Ask Me Anything
Ask me questions about anything: affiliate marketing, blogging, making money online, my life…anything.
Q&A posts are the easiest for a blogger to write (because your topics are predetermined), and sometimes the best for readers (because real common questions get answered. I’ll start by answering a bunch with text, and then if there’s too many questions to type, I’ll do some with video also.
Fire away!
#1: How do you scale your offers?
#2: Where do you think you will be in 2 yearS?
#3: Where do you think will the affiliate business be in 2 years?
1. How tall are you?
2. Why don’t you write a step by step guide of the process that you follow from the research stage until making a campaign profitable, along with the tools (i.e: software) that you use and how you use them? No need to share confidential details……..just enough to help newbies start earning decent income so they can reinvest it back. Pretend we are your dentist dad, and write the steps as if you were to explain affiliate marketing to your dad until he gets it profitable. (by the way has he sold his dental practice yet?)
I think a system is necessary :).
-Whats your cut off on a Campaign like clicks to leads ratio before its gone?
-What do you do with your profits?
You had a guest post on shoemoney when facebook ads first came out. Are you still using them and have you had any luck with them?
How do you choose your niches/products and how many campaigns would you recommend running at once? thanks, keep up the good content!
Carl
How many ad copies and landing pages do you split test with when creating a new campaign?
I watched this video on a strategy for breaking into tough ppc markets using a strategy of high bids low budget and keep on making new campaigns unitl you can consistently do over 2.5% ctr. I tried this strategy on a market I would like to break into and got hammerd – I was paying $10 a click for position 6 when I know the top 3 places would only be able to afford $1.5 per click max. I lost about $400 testing this offer.
You can watch the video at http://masscontrolsite.com/blog/?p=29 and there is also a free report that summarises the video whcih you can download from http://www.creativedigitalmedia.com/dominate/
Is this a strategy you employ?
Which market in the PPC arena do you consider (1 “hot” at the moment, (2 a long-term sustainable business model, and (3 the easiest and safest to promote
1. What is the first thing you do in the morning?
2. Do you like Pizza or Hamburgers?
3. How tall are you?
4. How long do you take to brush your teeth?
5. Do you prefer paper or plastic?
He. He. Just kidding… Love your blog! Keep up the great work!
What percentage of these questions have you been asked a million times before?
Which affiliate network do you currently think is the best?
I am only experienced in SEO marketing and know how long it could take trying to get top ten listings in google for a competitive keyword. But trying to learn more about PPC.
Would you rather work on a long process of SEO affiliate markerting trying to get top ten rankings in the search engine for your profitable keywords? or would you stick to PPC because of the “quick” money that you could make?
I would really like to see a “best practices” (according to you) on building a landing page.
tis would be awesome. :)
Thanks,
Jordan
How did you turn from a failing-to ordenery affilate to a super affilate?
what would you say was the action that sets super affiliates from the rest?
1) What percentage of you traffic comes from the content network vs the search network?
2) What is your average CPC?
3) Have you looked into banner ads etc
4) In your landing pages do you normally promote 1 product or do you do the comparison style ones more?
5) Any thoughts on PPV?
Cheers
1) What proportion do you use with content or search networks on your campaigns?
2) What is your average CPC on your big campaigns?
3) Do you do any media buys/banner ads?
What software do most affiliate marketers use to create their landing pages from your experience? What software do you use to create your landing pages?
How did you do your tuning process in YSM more efficient?
I have hundreds of adgroups on each of my campaign, most of it have more than 500 adgroups.
Their interface is very slow for us to do tuning through their website interface.
In Google Adwords, we can use adwords editor to do the tuning process and it’s really fast.
What made you go into affiliate marketing?
You sold your directory site for $8,000, and you thought, let’s go into affiliate marketing? Where did you first read that it was profitable?
And did you just thought: Let’s try Rintones, and like, hey I’m earning $xx,xxx?
How many keywords do you have for your big campaigns? 100? – 10,000?
When you first started, how did you go about settling on ringtones as an item that you could sell? Where did you literally begin in terms of finding an item to sell?
Do you design your own websites?
I’m curious about avg conversion rates for offers using Google Adwords Search Marketing.
I did belong to a highly expensive undercover profits coaching program and they told be that…
Physical products averaged usually around a 4-5% conversion rate through there own experiences.
CPA offers (with No credit card required) usually 10 – 15% conversion.
Clickbank products usually 1% – .05% conversion.
What has been your experience with conversion rates (using Adwords) with ANY of the ones listed above?
What are your thoughts on the learning curve to using Googles placement targeting to drive traffic to CPA offers? (ex… Easier than search? More profitable than search? More difficult to track conversions?)
