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I hate, hate, hate it when people enter a bidding war with me. I’m very competitive and hate being on the losing team. When people try and do it on PPV, I’ll try my best to stay on top of the pack.

I’ll start out by saying that you probably don’t want to enter a bidding war with 5+ other people in it. It’s hard to manage, and expensive. If I know it is gonna be a ton of people in position – and you can tell if its a lot if you set your bid to 1 cent – I’ll usually stay away if my EPC is already pretty close to the total bid. Our goal with this bidding war is to frustrate the hell out of our opponent and make him simply drop all traffic by out bidding him, make him lose money, and get him desperate.

1. Keep auto-refreshing your bids page. We want to make sure you get as much traffic as possible. Keep auto-refreshing the page every 5 minutes or so and check to make sure you are still number 1. Your opponent might not be as dedicated as you, step out to eat lunch, or go to sleep. Capitalize on moments like this and steal the traffic back!

2. Know your EPC. We don’t want to bid too far over our EPC,  but we may need to to bump our opponent out of his comfort zone. Chances are, you might be running the same offer, so your EPCs may be similar. You’ll want to know you are maximizing your earnings through optimized landing pages. As an added buffer, I collect emails, which in some niches gives me a lot more money down the line, making direct EPC completely negligible if I know what I’m doing with the niche.

3. Make him outbid you by a lot over his EPC. Yesterday I was stuck in a bidding war. I was shocked when I turned back to the screen and saw the guy trying to knock me out of the front spot by bidding over $5.00. The nutter left his bid there for about 15 – 20 minutes which means he spent about $100 in that time period on a campaign that only spends about $20 – 30 a day on that target. Way to ruin your ROI. He dropped his bid, and for the rest of the day I was bid in place 1. He either ran out of money or hit his daily campaign budget, like a fool. Yeah, if you’re reading this… you’re an idiot.

4. Download the adware and start spying. Get it on your PC or virtual private server to start spying on ads. I know people that keep it on their computers just so they can see what everyone else is doing while they’re working or browsing the Internet. Anyways, hit up the target that the war is on, grab their LP URL, their affiliate URL, and their tracking URL, and add them to your targets. Make sure they get absolutely no traffic/coversions. Yeah, its mean, but F*%# You… these are my targets.

5. Grab the internal page URLs of the targets you are going after, and bump your bid 0.01 above what they’re bidding on for the root domain. Now, I’m not sure if this is what is up, but my thinking is that you have to beat his bid, and he probably isn’t targeting the internal pages, but just the root. So his root domain bid will stay the same, but he won’t see you are bidding more on internal pages. He gets the traffic for the root, but chances are if visitors are coming from search engines and such, they probably aren’t going straight to the root. Again, this is just speculation and I haven’t played with the idea enough to see if it is true or not, but I think this could work.

Got any of your own ideas on how to beat your bidding wars? Share them here or talk about it in the forums!