Popshops.com

For example, if you create a site selling fine handbags and you need to populate that site with items for sale, you can use Popshops to select a Prada handbag from one CJ merchant, a Gucci handbag from another CJ merchant, a Marc Jacobs handbag from a shareasale merchant - all with a drag and drop fully graphical interface which displays photos and descriptions of each product - very cool!

Description From Website: PopShops is the largest searchable collection of affiliate products (over 22 million and growing) that spans all of the major networks. With PopShops you can Pick, Click, and Pop products on to your website or blog in minutes (we refer to those product layouts as “shops”) .

Check out Popshops.com - they just added a Wordpress plug-in - nice!

The concept is simple yet brilliant - it’s what I dubbed the “Choose Your Own Adventure Lander” - and this is how it works:

The first page of the lander contains a simple call to action headline “Let us match you with the right online DVD rental plan” - this statement is fantastic because there’s no obvious sell - it seems like this site is going to provide the visitor with a service - a site that wants to help - nice!

Following the clever headline is the tag “This will only take 10 seconds!” - hey, this site wants to provide me with a service and will do it quickly - wonderful!

Finally, the click-through - “How many DVDs do you watch per month?” - alright! This site is going to find me a DVD rental plan that’s tailored to MY needs - DY-NO-MITE! - you’ve got the visitor hooked.

I got out my crayons so I can break it down for ya:

So - the visitor chooses the plan that works best for them - from there on it’s smoke and mirrors. A phony calculation page:

And a redirect to the Blockbuster Free 2 Week Trial $32.00 One Page CPA Offer - that’s right Virginia, any movie watching lifestyle you choose all go to same page:

Making it Work for Me

I LOVED the simple brilliance of this - you’re distracting the visitor from the sales pitch by offering them a service (well, faking that you’re offering a service). Not only are you distracting them, but you’re building likability too - the visitor is thinking “Hey, this site is here to help me” - the PERFECT storm for conversion.

So, I got to thinking about how this concept could be improved above - I immediately noticed that the site is a Quality Score nightmare. Almost zero text, no sub-pages, no movie or DVD relevance - to get those 5-cent clicks, there would have to be some work done to build a mini-site out of this idea.

I also noticed that the site looses control of the visitor after the first click - I set to develop a way to retain control throughout the entire process, even on the merchant page.

Finally, I didn’t think the site was interactive enough - what would happen if we led the visitor through 3-5 decisions instead of just one? - would we increase that likability and trust factor? - would we get their minds even further from the sale and distract them even more with a custom appeal?

First Test

I first attempted this concept with a site that was launched a couple of weeks earlier. It’s a site that we sell our own informational product on. We had four similar products for sale that sat on a single sales page (one of those loooooong ClickBank jokers) - I used the CYOA Lander approach to break up the four products into separate pages for each with an intro page that had a “lifestyle selection” - something like: What style of poker do you play most? (question) - Texas Hold’em, Short Hand, Heads Up, No Limit Hold’em (answers)

Within 24 hours sales increased by over 30% - visitors appreciated the custom direction and the tailored sales pages. Major success!

Overwhelming Evidence

If you haven’t gathered from my writing so far, I am a bit of a knucklehead - so, in true knucklehead fashion I put the CYOA Lander experiments on hold to work on other projects (which to my defense are fantastic projects) - I did nothing with the idea until mid-September when my affiliate manager from Azoogle alerted me to a great offer that screamed of a CYOA Lander approach.

I got into action and created a near perfect CYOA - a few questions to get the visitor in the mood to click around, mini-site with a couple of articles to help with QS and a design matching the merchant offer. The results were astounding!

$2,350.70 generated for ONE OFFER in ONE DAY! This was our biggest take from one offer in a day ever! All from the CYOA concept.

As you can see above we spent $997.83 in Google Adwords to drive the traffic (and and additional $75 with Yahoo) netting over $1,200! Wow - it REALLY works - and it keeps working. Of course we have amplified our efforts big time and have been doing numbers out of this world - in fact, we have a HUGE campaign on the horizon that is a variation of the CYOA Lander - I fully expect to break the one day record very soon.

CASE STUDY

I know - I know - you’re thinking “That’s cool and all RightStarter - we’re happy for you - but how can I get a piece of this action”. Well, I want you to get a piece too. The CYOA Lander concept can work for just about any product, offer, niche - I’m going to show you how to apply it in a real-time, real-world manner - Starting Friday, September 28th, I will be posting step-by-step directions and templates so you can apply this idea to your own campaigns.

I will also start a live campaign and share stats with you so you can get a better idea of how to implement and execute.

In the meantime, I highly recommend that you sign-up for a CPA program like Incent-a-Click, Copeac or Azoogle (my personal fav). This approach works best with leads based offers - Clickbank will work too, but I’m not a huge fan of selling ebooks so you’ll be on your own with Clickbank.

Check it out at: www.rottenneighbor.com

Monetization: Google Adsense - showing some higher-dollar real estate ads but also showing miscellaneous low-revenue clicks. With more content this will be improved.

Chance of Success: Great! This site is super viral - everyone will be telling their friends and returning themselves periodically to make sure they aren’t being snitched on.

Take for example, YourOwnVows.com - my partner Travis and I thought we hit something big in November 2006! Prior to this, we had developed a number of very successful info-products that rake in great income - so, we were going into this pretty confident (cocky).

The project met all our (weak) criteria at the time - huge audience searching for a solution (custom wedding vows), very little PPC competition (1 other lonely competitor), great target demographic (women 25+) - sounds like a dream niche, right?

So, we invested $500 to outsource the writing of the vows and spend at least 6 weeks on the site design, sales copy, product design, etc. - We thought we had a winner!

