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Traffic University Exposed and Media Buying

Posted by JasperP on September 30th, 2008

I recently watched the Traffic University Exposed seminar and it was exciting to be able to talk to Carlos and Lupe live!  It was exciting to be able to pick their brain on their techniques on Internet Marketing.  It was also a bit entertaining too! - (Carlos is one freaky cat.. lol).  They have big hearts and it was a pleasure just chatting with them.

If you’ve never heard of Traffic Tactics, the basic idea is that they use media buying to generate tons of traffic online.  According to them, banner advertising is NOT dead.  In fact, media buying is done by big name companies all the time (You’ve probably seen the NetFlix banner all over the place).

They focus more on banner advertising rather than the usual PPC marketing that we see from other Internet Marketers.  The cool thing about banner advertising is that you can virtually get an unlimited amount of traffic directly from web sites or through ad networks like Casale Media, Tribal Fusion, etc.

Now, I almost was able to ask a question on the phone, but they had to cut it short because the seminar was getting pretty lengthy.  I wanted to ask them about my own experience with buying media.  About a month or two ago, I experimented with AdBrite, which is a self-serve ad network.  You can buy media at a CPC or CPM basis which is pretty cool.  I noticed they mentioned it in the “Media Buying Secrets” guide (which is free when you sign up for their free newsletter) and I decided to try it out.  I basically wanted to find out what I was doing wrong. I think I have a better idea with it now, so I guess I’ll give it a try again later on.

Listening to the seminar tonight, I realized that I think I was optimizing for the wrong criteria.  I was optimizing for which ads had a higher CTR when I should’ve been optimizing for higher CONVERSION RATES.  If a particular ad converts better, but has a lower CTR, that would be the winner right?

Another interesting point they made tonight is the emphasis of SPLIT-TESTING.  They split test so much that they even split-test PEOPLE.  Sounds odd, but one of the questions that was asked tonight was about where to find a good designer.  Lupe says to split-test designers and see which one does a better job.

Come to think of it, imagine if the working world was like that… each company hires 2 people for the same position and will keep the better one - hmmm, I wonder if they do that already.

Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts about them.  If you want to learn more about media buying and banner advertising, sign up for their free newsletter and you can get access to their free guide and hours of free video seminars.

Check it out now!

http://www.traffictactics.com
http://www.traffictacticsblog.com

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Posted in: General Comments(5)

Interesting Posts From My Google Reader

Posted by JasperP on August 31st, 2008

Just thought I’d post some interesting posts I found from my Google Reader.  I follow quite a number of blogs and found some of these posts to be very interesting.  I hope you find them helpful!

  • In addition to the 77 “silver bullets” above, here are more examples from PPCFool.com of great copywriting.  The idea is to impose “shock” to induce action from your visitors.  By using shocking keywords, you can startle your visitors to increase CTR.
  • How does the 20/80 rule apply to PPC Marketing? Basically, from launch to optimization, you should be left with a handful of keywords to optimize your campaigns on.  Derek at ClickConsultants.com explains how the 80/20 rule applies to keywords in your PPC marketing campaigns.
  • Here is something that I haven’t had too much experience with.. which is Facebook ads.  It’s pretty hot to get into right now, although, it’s getting much more saturated as more and more blogs talk about it.  Anyway, Zac Johnson talks about split testing different pictures in your ad copy. It’s interesting to see how each picture can make big differences!

So that’s it! Now go out there and make some money!

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Posted in: Copywriting, Internet Marketing, Pay Per Click Marketing Comments(0)

Free Pay-Per-Click And Internet Marketing Tools

Posted by JasperP on August 11th, 2008

This page will probably be a work in progress.. I’ll just add more and more links to this list as I see fit.

Here’s a list of free PPC and Internet Marketing Tools

Keyword Research
http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/gtrends
http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook
http://kwbrowse.com - finds related (LSI) kws

Keyword Tracking
http://www.tracking202.com
http://www.prosper202.com (self-hosted version)

SubID Tracking
http://subids202.com (Shows you how to construct subids for different affiliate networks)

Keyword Manipulation
http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/keywordpad

Keyword and PPC Campaign Export (Adwords, YSM, and MSN right now)
http://www.export202.com

Landing page analysis (with heat maps and click tracking)
http://www.crazyegg.com

Keyword Spy Tools
http://www.keywordspy.com
http://www.keycompete.com
http://www.spyfu.com

Web Traffic Analysis
http://www.compete.com
http://www.alexa.com
http://www.quantcast.com

Online Commercial Intent:
http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/OCI.aspx - predicts a visitor’s probability that a kw leads to a sale (cool!)

Search Engine Optimization Tools
http://tools.seobook.com

Domain Suggestion Tools
http://www.bustaname.com

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Posted in: Pay Per Click Marketing Comments(3)

Internet Marketing And The Business Mindset

Posted by JasperP on August 4th, 2008

993147_42341823.jpgSo how bad do you want to have Internet Marketing work for you? Or even have a successful business for that matter?  I believe that it comes from this inner desire to change yourself and to fulfill your dreams.  But how bad do you want it?

