29 May, 2020 - 03:51 PM
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Traditional PPC PPC, to me it's the holy grail of advertising. I'm gonna make a lot of people salty with this statement, and many will try to prove me wrong.. but, "I've never met someone that was a multi-millionaire solely from just doing SEO". Let that sink in for a minute and you will see why I think PPC and paid advertising in general is the best skill you can ever learn. You might find a couple outliers to my statement, but when you compare how many millionaires in our industry were born out of just solely PPC compared to just solely SEO.. well, you'll see where I am coming from. What is PPC? Well, it stands for "Pay Per Click" and it's exactly as it sounds, you are paying for visitors to click your ad to come to your site. If you need instant traffic to your site, this is the way to get it. The Players The major players in PPC are pretty much Google, Bing/Yahoo ( soon to be split ), and Facebook. Many people do not tie Facebook into traditional PPC, but it's such a large platform that it deserves to be part of the Big 3 that use to be just Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The only reason Facebook has been traditionally outside of the Big 3 is that Google, Bing, and Yahoo are all "search marketing" platforms, meaning that you have to type in a keyword and then get served ads based on the keyword you typed in to search. This means that the advertiser ( you and mean ) bid on keywords within Google/Bing/Yahoo we think are relevant to our product or service to get customers to see our ads. With Facebook, there are no keywords you type in to get ads. The ads are just there! This is because with Facebook you are pretty much bidding on demographics and doing "interruption marketing". Meaning, you are having to interrupt what the visitor is doing with your ad to get them to notice you. Instead of bidding on the keyword "RN to BSN degrees" ( As you would for Google ), you would be bidding on females who are 25-40 that live in the Chicago area with interests in Nursing and job titles of RN and showing them your RN to BSN degree ads. There are a lot of 3rd tier or Premium PPC players that are alternatives to Google, Bing, and Facebook. I am going off memory here, so forgive me if any of these companies have changed or gone out of business...
There are actually a lot more than the list above, but these are ones I have used to some extent myself and tend to be the higher-end or larger players. However, if I were to give you some advice.. it would be to stick with Google, Bing/Yahoo, and Facebook. Work with the 80/20 principle here, especially if you are new. Just running on Google Adwords, Bing/Yahoo, and Facebook alone will pretty much help you reach almost ANY demographic ANYWHERE on the Internet. The ease of use and the fact you know those companies will be here tomorrow should pretty much sway you to just use the Big 3 full time. I mean seriously, who ISN'T using Google or Facebook? Breaking into international markets tends to lend itself to a few different platforms ( Asian, Russian, and a few others ), but the large play for most of us will still be with Google, Bing, and Facebook. So what's it take to get started ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ? Almost nothing. You do need to have a credit card handy and a website. You can find vouchers that will give you free money up front like $50 with Bing and $100 for Adwords, but you still need a valid credit card to sign up and get an account. You will also need a website in order to make your ad. Ok, I'm in. Now what ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ? So essentially there are a few parts to getting started. I am going to assume you have money on a debit/credit card and a website. I am also going to give you a very high level of the steps involved because covering every option is way beyond the scope of this post. For Google and Bing/Yahoo, you are going to create a campaign and Adgroup where you setup where you want to target and who you want to target. Let's assume you're a plumber in Chicago and you want to advertise your business in the local area. You don't want to advertise nationally, so you narrow down the geographic reach to just the Chicago area, maybe you even narrow down to a section of Chicago since you really can't service the West Side as it's too far for you. Once you have that selected, you are going to move on to things like the time of day your ads run. Advanced Pro Tip: A lot of people just select the geographic area they want to target, like the zip codes of South Side Chicago. However, try the reverse. Select all of Chicagp first and then exclude the zip codes and areas you DON'T want. You might think in your head that this is the same thing and reinventing the wheel, but trust me.. it's not and you may end up with more traffic in the same qualified area. Maybe you don't work Tuesdays and you really can't take calls after midnight. If that's the case, you don't really want your ads running those times do you? Of course not, so you make your selections to only show your ads during the times you can work and take leads. You are also going to decide on your daily budget and also how much you want to pay per person that clicks your ad. This is an important step because if you put in too low of a budget or too low of a per click price, you are more than likely going to miss a lot of potential customers. You also need to account into your budgets for "tire kicker" type customers, competitors clicking your ads, and the fact that not every person that clicks will turn into a