Direct linking is dead – not a 100% accurate presumption, but for those that are too lazy to even test a landing page on any traffic source, you are missing out on some extreme benefits (read: more money). This especially holds true when trying to serve pop-up/contextually based ads. This is obvious when you know that most pop-up serving networks (PPV from here on) only display a pop that is limited in a fixed size and height – normally 700 x 500 or so. If you are direct linking, only a portion of the non-important parts of your offer page could be showing.

Let’s couple that with the fact that the attention span of a user that receives pop-up ads is very used to seeing them. I guarantee they’re pretty damn quick at closing them, too. You’ve got about 1-3 seconds to impress a user with the link you’re serving before they close it. Affiliate offer pages are usually slow to load, large, and don’t engage a user enough to have them fulfill the requirements for you to “Make Money, Get Paid”.

So, making a landing page breaks through those disadvantages fairly quickly.

So what’s the best way to go about it? It’s gonna be so cliché’, but Keep It Simple Stupid (K.I.S.S.) is a term I live by.

As far as design goes, I like to keep my tester landing pages very simple. A headline, a small paragraph and/or some bullet points, a button, and a big blue Arial font link.

Try implementing a flashing border into your landing pages. It helps grab attention to your landing page when you’ve got very little time to get attention. Flashing graphics or video can have the same effect.

The addition of sound is always a plus, too. If you’re a caveman and have no idea how to get a light MP3 file to play on your popup landing page, just do it the simple way. Grab a Youtube clip and embed it into the bottom of your landing page. I usually put it low enough to where the user would have to scroll to pause it. You can resize it to about 35 pixels in height and it will only the the timeline and play/pause button.  Add the autoplay tag to the link and you’ll be good to go.

Here’s a funny little thing that can happen – You can lose your traffic to other advertisers. How? In TrafficVance you can have the option of using popups or contextual text links. They’ll show if keywords on your landing page match those another advertiser is targeting. A simple fix is to turn all your text into links and use CSS to style it to look like normal text. Another benefit to that is that, more to click means more clicks. Put something like Clicktale or another heat map script on your LP and you’ll see all the goofy things people try to click.

Stop trying to go too broad with your targeting and landing pages. Identify a small group of potential buyers and test your landing page sales copy. When you can nail down keywords and terms that boost your CVR, you should be cloning a that tactic to another market slice (Say for instance targeting PS3 users on one landing page, Xbox gamers with another rather than trying to go at it all in one fell swoop).

You can also add Geo-IP insertion scripts that drop the user’s city or state into the landing page text, pull the keyword or URL you were targeting and place it on your LP, or add countdown timers and overlays to collect emails if they wait too long on the page.  These are just some simple tricks with tutorials all over the web on how to do them.

PPV landing pages don’t have to be insane or over the top difficult to build. Keep it simple, keep it relevant and remember to split test.

Here’s a really quick tip that is going to help you save money on your PPV campaigns.

Once I’ve got my campaigns optimized and know what targets I’m going to bid number 1 on, I set them off into a round of targets on their own. I then had a quick greasemonkey tool coded up that will go through all my targets and find the number 1 bids, and set it as that.

Now, day by day, sometimes hour by hour, bids are going up and down. This tool will set all my target bids down to 0.011 (minimum bid on TrafficVance). In some cases, my previous number 1 bid might be well above the current number 2 bid. After calculating what is needed to win the top spot, it goes back and sets the bid as so. The script has a line that allows me to set the maximum allowed bid so it doesn’t get me into a ridiculous bidding war that loses money for everyone.

I will not be releasing this tool publicly, however there is an old and primitive version of it in my forums. To get this coded yourself shouldn’t cost you more than $100 or so. It’s no more than 100 or so lines of code (if any), so its nothing too complex. This tool saves me a lot of time, and more importantly, money as in many cases I might be bidding several more cents for the top spots than I need to.

