So the trick to getting this script to achieve accurate images is to append additional words to the keyword. This makes it more likely for the Yahoo API to retrieve what we want. To do this, open the yahooimages.php script in a text editor, go to the 3rd line, and replace the word PICTURE with a short word that would make the image search term more specific.

If we replace the word PICTURE with the word breed, it would make the script call Yahoo for images based on “german shepherd breed”.

Or if our keyword was Madonna, we could replace PICTURE with “album” so that we would get a picture of a Madonna album cover (and not risk getting pictures of the virgin Mary or some Madonna nipslip paparazzi picture)

I’ve used this for ringtone landing pages in the past. Be sure to do some test runs with different keywords from your list to see if the image retrieved is appropriate and relevant. Please note also that the script is set to use a default image size of 125×125. You can change this by editing the width and height in line 9.

Bonus Tip: Geo-targeted Images

In the beginning of this post, I suggested you could have images display based on the visitor’s location. Using a simple geo-targeting script such as this one, we can do just that!

Just like in method #1, we could have a set of state flag images - and call the appropriate flag using this line in the landing page code:

<img src="images/<?php echo $geo_data['geoplugin_region']; ?>.jpg">

Pretty cool?

Are you ready to take your landing pages to the next level of customization? As always, I am interested to hear what sorts of other uses and ideas you may have based on this. Bring on the comments…

Now let it be said that, the form of split-testing we’re after here is pure and simple A/B/C testing. That is, we’re only testing variations of entire pages - not slight variations within a page. To do that, Google’s Website Optimizer is more suitable.

So - there are several ways to split-test landing pages, but the most common (and simplest) way to do it is using a small .php script that will rotate between and redirect to a set of landing pages you specify. Wes Mahler over at Tracking202 wrote up a brief instruction on how to use their landing page split-tester, but some people are having some trouble getting it set up just right. So I figured I could explain it in a bit more detail here.

First, a simple visualization of how this works:

The T202 landing page rotator looks like this:

Note: The script also relies on having a dummy file called count.txt with write-permission located in the same directory on your server. You can create an empty file like this in Notepador your favorite text editor.

Ok, so let’s say we have 3 landing pages that we want to split-test:

We also have the split-testing (rotation) script in the same folder:

So we have:

www.example.com/lander_a.php
www.example.com/lander_b.php
www.example.com/lander_c.php
www.example.com/rotate.php
www.example.com/count.txt

Configuration

1. In the rotate.php file, modify the following lines so they match our landing page filenames:

$landingpage[1] = ‘lander_a.php’;
$landingpage[2] = ‘lander_b.php’;
$landingpage[3] = ‘lander_c.php’;

Save the file, and upload it to the server along with the count.txt file. Make sure count.txt has file permissions of 777.

2. In Tracking202: Go to Setup - #4 Landing Pages, and add each landing page there with its own name, e.g. “My1stSplit_LP_a” and so forth. Set the landing page URL for each of them to:
   www.example.com/rotate.php. Select the appropriate Aff Network and Aff Campaign for this page.
   
3. Also, add a separate landing page for rotate.php and again use www.example.com/rotate.php for its landing page URL. We will call it “My1stSplit_Rotator”.So we have now added 4 landing pages in Tracking202:
   3 for the actual landing pages we will test between, and 1 dummy that is really only the rotating script itself.
4. Now go to Setup - #6 Get LP Code and grab the code for each of the three landing pages. It should look something like this:
   
   Insert this code into the appropriate landing page file (at the bottom right before the </BODY> tag). Make sure to also grab the outbound PHP code for any outgoing affiliate links you have set up for that landing page as well.Note: we do NOT grab the LP Codes for the rotate.php page, as this really is not a landing page.
5. Now we need to generate the destination link to be used in our ads. Go to Setup -#7 Get Links. Select “My1stSplit_Rotator” and generate the link for it.It should look something like this:
   
   And this is our final destination URL to be used in our source of traffic, be it PPC ad or whatever.

