It seems everyone and their brother has a content network now. After MSN’s launch a few weeks ago, now Ask.com is about to join in the context game. Here is what they have to say about it:

“On May 14^th, The Ask Sponsored Listings Team will roll-out an exciting new feature – contextual targeting. With contextual targeting, you can seamlessly extend your pay-per-click search campaigns to sites in our content network.
Reaching over 34 million unique users each month, the ASL content network includes premium content sites such as Match.com, Citysearch, Evite, and Ticketmaster and more. Ads are targeted to publishers’ web pages by matching ad content and keywords to page content so the ads displayed are highly targeted to the reader’s interests.”

It should be interesting to see how these sites convert for affiliates. I’m willing to test anything once. Look for a review in the future from me….

It’s Friday, I’m in a giving mood, so I’m going to drop a pretty big secret here.  I’m sure most successful marketers use this all the time, but this will be new for the newbies.  The secret is…. Drumroll please……

Niche Cross Promotion - You can bid on cheap keywords not in your expensive niche, to drive traffic to your niche.  What does this mean?  Say your PPC niche was totally saturated and all the keywords were too expensive.  You need to think of a category of keywords that is not in your niche, but somehow tangentially related to your niche.

An example may help:

Say your niche was fireplaces.  So you research all the terms like woodburning fireplaces, gas fireplaces, stone fireplaces etc.  But you find out all these terms cost $2.00 to be in the top 8, and you need to pay $.50 to make a profit.  Time to look for another niche?  Maybe not.  Now is the time to come up with a related niche that may have cheaper keywords, yet drive similar traffic.  After brainstorming you find that people searching for terms like home remodeling or home refurbishing may be interesting in fireplaces as well.  Plus those keywords are competitive at $.50.  You have just cross promoted your niche!

It takes a lot of work to do this, but on super saturated and expensive niches, it’s worth it.

Ps. This works really well with ringtones

I got pinged by CPA affiliates about the “what magazines do you read” thread started by Shoemoney.

I read a ton of blogs, but not too many actual print magazines.  But I do get:

• Business 2.0
• Wired
• Revenue
• Outside

Maybe if I didn’t spend so much time starting at stat spreadsheets and analytics all day, I could read more!

Google is now offering it’s new “Website Optimizer” in beta. At first glance this would seem to be a dream tool for affiliate marketers. It’s basically a tool that let’s you A/B test landing pages in a similar way that you can test multiple ads in Adwords. You can set up any number of landing pages with different elements, then get reports on which pages convert better. You can even make changes to your landing pages right from the tool. On the downside, Google gets to insert their tracking code into more of your pages and know even more of your business. I plan on setting up a few tests next week and report back with some results.

You can watch the demo here if you are interested.

If you have been doing affiliate stuff for long enough you have probably seen a phenomenon I call ‘conversion creep’. Basically it is the gradual decrease in the number of conversions over time. It’s important to note, I’m saying the number of conversions, not conversion rate. Why does this happen? Well in scientific terms, you can relate it to the second law of thermodynamics, whereas in a closed system, unless acted on by another force any system will increase in entropy. In layman’s terms that means: if you don’t get off your lazy ass and work on your campaigns occasionally, you will lose money.

So what are some sources of conversion creep?

• Loss of keywords: This is the main problem. In Google they go inactive, in Yahoo the are removed, and in MSN you get the annoying emails. All these need to be acted on, because you are losing valuable keyword real estate all the time.
• Landing page leaks: Once you have a landing page running, things can pop up over time that you wouldn’t expect. Php/sql errors can happen, hyperlinks can stop working, and redirects can fail. It’s a good idea to check your landing pages often as well as your server logs for errors that could be costing you conversions.
• Ad fatigue: This one may be a small factor because you would think that searchers for a specific term are always new people, but that’s not always true. If you shake things up a bit by changing ad copy you can often bump up conversions that have slipped off.

Running a PPC to affiliate campaign is definitely NOT a set and forget system, like some people seem to think. You may get lucky right off the bat, but it takes constant work and tweaking to stay successful.

Ok, so I know I have ranted about MSN Adcenter in the past, but they just seem to keep making things worse.  They seem to have the reverse Midas touch (everything they touch turns to crap).  Here are my latest gripes:

Lack of alternate text for dynamic keyword insertion over 25 characters.  You guys really need to get on the ball and fix this.  I don’t want to run 2 ads so one can fail over, or set up ridiculous {param2} fields for each term.  Please just fix this issue so we don’t have to take 10x longer than it should to do a simple dynamic keyword insertion.

Capitalizing the display URL.  Again, this is something you need to fix in your system.  Adding extra parameters doesn’t cut it.

Import/Export.  We still need a system to export keywords/adgroups/campaigns.  Then we can make our edits an import them back in.  You have the import feature on the beta interface, but it pretty pointless without an export feature.  All the other PPC services have this ability.  Even Looksmart and Ask have it in their interface.

Content Network.  When you upgrade advertisers to the content network, don’t turn it on by default.  No one is going to run in hybrid mode because we need to track the content network separately than normal search network.  Sneaking the content network into people’s campaigns is not going to win you any points.  Especially when people who aren’t on the ball about their stats suddenly see their conversions tank and delete their campaigns.

I am trying to be patient MSN, but please listen to your advertisers and work with us here. We are trying to give you our money!