Is there still money to make with PPV/CPV traffic? Yes! There has been a huge surge of affiliates running to PPV the past two years due to increased competition and bannings on other ad networks, however, that have made running PPV traffic a bit more difficult than it has been in the past. But here’s the thing… if it wasn’t making money for many people, there wouldn’t be so much competition. Now, the top guys have their own tracking systems, auto-optimizers and auto-bidders running 24 hours a day, and while having access to tools like that would make your job easier, you don’t need them.

Let me share my top 5 tips that will give you the upper hand when affiliate marketing on PPV traffic:

Do Your Research Before Hand

I know a lot of you tend to pick out offers, scrape similar URLs and throw them at the  wall hoping they’ll stick. You’re doing it wrong.

The most successful affiliate marketers will do their research before hand. Here is what I mean by research:

• Demographic Analysis – Who browses where?
• Psychographic Analysis – Who is interested in what?
• Competition Analysis – Where is your offer or similar offers already being advertised? How are they being marketed? What angle are they using?

You’ve got a few tools to do this without spending thousands of dollars on custom tools. Quantcast, Alexa and the Google Ad Planner are great for demographic analysis. I’ll browse through sites that Quantcast suggests fits the demographic I plan to target, and this gets my psychographic analysis out of the way. In some cases, I can see ads, whether they’re branding ads, small business ads, or affiliate ads, on those sites to, which gets my competitive analysis done. You can also search Google, Bing or Yahoo and browse through ads that hits the interests of your Psychographic analysis. WhatRunsWhere.com is an advertising intelligence tool that is very affordable and allows you to browse thousands of ads which can give you some true insight on what exactly is working where.

And the ultimate sacrifice you can make here is to install the actual PPV software on your computer. For instance, if you plan on affiliate marketing on TrafficVance, you can head over to GameVance.com and install their little software and ads will start slowly being served to you.

Take Angles Others Don’t

I know what you really want to do:

1. Find generic dating offer
2. Target all the other dating sites
3. …
4. $$$ PROFIT $$$

That worked in 2008 – 2009. Two years later you are old and played out.

To get around this, you’ve got to take angles others aren’t willing to take, either because it takes to much research (see tip above) or there isn’t as much traffic available. Truth of the matter is that if you want to fight rising click costs and increased competition, this is going to be one of your only ways around it. For example, taking a dating offer again, I would try and target those interested in interracial dating. Pick 1 race and target it to another 1 race. Black men for white women. Asian women of black men. Japanese men looking for America women. You get the point here.

Double Check Your Target Lists

This is one that will save you money in the long run. Always double and triple check your target lists. Many times, I find I’ll quickly create a new campaign, throw it up, and blow through my budget in 10 minutes. Why? Because I had Google, Facebook or Youtube in my list of targets. Not a very wise thing to spend your money on, honestly. Anything that has any sort of traffic (indicated by the activity bar on TrafficVance), and I’m not sure what it is, I will copy the URL and browse it just to make sure it is relevent for my current campaign. Yes, it might take 30 minutes to an hour out of my day, but I know its probably saved me thousands, if not more, in wasted spending dollars.

Get Rid of Non-Performers

Obviously, you will want to get rid of PPV targets that spend a lot and make back a total loss, but what about those URLs that only get 1 – 10 hits a day? Honestly, if they haven’t converted for you after a couple days, get rid of them. It won’t be worth the risk if you wait all month or two months for them to spend as much as the offer payout and they never convert. This might not seem like a lot of lost revenue for 1 – 2 targets, but imagine if you have 1 thousand or more of these. Then you could possibly be spending hundreds to thousands on targets that won’t work each month.

Use a Landing Page

And finally, I can’t believe I still have to suggest this, but use a landing page. I know you want the easy way in with direct linking, but it doesn’t cut it anymore. A landing page allows you to do so much more. Capture more attention to the page with audio or video. Manipulate the users, based off the psychographic analysis you did earlier, to do your own bidding. Presell the offer a bit more if the offer page doesn’t provide much info. Also, considering the size of most affiliate marketing offer pages aren’t optimized for PPV traffic, you can do that with a landing page. I’ll be talking more about landing pages in a later post.

Need some more help with your affiliate marketing PPV campaigns? I still offer 1-on-1 affiliate coaching. Contact me for more details.

