All posts in Yahoo Search Marketing

Give Yahoo Search Marketing Another Look

by UberAffiliate on May 7, 2008 in Yahoo Search Marketing with 35 Comments

Sorry for the semi-lack-of-posts, I’ve been moving into my new house all week and it’s sooo busy. More on that at a later time. For now, onto making money.

Once again, when again guru preaches (and once again including me), it’s the sermon that “Google is king of volume” and “If you want any high volume campaigns, it has to be Google.” To be honest that’s pretty much what I thought and how I made my campaigns – until now. I never really paid that much attention to YSM after my Google campaigns really started taking off. I’d take my big Google campaigns and just copy and paste them into YSM, and not really look at it. Well after re-creating some old campaigns last week, my philosophies have changed a bit and I’m now going to look at my Yahoo campaigns a lot closer. Take a look at my campaign from one day, May 4th.
 
Yahoo search marketing
 
Pretty crazy? I never thought a Yahoo search campaign would rack in 1,700,000 impressions in one day. Once I work on CTR and double that, I can be looking at 40,000 clicks/day to just this one campaign – on Yahoo!

Lesson here, don’t overlook Yahoo at all. Their system may be horrible and make no sense at all, but there’s definitely volume there to work with.

Popularity: 5% [?]

What PPC Engine to Start With

by UberAffiliate on February 6, 2008 in Affiliate Tips, Google Adwords, MSN adCenter, PPC, Yahoo Search Marketing with 39 Comments

Most of the time I post about PPC, I’m mentioning Google Adwords. Mainly it’s because it’s what gives most people the hardest time – myself included. I’d say it has the most risk, but also the most reward, as Google is the king of traffic when it comes to PPC engines. But what engines should you start with? What about Yahoo and MSN? Here are two open facts :

  • Most of my PPC traffic comes from Google Adwords, and I make good money off it. I do have Yahoo and MSN accounts as well, but I’m getting the most traffic from Google.
  • I know people who are making $3,000-5,000 day using Yahoo and MSN, with minimal Google. That’s definitely possible as well.

Don’t be tranced into thinking Google is the only way to a lot of money. There is plenty of money to be made in Yahoo and MSN – and generally it’s cheaper. So where I may spend $2,000 in Google to make $3,000, my buddy in Yahoo may spend $1,000 and make $3,000. Where did I start affiliate marketing? Yahoo Search Marketing. So when then do I focus most of my efforts into Google? Mainly because I’m a pretty impatient (scratch that – very impatient) person and I want the most possible traffic in the shortest amount of time. So I usually just go pretty guns and glory in Google and most of the times end up losing a buck or two (or three thousand two days ago – lol).

If you’re starting or having a rough time with Google, take a step back and work in Yahoo a bit. They’re a bit more confusing at times because some things in their system are just whack, but it’s cheaper traffic, lower volume so you’ll spend less, and not as overwhelming or upsetting as Google (because looking and seeing 2/5 bars in Yahoo for quality score just isn’t as rough as seeing “Poor – Please Bid $10.00″). MSN has been hailed as cool by some people because you can get nickel clicks on random keywords…this was cool in the days of ‘ole but I don’t really do anything like that any more. Once you get your campaign optimized and running in Yahoo, just export it and import it straight into MSN and let it run. Track it and make sure it’s profiting, but it should if you keep everything the same.

What about the even smaller guys like Ask and LookSmart. I’ve had a little success with Ask in the past and the traffic is really cheap, but I wouldn’t recommend LookSmart. I got a bunch of terrible traffic and lost a couple thousand, thankfully they refunded it all for me as I set up terms beforehand to “test” the traffic. In either case, I wouldn’t start your campaign testing with Ask or LookSmart, I’d just use them as a possible supplement to your already strong campaign.

So let’s answer the title – which PPC engine should you start with? Ready for the uber surprising answer – it’s up to you. If you’re more conservative, get things going on in Yahoo and MSN. If you’re impatient like me and don’t care about losing a few bucks, try and hit Google hard. There is one fact that I will tell you is the 100% truth though :

There is money to be made in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. All of them.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Yahoo $100 Credit Coupon

by UberAffiliate on January 27, 2008 in Yahoo Search Marketing with 18 Comments

Hit it up.

Someone just left that link in a comment, 100 bones to throw around in Yahoo. Grab it before it expires.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Yahoo Search Marketing Partners with American Express

by UberAffiliate on January 15, 2008 in Yahoo Search Marketing with 14 Comments

Some pretty hot news coming off the press here, Yahoo! Search Marketing and American Express OPEN are teaming up for a nice little partnership together. You now can receive a 5% discount to all of your Yahoo PPC if you use an American Express card. Five percent is rather nice, let’s think about that for a second. You’re a decent affiliate that spends say $500 a day in a Yahoo campaign to make $1,000 (which is entirely possible). In one month you spend around $15,000 with Yahoo. Pop in your Amex for the payment and you’ll get $750 back. That’s a big chunk of your mortgage payment for a month, or your car/medical insurance. Or just spend/save that extra money – I don’t care what you do with it. EDIT: Someone just brought up that in the fine print they state you can only get up to $500 back each year per card account. If you have a few Amexs you can still save a couple thousand I guess, and even if you don’t spend much it’s 5% back to you.

