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October is here, and as I promised, this blog will have nothing but campaign builds, 1 per day, that you will be able to take and try out on your own. This is day 1 of 31 Days of Affiliate Campaigns. Today, I will be taking a college loan CPA offer from the excellent group of guys from Envyus Media. If you aren’t signed up with them yet, you should be! They’ve got some of the most unique offers I’ve seen, including this student loan offer, Simple Tuition. Envyus always pays their affiliates on time, and they’re a good group of guys that will do anything to get your traffic.

Now, I’ve worked a lot with education leads in the past and it is an extremely hot niche. Couple that with the dying economy, the need for a better education for better positions, and the dire need for money to pay for that education, and you’re left with an excellent offer with a lot of different angles you can build off of. Simple Tuition is an offer I’ll be testing out right after I launch this post, so if you follow some of the advice I give you here, we could turn out to be direct competitors.

The Offer

First thing is first – we need to look at the offer page to get an idea of what we are promoting.

So, the offer has 2 different landing pages to send to – a first page submit and a second page submit. They pay out $3.40 and $3.50, so nothing significant for an extra page of data. Still, I’d recommend testing both and testing both for each traffic source you are running on.

Overall, this offer page is well designed, laid out relatively well, but what bothers me is the lack of information above the fold. The mid-section helps build trust with big name, reliable brands, yet the bottom section gives no information or pre-sell directly to this offer, until the 3rd column where it talks about their student loan comparison tool. I’d suggest building a landing page, which I’ll talk about late in the post, to give a bit more pre-sell. The fields are also be a little too far to the right side to be a viable option for direct linking on PPV traffic sources. In most cases, you shouldn’t be direct linking anyways, but you can always try it. I normally do, so I can test the basic conversion rate on any offer. Will it be consistent or not?

Basic Research

A good thing to do before launching any campaign is to understand the basic demographics of the affiliate offer you plan on marketing. You can use Quantcast, Compete, Alexa and the Google Ad Planner to get some of this basic information.

Clik the image to see the full Quantcast report

The site isn’t “Quantified” by Quantcast yet, but it gives a decent picture of what their general audience really is. You can see that most that view the site are young women, probably 17 – 20 years old, possibly mostly black, but I don’t know if that figure can be trusted 100%. Still, it gives us another angle to play with. So, mostly young women that aren’t in college, and are probably looking for a student loan. Not a huge shocker there. You can get more relevant data by checking out the “Audience Also Likes” section. You can see there are people looking for information on education, scholarships, and different colleges. You can pull demographic information from them, as well.

All in all, this isn’t surprising info for me, and probably shouldn’t be for you. The direct approach to marketing this offer should work – that is simple targeting people looking for student loans and scholarships. However, there is a lot more that you can actually do here.

Where To Run This Offer

This Simple Tuition offer from Envyus Media can be run in a multitude of places. It’d probably be fine to run this on MSN’s AdCenter search network direct linking on a large portion of long tail scholarship and student loan related keywords. Mind you, though, that shorter keywords and phrases will cost much more than the payout on the offer.

This offer will shine on PPV (Specifically TrafficVance) with a landing page. There are thousands of sites and terms that can be paired up with this offer. On top of that, you’ve got one hundred and one different angles you can play with. You can target high school students and high school websites. Target those currently looking for student loans. Target those already in college but in need of a better loan conditions or more money. You can go after parent networks, student credit cards, as well as targeting those trying to find jobs. All these different angles will need a landing page to help pre-sell the idea that they need a student loan. There is that, as well as the offer page being to wide for direct linking on PPV anyways.

Facebook is another excellent source for education traffic. You’ve got the ability to be able to target 17 and 18 year olds directly, as well as the ability to target individual schools and universities. I’m going to tell you a little story about how I used to run a scholarship offer a long, long time ago.

So you remember those old $10,000 scholarship CPA offers? They used to do ridiculously well on Facebook. I remember everyone trying the dad, mom and racial angles. Back then, those demographics were limited, and Facebook was mainly used by college students. So I went after the big piece of the pie. I targetted every college and university in the United States that I could, each with their own individual ad, having an image of their own logo be the ad image. The ad read something like “University Name Scholarship? – If you study at University Name, you qualify for a $10,000 scholarship. Click here for more details”. The ads killed everything out there. I was getting consistent 1% CTRs and 1 cent clicks. I made myself a lot of money in a very short time until the advertiser got pissed off that I was promoting the offer to current university students and probably infringing copyrights with the use of their logos, although they didn’t say anything about that.

Now, you might be limited by some things these days, but much of the above campaign details can be transferred to this one. Try targeting college students or high school students, using the name of wherever they are in the ad. Build landing pages if Facebook says no soup for you on the inclusion of user data in the ad.

Landing Pages

This is going to be one of the most important parts of this campaign. You will want to always be split testing this, whether it be general design split tests or landing page copy split tests. A landing page does not have to be complex, especially since we are only generating leads and nothing including a credit card number or social security number.

If you are going after the scholarship/loan angle, this is going to be easy for you. Simply let them know you’ve got a Loan Comparison tool so they don’t have to browse 50 different sites for the best offer… they can just get it on Simple Tuition. List simple benefits of searching for loans like guarantees of qualifying for a loan no matter who they are or where they are from or what their credit score looks like, interest rates lower than anywhere else, or that they don’t have to pay the loan back until x amount of years after they graduate. Anyone currently looking for a student loan will expect this coming to them, so don’t feel like you need a huge amount of pre-sell.

For other angles, you’ll have to do research on what is appropriate for them. Here is an example of something I would put on my landing page (or advertisement, for that matter) for those that are currently job hunting:

“No one is going to be hiring you anytime soon! (Here I’m negging the user, getting them emotionally engaged to my pitch) BUT, with a better education you’ll have a 79% better chance of getting that dream job with a 31.97% increase in salary! (Numbers are just for show, but in general, facts and numbers are trust building tools of a marketer’s copy) Go back to school with the help of Simple Tuition. Get a student loan with the best rates and don’t worry about paying it back until you get that dream job of yours!”

Yeah, its rough and needs about 20 more drafts until the language is right, but its a unique angle to take on those that aren’t currently looking to go back to school. With a bit more work, you should be able to spin something like this to get anyone to convert on the offer.

Also, use this opportunity to build a list. The education niche is very broad, and you can cross promote biz-op offers and perhaps even dating and gaming affiliate marketing offers to a large list like this. Here is a little diddly you can add to your landing page to get a email address: “To use our FREE loan comparison tool, all you need to do is submit your email below and hit submit!”. Building a list isn’t as difficult as everyone thinks it is.

Final Comments

This is an awesome offer for a niche that doesn’t get enough love from the general affiliate marketer. I recommend you at least try it. You’ll have a lot of competition going the direct route, but with a little wordplay you can spit this affiliate offer out to anyone. If you have any questions or comments, you know where to leave them.

Again, you can pick this offer up at Envyus!

And as always, help out your affiliate marketing friends (and me) by sharing this post! You can click any of the icons below or on the share bar to the left!