Affiliates know and love PPV… those that get it atleast. A common problem I hear with PPV is that new affiliates jump on it, and come out busted with nothing to show for their efforts. I think a lot of it has to do with jumping in head first, rather than dipping your toes in and testing the waters. It isn’t hard to spend $1000 a day on one target on PPV by accident. This is something we obviously want to avoid.

So for all you new affiliate marketers jumping on to TrafficVance or Media Traffic, or one of the many other PPV sources, let me give you this tid bit of advice:

Don’t Target 1000 URLs All At Once!

Seems like common sense, but I know a lot of you are doing it, and I’ve caught myself doing it. I did this once. It was on an IQ offer. The first day I ran it, I was targeting a few thousand URLs. I spent about 1000 dollars and made 900 back. Not bad, a little optimization would take care of that, right? Well I did an idiot thing and decided to target more URLs by scraping meta keywords off those sites that were profiting for me and scraping similar sites. This all added up to a total of 8000+ targets!

In the end, I couldn’t keep up with the optimization and the amount of targets that would perform well on different days. I ended up spending a total of $12,000 in one week, and only making back $8000.

I really screwed myself there.

So lesson be learned. When I start a new PPV campaign, I start with a maximum of 100 medium to light traffic targets. Anything with a full activity bar gets paused until I know the offer will convert, and what type of targets are working out with what kind of landing page (almost always a necessity these days).

If you think a high traffic target will convert well, place it in its own creative campaign, set the spend limit low, and only run it during times of the day where you have your highest conversion rate. This is why tracking like Prosper202 and a decent server/VPS are essential for PPV.

This will save you newbies a lot of headaches and heartaches.

Bevo Media PPV Spy from Ryan Bukevicz on Vimeo.

Ryan Buke is a great guy. He made the BevoMedia tracker which is a grade-A tracking system with free and premium versions available. But then he released info on the above video and tool.

Those of us that do a lot of PPV knows that this tool will probably not be something we are happy to have, now, publicly released.

How do I see it effecting PPV game? Campaign longevity will be very brief, a couple days at most until you start getting in to bidding wars with affiliates running identical offers or landing pages that they ripped right from you. More expensive bids, less originality, and a whole lot of **** hitting the wall. It opens the flood gates, really, for average to inexperienced affiliates to learn how to run PPV incorrectly. I like to teach originality to my forum members, consulting clients and friends when talking about AM. A PPV spy is a great tool to have in your private collection and in the hands of a person that knows how to use it for maximum personal benefit, but when everyone has simple access to one (for a tiny $400 a month), what do you think will happen?

Anyone care to share their opinions on this issue? Is this a game-changing or game-breaking tool? Leave your comments below.

For those of you unfamiliar with PPV advertising, it stands for pay-per-view advertising. Each ad is served as a pop-up or pop-under. Advertisers have control to serve these ads where they want by picking certain targets – websites that users browse or searched for keywords. This allows you to be very creative with your targeting, whether demographically or psychographically. In this post, I will be talking about how I used PPV to make a long term stable dating campaign.

Now, when you hear about PPV traffic, a lot of people talk about using URL targets. They allow you a bit more edge in targeting down what you really need. There is a downfall though: there is a ton of competition and this makes it very costly. These two things make it difficult to keep PPV campaigns going long term. I wanted to “beat the system” if you will.

I picked a very general and broad niche – dating – which is very competitive in itself, and made it my goal to create a long term campaign out of it. I picked 5 of the hottest offers in dating, rotated them in Prosper, created my link, and uploaded that to TrafficVance. I also made sure to put conversion tracking from TV on my affiliate network so I could more easily optimize the campaign without having to check stats from different sources.

But how to turn one of the most, if not the most, competitive niche into my own long term stable campaign? That was the question indeed. Keywords were the answer for me. First of all, I gathered all the dating keywords that I could:

• dating
• singles
• online dating
• christian dating
• singles chat
• dating services
• personals
• matchmaking
• etc

These keywords on their own were pretty competitive, although you can still find some basic dating keywords for $0.011 or so. After collecting all these keywords (I just got them all from the Google Keyword Tool and AffPortal), I needed a way to make them less competitive. One thing I do with a lot of my other dating campaigns is target locally. That is what I would do here.