What will happen now is that for every new visitor clicking our ads through our destination link, the next landing page in line will be shown. In Tracking202, the visits will be shown as visits to either:

My1stSplit_LP_a
My1stSplit_LP_b
My1stSplit_LP_c

Tip for Naming Landing Pages in T202

In Tracking202, give each of your landing pages descriptive names that remind yourself of the unique features of that page. By doing this, you can instantly see what landing page style works the best when looking at your statistics.

For example, I give mine names like “blueBG_noOptIn_redHeadline” to tell myself that the page I’m seeing statistics for is the one that has blue background, no opt-in form, and a red headline style.

Now get to tracking and optimizing for more profits!

For those of us who run large search campaigns, one of the most significant advances has been the release of PPC campaign builders. There are already several commercial offerings on the market - the most notable being Speed PPC and Efficient PPC.

These tools are actually really good, but they can be a bit pricey for the aspiring affiliate marketer who has little or no extra cash to spare (the two above tools currently run around $500 for a lifetime license)

Luckily, there is a poor man’s solution available. Well, the word “available” can be argued here. Because it was originally coded and released by respectable blogger Derek Beau in 2007 as an open-source project, but later taken off his website due to threats from the legal team of Speed PPC.

The script has since been hard to find - only occasionally mentioned in threads on Wickedfire, or offered to members there by me upon private request. Why me? Well I want to make it clear that I do not in any way claim to take credit for Derek’s work. His script is very well written and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. However when I started using it a while ago, I found a bug in the code. The bug would cause some tokens in some instances to be switched in order. And this would result in incorrect campaign .csv code.

So all I have done is correct the minor bug, and repackage it as version 1.1 (as to not be mixed with Derek’s original “version 1.0″)

So how does it stack up against the commercial tools?
When Derek first released the script, Speed PPC was the only competitor as Efficient PPC hadn’t been released yet. And at the time - Speed PPC had less features than it has today. Derek’s script actually did all the things Speed PPC could - and faster! (No wonder Speed PPC felt threatened and forced Derek to remove it)

But the most recent versions of the aforementioned competitors now have developed with more advanced features. Derek’s tool has the following basic features:

- mixing two sets of keywords into a combined keyword list
- generating unique destination URLs for each and every keyword combination
- generating unique ad title, descriptions, and display URLs for each keyword combination
- ability to generate 6 different text ads per keyword combination
- ability to set different bids for each destination URL (broad, phrase, exact)
- branching options (before, after, before & after, pair, no branch)
- grouping options (by root keyword, by branch keyword, by combination)
- formatting options (uppercase/lowercase, space, hyphens, blanks)
- output for Google Adwords only

As of this writing, the latest version of Speed PPC is version 3. Efficient PPC is in version1.1. They largely share the same features, and can do more things not supported by Derek’s script such as:

- output for MSN Adcenter and Yahoo YSM, with separate cpc pricing
- built-in keyword tools
- built-in keyword lists such as US states, cities, countries, brand names, etc.
- downloadable keyword lists
- more than 2 keyword lists as input for combinations
- multiple campaign creation
- automatic split of large adgroups and campaigns
- error detection in output
- ability to save and load existing project files
- cut/copy/paste functionality
- ability to define custom tokens for even more advanced output
The most notable difference however, is that the commercial offerings are installed and ran from your desktop pc. Whereas Derek’s tool is a php script that must be uploaded to your server and ran within your browser. Nothing wrong with that in my opinion - just FYI.

So why am I sharing this script now?
I believe the commercial tools have matured enough to no longer see this free script as a competitive threat. It obviously has its shortcomings compared to the paid tools. But on the other hand, I think it is an awesome alternative for those starting out and learning the ropes. If anything, Derek’s tool will make people want something more and eventually purchase either Speed PPC or Efficient PPC.

Besides, any affiliate marketer who is serious about this business and starting to make money shouldn’t think twice about investing in quality tools that will help him or her expand his business.