lead. What should my budget and bid be ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) ? If I were to give you some generalized advice here, it would be that you want to bid high enough that your ad will be #1 in the SERPs and that you will be able to have enough budget to have that ad run all day long during the times you selected. This is because in order to be successful, you have to have a mindset of "buying data", not immediately converting ad spend into revenue. If you are not bidding high enough per click ( as in the #1 position ) you might realize that many people are clicking, but not calling you or filling out the form. You very well might realize that no one is clicking. If you didn't bid high enough, you don't really know if the problem is you, Google, or the fact your ad is at position #7 and no one can see it. Maybe the customers are finding who they want to do business with ( your competitors ) at positions #1-6 already and then "just checking you out" at position #7, but in reality they have already made up their mind mentally who they want to spend money with. If your budget is too low though, you might have the same problems and not realize that maybe people who call plumbers tend to call at night when there is an emergency at home. All day at work they might not know there is an issue and since your budget is so low and it ran out at 1pm, your potential customers don't see your ad when they need you at 7pm. There are a whole host of other issues and reasons too broad for this post, but please bid into position #1 and have enough budget to run all day long non-stop when starting out. Anything less than that, well you just won't have the right data to make statistically relevant decisions on. Don't worry though, you won't be bidding into #1 for very long. You are doing this to buy data and to jump start your CTR, which is a major factor in lowering your per bid costs. Once you have enough data, you are going to be making changes in your budget and bidding position. On to keywords and ads... ( Google and Bing/Yahoo ) Next step is making ads. I start with no less than 3 ads and I make all my ads completely different. This is because I am looking for 1 base ad out of 3 different ones to choose as a winner and then make small improvement on that one winner later. For my ads, I like to look at what my competitors are doing and then make my ad stand out. So if I were to look at some Chicago plumber ads for the term "Chicago Plumber" on Google, I might see how everyone talking about how great their service is, but none of them focus on speed of service or price. Now knowing this, I am going to make one of my ads all about how I can get to your door within 20 minutes or less and I charge only $99 a visit. Ad 1, done! If any of you know of the "Jimmy Johns" franchise, you know how well speed plays a part in their advertising. My second ad, I am going to step into my ideal customers head and write an ad just for them. My ideal customer might be Bob. Bob owns a house and is married and just found out he has a water heater leak. His wife can't wash dishes or do their laundry and none of the kids can take a bath. Bob is 37 and in middle management and is too busy ( and scared ) to fool with the problem himself. Knowing this, I might write my ad talking how I can fix their leak without the wife getting upset the first time, and do it correctly with proper post-service cleanup. Ad #2 is now done. My 3rd ad, I like to do something crazy and wild. Since we are dealing with a local Chicago Plumber, I might make an ad that throws in the word Chicago in the display URL or even a CTA in the display URL. I might also stretch it out a bit and put in the headline that I am the "#1 Plumber In The Loop" ( if you are from Chicago, you know this term ). I might also tell you in the description lines that if you call in the next 2 min, I'll give you $30 off. Thing is, I can say a lot of things in my ad, but the call in the next 2 minutes and get $30 off is a hard CTA with an urgency. Truth is, the plumber prob gives everyone $30 off because he jacked his rate up $30 to cover it. Advanced Pro Tip: Don't be lazy or scared with ads. Some of the best ads I ever wrote, I would put in the day of the week in the ad. No I didn't have to change them daily either, but you could put in that "the sale ends Tuesday" and just run that all the time. Depending on the day of the week, Tuesday is either 2 days away or 7 days. Even at 7 days, thats enough urgency to get people to act. Get creative here. For keywords, what would someone that needs a plumber in Chicago type into Google or Bing? How about words like:
OR, you could grab a subscription to tools like SERPWoo.com and SpyFu and find out easily what your plumber competitors are already bidding on and steal all their hard work for yourself. Once you are done, you are pretty much ready to start advertising. Granted, this was a very high overview of Google and Bing PPC and was intended to get people familiar with it. On to some advanced stuff.... I gotta keep this a high overview too. There is just sooo much I could talk about, but we don't have the space for it here and I can't give away too much of my own secret sauce ( yeah, I know some of my own competitors are here on BuSo.. ) I thought I would tell you where I see a lot of noob and even intermediate level PPC guys mess up. Maybe I can also point out where agencies rip you off and what you need to be doing to ensure success. A lot of people might try to argue against this point, but if you are not in your Adwords/Bing account daily making changes, you just are not doing it right.