Wikipedia helped me gather a list of all the states and their largest cities. Using that list in combination with my dating keywords list, I was able to create a keyword list of over 30,000 keywords with this tool. Now, you might think I’m insane for using so many keywords, but you have to realize these are long-tail keywords:

• local matchmaking services in New York
• meet singles in MN
• online dating for Californians
• Anchorage singles chat

After firing up the campaign, I kicked out offers that wouldn’t perform well until I was left with only a couple that got results that were the most profitable. Most keywords were only getting 0-2 pops a day, however the total campaign would get me about 1-3000 pops per day, all at only 1 cent a pop. Surprisingly, I was getting about a 100% return on my money right off the bat. I put very little time into managing it. I even used it to build a small list, rotating in one of my own squeeze pages.

Every time I would get a conversion on a long-tail keyword, I would fire up AffPortal and do a Google scrub of all websites for that keyword. That allowed me to add several thousand more targets, many of which performed very well, too. All it all, I spent about $900 over 3 months on a campaign that took me all of an hour to make and another hour or two to manage. Revenue was at about $2000.

It is basically a free money kind of campaign for me, and the revenue gained from it is so marginal that I thought I would share it here. The idea here isn’t to blatantly go out and copy the campaign (although I know half of you will), but take away the idea and creativity that went in to building it. I thought outside the box, and I was rewarded for it. The most original marketers are the most profitable, and until you stop copying others campaigns, you’ll always be struggling to make the next step up to bigger profits.

Looking for more case studies and answers to your questions? The forums might be just what you’re looking for. Click here.

There is an old trend for landing pages coupled with PPV traffic known as the shock and awe method. It’s a widely used style of landing pages used to grab attention through random images that sometimes just seem way out of place and completely make no sense with the type of offer you are trying to promote. If you are having trouble generating a high CTR on traditional landing pages, trying out this style might work out for you.

If you are just learning how to write HTML, or have no experience what-so-ever, making these landing pages are very simple. As long as you know how to use Photoshop or other similar photo-editing software, and know how to make a link in a basic HTML web page, it’s pretty damn simple. Think of these style of landing pages are large banners, which is really all they are.

What you need is a really shocking or funny image. I’m going to use a picture of a cat because I love cats, and so do millions of others.

Aww. A crying kitty. Surely, it will get some attention when a user sees it, and that is what we want. All you need to do is add in a headline, a call to action or a button and you are good to rock with a very simple landing page. I added a border for some extra color and effect.

All I need to do now is import the image into a black HTML web page and link it to the offer I want it to go to. Feel free to test out this example if you’d like.

Will this style of landing page work for every type of offer? No. If you are trying to peddle off acai rebills with this, good luck. Your offer should be good enough to direct link, but might need a little more pizazz to get people to actually notice what the website is about. If you want to push offers that require a credit card, stick to testimonials.

I’ll have a few landing pages like this up in the store in a few days, and I’ve already got some up in the forums. If you are a member, check them out!

AffPortal is the must have toolset subscription for PPV. I don’t care how much you hate paying for stuff, if you can’t write these tools yourself, you might as well hop on it. There are 5 so different scrapers for URLs, keywords and even a scraper based on demographic searches. Essentially, they can allow you to launch a new campaign in 15 minutes. And here’s how I do it.

Step 1. Get Your Offer

I’m not going to help you pick your offer. Last time I did that I got berated. It’s all on you guys. Get the landing page URL, or one similar to it.  For example, if you are doing a car insurance offer, use geico.com.

Step 2. Grab More Keywords

Try keywords in your campaigns. Why? Because they can convert just as well as any URLs, in some instances, better. Head over to the Google Keyword Tool. Paste in geico.com under the website form and search. Voila.  Keywords! Hopefully you’ll have a list of about 100 keywords or so here. If you want some more, copy the whole list of keywords, paste it in the keyword form, and search again.