Download and Installation
1) CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE SCRIPT

2) Unzip the .zip file to a temporary folder on your harddrive

3) Upload it your server under a domain or subfolder. e.g. My-Test-Domain.info/derekppc/

4) Run the script by visiting that URL

How to use the script
Update: Since I first posted this, it turns out that Derek actually wrote a user guide to this script as well. One of my readers found it on Smax0r’s blog (Oooff.com) and posted it in the comments below.

CLICK HERE to download the PDF manual hosted on Oooff.com

CLICK HERE to download the PDF manual hosted on Profitapolis.com

Thanks to Slava and Smax0r for.

That being said - most of my readers can probably figure out how to use the script, but if you have questions feel free to drop them in the comments section.

Ok - now it’s your turn to tell me what you think. I wanna hear what you think of the script, if you find it hard to understand, or even if you just found it useful. So leave your comments below!

Lastly - thanks to Derek Beau for coding this script and originally making it available to the public!

ICANN is the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the central organization that controls domain names.

For years we have been restricted to choose from the given set of 21 top-level domains (com, net, org, and others), or 249 country-specific domains (.it .tv .us .no). Now the rules will change, and any new extension can be created by businesses or individuals.

This means that anyone can become the owner of their own domain extension, and become the sole registrar for resell rights to domains on it.
As an example, you can register .ppc as a new extension and become the registrar for .ppc domains. People can then buy domain names on your new .ppc extension, such as makemoniesonline.ppc or mad.ppc

Longer extensions are also no problem. Today we have things like .mobi or .name. But how about .pedobear or .reallysucks?

When the floodgates are opened this fall, there will undoubtedly be a huge goldrush to acquire the most sought-after extensions. Obvious ones like .xxx, .sex, .money, .free, .you, .hot are sure to be ripped off the shelves in no time. Expect a stampede in the lines at ICANN from investors and bigtime domainers.

Not to mention all the possibilities for countries and cities to have their own extensions. Also expect big spenders to buy up bulks of common last names. “Hello John Smith, would you like to register john.smith today for a limited time only at $9.99?“. It’s a domain investors wet dream come true.

But wait - there’s more! All new extensions can now also contain special characters for foreign languages. And this is actually what prompted ICANN to move forward with this new policy. ICANN has been under pressure for years from countries like Russia, who really wants to use the cyrillic alphabet in their domain names. Their prayers have finally been answered.

The bad news? Well, acquiring the rights to a new extension is not coming cheap for the average .Joe.

ICANN requires a new extension application fee of $185,000. Additionally, being a registrar of your own extension will run you $75,000 in annual ICANN fees. ICANN is a non-profit organization, but justifies these high fees with the costs they have had developing the new standards and technology.
ICANN will also have to deal with the inevitable conflicts between “rightful” owners of certain names. More so between governments who will claim ownership to disputable territories. It is feared that third-world countries will be left behind in this race, as the high aquisation costs will prevent them from reserving names important to their culture or geographics.

The good news? The opportunities here are still so vast, that the initial investment and costs could pay off fast for those who get in early.

It will really be interesting to see how this plays out.

Now - what domain extensions would you buy? Let’s hear it for some good, bad, or whacky ideas!

This post is mostly a recap of answers I have given to members of Wickedfire when content network questions have come up. I hope this will be helpful to those of you who still struggle to understand it, and that you can set up your first profitable campaigns on content with the use of this info.

First of all, when creating a new campaign for the content network - disable the Search network. You want your content network campaign to only bring in contextual traffic.

Second, you don’t wanna load up thousands of keywords to a content campaign without some organization to it all. So let’s get started with my personal list of tips…

1) Keep the number of keywords per adgroup low (15-30, no more than 50) and closely related

2) Google ignores phrase and exact match on Content, so you need to rely on your negative keyword list to narrow down the matches. So if one of your keywords are “widget investments”, your ad may also show up on sites talking about forex investments and property investments. In that case, you need to add “forex” and “property” as negative keywords. This to better target your ads, reduce the amount of curious (but not serious) tire-kickers, increase your CTR and conversion rate.