The main thing is, you need to be in the account daily and you need to be making daily optimizations. That includes your ads, budgets, keyword bids, keywords, demographic options, your landing page, and much more. A few more tips:
Whew, so what about Facebook? Glad you asked. The process for Facebook isn't much different. The largest difference is that people on Facebook are not searching for your "it". They wanna see what their favorite celebrity had for dinner last night or what drama their ex is getting into tonight. With that information, there are no keywords you are going to be bidding on. You are also going to put a lot more effort into your ad, especially the image, to "interrupt" what the user is currently doing to get their eyeballs on your message. Facebook is more centered about demographics. You are going to be setting up campaigns based on geography, interests, education level, gender, age, and a whole slew of other options. The most important thing to remember is that unlike Google and Bing/Yahoo, people are not looking for you or your product. Your ad image needs to grab attention and your ad text needs to bring home the bacon to get them to click. With that said, Facebook can be some of the most profitable traffic that you can run in the right niches. Even 6 years ago, people were making 7 and 8 figures Net profit off Facebook traffic alone. They still do today... On to some advanced Facebook stuff....
Man, I love me some retargeting. You will find out why if you pay attention to the posts AFTER this one. Retargeting is probably the most underused tool in PPC today. Sure, tons of people use it, but they use it in a very very cookie cutter way. I'll explain this cookie cutter method in this post, but you will see just how "out of the box" you can get in the posts afterward. So what is Retargeting/Remarketing? Basically, it's an ad network tagging you as part of a predefined group and then me purchasing that group for whatever reason I want. That's a 50,000-foot view of it. More specifically, I can drop a cookie on you once you visit a site I own and then the ad networks I work with can later find that cookie when you browse sites they are partners with and show you another one of my ads. If you have ever been to Amazon.com and looked for a kitchen blender and not purchased, but then surfed the web an hour later, landed on CNN.com, and oddly seen an ad from Amazon about the SAME kitchen blender.. well, that's remarketing. BTW, remarketing and retargeting are the same thing in case you got confused with my wording. Knowing this, your creative juices should already be flowing enough to see this is a great way to win back customers that didn't purchase from you and help you reach out to them with another ad about what they were interested in. You already know this person looked at and possibly wanted something from you, but maybe today wasn't the right time to pull the trigger for them. With remarketing, you can hit em up again with the SAME AD later today, tomorrow, or even next week ( on payday ) and get them back into your site before they forget about you. That's pretty much the cookie-cutter approach to remarketing. This is what 99% of digital marketing agencies and in-house marketing specialist do for their clients and for themselves. Trust me on this, I've been an employee for several agencies, been in-house for multiple companies, and even consulted some pretty big brands and I have seen all the noob level stuff they have done and try to pass off as "cutting edge" when it comes to remarketing. Pretty F*cking boring and ( at best ) mediocre. Who offers remarketing services? These days, pretty much everyone. Some of the most well-known are: Adroll Perfect Audience It wasn't always this way. Remarketing was a huge feature once available only within media buys on certain exchanges. This is how I learned about it and learned how to use it before it was widely adopted. Are there any cons? Not so much con's against remarketing, but mostly against people not knowing what they are doing and not thinking things out with remarketing. For example. I constantly get ads for a certain course I purchased months ago online.
