Since I began working online just over 2 years ago things have been constantly changing, new laws come into place, Google wants you to provide the user with some value rather than a 1 page site full of affiliate links and not to mention the competition is always growing.

It’s always nice to see tools come out that not only help make your life easier but to add value to your website and stand out from the crowd by having a unique feature on your website which beings me on to the topic of this post: WP-Answers.

When I first checked out the demo (which can be found here) I already had a number of uses for the plugin which I could use on both my affiliate marketing campaigns along with some smaller SEO sites I have knocking about. You could use it as another form of fresh regular content, build up a FAQ for your website or just another method of getting interaction from your traffic… the list really goes on.

Features

You can see a full list of the features here along with a more in depth description but for those who want to get a quick overview here is what this plugin will do for you:

• Question & Answers System – it works in the same way as Yahoo! Answers
• Points System – interaction with the site will award you points which can be seen on a leader board.
• Profile Pages – provides a history of each member with any questions they’ve asked or answers they have provided.
• Automatic Content + Updating – This is one of the main features I like about this, especially for affiliate marketing websites, you can pull content directly from Yahoo Answers (both questions and answers) and even set a schedule to post new content every hour, day, week or whatever you want.
• Customised Content – regardless what niche you’re in you get to pick the keywords that trigger the content to be published
• Easy Advertising Management – control any banners or adsense from the control panel
• 6 free themes ready to go – you can check out the themes by viewing the demo (top right).
• Free Tutorials & Support for life – pretty self explanatory

Price

When it comes to the pricing they have 3 different tiers available:

• Single license – $89
• Multi-site license – $179
• Developer license – $249

It just depends on how you intend to use it to which one suits you the best. NOTE: Oliver has been kind enough to offer any of my readers a 20% discount by using the code RB1000 at the checkout.

Affiliates Welcome

If you own a blog or do any affiliate marketing feel free to sign up as an affiliate and earn 35% of any sales you can generate by clicking here.

Overall WP-Answers does seem a pretty good plugin, there are plenty of ideas you could incorporate this into either making it an expansion of your current site or creating a whole site based around Q&As in a niche topic.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had an idea, got it all up and running for it to fail and a simple change in offer has boosted performance instantly – without any other changes. Even having the exact same offer on different networks will perform different so in order to squeeze all of the revenue out of your campaign you need to test every offer in the niche with every network you can.

Just last week I used this tip taking a campaign losing money to making a profit. It just shows you that you have to exhaust everything and be willing to spend money to make money, I’m sure with more time and more scaling I can get the initial loss back and much more – just for having the confidence and patience that it had potential.

Split test ads/creatives

Depending on what type of campaign you are running really depends on the type of ad you should run. Take PPC for example where you pay for every click you get, you need to prequalify potential customers as much as possible to maintain the highest ROI possible. There is no point in creating an ad saying something’s free when it’s not – that will just lead to plenty of clicks (cost) with them not converting (no income) leaving you in the red.

On the other hand if you are bidding CPM or a flat monthly price you have more leeway in how you structure your ad, regardless if they click or not you are paying so you can leave them hanging and wanting to know more information. The aim of the game with this type of campaign is the highest CTR possible.

When creating your ads (especially banners) you have to practically test everything, it’s weird how things work. You could ask your little brother/sister or anyone to create one in paint – compare it to your professionally paid for design and I wouldn’t risk putting money on the winner, it could go either way.

The main things I test in no particular order are the images used, headline, colours and the wording (i.e. giving different messages aiming to different people). For example say you were advertising on a parental website or something universal, you could split test a couple of ads, one targeting mothers and the other targeting fathers.

Try to be creative and think outside of the box, again if you have any questions about this step feel free to post a comment and I’ll answer it the best I can.

Anyway with that out of the way I’ll get stuck in:

Split test your landing page

The majority of times I begin a campaign I use 2 landing pages to test first, often drastically different in the approach i.e. 1 review page and 1 presell or something. Sometimes I begin with 1 or sometimes I’ll make more and give it a test to see which option gets the best response. I tend to make the colour scheme something similar so that doesn’t become a massive factor of their performance. NOTE: direct linking may also be viable depending on the offer.

From there I can then drill down into the winning page type and begin testing elements of that to increase the click through rate. Remember to also track the conversion rate as that’s ultimately what will make or break the campaign. You could have a landing page with over 50% CTR but if the conversion rate sucks it’s not doing its job. If you are using prosper202 or tracking202 all this is taken care of.