Here’s a little story that might help illustrate this:

Once upon a time, there was a guy named Bob who would sit on his porch all day with his pet dog, Fido.  Jack, who likes to take walks around his neighborhood,  always passes by Bob on his way to the store.  Everyday, Jack would hear Fido constantly whining, but he would just lie there all day.

One day, Jack decided to ask Bob, “Hey Bob, how come your dog is always whining?”.  Bob replies, “Well, it’s because Fido has a tack in his foot.”.  “Then how come Fido doesn’t try to remove it?”, Jack asks.

“Because it doesn’t hurt bad enough”, Bob says.

Now that probably wasn’t best story in the world, but it does illustrate a point.  If something hurts bad enough, then people tend to take action to improve their situation.  A lot of people are comfortable with their situation and never go beyond that.

Being able to materialize your dreams is something that comes from within yourself.  When you find your reason to fulfill you dreams, then you’ll go beyond the failures and obstacles to reach your destination.

In this business, failure is not an option. You will most likely fail at some point doing this type of work.  Why? It’s just a part of doing business.  Some things work and some things don’t.  Once you improve your tolerance for failure, you will start improving your business mindset.

With Internet Marketing, there are so many things that can go wrong and so many variables to take into account.  Demand, competition, copywriting, data analysis, coding, design, work habits, learning ability, etc, etc.  I could probably go on and on, but you need to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are in order to compete as a marketer.  This means that you’re going to be learning some things that you have never learned before and the learning curve can be kind of steep.

Remain persistent and push forward through all the failures and you might find yourself in a profitable situation.

“Fail as fast as you can.  Get it over with and move on.”

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Posted in: Business, Internet Marketing, Mindset Comments(0)

Project Yahoo: Campaign Progress And Dating Niche Launch

Posted by JasperP on July 31st, 2008

1038472_45709527.jpgSo I’ve been trying to test out traffic on Yahoo with the purpose of taking the profitable keywords and moving it over to Google.  I’ve only been testing out the traffic for about 2 weeks using a specific method of testing broad keywords and text ads.

The general guideline is 10,000+ keywords (grouping <1000 keywords with 1-2 common keywords for each ad groups) and 10+ ads for each ad group.  The main purpose for testing like this is to get a broad view of what types of keywords convert as well as what types of ad copy converts best.

I optimize these campaigns every day by using the following criteria (These guidelines come from Artarmon42 and Keliix06 of ClickConsultants):

  • Sort by clicks and delete keywords that make absolutely no sense
  • Sort by impressions then by CTR and use the following guidelines
  • Delete keywords with less than 250 impressions and no clicks
  • Delete keywords with less than a 0.4% CTR

The exception to these rules is if the keywords appears to be highly targeted but I just need more data to verify.  I will let those type of keywords run until I reach 1-2x the commission.

So far I’ve learned quite a bit from this project.  I’m learning to micromanage a bit more and I’m paying close attention to the details of my campaigns.  I’ve also constructed my own keyword-level tracking script from the tips at the guys at ClickConsultants.

I might as well reveal the niches that I’m working on right now with Yahoo.  I think there’s no point in hiding the overall niche.  So instead of telling you Niche #1, Niche #2, etc, I can just tell you that I’m currently focusing on the following:

  • Debt Consolidation
  • Dating
  • Online Games

Here is the summary so far:

Project_Yahoo___July_2008.gif

As you can see, I’m still in the red with a negative ROI. I expected that because of the fact that when you’re testing a wide variety of things, it’s really difficult to pick out the good keywords and text ads on the first try (unless you’re either damn lucky or a super marketer!).

One thing that I noticed, though, after studying my debt relief offer in great detail was that my traffic was being sent to the Smiley Central International offer! Usually when that happens, it’s because the offer doesn’t accept traffic from a particular country.  In my case, I was sending traffic to Canada! I just changed that yesterday and now my CTR went from 1.0% to 0.5% overnight!  So I’m basically starting over again with the whole tuning process.  Oh well.  Lesson learned.

I did get my first lead for the debt relief campaign and this was after removing Canada from my geo-targeting options.  I’m probably going to re-import this campaign since the stats are all screwed up now due to the different traffic sources.

On another note, the dating niche that I’ve been working on is finally being uploaded to my YSM account as I write this.  Here are the stats on that:

  • 16,665 Keywords
  • 26 Ad Groups
  • 16 Text Ads per Ad Group
  • CPC: 0.10
  • Daily Budget: $5.00

I’m probably going to let this one loose tomorrow as soon as everything gets approved.  I’m just waiting on my text ads to get approved.

Anyway, that’s the scoop on this project! Hopefully I can start making profits on these new niches soon!!

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Posted in: Affiliate Marketing, CPA Networks, Pay Per Click Marketing, Projects Comments(0)

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