I'm not a baker, I don't want cookie-cutter remarketing! So what are some awesome ways to use remarketing? I'll list some ideas out below:
I can hear many of you telling me that remarketing isn't free, so why would you spend more money for several of the things above? It's because you can and no one else is doing it. You should be running a proper business that makes enough coin that you can do what no one else is doing so that your customers remember your brand over others. If I bought something from you and then an hour later I see an ad on Facebook from you thanking me, I'm gonna be pretty blown away and wow'd. I'll probably end up a loyal customer to your brand because you went the extra mile. The extra $1 you spent on me will probably Net you a lot more coin than that over my lifetime with you. Pay-Per-View Often times PPV is overlooked for the dazzle and the glam that is PPC within the Big 3 ( Adwords, Facebook, Bing/Yahoo ). Sooo, what actually is Pay-Per-View? No, it's not that channel you rent secretly on TV while staying in a hotel during Affiliate Summit. Typically, PPV is pop up traffic where someone lands on a URL and then gets a pop-up ad within a few seconds. I know, I know.. you are probably thinking those annoying pop ups like when you get Rick Rolled or you hit a spammy biz-op page. This is sorta like that, but the pop up doesn't come from the URL you visited, it comes from software you agreed to ahead of time to serve you advertisements. So think about a free anti-virus download app or ebook that you install on your computer and half way through the install they ask you to install a new browser or app to keep the download free. Once you agree to this, the software silently watches over your browser and records what URL you are visiting and serves up a pop-up ad when it has a good advertiser match for that URL. Now, why on earth would you want to purchase traffic like this? I'll give you an example of a past campaign I ran and let's see if you can figure it out in your head. Long ago, I had a hot offer in the colon rebill niche. I knew a few other hot colon offers on the market, so I went to my competitors and pretended to be a potential customer and signed up for bottles of their products. I got to the very last page before I needed to input my credit card and I recorded the URL of JUST that page. Lets say that the URLs were similar to trybromalite.net/purchase.php?affid=4006 I then went to several PPV networks and bid .005 cents on those URLs I recorded. Yes, that's half a cent ( in USD ). See, I knew that millions of people had this "Adware" software on their computers and I also knew at some point they would stumble onto one of my competitors offers because my competitors were buying ads all over Facebook, Adwords, on LARGE media buys, on Plenty of Fish, etc. I figured I would let my competitors do the heavy work of advertising and convincing the customer of buying a colon product and that I could simply bid on their credit card sign up URL when those customers whipped out their credit cards. All I needed to do was pop up my ad at the last second convincing them purchase my colon product instead for less. Sometimes my ad would have audio playing that would scream out "Stop, hold on a second for a special 1-time offer!". Then my page would pop up and just happen to look exactly like my competitors page with my credit card form and "reduced price special". Paying .005 for that exact moment in time was like shooting fish in a barrel. I was probably the only person doing this back in the day. I even went as far to ask my TrafficVance rep ( the VP of the company ) if anyone else was targeting sign up or thank you pages and she said she didn't know of anyone else doing it. The fact that I was paying the cheapest price possible and no one ever bid with me or above me on those URLs also confirmed no one else was doing this at that time as me. Why do people install this adware? They typically get something in exchange for free like software. Generally, its some kid in the household wanting an app or game and they install the Adware on the computer. Later on, little Jimmy's mom and dad use the computer and get the pop ups. It's just bidding on URLs? Nah, that's just one of the options. You can actually bid on keywords so when a user lands on page and that page contains the keyword, your ad can pop up if they hover over that keyword. You can bid on full URLs, parts of URLs, or even just letters. I had campaigns where I would bid on bits and pieces of URL sections like:
