Archive for the ‘CPA’ Category
So a couple of days ago I told you about our first real campaign to generate income from CPA offers by advertising on Google. Tonight I have stopped that campaign. I wouldn’t call it a failure but it wasn’t necessarily a success either. All said and done, I think we lost about $6 on the whole thing. I’ll consider that a break even because we’ve lost a lot more in one campaign.
What did I learn from the whole thing? I learned that I still have a lot more to learn about PPC and CPA. When I did all of the math before we started this campaign, it seemed like a sure winner. After letting it run for two days, it didn’t seem to go anywhere. I don’t know if the niche that we picked was just no good or if our ads just didn’t grab people enough. We just need to do some more research, tweak a few things here and there, and shoot for it one more time.
I think every time we have a semi-unsuccessful campaign, it brings us one step closer to having that amazing break out campaign. We learn more dos and don’ts every time.
I think I’ve aligned myself with a good mentor now as well. I’ve been talking to some great people who know my whole story and want to work one on one with me to help me turn some of my campaigns in to very successful campaigns. I can’t wait to start working with this guy.
I’ll let you know how that goes.
It’s really late right now so forgive me if it looks like I was half asleep when I typed this. Yesterday, Joe and I did our first real experiment with PPC to CPA. We have played with PPC in the past but I don’t count it because we didn’t track anything, we didn’t know what we were doing and we had a coupon code for $50 worth of free Adwords ads that they gave us when we signed up for hosting through PowWeb. This time it was our own money, we had a game plan and we had a solid strategy.
For anyone who’s reading this that has no idea what the heck I’m talking about right now, I will explain a little. PPC to CPA are acronyms for Pay-Per-Click to Cost-Per-Action. The idea behind the whole thing is that you create an ad on Google, Google charges you a certain amount per click, and we turn around and promote an offer that pays us every time someone signs up. For example, we buy an ad on Google, select the keywords that will cause that ad to pop up when people do a search, and then Google charges us $0.50 every time someone clicks on our ad. Our ad directs the person who clicked on it to an offer that pays us $4.00 every time they fill out a form. So now you’re probably thinking, “WOW, that’s amazing! You can spend $0.50 and they’ll pay you $4.00??!!? You’re going to be rich!”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way.
I’m not going to give away what niche we were marketing in or what keywords we were using today. We are still running this campaign because we haven’t quite figured out what kind of profit potential it holds yet. Once we’ve decided that it’s not profitable enough, then I’ll give you more details. At that point, I won’t care if you copy it.
The campaign we did today was for an ad we found on the Neverblue network. It actually paid out $4.00 every time we managed to get someone to sign up. We went in to Google, picked out all the relevant keywords, and then created an ad for each individual keyword. We then created a landing page where we would send people, the landing page would hype the offer a little bit and then pass them along to the actual sign up page. We put in a max bid of about $0.50 per click and we let it go. Unfortunately, nothing happened. $0.50 per click wasn’t a high enough bid for the keywords we were using. Our competition was outbidding us. I upped our bid to $1.00 and we finally started to see people click through.
On our very first click of the day, we got a conversion. We thought we were going to kick butt! We had a 100% conversion ratio. Then a few more clicks rolled in but no conversions. People were clicking on the ad, looking at the form, and deciding that they didn’t want to fill it out. About an hour in to the campaign we got our second conversion. Things were looking up again. Unfortunately, we had 10 clicks by this point and only 2 conversions. If you’re doing the math, that basically meant we spent $10 to make $8. We were at a $2 loss. From that point on, the rest of the day was dead. We saw no more real action. I guess sometimes PPC is very bazaar. In an hour period, we received 10 clicks and 2 conversions and then in the following 8 hours we received barely any action at all.
For any PPC experts out there that are reading this; we did do a ton of keyword research as well. I’m going to save that for another day. Far too in depth for me discuss at 1:00 am.
I’m letting my campaign run overnight. I’ll fill in the details in the morning.
For those of you who don’t know what a CPA network is; CPA stands for Cost-Per-Action. It’s the latest marketing methods that online marketers are using these days. Instead of marketers getting paid every time someone clicks on an ad or every time a sale is made, they get paid when an action is taken. This action can be as simple as entering an e-mail address or zip code to filling out a 10 page survey. The easier it is for the customer, the less the payout is from the CPA company.
From reading forums, other blogs, e-mails, tweets, etc, it has come to my attention that there are a lot of people out there that are having all sorts of trouble getting accepted in to CPA networks. I thought this was really weird because I had absolutely no problem at all getting accepted in to every network that I applied to. I found a plan that I had read somewhere else, I tweaked it a little, and it worked for me perfectly. If you don’t follow my plan, you may still get accepted in to the networks but this is almost 100% full proof. The networks basically want to see that you are not some sort of scammer who is going to throw up a quick site, get all their friends to enter their e-mail address, collect the commissions and then move on. (This doesn’t work by the way. CPA networks can spot these people a mile away. The conversion rates are too good and they stand out like a sore thumb.)
Here are the steps to follow:
1. Register a domain name. I recommend a “.com” domain name. These are the most professional looking. If you are going to push auto loan CPA offers, you can register something like www.thebestautoloan.com. I always register my domains through GoDaddy. If you use the coupon code “OYH3″, you’ll get your domain name for a year for $6.99.
2. Get a webhost. I suppose you can probably host your website on a free server like blogger, or Wordpress but I highly recommend that you register for a paid host. It will look more professional and you will have so much more flexability in the future. My favorite host is called PowWeb. For the first year, you will get your hosting for $3.88 per month. It has unlimited webspace and unlimited bandwidth and it will run Wordpress, Forums, or any other type content management that you’d want it to.
3. Create a simple website. My recommendation is that you set up a simple blog. Log in to your host, find the fantastico button and install Wordpress on your server. Once you have Wordpress installed, log in to your blog’s admin section and type a couple of quick posts about who you are and what you intend to write about or promote in the future. The site doesn’t have to be anything crazy. I have heard that a lot of the networks don’t even visit the site. They just want to see that you have one.
4. Get an e-mail address that is linked to your domain name. You can set this up through GoDaddy. If your site is thebestautoloan.com, you would want an e-mail address that is something like matt@thebestautoloan.com. Just set it up so it forwards to whatever e-mail address you use now. This just shows the networks how professional you are. Having a Gmail, or Hotmail type address looks really cheesy to them. They won’t take your business seriously.
5. Make sure that your phone number has a professional sounding voicemail if you aren’t going to answer it right away. I set up a Skype phone number so that I can have a special voicemail just for my internet marketing business. My voicemail says something like, “Hi, you’ve reached Matt from MBT Media, your call is very important to me. Please leave me a message and I will call you back as soon as I can. Thanks”. This is huge!! The CPA networks WILL call you. If you miss their call, they will get your voicemail and they will know that you are a professional.
6. Call them back! This is my final step. When they call your phone number, either answer it when they call or call them back as soon as you can. This is imperative. You will not get accepted in to CPA networks without speaking with an affiliate manager at the network. I can not stress this enough! When they ask you how you will be promoting offers; tell them the truth. I told them that I plan to promote offers on my blog, through banner ads, and linking throughout the content. I also told them that I intend to experiment with e-mail marketing and pay-per-click marketing. That way there are no surprises when they see me sending traffic via these methods.
That’s it. If you follow those steps, you should have absolutely no problem getting accepted in to a CPA network.
Here is a list of my favorite CPA Networks:
NeverBlue
Hydra
MaxBounty
Clickbooth
Good luck. It really is easier than you would imagine. If you have any more questions about my technique, ask them in the comments section below.
