Affiliate marketing can sometimes be a tough nut to crack. I know there are times when I get frustrated and a little down. So where do I look to for a little guidance? Yep, monkeys. Monkeys apparently have high IQ’s, so here are a few ppc tips that us humans can learn (This post is part of a group writing project put on by problogger.)

1. Start Small
If you are just starting out, don’t expect to become the 800 pound gorilla in your niche the first week. I’d suggest picking a smaller niche and getting a profitable campaign under your belt first. Then you can tackle the ringtones, dating, and financial offers. Also, build your campaigns out over time, add a few hundred keywords a day, to get the feel of how to manage the offer. Dumping 20,000 keywords into a campaign will just get you frustrated, not to mention a huge CC bill.

2. Do Your Research
I think one of the most overlooked keys to being a successful affiliate is the research. The niche, competition, offers, keywords, landing pages, etc… This can really make or break you. Spend some time going over each component of the offer. As you get more experience this step gets easier and quicker.

3. Split Test
You’d be amazed at how just the smallest changes can bring a losing campaign into a profitable one. Be sure to split test, if you’re not you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. I’ve literally seen conversions double from just 1 tweak. Test the ad copy, headlines, images, landing page copy, call to action etc… This is just part of the optimizing.

4. Use the Technology Given
Their are a handful of extremely useful tools that are available to the affiliate, lots of them free. Use them. Things like adwords editor, prosper202, keyword discovery, wordze, aweber, typo tool, etc. Take full advantage of these tools. They will not only make your life much simpler but can speed up the process of cranking out campaigns and better optimizing them.

5. Speak Their Language
It’s important on your landing page to speak the visitor’s language. Is your target customer young, old, mothers, dog owners, webmasters, etc … The more your landing page copy sounds like them the more they will listen. Also, pulling your keywords into your lander can really give conversions a nice boost.

6. Outsource
Being a one-man business can get overwhelming very quick. Easy to burnout. Two basic things you can outsource are web design and content. Most of my content and some design work as well as some keyword research I outsource. Plan out a campaign from start to finish and break it up into smaller tasks. This may give you some ideas at other areas you can possibly outsource. It’s helpful to focus on your strengths and hire someone else do the work in areas your weakest in. Use sites like elance, getafreelancer, and odesk.

7. Take the Plunge
You will never get anywhere if you don’t take any action. There will never be a perfect time when all the stars line up for you to start. You have to be willing to risk in order to succeed in this business. Don’t wait until tomorrow start TODAY!

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If you’re an affiliate marketer, you most likely use Firefox. Along with using firefox comes all these neat little extensions that you can “plugin” to make your life easier and hopefully more productive. Below are just 7 of the most useful extensions I’ve found that help make our jobs as affiliates easier. I’m sure there’s dozens more, but this is just a start…

IE View
Haha, to start off, you should at least have the option of viewing your landing pages or sites in IE. This simple tool allows you to do that. Great for cross-browser testing. Not all sites look the same in Firefox vs. IE as you may have found out.

Going Global
Kudos to Dave over at Redfly Marketing for this handy plugin. Let’s you view google ads from anywhere in the world. Fully Customizable too. No more finding proxies on your own to view that ad running in Australia.

Web Developer Tool
This tool helps in building web pages and sites. Allows you to view source, CSS, as well as other useful tools.

Azoogle Toolbar
This is for you Azoogle lovers out there. You will need an account first (obviously). Just look under the tab Tools and you will see it. Allows you to view alerts, news and real-time stats of your account from a nifty little toolbar.

Screen Grab
Build up your swipe file of headlines and landing pages with this tool. Allows you to save a webpage as an image very easily.

SEO for Firefox
If you do any SEO, this tool can make your life much simpler. Includes a handful of parameters to display that are also customizable. Go ahead and test it out…

Live HTTP Headers
Shows you whats going on with your web browser behind the scenes.

These are just some I think are most useful. Would love to hear if you use any others that have helped you as an affiliate. I’m sure I missed some good ones…

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Google continues to hone in on Quality Score and just recently announced some changes coming in the next few weeks. Below are the three main changes that they plan to incorporate:

• Quality Score will now be calculated at the time of each search query
• ‘Inactive for Search’ will no longer be used for keywords
• ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’

It will be interesting to see how this affects the quality score particularly the real-time calculation. It now seems Google will determine the right at the time of search if your ad is worthy enough to be displayed. Hmmmm …

Inactive for search disappearing is just another way of saying be prepared to pay a pretty penny if your want your ad to show. Doing away with the minimum bids is a smart thing. I never found that particularly useful. Moving to a first page bid can give you a better idea of what kind of competition you’re dealing with.