Think of footprints in common CMS's or e-commerce systems.... OK, so what are the cons? If you get on a popular ( high volume ) URL or keyword, you can blow $5,000 in a few minutes. Don't try targeting amazon.com, cnn.com or a string that might match those like zon.com or www. Competition is also very very fierce. Being first or second in the bidding pool is critical for a lot of advertisers. A fraction of a penny is all it takes to grab the #1 spot when it's time to get your ad popped and people fight over this so much that it has lead to specific bidding tools being made just to go into your accounts, monitor the high bid, and adjust it by .005 higher if you are not the highest bidder already. This drives bids up like mad and unless you have one of these tools and can f5 every few seconds, you are out of luck. If you do have one of these tools, you might find yourself paying well over $1 a pop-up. Spy tools have also came along and jacked up your spend. Yes, they are very very hard to make ( unless you have the right info ) but I actually developed one of the first spy tools on the market for PPV and kept it to myself for years. Every time there was a pop up on my tool, someone just got charged money for me to spy on what they were doing. Renting Renting might be a bad name for this, but these strategies don't really fit under the other sections... Have you ever thought about just making private deals with people instead of going to an established network? Renting email lists Many site owners collect emails and would be more than happy to strike a deal with you to send your message to their list. I've done deals where I have offered % of sales, paid for email signups, paid per open, and even paid flat rates with simply approaching someone in the same or similar industry and striking a deal with them to send out an email for me to their list. Not only can you pay them to briefly mention you in their normal emails, but you can also pay for them to send out an email entirely about you... or sponsor a series of emails. Maybe you even work out a deal where you promote their product and they promote you. In the end, I love this method because I bypass ranking, approvals, and other BS and get straight to getting good emails and people seeing my message. Need to know where to find people that will strike email deals with you? Probably the best place is to reach out to those in similar industries as you that serve the same demo as you. Another great resources is actually your favorite CPA network. Yeah, you probably don't know this, but every CPA network worth their salt has an internal mailing department/operation. Reach out to your network and strike a deal with them to send out your email message to their list. Renting Forums Many times you can hit the forums your traffic frequents and purchase temporary sticky threads. These look a lot like normal threads, but they are all about you and your offer and are "pinned" to the top of the forum so everyone see's them. They never move down until you stop paying and are a great way to get eyeballs on your message. Another idea is to find top posters on those forums and offer to purchase their signature space. Many times you can rent out the signature area for cheap and get many eyeballs seeing your banner over and over again because you banner will be seen on all their new posts AND their old posts. Lastly, you can even decide to purchase a new "theme" or skin for the forum. Typically this is done by hiring a designer who is experienced in creating forum skins. The designer will create a new color scheme for the forum ( that goes with your product or company color scheme ) and also rebrand the forum with your advertising. You give the new skin to the forum owner and agree to pay them to use the skin for 30-120 days. Renting Demos So this is a method I haven't seen anyone talking about and yes, I will claim I am the first person to try this and talk about it publically. I came up with this idea back in 2007, so if someone did this before me, well... I don't know you. I wanted a way to reach a certain demo without paying for ads via Adwords. I figured I could just Google the term I wanted traffic from, reach out to site owners that ranked well, and pay them for placing my ads directly on their sites. The thought was, why pay Adwords to show my ads on the display network when I didn't even know if these sites had legit traffic? What if I just typed in the keywords I wanted traffic for and looked at who ranked top 10 and contact each of those sites and see if I could work out a CPM or CPM deal with them directly. By doing this, I knew I was paying for traffic on sites I knew were ranking for the terms I wanted traffic from and the traffic would be legit search engine traffic, the best kind of traffic of all. BUT, THATS NOT MY METHOD. Yeah, it's not. That's where a lot of you thought I was going. But why in the hell should I waste time making ads? What if I found an awesome site to partner with, but they don't want to clutter up their page with ads? What if who I am dealing with is a direct competitor and there is no way in hell they are going to put up my ad. Well, here