From an affiliate marketing perspective, Media Buying (also known as Display Advertising) is when you purchase ad space on a website or network of sites. It could be in the form of text ads, banners, rich media, or video ads. You then populate that ad space with creative pushing the product you’ve elected to promote–driving traffic and conversions to your designated merchant and getting a slice of the pie for yourself along the way–much the same way as it works in Pay-Per-Click. Media buys are usually priced on a CPM (Cost Per 1000 Impressions) basis, and can cost anywhere from 1K to 100K depending on how you negotiate the terms of your agreement. Media buys aren’t anything new.

They’ve been around since before the dawn of the Internet, most recognizably playing key roles in the offline world such as TV and radio advertising models. They’ve also been an important part of the online world for more than a decade now–albeit spending most of that time flying under the radar while PPC, CPA, and CPC took their superhero grip.

So what’s changed? The main development today is that PPC and other affiliate marketing strategies are becoming more crowded and less cost effective than in the early days. As a result, Media Buys are making a surge because they offer a profitable alternative to the more chock-a-block world of PPC. One of the key advantages Media Buys have over PPC is that you don’t have to dump tons of money into bidding on expensive keywords, and you won’t get Google slapped.

For a detailed look at the inner workings of a Media Buy, check out this great article by Erin Cigich at Clickbooth.

In this post, when we say alias, you say, “KUMBAYA!” But seriously now. By “Alias” we actually mean something a lot more applicable to your online business. We call it our Alias ID System. This is a powerful RevenueWire feature you may not yet know about that has numerous benefits for the campaigns you run.

So Here’s The Thing…
The RevenueWire Alias system allows you to create custom affiliate links using “aliases” or custom IDs.  Additionally, you can enable and disable an alias at any time.  A “Memo” field is also provided to help you later identify what a particular alias was used for, or where the alias link can be found on your sites. The “Memo” field is free-form and can you can add any text you like.

What’s The Benefit Of Using Alias IDs?

RevenueWire’s Alias ID System allows you to track different campaigns without having to create multiple affiliate accounts. That means you can compare different campaigns under a single name, while consolidating your campaign tracking and payment wire transfers from a single account.

All you have to do is simply come up with the alias name(s) for a given product. The Alias you enter into the text field actually replaces the affiliate ID in the given link schema, so it’s a highly accurate tracking method.

How Does It Operate?

To create an Alias ID, select the “Setup” tab and select “Alias Setup” from the sub-menu. Once you’ve created an alias, when selecting “Get Links” for any product in the “Products” tab you’ll notice your alias affiliate links appear below the link containing your primary account ID.  You can then cut-and-paste the link you’d like to use into your affiliate landing page.

Again, with the Alias system you can track multiple campaigns associated to multiple products all from one master account, saving you from having to deal with the hassle of managing multiple accounts.

Gripping The Handle

When it comes to actually choosing the words you use, it helps to keep it simple. Keywords that indicate the product or a distinguishing aspect of that particular campaign are the best. You want to be able read the Alias and instantly remember what campaign/product you’re looking at.

How Is An Alias Different From a SubID?

Basically these two methods accomplish the same end, but their structure and how you apply them to your campaigns is where aliases and SubIDs differ. (BTW, RevenueWire offers both options.)

Aliases are recommended for campaign level application. SubIDs are an addendum to the Affiliate ID and are more effective when used to differentiate links within a particular campaign. That means you can create SubIDs of your Aliases. All of this leads to more accurate tracking and simplified campaign management, which leaves you more time and space to make money doing what you do!

Alias IDs and Custom Tracking Codes (TIDs)

RevenueWire’s affiliate links support the use of both an alias name and a custom tracking code variable.  In a case where you choose to use both an Alias name and a custom tracking code, your link would look like this:

http://aliasid.merchantid.revenuewire.net/productname?yourcustomcodehere

Combining Alias IDs and custom tracking codes can add an entirely new level of custom reporting possibilities to your sales tracking.

Also, merchants see only your primary affiliate account ID regardless of what alias is used. This ensures your custom tracking links remain private.

WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT REVENUEWIRE’S ALIAS SYSTEM AND HOW IT CAN BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS? EMAIL US AND WE’LL BE HAPPY TELL YOU MORE.

