This update is part and parcel of Google’s “caffeine” modification, which returns data that’s 50% fresher than what was yielded in past searches. This increase in the volume of fresh data rendered is now made possible by Google’s switch to processing data in “pieces” rather than in “layers”, which was standard practice prior to the update.

Schizophrenic Algorithms

It might not come as much of a shock, but each year Google changes its algorithm anywhere between 350 and 500 times. What often happens as a result of these changes is that people who get too focused on exact ranking factors see their site drop when Google releases these algorithmic tweaks.

Minor Quakes From The May Day Update

On the face of it, the May Day modification is simply a rankings change, not a crawling or indexing one. That said, it has still had its effects on some websites. For some it has resulted in a decrease in traffic volume, even though their pages are still getting indexed. After the update the pages seem to not rank as high as they did before, and this is where the stress comes from.

Google’s changes seem to be primarily affecting “long-tail” traffic stemming from the longer search terms that more sophisticated searchers use. When you calculate the net effect of those searchers per site, it adds up fairly quickly, given that long-tail searches convert at a higher rate.

The algorithm change also seems to be affecting very large sites with “item” pages, such as e-commerce sites. Pages of this nature usually don’t have many inbound links, and the links they do have are usually buried within the site. Chances are also very high that these types of sites don’t have substantial amounts of unique content.

The Importance Of Unique Product Descriptions

An important observation to make is that it’s beneficial to keep unique product descriptions for anything you’re selling on your site. To date, the sites that only use a manufacturer’s generic product copy could suffer the most from the May Day update, experiencing a heavy loss in direct traffic to their product pages.

Provide The Freshest Content Yet

Products aside, having relevant content that addresses the search terms that you’re trying to rank for is always a good idea, and the main search keyword is just the start; Google looks for synonyms, uniqueness and strength of the linking profile.
***Looking for original content? Check out our friends at www.constant-content.com

What Is Google Trying To Achieve with This Update?

The goal of the May Day update is to universally improve search quality and user experience. Google has openly stated its intent to ensure when you search for something, you’re provided with the highest quality content on a per search basis. Basically Google trying to make search more helpful and weed out any content duplication, as well as minimizing the impact of what it considers to be lower quality websites.

What Types Of Websites Are Being Affected By This Update?

The hardest hit by the Google Algorithm change are auto-generated pages and content farms. As already mentioned, the May Day update is basically engineered to improve search quality.

This is a good reminder for affiliates that you should always be providing the highest quality content for your consumers. A recommended tactic is to provide content not available anywhere else, and ensure that it’s helpful; also,  avoid scraped, generic and low quality content whenever you can.

How Can You Determine If Your Site Is Affected By This Update?

The best way is to check on your own around the time between April 28th-May 3rd. This is when a lot of sites notice a loss of 5-15% of their normal long-tail traffic. Furthermore, if you check your search referral traffic between April 28th and May 3rd you may have seen a drop in these statistics as well.

Check to see if the change is in the number of referrals, or the number of pages getting traffic. A drop in traffic to your bigger terms probably is not a May Day effect, but drops in search referrals could be. Also, if your index or crawl stats changed suddenly, this could indicate you were hit by the update.

To be certain, check any links to your child pages across the site; these pages may have suffered a May Day relevance drop. If you don’t have unique content, even on your less important pages, you may have seen a dip.

In part two of this five part series we will cover in more detail what factors cause the site to be affected, and in subsequent articles we will discuss what improvements can be made and what you can do to minimize the impact of this algorithm change.

The May Day Update Part 2
The May Day Update Part 3

***This article is the first in a five part series brought to you by our partners at Metamend, the Search Marketing Experts. Since 1998 Metamend has been widely recognized as one of the leading search engine optimization firms in the industry. Providing advanced organic search and Internet marketing searches to clients in over 60 countries, Metamend works to bring pre-qualified visitors to their clients’ websites and to convert those visitors into long-term commercial relationships. Metamend’s search and Internet marketing methods follow the best practices outlined by the major search engines, and its staff maintain strong personal relationships with others at all levels of the search marketing industry.

Direct marketing, more than any other method, is all about testing and quantifying consumer responses. The advantage that online direct marketing has over its offline cousin is that the responses generated online (click-throughs, conversions, sign-ups, etc.) are likely to get measured, tested and improved upon more rapidly. The Internet is a giant data recording machine, so it has naturally taken David Ogilvy’s founding principles of “testing, testing, testing” to the next level of awesomeness.