is where I pretty much dominated my competition and stole a lot of their organic search engine customers while never once ranking my site in Google against them. I approached the sites and offered to pay them based on CPM to place my PIXEL on their site. Yeah, a pixel. No ads cluttering up their site, no competitor telling me no, and no split testing to find a CTA. I simply told them I would pay them $2 per 1,000 impressions that my pixel triggered from their site. My pixel was just a piece of Javascript that sat on their page just like any ol Google Analytics pixel would. Uh? This wasn't just any pixel, it was a remarketing pixel. I was building up a highly targetted audience of the best visitors ever for less than $2 per 1,000 unique impressions. What would you pay for someone that just typed in "buy weight loss pills" from Google and now you have them in a remarketing list that you can hit over and over and over again for life? The great thing is, I could do this over and over with new sites every time an algo update or manual penalty hit a SERP. I didn't give any thought to buying blackhat links, who were my competitors, doing SEO audits, or trying to hit top 3 on the first page. I let other people do the work and cry out the tears and sweat. I came in on their coat-tails and enjoyed the ride with them like a parasitic leech. The best advertisers were my competitors that I got lots of juicy traffic from. They only knew me as "John Greene" that wanted to make a CPM deal with them which did not clutter up their site with ads. They probably thought I was some dumb noob that they were gonna make a few hundred dollars off of... if they only knew! Every time one of my "advertisers" got hit with a penalty, I just found the new guys ranking on page one and made the same deal over and over. Of course, not everyone did the deal and some of them were very big brands that weren't going to do a deal like this anyways. Point is, you gotta get out there and try and see who plays ball with you. Affiliate Program Owner So you want to be with the big boys now and offer your product out to affiliates? Congrats on leveling up in life Mario. While many people do not consider having their own affiliate program a part of PPC or Paid Advertising, it actually is. All that is happening is you are getting clicks ( from affiliates ) and then paying out for an event ( like CPA, CPS, revshare, etc ). It's really no different than if you ran ads on Google or Facebook, except you probably won't pay on a CPM or CPC basis. A lot of people skip having an affiliate program. They think it's too hard and involves a lot of work. However, there are 3rd parties who can make the transition easy for you... as long as you pay them. Who can help me set up an affiliate program? Several companies I know off the bat are:
Going at it alone. I've personally done it by myself and also went through 3rd parties. The awesome thing about setting up your own is that anything you dream up, can be done! Typically, you are going to have to set up tracking for each of your affiliates and figure out a login system and other essentials if you do not use a pre-scripted plugin like Post Affiliate Pro. However, this is where I drop a bomb on you. One that pretty much spearheaded a company I worked for into the stratosphere and took them from doing $6MM in yearly revenues to over $30MM. I'm never happy with a situation or deal unless I get tremendous upside from it. In planning out the affiliate program for a company I was employed with, I decided to go it alone and build one that suited us perfectly. This was the mid-2000's and there really wasn't any plugins and 3rd party help except a few newcomers. I decided that since I was building my own affiliate system, I could change all the rules and bend them to my will. Instead of giving each affiliate a URL with a variable that would just 301 or 302 redirect into another URL ( Example, mydomain.com/index.php?affid=318 which would redirect into mydomain.com/index.php ), I simply let them link to whatever page on my site they wanted. I had thousands of products, which meant thousands of pages. My affiliates could link to any product page they wanted with nothing else needed for me to track their sales. If they wanted to link to me and make a sale for a certain product, they didn't need to know a special URL with their affiliate ID and the product page ID, they just linked to me like any site would normally link to me. So if a product on my site had a URL of mydomain.com/med/emg/defib.php, all the affiliate needed to do was just link to mydomain.com/med/emg/defib.php and get a sale. Ugh? See, when you bend ideas to your will and imagination.. you no longer have to play by everyone else's rules and standards. Once an affiliate signed up to the program I developed, all they needed to do was submit the sites