3) Build up a large negative keyword list for each adgroup (and it may not be wise to re-use the same neg. kw list for all adgroups because you may accidentally block out things unintentionally). Put just as much care into building a good negative keyword list as you do building your regular kw list. The purpose of the negatives is to filter away sites that may have SOME of your words on them - but are irrelevant to your offer.

4) Google looks at the keywords in your adgroup as well as your actual ad in order to figure out where to place your ad, so make sure your ad contains (or is themed to) the keywords for that adgroup. Google will then, based on the most common “theme” of your keywords, assign your adgroup to a certain category on their network. You can download a list of these categories here.

Whenever I plan a new content network campaign, I use that list as a base for picking out the categories most suitable for my campaign. I then do some keyword and URL research that would be a good fit for those categories.

5) You can split-test two identical campaigns - one with CPM bidding, and one with CPC. ROI can be very different on the two bidding models, but one isn’t always better than the other.

6) I also recommend trying out site-targetting in another campaign. It requires some more work to find good sites, but there are some real goldmines to be found. I’ve found particular pages yielding 80%+ CTR on my ads.

7) Content QS is pretty much all about CTR. The trick is to find a middle ground between bringing in as many clickers as possible while filtering out non-converting tire-clickers at the same time. In short: be inventive and use shock value if need be, but also stay somewhat honest about what you are sending the clicker to.

You can have multiple campaigns and adgroups with some of the same keywords used in all of them - just not IDENTICAL adgroups or campaigns.

So one adgroup could be:
“blue widgets”
“dumb widgets”
“widgets discounts”
“widget facts”
“witgeds”

And another one could be:
“red widgets”
“dumb widgets”
“widget facts”
“widget scams”
“holiday widgets”

9) Always keep an eye on your placement reports and weed out sites with abysmal CTRs / conversions. Set aside a day or two and do some research on what sites you can target with site-targeted campaigns. It can be time-consuming to find a good list of sites or even better; specific pages to target - but it can REALLY pay off. I’ve found pages that have seen consistent 80% ctr for a very specific offer.

10) I personally also block certain sites like myspace and about.com right off the bat. They tend to bring nothing but millions of impressions and shitty ctr / no conversions.

Planning and Managing a Content Network Campaign

You need a completely different keyword approach for search vs. content. In search, you’re looking to bring in traffic based on more or less a specific product or solution the user was actively looking for.

In content, you’re trying to bring them in as they are not necessarily actively looking for an ad or a link, but you wanna have your ads present on the pages and sites they visit.

Therefore - you should research two different keyword sets. On content, you will usually have a larger negative keyword list, for example.

Having it in its own campaign also makes sense from a management point of view. You can give each campaign its own ad-scheduling and budget. Budgeting a search campaign can also be very different than budgeting a content campaign in the same niche, for the same product.

For both search and content campaigns however; always set up smaller, tight adgroups with closely related keywords (if doing keyword-based content). For placement-content, break it up into several site adgroups based on site themes and demographics.

Text ads or Image ads

I have personally always had more success with image ads in my content campaigns, but by all means - you should test text ads also. In some cases, audiences could be prone to banner blindness and take your text ads more seriously. So come up with some text ads, but also take the time to add some image ads to your adgroups. Your options are to create your own, have someone create them for you, or to use the default creatives as supplied by your network (although they’re normally not that good in my opinion).

Keyword Grouping and Adgroup Setup

I see people using keyword lists based around adding a prefix or suffix to the same root keyword.

This is an approach suitable for search campaigns, but not really for content. When deciding on keywords for a content adgroup, try to think in terms of making an adgroup for a certain sub-group of your demographic.

Using the eating vegetables example, let’s say you’re promoting an offer for a free 1-year supply of veggies. For this adgroup, we then ask ourselves:

1. What types of people will be more likely to be interested in this offer and give us conversions?
2. What sorts of websites do these people frequently visit?
3. What keywords are most prominent on those websites?