Definition of Online Direct Response: The process of generating a lead, sale or other similar action directly from an Internet ad. Online direct response is measured through click through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CR). Cookies and special tags are used to track which ads, landing pages and paths deliver the most conversions. This type of tracking is also used for cost-per-action (CPA), where the advertiser pays for a pre-specified action (e.g. sale, sign-up, etc.).

Probably one of the most underused online direct response techniques is email. This personalized, targeted and simple tool can boost average conversion rates into the stellar range (e.g., STOPzilla’s emails convert at an astonishing 10%), far higher than other affiliate methods such as PPC. Affiliates should definitely look into using email as part of their campaigns. (Stay tuned for more articles on this subject!)

Direct-response is a powerful strategic tool for affiliates. Do you actively use direct-response techniques in your affiliate campaigns? If so, which ones? How successful are they? We’d love to hear what you think!

If You Build For Quality, The Conversions Will Come.

This is probably the biggest topic in affiliate marketing today. Affiliates have to change the way they think about their business. Gone are the days where you could tack up a flimsy download button-crazy landing page stuffed with slimmer than trim content, and still make bang for your buck.

Nowadays, the game has changed. The role of the landing page has morphed. It’s become the final step in a much larger process watched over carefully by Google’s quality administrators, instead of the be-all and end-all of the online sales funnel that it used to be. The landing page is now just one critical component in a much larger structure that’s driven by the need to provide consumers real value.

Affiliate marketing’s new gold standard involves building out rich, relevant content sites around highly-targeted landing pages that are designed for the sole purpose of closing the sale. The new industry buzzword is “pre-sell”, rather than “hard-sell”. Today’ s affiliate has to do the legwork. They have to run as much value-selling up front through their site, so that when the consumer gets to the landing page they’ve already inspired them with an unmistakable commitment to the highest standard of customer service.

Build Topic-Related Sites With Authentic Content.

The art of the pre-sell is about loading up the front end of your sales funnel with original, useful content and trust building elements that aren’t directly related to the product you’re selling. The content you offer is directly related to the larger problem or need your customer has, and the product becomes the natural solution to that problem rather than the focus of your site. In other words the product becomes an adjunct or aside to the primary goal, which is to provide the consumer with the best solution, i.e., the perfect answer to their search query.<

Creating a site with a Home Page, Features Page, Contact Info, Testimonials, and an authentic Blog is necessary and best way to tackle this pre-sell method. It's also the key to staying alive in the affiliate game. The content on this type of site has to have true value. It has to be relevant to the solution your product provides, and give the customer precisely what they're looking for when they go from one of your PPC ads to your site or product landing page.

Say No To Black Hat.

Shady landing pages don’t last as long as they used to. The industry has definitely tightened its chops. And since Quality Score doesn’t allow you to start fresh with every new campaign or new content type – any bad history you’ve made follows you to your next destination. Having bad history also means you’ll pay a positioning and cost-per-click penalty foe stepping outside the lines.

So needless to say it literally pays to do it right from the very start. If your paid search advertising is opportunistic and inconsistent, or attempts to mislead or deceive users, you’re business will suffer in the end.

Build Your AdWords Accounts Sequentially.

When starting a brand new account, you should build sequentially. First add keywords and ad groups with a tight and narrow focus to your landing pages and give them enough time to earn a good Quality Score (6 at least) while giving the account some history of good performance.

It’s speculative to suggest the ‘right’ size or period of time, but a few weeks with keywords numbering in the dozens or low hundreds seems to work. Equally important is amassing click histories in the hundreds or even thousands – enough data for Google to truly evaluate your performance.

Conserve Your Top Performing URLs.

This one might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but after a little explaining you’ll see why it makes sense. While the precise impact of the historical CTR of a target URL is unknown, it makes sense that Google would give you the benefit of the doubt with any URL that produces consistently strong Quality results.

With this point in mind, you might want to lean on the conservative side with how you use those ‘big ticket’ target URLs. It’s a bit like what a coach goes through in sports when he has to decide how many minutes his star players should play. He doesn’t want to burn out his franchise go-to-guys before they get a chance to win the game, but at the same time he wants his best players on the floor as much as possible to give his team the greatest chance of winning. It’s a balancing act – and the same goes for your PPC campaigns.