Contact: affiliates@revenuewire.com.

TO SIGN UP WITH REVENUEWIRE, VISIT HERE.

Link Building Is Where It’s At

As we all know, search engines crawl your web site looking not just at content, but also at the number and types of web sites that are linking to your web site. The updated algorithms used in these search engines, like Google for example, are continually making determinations on the quality of your linking. Higher quality back linking will yield a much better result than a back link determined to be of lesser quality or no quality at all by the search engine’s algorithm.

Under current search engine algorithm rules, this becomes a question more of quality than quantity in the post- Google-May-Day-Update world. Given this new importance of properly formed links, let’s look at what characteristics make a link a higher quality back link.

What Makes A Link High-Quality?

Higher quality back links possess one or more of your web site’s keywords, especially somewhere in the anchor text. Back links with keywords located in the anchor text are generally viewed more favorably by search engines than back links without keywords in the anchor text. This is because it appears that the links are coming from sites with related information when the keywords are found within the anchor text. Therefore, the link appears to possess higher relevance to search engines like Google. Websites that appear to have a multitude of irrelevant incoming links will not be viewed as important by the search engine as would a handful of properly formed and relevant back links and keywords.

There are some beneficial strategies and techniques that we can use, and for clarity we will separate them into two categories: 1) Internal linking, and 2) Back linking.

1. Internal Linking Strategy

For internal linking strategy, we are looking to reduce the amount of “link jumps” which have to be followed to find affiliate product pages. These link jumps not only confuse the search engines, but they can confuse and turn off the customer as well. Consider the idea that wherever possible, you should link the pages and / or products that you wish to promote closer to the relevant homepage, or possibly closer to the featured products on the homepage. There are tangible marketing benefits to this strategy beyond the search engine ranking. The end user experience will be better and this can also encourage return visitors to your site organically.

In addition, keep in mind that it’s beneficial to ensure these links go to pages that have been updated with the type of quality content we previously mentioned. It pays to be thorough and consistent in this step. Again, the end user experience will be improved by taking these important measures.

When properly formed, optimized pages and links have the benefit of passing on your desirable page rank directly to your product pages, by featuring links to those products from the very same valuable pages. This is especially true of your pages with a high or “higher” Google page rank.

This will help increase the ranking for your product pages while simultaneously increasing your long tail traffic. This is especially true if the content requirements are correctly applied as we previously described.

2. Back Linking Strategy

Now that we have our internal links working correctly, we will look at back linking, and how to make this crucial step as beneficial as possible to your web site.

The goal here is to see continued increases in back links to your deep pages or the properly formed product pages. Then, we will want to make sure to keep the applicable content relevant and valuable. When something in your business changes, then make sure to update your content. While no one can update their sites on the fly all of the time, regular updates to what you have will keep your site relevant. This step alone, on pages of this nature, will tend to attract links over time.

Let’s keep in mind that back linking should be an ongoing, continual process, as older links will decrease in value over time and fresh, relevant content will still draw the desired attention. For example, if your product offering is static, there is no reason that your descriptions and photos need to be that way. By changing the descriptions periodically and adjusting photos and comments, you can generate a level of freshness that will get noticed by the search engine.

In fact, by encouraging site visitors to leave comments or product reviews, the customer will actually do much of this work for you. Regular visitors leaving commentary can generate the level of freshness we require. We need to make our changes while keeping in mind that relevance is key for back links, not page rank as you might think. In fact relevance, not page rank, should be the deciding factor you use when acquiring links. The end goal after all is to get found by both the search engines and your customers.

One way to insure that you’re forming the back links properly is to consider each web page as a separate entity. Develop your links with that in mind and work carefully on a per page basis. This will keep the content relevant as your focus will be only the page at hand. These properly formed links will give you the traffic that you are looking for, and it will get the customers who are looking for you to their desired destination.

We now have some beneficial tools in our arsenal to combat the effects of future algorithm changes, like Google’s May Day update. By modifying our collective focus to enhance our internal linking and back linking, and changing our view of what is important from page rank to relevant content instead, we are prepared to keep our web sites highly searchable and, somewhat by default, the rankings will follow.