they would be promoting us on. This is similar to what eBay does now days for many of their affiliates where they want to know the sites you promote their product on. If you registered your site/domain with me as an affiliate, all I needed to do is then track the referring domain via PHP when a customer visited my site. If that referrer matched what I had in my affiliate logs, then I know to credit any potential sale from this visitor to you. All I needed to do then is drop a cookie on them and let them browse my site and credit you with the sale. Oh I get it. - No, actually you don't So why did I go through the trouble of reinventing the wheel for affiliate tracking? Because I just got an upside in the whole deal. Now, I don't just get sales... I get SEO value from you linking to possibly hundred of pages on my site in the most natural and non-spammy ways that are free of any possible 301/302 redirect penalties and future proofing most of my SEO linking strategy. You are linking directly to my site and nothing looks odd about it within the link itself. I killed 2 birds with 1 stone. See, most 3rd parties are going to make you use their link from their domain to track your affiliates sales, which means now that link is going from the affiliate's sites, to the 3rd party's domain, to finally your site. Several redirects and another domain having to pass any juice ( if they had even set it up that way ) and also not being very future proof SEO friendly. In my design, every affiliate was an SEO partner and I helped create a mountain of links that were deep within my site and built up over time by other people. The beauty in this was that I paid almost nothing to most of them for this work. In the affiliate world, only 10% of the affiliates will produce 90% of the income. So for every 100 people I had promoting my goods, only 10 of them actually brought in sales that amounted to a monthly payout. The other 90 affiliates tried. They sent in maybe 1 sale or 2, but these would happen spread out over months at a time. However, all 90 of them still had to link to me from their sites to even register those sales. Many of them never sent in a sale, but I still had my site linked on their sites. This is how you create an upside for yourself and how you generate sales AND SEO value at the same time. This is why you should always trust your gut and do whatever it is you wanna do. See, I don't build affiliate programs to earn money ( which is always nice, I'll take it ), I build them to get free links and to boost my site to the top of Google and then take 100% of those organic sales I now get from the ranking. Most people build affiliate programs to end up relying on 10% of their affiliates that they have to share 50% of the profits with. And those affiliate can leave your program anytime they want and leave you with nothing afterward. Always look for an upside and take it every chance you get. Media Buys Man, anyone can do a media buy. But so many of you pass this up thinking you have to lay out tons of money in order to do one. Sometimes you want to advertise on a site but they don't have a self-serve ad system in place. This is where a media buy would come into play and the way you setup the media buy is with an Insertion Order ( also called an I/O ). Back in the day, Plenty Of Fish didn't have an ad system where you could sign up and start buying clicks. You had to do a media buy with them. Some of the largest exchanges didn't have self-serve ad platforms and you had to do a media buy with them as well. Companies like Synacor, Turn, Zedo, Burst Media, and many many others. You would have missed out on a ton of traffic that Google and Facebook couldn't even reach and sometimes still don't reach today. Wanna promote an offer to Jewish people and you want to hit the sites they frequent the most? You're gonna have to do a media buy with a company that owns a large portfolio of Jewish-themed sites. OK, so tell me about this Insertion Order deal. In a nutshell, it's just a contract outlining who does what and when. It will spell out when payment is due, how it is due, what the network offers you and under what conditions all the terms are bound to. It's actually pretty simple once you do a few on your own. Probably the most important things you want in your I/O are the following:
There are lots of other things too, like day-parting, demographic targeting, if you are doing RON ( run of network ) or selected pages/sites in their network, frequency capping, and much more. However, this is a crash course and trying to touch on everything is a bit out of scope for this post. The important thing to remember is that with any contract, pretty much everything is negotiable. But don't let the little things like day-parting keep you from not doing a media buy just because I didn't cover it here. If you follow the 3 points above and get a 24 hour out clause, an even spend clause, and make sure your ads are above the fold, you minimize a lot of the failure and hesitation people have with media buys without having to have a million dollar budget to test the waters. Give me an example. Ok. A lot of networks don't want to deal with small buyers. If you only have $6k to test the waters with, the ad networks that do media buys might turn you down. I am not saying all of them will, but here is how you can use an I/O to your advantage. Simply tell them you want to do a $1MM dollar I/O over 365 days. If you put into place an Even Spend and 24 Hour Out clause, you can test the network for 1 day and only spend $2800. You give them notice and they have 24 hours to cancel on their end. At worse, it takes them all day to do it and your only out a total of $5600. If you also had in place to be above the fold, then you just got a lot of great data to decide what you are going to do next on this media buy ( keep going with a 2nd one, or find another network ). That's a very simple overview. Some networks will run a credit check/check your Dun & Bradstreet number to ensure you have the funds and reputation for paying you say you do, but a lot of them don't. However, if you actually try to pull off a 7 figure media buy.. they will more than likely check if you can actually pay. So what's the least amount of money I can spend? Well, that depends on who you are working with. If you are working with a small site without much of a presence, it could be as little as $500 maybe. Larger exchanges and sites really aren't going to want to deal with you if you only have $500 and if you offer up a $1MM I/O spread out over 5 years, they will probably just ignore you. There is no right answer to this question because you could do a media buy with anyone over anything. At that level, it is just all dependent on the deal you strike and testing out the waters. Aside: Deal making is an art you really need to master. If you are new to deal marketing, I suggest you read this book ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345479173/?tag...nparser-20 ) this is not an affiliate link. After you read it, find a few others that are more recent in Amazon and learn how to make REAL deals, not just accept street deals from people. Some places do have minimums in place and won't budge on their I/O's. At the end of the day it is going to come down to pulling up your big boi britches and testing out the waters to see who will take what. There is no point in discussing this point unless you are out there asking questions and trying to strike deals, then pivoting on the ones that didn't work out and trying again. Some things you need to know. There are a lot of terms that get thrown around in dealing with I/O's. Below are some of the more common ones:
Wrapping Up Not much to say here. I hope you got through all of the posts and got some good overviews and golden nuggets from them. Most of the gems I shared aren't talked about in those "Guru" ebooks, $10k coaching events, private paid forums, or even in those exclusive Skype groups. How do I know? I've probably paid for every Udemy course, ebook, private forum, training event, and begged my way into those same Skype groups only to be disappointed by the BS that goes on within them. The fact is, the real gems are only known by the "doer's" of the world. The doer's are the ones that come up with, find, and exploit all these methods. It's not the "readers" of the world or the "teachers" of the world. Only the "doer's" You can't find a sunken ship full of gold coins off the coast of Spain if you aren't the one out there looking for it, diving for it, and exploring the coastline for it DAILY. The doers of the world hold all the secrets. Those that are doer's, are hardly ever teachers. The very small select that do end up teaching, never give away their true secrets for $197 or even $10k because the real golden gems can make multiple millions of dollars and just why would you share that with potential competitors? Most of the things being pushed for $97 monthly, $197 one time, or at a $10k coaching event are hardly ever put together by the real "doer's". Sure those "gurus" are doers in the fact they're "doing" an event, but most of them aren't the grunt work "doer's" and most of them aren't giving you the gold nuggets either that could pit you against them in a few months time. Sadly, a lot of them are just pushing out content they got somewhere else themselves, like a book or seminar they attended and repackaged to now sell to you. The best thing you can do to learn more about paid advertising is to participate daily in losing money and finding out why you lost that money in the first place. The next day, learn from your mistakes and correct course. |
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