Try to give your big URLs a rest in situations where you’re working with unknown performance variables, such as new PPC ads. Google tends to give less leeway with new niches and keywords i your text ads than with historically proven ads, so you don’t want any potentially poor performing campaigns hurting your QS on a landing page that is a proven winner. Try to use your best performing URLs as an anchor for your continued success.

What do you think about the way affiliate marketing is changing? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Post a comment and let’s get the discussion rolling!

From a recipient’s point of view, the biggest problem is that none of these emails seem genuine, personalized, or targeted towards their individual needs. They’re simply blasted out in desperate hope that anyone with basic levels of brain activity will read them. In the end, however, their only lasting impression is to numb the reader’s mind and thoroughly annoy their sense of tranquility. So of course why would your target consumer open and read your emails when they’re so conditioned to receiving junk? It’s more than likely that they will quickly block the address and set any future sends to get automatically dropped into their junk folder. This is the kind of wall legitimate email marketers are up against.

The all-to-common, instinctive grudge against email marketing is unfortunate because it can actually be a very powerful business tool when used the right way. When implemented with skill and tact, it’s a valuable strategy for any online business.

Against The Odds – Challenges Facing Today’s Ethical Email Marketer

The first challenge today’s email marketer has to overcome is the unavoidable perception of webmasters and consumers that your email is spam. The way email has been (ab)used in the past means that at least some people and some machines will peg you as spam mafia right off the bat.

You’ll also have to deal with recipients that use the latest blocking and filtering software. The prevalence of this technology has gone off the charts since the recent spate of email viruses that brought several healthy corporations crumbling to their knees.

In terms of proving your legitimacy to the recipient and the webmasters, time is a limited commodity. Yahoo, AOL and others now enable users to report spam with a single click. That means proof of sound business practices and the ability to capture your consumer’s attention have to happen instantaneously for you to get through all the standard email roadblocks.

Successful email marketing strategies of the future will be determined by one factor: Intelligence. How much you know about your target recipient and what you do with that knowledge will determine whether or not your message hits its mark.

With so many countries now imposing massive penalties on spammers, and most of them keen to make examples of those who abuse the rules, affiliates need to be extra vigilant in all their email based marketing communications.

Throwing Down The Gauntlet – Using Email Marketing The Righteous Way

Even though there are definite obstacles to successful email marketing today, they are by no means insurmountable. A lot of it has to do with taking the time and care to build strong lists of qualified prospects, and creating email communications that offer a value proposition and message your target audience can easily and genuinely identify with.

Here is a bucket list of things you can do to get your email marketing campaigns up to snuff:

Be Real

Don’t send email to people who have no idea who you are or what you want. It’s simple. When you do send an email, make sure its relevant to your reader, and develop a writing personality that is as authentic and accessible as possible. Why? Email is essentially a private and personal medium. It’s used primarily to communicate with people you know and trust. Marketers should respect that fact. Engage your reader’s sense of individual self, rather than talking at them like a typical nondescript advertising pylon.

One way to develop this personal style is by not developing a style at all. Just write like you’re yourself. (Even if you aren’t). Use plain text – it is astoundingly more real looking than graphically designed emails. Frank Kern and Andy Jenkins are masters of writing the “regular guy” type marketing email, and those dudes make a killing.

Also, try using humor and anecdotes to establish a friendly rapport. Write like you would talk if you were there in the flesh, not as if you have a bionic arm that types out 8 gazzilion pre-programmed words per second. Get your mind out of hiding behind that cubicle barricade buried deep in the geiser of Happy Valley Tech Park. Listen to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck in your garage, rock some air guitar, then write your masterpiece. Obviously you still want to be polite and personable, but whatever you do don’t be mechanical. BE REAL.

Get Wise With The Double Opt-In

Speaking of mechanical… It’s time to get technical. We’re gonna preach this science now. The science of the double-opt in. Always use it and you will be free!!!

Seriously. It works in two steps. First you convince them to opt-in to providing their email address via subscription. After subscribing to you send them an email asking them to confirm their intent to subscribe. In this letter of confirmation, include information about the nature of the list they’re about to join, reassure them they haven’t sold their soul to the Devil, and be up front about how their personal details will be used once they’ve signed up. Your confirmation should also explain why they’re receiving this letter and tell them that if they don’t confirm, they will not receive any further communication from you. In this way the double opt-in method provides a simple means for people to unsubscribe from your list.