Thanks,
Jason
Have you done much site targeting in google? What were/are the results?
Thanks.
How long does it take you on average to find a successful campaign? And if it’s not successful right away, do you try other angles? Or do you move on right away?
Do you prefer direct linking or making your own landing pages?
You say, you are only running a few campaigns that you try to dominate. How do you go about dominating them? And what is the factor that helps you the most to dominate a nice?
In todays competitive landscape, what is the most important factor to be a successful search affiliate? I already learned that tracking is very important and took care of that, and obviously copy writing is very helpful, but still I’m curious. Besides those skills, what skill do you value the most?
You mentioned a mega slap on your accounts with the latest Quality Score update. What did you do to fix it ?
You mentioned the importance of finding a business partner to grow your affiliate revenue. I chat up established affiliates all the time but they never give me the time of day, because I have nothing to offer them that they dont already have. I even met a few in person at ad-tech NY, but still no luck in any partnerships.
So how does a new affiliate go about finding a business partner?
^^ Nice
Hello Paul, just wanted to say thanks for your site and openness in sharing.
I know there are many variables involved but out of your experience what seems to be the most important strategy or step to bring an unprofitable campaign to profitability? and if you don’t mind going into a little detail.
Thanks,
Andrew
When testing a new offer…
-> do you use direct linking or put together a simple 1 landing page website? you use Yahoo for that initial testing?
Your most profitable campaigns…
-> tend to be comparative landing pages or specific offers?
-> Are mostly available through affiliate networks or personal connections?
To maintain good Quality Score in having info in your websites…
-> Do you have someone else always write you the articles? If so how many on average and is it using a blog?
what host would you recommend to host landing pages? Where do you get your images from? Do you scrape them from flickr or buy royalty free pics?
Great blog.
1. Which method of advertising through PPC do you find more profitable – Adwords or YSM?
2. Do you like to promote high volume/low commission items, or do you look for high commission items that may not have as much volume (but with the goal to move a lot of volume)?
Can you show us at least one of your profitable landing pages?
Or, if not, can you explain how you take a campaign to the next level/scale it out?
I can’t find the post now, but I read either on diorex or CDF blogs that for campaign testing purposes you could :
(1) put the url of a relevant content site in your adwords ads and have adwords give you a good quality score on that.
(2) Then immediately after that you go in and change the urls in the ads to the actual landing page that you want (that you know wouldn’t quality score well) so you could start off with reasonable click costs.
Is this true? can this be done ? I think google would catch on too soon before you got enough clicks to establish profitability.
what are the best ways to monetize my site?
I’m trying aff links but so far the income is ZERO from them. any suggestions or resources?
thanks
Hi, Your are my idol lol :)
I am doing PPC since a few months but I find it difficult to scale. Most of my campaigns make me some profit but I have no idea how to expand them. My eCPC is pretty low so I cant afford to bid higher.
How do you tweak for higher eCPC ?
Have you tried http://www.ppc-coach.com/ ?
What do you think about it ? Would you recommend it to PPC newbies?
Thanks!
1. Do you run your business as a company or individual?
2. What percentage of your profit do keep and what percentage do you reinvest?
3. What’s your ultimate income goal? How much money do you want to be making?
4. When you started out, where the banks confused as to why your credit card bill was so high and how did you manage to get such a large limit as you don’t have a long history?
5. If you were limited to 3 affiliate networks, which ones would you choose to use?
6. What would you advise someone if they wanted to scale their revenue from $20K a month to $200K?
What would you do differently to get where you are today faster? What things you would avoid doing and so on.
how do you go about tracking each campaign profit / losses? do you have some kind of automated system, or update it all by hand?
atm im doing it all manually. takes forever every day or so to check everything is still making profits.
Paul, what’s the best way to approach a super affiliate like yourself if I wanted you to promote a product or service and have you say yes? What sort of things do you look for that will help seal the deal?
How much do you make total a month after expenses? What is you average profit margin percentage per campaign? Thanks!
How much do you make total a month after expenses? What is you average profit margin percentage per campaign?
Hi Paul,
Do you use any sort of website builder to crank out your landing pages/hybrid sites? Or do you have your programmer do everything?
What do you think of using WordPress blogs as landing pages?
Do you test campaings initially on Content and then move to Search?
thanks,
I have been told to only focus on aff programs with at least $15 / transaction comp. Do you have criteria on min comp, or is anything open? Hi vol, low comp, low vol, hi comp? does it matter to you?
What kind of offers do you recommend for newbies?
What do you think are the big changes coming in Affiliate Marketing this year?
Name the #1 you do that enables you to run a successful affiliate operation, vs someone who fails at affiliate marketing?
Why does nickycakes hate you? Even tho he comes to your blog everyday?