In the next and final article in this series, we will demonstrate how to tie all of this advice together to give you the necessary tools to properly adjust and overcome this May Day algorithm update and plan for any future updates.

If it has in fact affected your site, the next logical question on your mind will probably be, “What exactly about my site may have caused it to be affected by the change?” To answer that question thoroughly, the first thing you’ll want to do is review the actual content on your website(s).

Content Is Still The King

As we’ve all heard so many times before, and rightfully so, content is king. The first thing you should do is take stock of your web site’s content and evaluate whether or not it’s offering something useful to your web site visitors, or, if it is engaging in deceptive practices, intentional or otherwise.

Content Audit With A Fine-Tooth Comb

Pay especially close attention to your web site’s affiliate program. Ask yourself if this part of your business is simply mirroring other websites instead of providing unique, useable content for your visitors.

In addition, you’ll want to review your content from the perspective of an outsider looking in, because that’s basically what Google is going to do. Ask yourself if the content you’ve posted is engaging to the viewer, or if it’s poorly written and nonsensical in places.

Does your page or pages content read as if it would make people want to stay on your site for a longer visit, or simply hit the back browser and look somewhere else for the answer to their query? If you notice a degree of stagnation or incoherent writing, then you should consider updating it with some fresh, engaging content. Your aim here is to make the visitor stay long enough to really read what you have to say.

The Fall Of The Blogger Automatons

Prior to the Google May Day update, using auto blogger software had been an effective way to generate fresh content; many sites simply used content scrapers to populate their web site’s updates. This practice was an extremely effective way to generate fresh content while using minimal labor, time and expense.

Unfortunately, after the Google update, any articles that are not written by the original publisher of the content will most likely be seen by Google now as being of lower authority and will not return the ranking and traffic benefits that this practice once used to.

While this is not always going to be the case, it is what Google has stated as a primary goal of the update, and we are all painfully aware that they update the algorithm regularly. If they missed it the first time, chances are they won’t miss it a second time.

Don’t Forget Your Product Pages

It will also help to make yourself aware of any of your product pages that could possibly be viewed as unrelated or having inadequate content. Pages that fit that profile will not assist in ranking anymore. Site depth is one of the stated factors that Google is weighing heavier than ever, which is to say you should make sure everything appears as correct and as fresh as possible throughout your site, not just on the upper layers.

The Appearance of Authority

In addition to automated scraping, and reproduced blogging and content, your website’s “appearance” needs to be authoritative and legitimate. It needs to present itself as being a serious, “real” business. Google is now reducing relevance for web sites that appear to exist simply to convert visitors to a sale. That is not to say that Google is anti-merchant, but the effect will be that web sites perceived as being of that “conversion only” nature are going to be ranked lower under the new algorithm change.

Some websites that are known as “Thin Affiliate” sites, which to Google may appear to offer no additional value to site visitors beyond a sale, will see a drop in their rankings as well. These changes have affected a great number of businesses, and in a very significant way.

Internal Links and Back-links

Other factors for you to consider are your internal links or “internal linking” as Google sometimes calls it. A web site’s obvious lack of links to deep pages, for example any product pages coming from the homepage, are going to be devalued under the Google May Day update. It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or not. The absence of links to deep pages can and will have a serious effect on your traffic going forward.

Lastly, take a hard look at your site’s deep linking or back-links. The May Day update reduces relevance for sites displaying a lack of links into the deep pages. When landing on your site, if your content appears to have all links which seem to point to the homepage, regardless of what is stated on each individual link, then you are probably one of the web sites feeling the effects of the recent update.

Deep linking is probably the most time consuming of all the solutions for the May Day update, but the easiest to make. Those links need to go somewhere, and unfortunately, all links pointing to the homepage won’t earn you any points with Google. If you have products to sell, consider modifying these deep links to go to new products or offerings. This is the equivalent of “killing two birds with one stone” as far as the Google update is concerned, and you should see some of your ranking or relevance return, and quite possibly even see an increase in ranking in certain areas.

For example, instead of linking: www.yoursite.com, use something like www.en.yoursite.com/new/product if you have multiple language pages. Even an URL like www.yoursite.com/julysalepage may be more effective for your purposes. The idea here is to differentiate these links from simply reflecting 10 links on your site that read www.yoursite.com but are hyperlinked elsewhere.