While this method requires a little more effort on the part of the user, it significantly decreases the threat of spam accusations and also increases the dollar value of your mailing list as part of your overall business portfolio.

Communications Transparency

Nothing to hide means nothing to get angry about later. That’s why any subscription form you use to harvest email addresses and other important info should link to a separate ‘Details Page’ where people can review information on what types of communication you’ll be sending to them. Be up front and transparent and it will pay off in the long run.

Mind Your Ps and Freebies

There are a lot of spam filters available today, and they’re becoming more and more popular among online users. One of the major criteria these applications use to determine what is and what isn’t spam is your email body copy.

Using pulp words like ‘free’, ‘bonus’, ’special’, ‘discount’ too often in your body copy can cause your emails to get banished to the dungeon of spam folders. That’s why you should test your copy first.

A simple way of testing copy is to open an email account with a free provider like Yahoo!, send your marketing emails and newsletters to that dummy address, and see if your mail gets pushed to the bulk mail folder or lands square in the Inbox. Yahoo and other services have spam filters that are active by default when you open an account so this is a great way to test your mettle.

Beef Up Your List Security

At the very least your subscriber list should be password protected. Even better? Keep your list on a system that isn’t connected to the network. This will stop hackers from getting their mitts on your list, and reduce the chance of email viruses scanning your drive for addresses and inadvertently sending infected email to subscribers without your knowledge.

Make Sure Your Lists Are Independent

This tip is for marketers that are managing multiple lists. It’s critical that these names and addresses don’t get mingled and mashed. Keep them discrete. Your subscribers should only ever receive communications from the email list they subscribed to.

Keep Your Records Current

Keep detailed records. That way if you’re accused of spamming you’ve got the information to prove them wrong.

Don’t Forget Virus Protection

This one is obvious but needs to be said. It’s crucial that you run up-to-date anti-virus software at all times. If you don’t – well the consequence could be disastrous.

Ok so that’s a good arsenal of things to look out for. Try them out and let us know what you think. Did any of them work? Do you know of any tips we didn’t mention? Let fly!

The Power Of The Niche

First up, niche sites work really well with AdSense because they draw targeted consumers; people who are interested in that specific niche and its related content.

Digital products such as registry cleaner review sites are great examples of this type of niche strategy. When all the content is focused on a single problem, solution, product or subject, it makes a significant difference to your conversion process. The symmetry between content and advertisement makes the initial click and then the purchase a much more intuitive decision for the consumer to make.

Google’s AdSense code displays ads relevant to the content you’ve built into your sales pages. Since the viewers that visit the site are already there for a very specific reason (to read about the topic addressed in your content), the correlated ads they see generate higher click-through rates than ones on less targeted sites.

Basically, niche sites are the best way to get that close correlation between site content and the ads that get displayed.

One Keyword Only, Please

This is something a lot of beginner affiliates don’t know about. Many assume that optimizing their pages for multiple keywords is the best way to go. Evidence, however, suggests the contrary.

Keywords are one of the primary factors that determine what AdSense ads get displayed on your pages. It’s been shown that if you isolate and optimize for a single keyword, the chance that AdSense will deliver ads relevant to your pages is much higher than if you use multiple keywords. If you target too lots of keywords on the same page, you risk getting displaying that aren’t relevant to your content, and therefore losing clicks.

All you have to do is make sure you choose the right keyword for your niche through the research and ongoing testing.

Coordinate Your Ads With Your Site Content

Using colors in your ads that match the colors of the content on your website has proven to work very well through AdSense. Maybe it’s because the human eye associates common colors with common ideas and patterns. Whatever the reason, design continuity is an important part of campaign optimization.

Design continuity includes things like using blue for all the clickable links on your AdSense blocks. Blue is the universal link color and gets instant recognition with viewers. It communicates without equivocation, “hey you, this is a link.”

Also, the “open air” display format (no borders around the AdSense ads) has proven to generate better click-throughs. This one is a bit of a mystery as to why, but the numbers don’t lie. If you want to see for yourself, try testing the open air format for 100 unique visitors to your website, then record the click-through rate and the average amount generated per click.