It could be something as simple in the change of your approach could turn it profitable, sometimes more is required so be sure to test the main elements of your landing page such as the colour scheme, headers, images, call to actions or layout to name a few.

I use this script to rotate my landing pages and it works fine: http://prosper.tracking202.com/scripts/split-testing-landing-pages/ – just put that code in the index.php of your domain and edit the code so that it can pull up your landing pages.

If you have any specific questions related to landing pages feel free to post a comment and I’ll answer it the best I can.

Stop Procrastinating

Close everything non-related to your work and just get stuck in. I’ve found that if you take too long on tasks (example taking days instead of hours) it drags out the process of getting that campaign up and running which in turn will make you feel you’ve spent far too much time on it for it to fail.

You pack up and move onto the next – chances are the exact same will happen and after X campaigns you have spent your entire test budget convinced that affiliate marketing doesn’t work.

A simple post yet effective, they will get more in-depth I promise

Never assume if your first test doesn’t work – it doesn’t work

I’ve been a sucker for this mainly in trying FaceBook advertising, mainly because of the time frame it takes to get approved/disapproved I felt that because it didn’t work out I would be better trying something else rather than doing it all again – stupid I know.

There are so many factors of a campaign which could be preventing your campaign from breaking even or even being profitable. I will talk about some of the things in this series for you to look out for and hopefully allow you to find that winning campaign.

Next post to follow tomorrow so be sure to subscribe to my blog so that you get updates of all of the posts in this series…

I have mainly been looking into banner buys for my campaigns taking them to the next level. I’m sure as with everything else I just have to keep testing placements, banners, landing pages and what not to find a winning combination before scaling that out to as many places as possible.

I feel that the majority of my posts will be related to this as and when I come across any solutions to problems I come across.

Aside from that I’m working on another project outside of internet marketing all together with a friend of mine which seems to be becomming a pain. I can’t go into too much detail as of yet but we had a script made and has taken a while to get all of the bugs ironed out because it’s pretty complex. It is just about in a working state so I just need to create a custom look for it based on what we want and get that padded out ready to launch. I maybe touch on this later on – I haven’t decided.

“Yea I love using dual monitors, I would say that I don’t think I would ever be able to go back to single but I have just bought a netbook for when I’m travelling and I’m loving it.”

It just so happens that I have my main setup packed away as I’m in the process of moving so I have gone back to working on my netbook which is usually fine, other than I find it awkward when designing on such a small screen, when making landing page graphics, banners or anything else in PhotoShop I like to have it all visible so that I can see how it looks overall.

Anyway I decided to whip out a last minute change which allowed me to increase my productivity check it out below:

19″ disney princess tv/dvd combo with a vga port courtesy of the little one…

Even if the payouts range from $10-$30 that would still be a nice $100-$300/day profit from free traffic. At the moment my expenses are pretty low so before I dive into getting a mortgage I think it’s a good idea to spend some of my time on the things that take longer to get into action. I’m sure that if I can get them doing 1/lead a day that in time that will rise to 2, 3… you get the picture.

I’ve setup 2 (1 not being indexed) and working on the 3rd as we speak. I have made a checklist kind of spreadsheet with the steps needed to make sure I don’t forget anything. I only spend a few hours a day on creating new sites because I’m also running ppc & media buys on them too.

Also on a side note my first one received its first organic lead which gives me the confidence boost that I’m doing something right – the paid side of things is beginning to pick up too I just need to scale more.

Began throwing content out and submitted a sitemap to the search engines using one of the plugins (I forgot the exact name). Anyway I began checking the progress each day in between various tasks checking to see if it had been indexed.

Anyway 3 weeks later it hadn’t and I had been trying various ways to get that changed – I’m not a great seo person at the moment so I was a bit clueless. I decided to just move on and make another as I had about 3-5 on my mind I wanted to get sorted, I did the exact same process and after submitting the sitemap – it was indexed the next day.

I guess it doesn’t pay sometimes to get caught up with trying to fix a problem that’s out of your control. I could have just bought another domain and set the first site up on that (which I probably will) to get that one going instead of waiting about for the 3 weeks trying to get this one working.

Any ideas why it hasn’t been indexed within a month? Perhaps the domain was previously banned or blacklisted – I don’t know. Although checking on the way back machine no results come back.