Step 3. Take It to AffPortal

Head over to AffPortal and use the Batch URL Scraper. Unless you want to test out low traffic URLs, just keep your Search Depth at 1 page. Copy in up to 100 keywords at a time and you’ll be given a shiny new list of hundreds of URLs. Paste them all into Excel and hand-examine them to make sure you aren’t targeting any irrelevant sources. If you want more variety and targets to test, run your list through the URL shrink or URL Modifier tools.

Step 4. Implement

Start testing it on whatever traffic source you want. Paste it all up and you are good to go!

Now – this isn’t the most effective way to launch a campaign, and it certainly isn’t the only way you can go about targeting, but if you are looking to launch 20 campaigns in 1 day, this is the way I do it. Of course, this is the way many other do it, so it might not be the cheapest. If you are looking for good offers that convert and trying to do it fast without a real budget because you plan to make back what you spent through scaling it, then I’d suggest this. If you only have 100 dollars, stick to being more cautious.

For those of you that need help in bidding wars in TrafficVance, you are gonna love the auto-bidder in my private forums. Check it out!

Here’s a general case study for you guys. It wasn’t a huge smash hit, making me lower double digits, so I didn’t bother to really optimize it. I pretty much let it run on its own for a the short life span of the campaign as a few days after launch the campaign was pulled from the network.

Step 1: Offer Selection

I look for offers I think would perform decently without a landing page. It just gives me more confidence that once I have a landing page, my EPC will only go up with the extra presell. These types of offers aren’t as common as they used to be (think short form lead gens that convert on the first page). I took a look at EWA and found Lord of Ultima to fit those specs, but with a very, very low payout. Only $0.95 a conversion. I always shied away from games, but thought what the hell, because I knew it would only take 1 hour to build it, and 15 more minutes to optimize it once I had my data.

Step 2: Scraping Targets

I decided to just go for niche targeting here. I could have done demographic targeting, but it would take more optimization, and with $0.95 payouts, you don’t have much room for testing some of those higher traffic targets out, especially if you are on a budget or don’t want to bother with managing it (call me lazy, but I think I’d call it being efficient. I knew this campaign wouldn’t make me more than $50 a day at the get-go).

… and that’s all you blog readers get! To read the rest of the case study, join the private forums. I reveal my targeting scheme and what targets did the best. You can mimic the campaign with other similar offers using the same targets! When you join, you’ll also get access to a large downloads section (over 50 landing pages and ad creatives already up for grabs to members), special offers and discounts, and one-on-one help from me.

Most any offer is marketable through PPV. There is a certain line, though, where an offer becomes more difficult than the rest. I just wanted to cover some of those lines and share with you guys how you can spot an easier affiliate offer from the rest.

Amount of Info on the 1st Page

How much info is there on the first page? Does it presell the offer well? Now assuming you are direct linking, sending people straight to a 10 form page with very little explanation to what service they are signing up for wouldn’t really work. When I’m looking to direct link (which honestly, I don’t do much of anymore), I don’t want more than a few forms to fill out on the first page. I prefer more if it is actually a multiple page submit, where the first page is just an information page with a big sign up here button.

Offer Page Size

Here is another important one for you direct linkers. The offer might be a super easy converter. Fill out 1 – 2 forms and get your commission, right? Sure, if it fits on the pop up. Most PPV networks pop at 750 x 550 pixels, but many offers are much wider than that. If the conversion button or forms are off the side or below that 750 x 550 pixel pop-up, that easy commission just got a little harder as the user has to actively scroll to see it. This is another reason why landing pages seem to be the way to go now.

Free vs. CC Submit

There is still a lot of money to be made in CPS/Rebill products with PPV. It isn’t impossible to sell, but it is much harder, and you will have to use a landing page. In my private forums, you can find one such example I used for rebill offers (and no, it wasn’t a flog/fartical/fake testimonial). I have also made some CPS offers work on PPV, too, however, the payouts are lower and much harder to work with. You need to spend a lot of money testing landing pages and targets before you start seeing results. For the affiliate marketer on a budget, you may want to steer clear.

So do you see any type of offers or offer page styles that work better than the other? Talk about it in the comments, or join the forums for further conversation!