After the initial testing phase, change just one variable of your AdSense block. You can try swapping out the color of the font in the headline as ann example. Again, wait until you get 100 unique visitors with the new headline and then gage your click-through rate for that color variate. If click traction spikes, stand pat with the with the new header color and switch up another single variable for your next test.

Continue testing this way to keep improving your campaign performance.

Place Your Ads Above the Fold

This tip works every time. Setup an AdSense block above the fold. Why? Internet users are notoriously impatient. They want to see what they’re looking for as soon as they hit the page. Placing ads above the fold is an absolute must for getting your ads noticed and generating the high-volume clicks affiliate marketers need.

Also, digital heat maps have shown that the human eye tends to be naturally attracted to the top left side of a web page. Place an adsense block in that spot and see how it performs.

Proper Ad Spec Selection

The medium rectangle format [300 pixels X 250 pixels] is the most popular. Other affiliates swear by the [468 pixel X 60 pixel] format . Want to be sure? Test both. See which one does best for you.

Monitor Your Account Closely

Keep a keen eye on your ads and how they’re performing. This is probably the most critical activity in maximizing your AdSense ads. You should also know that your AdSense account is a great resource, you just need to dig a little deeper to get the most out it.

For example, The Channels feature is pretty solid. It lets you know what’s happening on which pages of your site. All you have to do is set up different channels for different pages so that you track what pages are generating the clicks. This works best for small sites designed specifically for AdSense.

To get a taste of what we’re going on about, try reading some Lorenzo Green, creator of the popular affiliate blog Mr. Green. His latest post has 5 super valuable A/B split tests that will help you tweak your campaigns for the better. Read the post here: http://www.mrgreen.am/affiliate-marketing/58-split-testing-case-studies/

Enjoy!

Currently the service offers the following analytics:

• % Engaged vs. Spam/Disengaged
• Who is interacting with you
• % Male and Female Segmentation
• Location Overlay (Geographical location of followers both domestic and global)
• Sentiment Analysis
• Time of day of Tweets and Re-tweets

It only takes a minute to sign up and then you’re in like Flynn. So be sure to check it out!

In case you missed it, or want the notes to look at, here’s a summary of the presentation RevenueWire’s General Manager, Bobbi Leach, made at this year’s Affiliate Convention in Los Angeles.

It’s packed with useful data, insight, and information, so be sure to read to the end! Also, if you’d like to see the presentation’s accompanying visuals, you can download the Powerpoint file here.

Presentation Agenda

• Why is pay-per-click an important strategy for growing your business? It’s not to say it should be your only strategy, but if your objective is to make lots of money then PPC will likely be a key component.
• An overview of how you should manage your PPC campaigns. PPC is a system that requires time to perfect and needs ongoing management.
• The three key ingredients of a PPC campaign. This presentation simply provides an overview of how they need to work together.

Search Primary Source of Sales

-    As we all know, more and more people worldwide are using the Internet to make purchases.
-    There are lots of different studies projecting the growth of ecommerce in the US and around the world over the next 3 years. Three different US studies (Forrester, Jupiter and eMarketer) project anywhere from $200 to $300 billion for B2C. Europe is expected to be $125 billion. Worldwide is expected to reach $1 trillion by 2012.
-    So if more people are purchasing online, it makes sense that, as affiliates, you want to capture some of that market.

-    The number one source of traffic for online sales is search. Email is a distant second in terms of driving traffic that generate sales. Other methods represent an even smaller proportion according to a recent ComScore study.
-    PPC is a key method to capitalize on the volume of people who are searching for items to buy online.

Super Affiliates Use PPC

-    If you’re still not convinced that PPC is the best method for earning revenue, then let’s look at what the high performing affiliates do

-    On average, the high income affiliates use PPC 2.5 times more than the low income affiliates.
-    Plus, high income affiliates are more likely to invest significant portions of their budget into driving PPC traffic. According to the same Affiliate Benchmark report, lower income affiliates spend less than $1000 per month, where as higher income affiliates spend over $5,000 per month. In fact, super affiliates usually spend tens of thousands each month.
-    The higher income affiliates are also more likely to use multiple search engines – Adwords, Bing – for driving traffic.