We launched and pumped $350/day worth of Google traffic to the site for a week- and the traffic was there, thousands of clicks - we used every bit of our daily budget. We’re rich, right?!? - uh, 5 sales - FIVE SALES! - that type of ratio has to at least nominate us for the Worst Product Launch Hall of Fame.

What went wrong? We didn’t respect the organics - while researching the product, we noticed the organic listings but chose to ignore them. If we paid them mind we would have realized that the organic sites were giving away vows for free and monetizing via Adsense - even though they offer a inferior product, the appeal of FREE outweighs the process of whipping out a credit card to buy something that the end user is willing to spend extra effort to perfecting on their own.

Is it salvageable? Possibly - we could offer the book for free as an incentive to collect data with an autoresponder - building a list of brides to be could be lucrative. That plan is more suitable for a SEO initiative to organically rank with the rest of them than a PPC campaign - however, if the value of an acquisition merits it, a PPC campaign may be in order.

Those of you who have experience with launching a Google PPC campaign most likely have felt the sting of a Google Slap - the sinking feeling when you watch what should be .5 cent keywords turn into $.50 and $1.00 keywords - in a lot of cases crippling your campaign altogether. It sucks - BIG TIME!

While there’s very little rhyme or reason to a Google Slap (Google’s stance is that it enhances a user’s experience if they are taken to advertiser sites that apparently are supposed to foremost educate the visitor - then if they hang around enough, perhaps - maybe - possibly they may buy something from you). Google rates your commitment to better humanity with your site on a scale called Quality Score. In typical Google secretive fashion, little is known about what factors make up a Quality Score - here’s what the IM community has figured out though:

Google Hates

• MFA - Made for Adsense - Adsense arbitrage sites
• Sales letter sites - those looooong one-pagers that Clickbank merchants are obsessed with
• Squeeze pages - landing pages setup to collect emails
• Affiliate landers - especially landers with a sole link to a affiliate link
• Direct linking - using your affiliate ID as your target URL in your Google ads

Yeah - that kinda puts a damper on just about every “easier money” technique.

So, what can be done to improve your chances of not suffering from baby shaken syndrome due to a slap?

1) Always develop a lander for your affiliate offer - never direct link. Beyond improving your QS, a lander allows you to pre-sell with targeted copy, compile a mailing list and have better control of tracking - among other advantages.

2) Design your lander as a “mini-site” - include a contact page, a privacy policy, about us page, a couple of outbound links to authority sites (wikipedia), and 3-4 pages of original article content (optional, but helpful)

3) Try to insert your keyword into your Adwords ad - If you have several prime keywords, create several adgroups.

4) Don’t stuff an adgroup with too many keywords and make sure all the keywords in an adgroup are related - having dozens of adgroups per campaign should be the norm.

5) Serve up fresh content - try to add a block of text, better yet a new page every few days to your “mini-site”

6) Install a Wordpress Blog on your domain and fill it (5-10 entries) with topic related info - link to this blog from your lander (this one helps QS a great deal)

Fighting with a secret computer algorithm can be frustrating but following these steps *should* lead you to a OK or GREAT quality score and those coveted $.05 and $.10 clicks.

- RightStarter

In fact, time is so relevant - I have planned a multi-part offering. So, look for future “time” related postings.

I don’t plan on getting all philosophical on you, the focus of RightStarter.com is to provide you with solid advice and examples of IM success - but, it’s important to realize that time can be your greatest ally or potentially your worst albatross. Lack of movement on an idea - being paralyzed by doubt - will kick your ass in this business. Don’t waste another moment procrastinating on your success… Now Get Up!

The Perfect Stall

A lot of new (and seasoned) IMers get so caught up in the research and design of a campaign that they leave no time for execution. If you spend your time painting emblems on your sail, your boat will never get out in the water.

It’s OKAY to launch your site and campaign without it being your perfect vision - there will always be opportunities to tweak and revise. In fact, even if you do launch your “perfect vision”, you will most likely have to tweak in order to accommodate conditions you didn’t factor.

Of course, you don’t want to launch anything that’s not in a condition to generate sales or conversions - that would be foolish - but, as long as the sales mechanism is in place (whether that’s a shopping cart, affiliate link or leads collection form) and you have enough sales copy to direct visitors to your call to action - PULL THE TRIGGER and get your boat in the cyberspace waters.

Here’s how I approach a project to avoid procrastinating a launch - this approach will get a site up and running within 10 hours:

• 2 hours to research - do what you feel works best for you - exploring keywords, message board trolling, reading niche magazines, etc.
• 3 hours to write sales copy - my favorite way to speed this process up is to “borrow” from campaigns that are working - don’t steal though - work off of successful concepts
• 3 hours to design the site - using a html editor and a graphics editor gets easier and faster with time - templates and Wordpress speed this time up tremendously
• 1 hour to compile a keyword list - keyword apps such as WordTracker or my favorite, Keyword Discovery make this step a breeze
• 1 hour to launch a PPC campaign -writing PPC ads is easy when you”borrow” copy from another industry - if you’re selling trumpets, borrow copy from the top piano ad

There’s your boat and once you hit the PPC trigger, it’s in the water. Is it going to be the perfect campaign? - hellz no, there’s no such thing. Are you on your way to make cash? - hellz yes, if your research, copy and PPC campaign are decent.

Can you make your campaign near perfect? - yup - test test test - tweak tweak tweak - you now have all the time in the world to do that WHILE CASH IS FLOWING IN - and cash flow is what it’s all about.

After practice, this method becomes less and less a race against the clock - you’ll soon see that you can knock out a niche and 3 sub niche sites within the 10 hour period.

Summary: You cannot generate anything without a launch. There’s never a perfect campaign - so, there’s no reason holding back. Get your boat in the water THEN perfect it’s sailing. Now Get Up!

-RightStarter