There is a lot of buzz out there about Google’s new PPA (Pay-Per-Action) ads which are currently in beta. I will post my views of the service after I have had a few more weeks to see the real world results, but until then, here is a step by step guide of how to set up a PPA advertising campaign on Google. There are 14 steps and screenshots in total.

1. First step is to create your action and setup conversion tracking. By going into the conversion tracking section and choosing “Create New Action”.

(Click images to see full size)

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For about the last 6 months I have been #1 in a very competitive niche at Azoogle. From what my AM tells me, I completely dominate this niche. So how did this happen? Very simple: hard work. You can’t just slap together a campaign in a few hours or days and expect to do really well. You may get lucky for a while, but eventually your earnings will dip. It’s difficult to keep a campaign profitable over the long term. Without giving away my offer, here is how I did it in general terms.

1. Keyword research and structure. Of course a good keyword list is very important. Start with a great tool, and then add every variation you can think of. More important almost than your master list, is how you break your KWs out into groups. Correct adgroup structure is a huge factor in your campaigns success. The more targeted your ad is to your keywords, the better your CTR will be and conversion rate.

2. Make a good landing page, then keep making more and split testing. You just never know what will convert until you test it.

3. Know your seasonal trends for your niche. Everything has seasonal patterns. Even the most non-seasonal product has peaks and valleys than you can exploit.

4. Buy more traffic. Once you have a well converting campaign, try it out on every possible network you can. If you don’t you are leaving money on the table. Don’t believe what you read in forums about PPC networks. Test them for yourself. One of my best converting networks is one that everyone in the forums calls crap. To me it’s gold though.

5. Know your niche. This is the most important tip I can give. Research everything you can about the product and market. Know the demographics of the target customers. Know their age, sex. geographic location, marital status, income level, browsing habits, and what they ate for breakfast this morning. Read the trade journals for the industry. Find out everything you can, because every piece of info you learn will help target your campaign. This is a step that many affiliates skip when just going for the quick buck, but if you really want to do well it’s essential. Think of yourself like a marketing contractor for the publisher’s company. They are paying you to know as much as possible about their consumers so you can better market their product to them.

I think if you work hard enough, you can eventually own any niche you want, even the most competitive ones. It’s just a matter of how hard you want to work.

Here is my tip for the day.  Avoid Vista as long as possible!  Run away as fast as you can!  I bought this sweet new top of the line HP laptop from Amazon (with my Azoogle Rewards of course), and it came with Vista.  No problem I thought, I have to get used to it eventually.  The problem is the OS is a POS.  It turns out after many hours of research, that Vista doesn’t not work with 90% of the wireless connections out there.  It works fine while wired, but you can forget wireless.  I tried HP support which is a total joke.  I used to be a system/network admin, so I know what I am doing.  After 1 minute on the support call it was clear I knew more about the tech, so I was on my own.   I tried MS forums and message boards.  I really just don’t have the time or patience to deal with this crap anymore so I am going to downgrade the laptop to XP.  I normally dont bash MS but how the hell can they release an OS that they know is not going to work with wireless??  Not to mention all the IPv6 crap that sends double DNS queries for all your IP requests.  What a joke!

I definitely have issues with Google’s quality score and the constant battle to keep campaigns running on their network, but one thing I can’t fault them for is their interface. It is simply the best out there, hands down. When you are handling large scale campaigns, their offline adwords editor is a huge time saver. Here are a some tips you may or may not know about in the editor.

Tip #1 Using the editor to build campaigns for other networks

With the Adwords editor, it is very quick and easy to build campaigns with multiple adgroups, ad copy, and keywords. I have found that it’s the fastest way to build up a campaign and get it into CSV form so you can work with it on other PPC networks.

Just build the campaign in “draft mode” then go to File > Export to CSV > Export Current Campaign. Now you have a campaign in spreadsheet format that with a little massaging, you can upload into other engines like MSN or Yahoo.

Tip #2 Copying text ads to other adgroups

If you do a lot of ad copy testing (which you should!), you often want to move ads from one group to another. Or rather than writing a whole new ad, copy an ad from on place to another, then tweak it. In the Adwords Editor this is a piece of cake.

Just click on the adgroup that contains the ad on the left panel, then click the text ads tab on the top. Now highlight the ad in this view and do a control –c. Now navigate to the new adgroup and do a control –v. The ad will now be ready under the text ads tab to run or edit with your changes for A/B testing.

Tip #3 Whole campaign inactive keyword bid edits

This is probably my favorite feature. With Adwords, keywords are constantly going “inactive for search” and you may need to up edit your bid amounts to activate them again. If you have a campaign with 200 adgroups, it would be a tough task to check each one and then go in and edit each keyword with a new bid. With this technique, it’s a 30 second task no matter how many adgroups you have.

In the Adwords Editor click on the main top level campaign on the left panel (not an adgroup). Now click on the keywords tab. Then click the status bar (usually twice) to sort by inactive words. Now you will see all the inactive keywords in all of your adgroups. To change the bid amount you scroll down to find the last inactive word, do control-shift-home to select only the inactives, change the bid, and bam, you are done. When you look at your adgroup list now, you will see the change icon in all the adgroups where keywords were changed. That would have taken hours on a large campaign with the web interface.

Just a note to any PPC networks like Yahoo, MSN, Miva, Looksmart etc. who might be reading this. If you really want to increase your network usage and spends by your advertisers, build an offline editor! The easier it is for people to run their campaigns, the more money they will spend with you.