Spell Out Your Sell

Spelling out what you’re selling is beneficial in more ways than just the obvious; it will get you traffic from Google as well.

In general just keep in mind that these changes, while frustrating, are actually good for your business in the long run. Furthermore, you can be encouraged by the fact that there are multiple solutions and ways available to you to ensure a positive outcome for your business.

Next in the series, we are going to take a hard look at how to improve your web site’s quality to combat the effects of the May Day update, and we will make a few recommendations to get your traffic back, and in some cases, even improved.

***This article is the second installment 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.

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 web 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.

What these affiliates need to know, however, is that affiliate marketing is absolutely NOT as hard as they might think. At first glance it might appear daunting, but it’s critical not to get spooked by all the jargon and lingo and stay focused on what can be realistically accomplished. In the end most of the strategies and methods in affiliate marketing are based on simple business savvy, and anyone who has the confidence and commitment to do it can.

Many networks will attest to the fact that all too many new affiliates throw in the towel when their first crack at it doesn’t materialize into windfall profits. That’s probably the major reason why 90% of those who join affiliate programs make no sales or just a few sales and then call it quits. These are simply mental barriers to their success. Barriers that can be overcome by taking initiative, trusting your instinct and trying things that aren’t necessarily proven to work, but which you have a hunch will turn out profitable in the end.

So don’t sit back. Dig your heels in. Test and try things out.

Try The Products Yourself.

For example, if you’re thinking of promoting an iPod-iTunes Media Conversion program, first download it and use it yourself. Get to know the ins and outs of the purchase and install process as well as the product interface. Take notes as you go. Do you like the program? Is it easy to setup and use? What features does it have that will appeal to your target audience?

Knowing this stuff is the first step to becoming a top-tier affiliate. You won’t able to promote a product successfully if you don’t know how it works yourself. If you’ve experience it for yourself your insider knowledge will be reflected in your promotional copy and the way you market the product.

Come Up With Product Endorsements On Your Own.

Since most people buy based on a strong testimonial or personal recommendation, unique and compelling endorsements are one of the classic marketing techniques. Don’t rely totally on the merchant of the product to provide you with your marketing materials. Put the marketing power in your own hands by creating a test user base and having them supply you with positive comments and reactions to the product.

Create Your Own Marketing Publications.

Communicate with your prospects through your own emails and newsletters. By doing this you can personalize your marketing message and save yourself the cost of paying someone else to create them for you.

When you write email or newsletter content use the WIIFTC principle. WIIFTC stands for “What Is In It For The Customer”. You should ALWAYS write with your reader’s interest in the front of your mind. Nobody online is interested in hearing you run and on about yourself. Instead, address what the reader feels and needs in every aspect of your marketing content.

Analyze and Interpret Your Data.

Be proactive, get down into the details of your campaign data and see what the numbers have to say. A lot of affiliates get scared away by the thought of doing deep stat analysis, but if you start to learn early it will prove to be the rainmaker in terms of taking you to new heights of affiliate success.

Things to look for in a dashboard are a variety of control options, real-time sales tracking and in-depth analytics that break down transactions for each product into usable data like average earnings per sale, click-through rates and conversion rates. You should also be able to monitor sales by region or source.

Until next time, pull up your sleeves and feel confident about your abilities!

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.

Any seasoned PPC affiliate will tell you that constantly monitoring your traffic and sales in ‘real-time’ can cause minor heart palpitations. That’s because what you’re watching is in constant flux. It’s a proven fact that traffic and sales vary wildly throughout any given day. Google may decide to throttle your traffic in some new and unexpected manner, or the purchasing behavior of your customers could fluctuate at any point. It’s this state of heightened anxiety that is the natural enemy of the successful affiliate.

Why? Any changes you make to your campaign based on this ‘real-time’ information can come back to bite you. For example, let’s say you log in to Adwords and notice that your ad spend is a lot higher than it’s been historically for that particular time of day. It’s getting to a level you consider ‘abnormally high’… So what do you do? At this point your natural inclination might be to jump to conclusions and gear down your daily budget, or even pause your campaign entirely. But we urge you to resist the urge! There’s no better way to have Google put your account into the nightmare of ‘manual review-land’ than messing around with your budget or starting and stopping campaigns on a dime. It could turn out to be days or even longer before they decide to turn the traffic tap back on.