I wish I had a LinkShare account with an approved Amex program so I could pop in my affiliate URL, but it probably won’t be approved for a couple days. So I’ll just take a hit for the team in getting this news out quicker – American Express is key. How many times have I said that now?

Click here to get $25 credit from Yahoo Search Marketing.

Can we expect more than just this initial goodie?

“Yahoo! is pleased to work with OPEN from American Express to offer
savings on our award-winning Web site hosting, e-commerce and search marketing
solutions, which enable small businesses to quickly get online, sell online,
and market online,” said Todd Daum, vice president of Marketing for Yahoo!’s
Online Channel Division. “Yahoo! is also committed to expanding our
partnership with American Express as we explore opportunities to help connect
our respective companies with customers online.” [source]

It’ll sure be interesting to see what else they can come up with for us, but for now let’s enjoy some simple cash back.

Also remember that the contest is still going on. I’ve gotten some alright traffic so far but if you haven’t entered yet, it’s surely not too late. One solid link and you could be #1…trust me. Good luck!

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Secret to Beating Yahoo’s Quality Score

by UberAffiliate on December 8, 2007 in PPC, Quality Score, Yahoo Search Marketing with 21 Comments

So anyone who’s anyone knows that Yahoo’s quality score sucks, and nobody can understand it. Hell, they can’t even understand it themselves. A while back I ranted about it and talked about a phone conversation with Yahoo where the rep told me not even he knew how their quality score was done. Since I’m a nice guy, I’m going to post my secret that’s been getting me “around” it for quite some time now. Before anybody thinks this is the key to making millions, read the following points :

  • It’s not really some super-secret hack, just utilizing something most Yahoo users have access to.
  • It deals with the campaigns that either are random non-related keywords (like for ringtones), or campaigns where even though your quality score should be great, Yahoo slaps a nice “you suck” on it with 1 or 2 bars.
  • You need a Gold account for this.

Okay already, now what is it?

Like I said I’ve been doing this for quite some time, as I got into Yahoo Search Marketing long before I attempted Adwords. What I noticed was, whenever I started a new campaign, I got a ridiculous amount of traffic for the first couple days, and then every day after that I got emails from Yahoo saying (this is a cut and paste out of one I got today) :

Dear Advertiser

Ads and/or keywords you submitted for account ‘My Account’ [xxxxxxxxxx] were reviewed to ensure that they comply with the Editorial Guidelines.

Keyword results:
Pending: 8
Declined: 0
Removed: 10

Note that this was my ringtone campaign where the keywords weren’t related to ringtones. Every day Yahoo took away 10-20 keywords, and these were keywords that were converting. My ads all had 1-2 bars in quality score, but I was still getting decent position because of the no competition. But over time, my accounts started to die because 1/2 the keywords had been removed by Yahoo. After even more time, Yahoo introduced it’s “Low Quality Ads” thing, where if you have too many, Yahoo turns off the entire campaign. And in an account where there’s 100+ “low quality ads”…yeah it got shut down.

So I got thinking, “Hmm…you get a really nice traffic burst when you first create the campaign, then it dies after a couple days.” This is because Yahoo throws your ad up nice and high to test out how it’s going to do. Then they calculate your quality score and if it’s low (which happens most of the time because their QS is whacked), your position drops and they start removing keywords. This is where your Gold account comes into play.

With a Gold account, you’re given the feature of importing .csv files. On a quick note about getting a gold account, you have to spend $500 in 3 months, or $1,500 in 1 month to get one. You can call and whine about it but they’re usually pretty stingy. So do what you can to get a Gold account. Now for the secret. What I did was download my campaign and open it up in Excel. I turned all the keywords back to “On” (as the status for a lot change to ‘Deleted’), changed the campaign start date to today, and then messed around with any bids that I wanted to using a simple find+replace. Then I deleted my campaign from Yahoo and reuploaded it. Voila, I was seeing that nice traffic burst again. Two days later comes and it dies. Delete that campaign, change the start date in your import file, and reupload. So it’s not really beating their quality score, more of getting around it since you’re going to be deleting your campaign before it even has time to calculate it.

I’m sure it’s easy to automate just changing the date and reuploading, but it takes literally 30 seconds to do. So for an extra few hundred bucks a day, it was well worth it. Feel free to quote me on this :

“Affiliate Marketing Problems : if you can’t beat them, get around them.”

Hope you can make some good use of this if your campaigns keep getting slapped. I was able to get more traffic for a cheaper cost, so it really helped some of my stuff. Look what you guys have done to me, making me start to give away secrets…

Popularity: 6% [?]

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