Lessons Learned By Scott Richter teach my boy’s Granddad how to do PPC on PerfSpot.com, and soon he was doing $1k a day. You can learn to do successful PPC from scratch too! Here are some tips to get you started: • Focus on international traffic. US traffic is too expensive. If you have a friend that can speak another language, ask them to translate your ads and landing pages. • The two schools of thought are brute force and prototyping. Brute force is about massive keyword lists and automated programs that cull out the garbage. Prototyping is hand-building campaigns to find trends and clever ad copy. You can get the best of both worlds by prototyping first and then getting an engineer friend to scale for you based on rules. • Rent A Coder and oDesk are best for submitting your engineering. The services are cheap and reliable. • Run content network and weed out the bad sites. Try demo targeting. You’ll be surprised how differently combos for age, gender, geography, and time of day affect conversion. • Rotate between direct linking and your landing page to see which converts better.
Scott Richter
Many affiliates boast inflated earnings, and then spread misinformation, perhaps intentionally, to mislead everyone else. Their “secrets” no longer work and are therefore safe to release. And then there are folks who hawk their ultra expensive Pay Per Click (PPC) training courses and software. Not saying these aren’t useful. Just saying it’s hard to get a real education on PPC. What forums should you read, what software, whose blog, and so forth? A few years ago, I decided to give the PPC game a try. What did I know as a “high volume email deployer,” guy running an affiliate network (affiliate.com), and new to PPC? Well, I started running dating and ringtones ads and within a few days was killing it. Markus Frind, CEO of PlentyofFish.com, was doing the same and was teaching his father, girlfriend, and other people who had no clue about Internet marketing about PPC. And they were making a few hundred bucks a day. I decided to
14 | OCTOBER 2009 | FEEDFRONT MAGAZINE
• Work closely with your reps from the advertiser, affiliate network, and publishers. Your relationships will give you the head start on what’s hot, plus give you sustainable profits. • Every ad group should have just two or three ads, not just one and not ten. This allows you to choose winners quickly. • When you start a new account, you want to build great account history, or else your ads will go under review if there are too many disapprovals. • MSN converts better than Google, but it has lower volume. • Always run the same offer via two networks: your primary (that makes the most money for you) and a backup (just to keep your primary honest with payouts and scrubbing). • Learn Google AdWords Editor and Google Analytics. They’re free and most affiliates don’t understand that you can tie these together to create awesome reporting.
Scott Richter has had huge success in affiliate marketing and shares his experience in building and optimizing successful campaigns at scott-richter.com.