PPC Has Other Benefits

-    PPC has a number of other advantages over other methods for driving traffic.
-    On average, PPC drives much higher volumes of traffic than other methods such as SEO and email – usually 10x the volume.
-    On average, it also generates higher conversion rates – usually 2 to 3 times — than other methods including SEO and email.
-    Paid search is also very targeted not only because of the key words you’re buying but also by other criteria such as regions, timing and ability to control your messaging – tying specific key words to ads and landing pages.
-    And more importantly, PPC is very easy to track and measure your ROI
-    Testing is the path to gaining market knowledge. With PPC you can very quickly determine if there’s a market for the product you are pitching.

PPC is a System

-    If you want to be successful with PPC, you need to manage it as a system of interrelated parts that require continuous improvement. That sounds simple, but it takes a lot of work and it’s what separates the people who run basic PPC campaigns and those affiliates who run very successful PPC campaigns.
-    The overall process includes building your campaign, tracking the results, systemically testing elements of the campaign and deploying those improvements. Your initial goal should be to build a successful campaign – generate a positive ROI – perfect your system and then test new stuff in separate campaigns.

-    And just when you think you’ve got your campaigns optimized, the market changes. Search is a dynamic field – what works today may not be profitable tomorrow.
-    You need to stay abreast of changes in the marketplace and with search engines. For example there are new regulations from the FTC on endorsements, and you should always be checking the Editorial Guidelines of the search engines you’re using.
-    A top PPC affiliate is systematic, analytical, detailed and good with numbers, while also being creative, intuitive and entrepreneurial.

Calculating ROI – The Most Important Metric

-    The only metric that really matters in tracking your success is your ROI.
-    While you are going to track your overall profitability for your business, you need to track your ROI for each campaign.
-    The great thing with PPC is how easy it is to track. You simply need to know is your campaign cost and revenue then you can calculate your net profit and ROI.
-    While the net profit shows that you are making money, the ROI shows how well you have your money working for you and provides a metric to compare from campaign to campaign. All of your campaigns might make money, but if some are only generating a 5% ROI then it might be better to move your money into the campaigns that are generating a higher ROI.

Calculating ROI – Planning

-    Besides evaluating active campaigns, you should be projecting your ROI before even starting a campaign. By making some assumptions such as the CTR and CVR, and then entering your revenue per customer, you can quickly determine how much money you can spend on a key word in order to be profitable. After doing your keyword research, you might find that the likelihood of making money on this campaign is pretty low.

-    By using this tool you can determine go, no-go decisions as to whether you even start a campaign or if you have existing campaigns that you are evaluating, you may move more of your budget into the campaigns with higher ROI.
-    So just to give you a sense of what you should be aiming for – if your campaigns are generating <5% ROI, you may need to continue optimizing them or if you’ve tried that already, then they may not be worth continuing. Likewise, if your campaigns are generating a 10-20% ROI, then you’ve got some winners.

The Elements of PPC

-    Managing PPC campaigns as a system also means optimizing the ingredients from key words to ad copy and landing pages.
-    If you are using PPC to drive online sales, then you need to understand not only the product features and benefits, but also your customer’s purchase behavior.
-    While understanding the product is going to give you certain key words and messages to highlight, it’s equally important to develop a customer persona. Who they are, What they need / want, What purchase process are they going through, Are they ready to buy versus just evaluating options, etc.
-    Each product feature and customer need will likely lead to separate key word lists, multiple ads groups and multiple ads – all optimized for this specific need / feature.
-    The more targeted you can be, the better your conversion rates and therefore your ROI.
-    So let’s look at each of the three ingredients and then we’ll come back to campaign structure.

Keywords

-    Start generating a list of key words – there are tools to do this such as Google’s keyword tool and Wordtracker to KeywordSpy and KeywordDiscovery – plus sources of data like your Google Analytics and competitors.
-    Once you have a comprehensive list of key words then add things such as misspellings and plurals as well as negative words you don’t want to pay for.
-    Then organize your keywords into categories – how you organize them will depend on each campaign, but essentially put them into relevant groups based on how your customers will search for this product.
-    Don’t worry about have too many categories – the more categories means the more targeted your ads and landing pages will be. In fact, how you organize your keywords is secret sauce for some affiliates.
-    If you’ve done your ROI for this product, you should have a CPC that is your maximum. This is what you need to monitor when you’re evaluating the success of keywords.
-    The high income affiliates who use PPC manage lists with thousands of keywords. Usually using spreadsheets, you will be continually culling your keywords – moving them into different buckets from active and tested to negative keywords.