What does this mean?

All in all, if you have a solid site & landing page with relevant keywords and ads, business show continue as normal. Clicks may get even cheaper as some of your competitors drop off. Just hope that it’s not you Love to hear your thoughts on this, just thought I’d post this as the news came in …

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I recently did a post about ad qualifiers and how to filter your traffic. I basically stated getting a high CTR for the sake of CTR is not always a good thing. That being said, there are times when you may want to increase your CTR on some of your campaigns.

Shock Advertising

Believe it or not, there is a practice in the marketing world known as shock advertising.

Shock advertising is a type of advertising generally regarded as one that “deliberately, rather than inadvertently, startles and offends its audience by violating norms for social values and personal ideals.

Moving this to paid search, you just need to include some unusual or shocking words in your ad title or text to draw attention. How many times have you searched for something, only to see over half of the ads basically state the same thing? Boring. Having your ad stand out from the rest of the crowd can get you those extra clicks. Using uncommon words can sometimes do the trick.

Common Examples

Below are just some of the words that I’ve seen used. There is really an endless list to choose from, they don’t necessarily have to shock, it just has to be unusual and different.

• Exposed
• Scam
• Naughty
• Sneaky
• Secrets
• Wicked
• Yucky
• Disgusting
• Gruesome
• Fatal
• Jealous
• Traitor …

The trick is incorporating them into your ad text. I’ve really seen some off the wall ones, and don’t even want to put them up here. This is just to get your mind going, how you use them is up to you.

Caveats

Again, like I’ve said in the past if your pay per click CTR goes from 2% to 5% but your sales or leads don’t increase along with it, those are wasted clicks, assuming your adwords quality score stays the same.

Also, if you put words like scam or exposed in your ad title, your landing page better do a good job explaining this. If the visitor clicks and sees nothing related to a scam or exposed, they might get frustrated and leave your site. Something to keep in mind, before you start injecting shock words into your ads.

All in all, it couldn’t hurt to test this out. Setup a unique lander for some of the words you have in mind and turn them on. You could be in for quite a shock

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Just got back from Affiliate Summit in Boston. Great Experience and definitely glad that I went. If you’re new in the affiliate space, I’d highly recommend you try to attend at least 1 of these, if anything just for the networking.

The Summit

To be honest the exhibition and seminars were mediocre. It seemed the conference was more designed for the networks and the merchants. Maybe it was just me, I don’t know. I was able to speak to some of my affiliate managers which is great to put a face to the name. If I hadn’t already joined with a dozen or so networks, the exhibition floor would have been useful. I just didn’t want to sign up with anyone.

The Networking

This is what made the whole experience worth it. I’m not the most outgoing guy there is, but just to be able to talk to other affiliates was great. Here are just some of the people I got to talk, meet, and shake hands with:

• John Hasson
• Benny from GeekBlogger
• Zac Johnson
• The guys from Prosper 202
• Ian Fernando
• Eric Nagel
• Fellow Dallasite, Andrew Payne
• Wes from Masterless Samurai
• Charles from Art of Leads
• Jimmy Ramos from Somar Consulting
• and Paul from Uber Affiliate

I was looking for Jonathan Volk, but he seemed to be elusive. Anyways, being able to shoot the breeze and talk affiliate marketing was fantastic, can’t do that back home as I don’t know anyone who does this. Such a young and new industry. One thing I recognized is that most of the affiliates I met were either my age or younger. What does that mean? Cool though to see some very young and very successful guys.

Credit Card Roulette

On the last night at dinner, I introduced a game that I use to play when I was working (back in the day). Basically you just order whatever you want, and when it is time for the bill, everyone at the table takes out their credit card. Fan them like a deck of cards and then have the waitress pick one. The lucky card gets the bill. By the way … thanks for dinner Andrew Luckily there was only 4 of us…

All in all it was fun, good to be back though recharged to launch some new campaigns.