These type of blink-of-an-eye changes may set your mind at ease temporarily, but in the long run could cost you thousands of dollars in revenue from the ensuing campaign review. More often than not simply taking a minute or two to look at the previous day’s traffic, sales, and ROI stats will save you from the perils of snap decision-making. If you wait it out and don’t sweat the hourly fluctuations, you’ll often see your campaign right itself and finish up on a positive note.

If you’re looking at your stats regularly, be sure to relax, take a deep breath, go for a walk, meditate, levitate, or do whatever it takes to get your blood pressure down and your head into original chill mode. After all that’s where the best ideas come from. Try the old-fashioned method of taking a step back and changing your attitude toward the way you look at your campaign.

This could mean that the next time you’re evaluating your bids, content, or some other aspect of your business, you slow down a little and take more time to make a decision. Instead of worrying, try working yourself into a calm relaxed state, and from there think about what is going to be your best move. Don’t let panic force your hand. In short, when you’re stat checking, make sure daily fluctuations aren’t negatively affecting your overall outlook of the universe.

Stay positive – it works!

Unlike other industries, the global recession has actually increased the momentum for innovation in the Affiliate Marketing Industry and has lead to a continuous pattern of growth in its solutions and services. One of the latest outcomes of this tremendous growth rate is the announcement of RevenueWire’s integration into Affmeter’s platform to better serve RevenueWire affiliates.

Integration with Affmeter’s platform empowers RevenueWire member affiliates to consolidate and view their sales tracking statistics from all their affiliate networks and Google PPC ad campaigns in a single location. Affmeter saves time and money by eliminating normally repetitive tasks and increases productivity with easy to read tables and downloadable Excel spreadsheets.

With Affmeter, RevenueWire affiliates will be able to easily find which merchants are their biggest income generators and which ones are costing the most, and analyze net revenue by comparing earnings and cost per campaign.

During Avinash’s keynote speech he took a slightly different approach and focused on making analytics “sexy”. I must say it worked out pretty well, especially after a couple of hilarious stories about his quest for sexy jeans online and A/B testing for pop-up adds of half naked girls for American Eagle Clothing!

But seriously folks. The two main points to take home from his keynote at IMC were the importance of segmentation and analytics. In his presentation Avinash tried to show what makes these two metrics appealing to online businesses.

Segmentation

Avinash shared with the audience a few tips for how to easily segment your data, and explained why segmenting is an excellent strategy for gaining insights into your visitors behavior online.

He stressed the importance of not just looking at the aggregated data, but segmenting out your data and going deeper into the statistics to get a rich understanding of your visitors’ wants, needs, and motivations.

He used the Visitors Recency Report as example, a report that shows the frequency of visits to your site. The more people that visit your site, the more valuable they are to your company as this behavior most likely indicates customer loyalty. Without segmentation you would never have identified this subgroup within your traffic.

Analytics

Avinash also touched on how when it comes to analytics people get caught up on unique visitors and number of page views but usually look past the bounce rate and tracking conversions. According to him, this is a big mistake.

In Avinash’s own words, “Bounce rate means: “I came. I puked. I left”, and at the same time it is “the sexiest web metric ever”. Bounce rate measures the quality of traffic you are acquiring and it helps you understand where and how your site is failing your visitor.”

Furthermore, he pointed out that online marketers often get overly excited once they make a sale, when what they should be doing is staying cool and tracking the conversion. This is the the next step in understanding what was the cost of making that particular sale.

That means in order to succeed you have to set conversion goals and not be afraid to set more than one conversion goal at a time. It involves setting multiple goals for both micro- and macro- conversions.

For example, even though your macro-conversion goal is to make a sale, your micro-conversion goal can be the number of subscriber for your newsletter/rrs feed or number of clicks on your coupon.

He wrapped up his keynote by emphasizing how data does not provide you with a competitive advantage, rather it’s your effort and imagination with the data that is what is going to set you apart from the rest.