Ad Copy

-    Writing ad copy takes practice. It’s not something that most people do well right away.
-    You need to practice the 3 Cs – be concise, be compelling and communicate your competitive advantage.
-    It’s difficult getting across a motivating message in very few words.
-    The most important thing to remember is that your ad should reflect the key words you’ve bought.
-    You need to know the Editorial Guidelines of the search engine you’re using inside out.
-    Because you’ve generated hundreds of keywords and organized them into dozens of categories, you are going to have many ads.
-    As a general rule, you may start with 4 ads per ad group, track performance and keep pruning the non-performing ads.
-    Tracking the success of each ad isn’t simply looking at the CTR, but ultimately if you converted these clicks into purchases or sign-ups.

Landing Pages

-     You’ll likely have a landing page for every theme, and probably multiple landing pages for each campaign.
-    Again, the point is to make it as consistent as possible from what the customer is searching for, to the ad they click on to the landing page they view. The more consistently it meets their needs, the better your conversion rate will be.
-    In addition to testing different landing pages – which one converts better – you’ll want to test elements on each landing page.
-    Split testing takes a very systematic approach. You don’t want to be changing to many things at once otherwise you don’t know what change generated better results.
-    But you do need to test everything – start with the overall look of the page, then start changing major copy, graphics, colors, button placement and secondary copy.
-    The most important element on the landing page is the call to action button. Make sure what you want the customer to do – buy, register, download – is very clearly and prominently placed on multiple locations on the landing page.
-    The most important thing to measure for your landing pages is the CVR.

Campaign Structure

-    When setting up your campaigns, the structure of how you organize everything is very important.
-    Structure means creating multiple ad groups for each keyword category you’ve created.
-     Keyword categories should be grouped by close-knit themes and they should be appropriately named.
-    This will help you to easily track the success of your campaigns – kill unprofitable ad groups and invest in expanding profitable ones.
-    If everything is lumped together it’s more difficult to know what keyword and ad combos are working best, therefore it’s difficult to track ROI and prune the non-performing ones.

Building Block

-    PPC should by no means be your only method for driving traffic BUT it is one of the major ones.
-    If you want to be a high income affiliate, then more likely you’ll need to use PPC to get there.
-    But it will take time to succeed and you’ll need to be very disciplined about following a systematic process.
-    And no matter what it should be part of an overall mix of marketing tools that you use from SEO and email to social media.

How to A/B Split Test Landing Pages

You’ve just launched your landing page which looks great, concisely communicates the benefits of your latest promotion, and has a straightforward call to action. Now, you could simply review the reports to see how many impressions, click-throughs and conversions it generated. Or, perhaps you can take it one step further and create a different landing page to compare the effectiveness of the design, call to action or price points.
By applying A/B testing you can find out how people are responding to both landing pages, and where you can improve to generate a higher click-through rate and more conversions.

What is A/B testing?

Landing pages can be designed for email subscription or lead generation. But how do you know what works and what doesn’t? A/B split-testing can be used to refine elements of your landing page for usability, conversions and most importantly, your return on investment. When you create two different versions of a page you can conduct an A/B test to see which is performing best. This is becoming a very popular practice because you can easily show different versions of your landing page to people at random (i.e. using your online marketing software, Google’s Website Optimizer tool, etc).

How do you conduct an A/B test?

Typically, you start by dividing your audience into two groups. One group is exposed to the original version of the landing page and the other group views an alternate version. The other version may have a single element changed which could include the headline, banner, or call to action. Then you can begin to track the results between the two slightly different versions.

For example, suppose you want to determine the best call to action to use for your landing page. If you have a form, you can insert the CTA directly into the submit button name. Instead of telling your visitors to “submit” their information, you can tell them what they will receive upon completing the form. For instance, the button could read, “Download our brochure.” By creating two identical landing pages, with the exception of the “submit” button versus the test call to action, you can track the success of each page to determine the winner.

What should you be testing?

You can test a variety of elements on your landing page including the content, offer, headings and banners. Colors can also affect the success of your page, as well as the location of the images, form and call to action.

Only one element should be tested at a time throughout the A/B split testing period. In other words, do not try to test content and page design at the same time. It’s also important to avoid assuming what elements will perform best. Thorough testing will give you measurable results. What you expect to perform best might actually be the opposite.