The answer might be a list more like this:

• cooking
• vegetable
• vegetables
• veggies
• vegetarian
• vegan
• eating
• eating vegetables
• steaks
• sirloin
• carrots
• broccoli
• cucumber
• cauliflower
• boiling
• recipes
• recipe
• steaming

With a negative keyword list such as this, to supplement it:

• -growing
• -grow
• -grows
• -harvesting
• -harvest
• -planting
• -plant
• -plants
• -farming
• -farm
• -farms
• -candy
• -cookies
• -dining
• -restaurants

(assuming you don’t want your ads on sites devoted to restaurant guides, farming, or recipes for sweets)

You could get a hunch of what sites you could be placed on, by using the free Adwords Digger (requires an opt-in but you can opt-out once you’ve downloaded it). This would give you an idea of whether or not you’re on the right track with your content adgroup keyword selection.

Another great resource is Google’s new Ad Planner.

If you have such a massive list of keywords for your campaign as a whole, I would definitely try to weed out a bunch, and start out with grouping the most obvious ones. Chances are, your big list has tons of 3 or 4+ word longtails, and it will be a nightmare to write out negative keywords for them all. Remember - all content keywords are considered broad match, and phrase/exact is ignored!

So to save yourself some work, start out with the most obvious 1 or 2-keyword words and spend your time focusing on who and where, instead of generating variations off of one root keyword.

Other Good Resources

David Szetela’s Content Advertising Series. Nice articles that goes through the fundamentals as well as more advanced tips.

Also check out Adhustler’s article on his content network strategy  and SlightlyShadySEO’s content network article for some great tips.

After picking him up from his hotel in downtown Oslo, we headed back to my house where we had dinner with my wife and kids.

Let me tell you - Lord Brar is a very nice guy to talk to. You sometimes get a different impression of people when meeting them in real life vs. just chatting online. This guy is very down to earth and has great sense of humor.

Thursday, we spent all day talking business back in Oslo. It’s true what they say - networking with like minded people in person is a great thing because it gives you so many awesome ideas. I sure walked away with some good ideas, and so did he. Without saying too much - we are going to try a test collaboration in a certain niche market both online and offline.

Here we are eating dinner at my house..

Their advertiser interface still could use some improvements at this point (something I’m sure we will see over time). I personally found it cumbersome to browse through their categories and genres when selecting the interests of your target audience. For the Google Content network, I prefer planning my campaigns offline - using a spreadsheet of Google’s categories.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to do the same with MySpace Ads? Hell yeah!

So here it is - a Profitapolis exclusive: The complete audience target “interests” list in a handy offline spreadsheet. Not seeing yet how this can help you?

Get ideas for what offers to test on MySpace

I for one tend to ignore many demographics when launching new content or site-targeted campaigns. There are just SO many groups of people out there.. SO many interests… SO many different groups of fans of a certain tv-show, a book franchise, a band, or a lesser known sport or hobby. But these can easily be tapped into with ads catering directly to them. I get ideas all the time just by looking through people’s interests. Many of the CPA networks have a wide range of offers that in one way or another can be promoted to these groups.

Of course - MySpace Ads already gives us all this data in their interface. When you create a new campaign, you can browse through their categories and genres and see how many users your ads will (potentially) reach. But it has its limitations.. You need to expand each category/genre manually, and then click Add on each to add them to your list. The list also only holds 50 groups at a time. By having the entire interest-list offline and in a manageable spreadsheet you get instant access to see all the genres at once.

Who are the MySpace users?

The numbers tell us some interesting things about MySpace users. Everybody knows that MySpace generally attracts a younger crowd, dedicated fans of bands or artists, teenagers, and the type of people who compete in having the gaudiest themes on the web, lol. Facebook on the other hand, has a somewhat more mature crowd - and is less focused on entertainment. The MySpace audience interest list reflects this.

Looking through it though, it seems to be missing some categories. For example - under Musical Instruments, they only have Bass, Guitar and Piano. Is nobody interested in the drums or home recording? Unlikely.

The 800+ category list is sure to be expanded though, and there is plenty to choose from for pretty much any offer you can imagine testing out.

Download it here:

Right click, and “Save As…” to download. The file is in standard Excel format but can also be opened with the free OpenOffice Calc.Feel free to leave a comment about how you think this list can improve your MySpace campaign planning.