NOTE: To ensure accurate test results, make sure your landing page is hidden from organic searches and the main navigation is removed. Typically, landing pages are hidden to ensure that people are only coming from your intended email marketing or PPC campaign. Furthermore, usually there is no top level navigation or unnecessary links so that people don’t get swayed to another part of your Web site before completing the desired goal or conversion.

How do you track A/B test results?

There are two ways that you can track your landing pages. You can set whether A and B will be directly competing against each other by displaying version A to half of your visitors, and version B to the other half. Alternatively, you can have a dominant design that is seen as the standard to most of your visitors, then have a second design that’s viewed by a smaller group until the new design has proven itself.

Now you can compare the click-through and conversion rates between the two groups, and when you have your winner, it becomes your standard or benchmark landing page. Continue to test it against other page elements until you’re convinced that you have the best landing page for your online marketing campaign.

How do you know if your results are accurate?

The length of your test is determined by the strength of your data and a significant sample size. For instance, if your sample size is too small, results may be skewed because you will not have enough data to provide statistical significance. Make sure your time span and metrics are set to give you enough performance data to validate your landing page testing. For a comprehensive explanation of “The Math of Tuning” refer to Chapter 7 of the Tim Ash book, Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions. If the results of your tests have not met your expectations, you’ll need to test longer or make further changes to each of your landing pages.

Remember, once you have decided on the look and feel of the page, it’s important to maintain the design until testing is complete. If changes are made throughout the test period, you will never know what was successful and what was not. Even the slightest change can affect your page results drastically.

When you have completed your test, don’t hesitate to do it again. Why? Because what appeals to customers will change over time. Thus, testing should be an on-going part of the marketing process to help you optimize and get the best results from your online marketing campaigns. Once you have the results from one test, examine them to determine how to improve the element tested, and then continue on to test the next element on the landing page.

A/B split testing is a cost-effective way to help you gauge how well your landing page is performing and what elements need to be modified or improved. In the end, you’ll know exactly what to focus on to generate greater results and higher conversions.

Additional Resources:

• Putting A/B Testing in Its Place
• The ABCs of A/B Testing
• Introduction to A/B Split-Testing for Your Webpages

In such a scenario looking and sounding different than your competitor’s in the sponsored SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) results becomes ultra-critical to your PPC campaign success.

You should ask yourself questions like, Does my landing page look like everyone else’s?  Does my content represent only a rephrased version of other top affiliates? How can I stand out from the rest?

To get started you can do some intel on what other affiliates are doing and then try to define your own style from there. Search using Google and click on some of the top ranking ads. Have a pen and paper ready to take notes on design patterns and copy trends you come across. But don’t copy. Try to innovate as much as possible while sticking within the parameters of what has proven to work well in that niche. In a word: REFINE.

Your notes on keywords, matching strategies, ad text, promotion strategy and more will how you design your own marketing collateral and ultimately affect whether or not a particular landing page or ad is highly relevant to a user and therefore successful or unsuccessful in your campaign.

There’s strong evidence to suggest that searchers often click on one ad, don’t like what they see and bounce or click ‘back’, only to click on another ad in the sponsored results.

When your ad is the second or third ad they click, ask yourself whether they’re seeing exactly the same graphics and overall text that didn’t interest them the last two times. Is it possible that they assume your ad is the one they just clicked on because it looks almost identical? Simple mistakes like these could sabotage successful campaign strategy, kill your conversions and quickly eat up your allotted ad budget as the number of bounces on your landing pages goes up.

So what can you do?  What if your landing page performs decently, but is very similar to all the other landing pages in the SERPs?

Over time, as Google begins to do more and more human landing page review, your Quality Score will eventually suffer the dreaded slap. So as the old adage goes, there’s no time like the present to plan ahead by designing a new landing page, featuring a similar theme that’s working, and A/B split test it.

If you’re promoting RegCure for instance, and you are seeing success with a “performance” theme, why not try designing new graphics and copy that pictures this theme in a different way.  If you give it some thought and research into stock imagery sites like iStockPhoto.com using your top keywords, you may be pleasantly surprised at the fresh ideas that come about.

As always, try to think like a searcher and visualize how your whole experience flows from search to click to conversion or download.  There’s never been a better time than now to look, sound, and be different and unique.