Practical Media Buying Tips

Generally, a media buy is whenever you buy advertising on a site, but PPC (Adwords, Bing) is often not considered a media buy. Direct site media buying is one of the highest ROI advertising methods online. It is simply buying banner ads and text links on high-traffic websites and forums and sending them to affiliate offers. There are a lot of misconceptions about display advertising, mostly that users have “banner blindness” and ignore ads on websites. Many advertisers are finding huge success with the massive amounts of inventory and little to no competition which means cheap traffic. However, as with any large scale media buy, profits don’t always come without conducting some split tests. If you go into a high volume media buy with just one or two landing pages and creatives, it’s likely you’re going to lose money.

Here are some key essentials that will allow you to optimize and scale your media buy:

1) Pay attention to your budget. This is a very important step when it comes to media buying. Having a budget will let you determine what type of methods are compatible with what you’re trying to achieve. There are ads that run hourly, monthly, by the clicks or as frequent as your budget allows. Start off with an initial small budget and do test runs on different campaigns. When you can see which ads work best and on what websites, then go ahead and invest more to keep them running.

2)  Don't place buys on default pages. People often do not change the default page on their browser. They launch a Web browser and then, as the page starts loading, they jump elsewhere. Depending on the way sites measure an ad served, you may actually be 'charged' for ads that a user never sees. Sites often ask for a premium on default home pages, a spot where I loathe buying even at a discount.

3) Identify your target market. If you have a specific product or service that you’re trying to promote, you have to make sure you’re reaching the right audience, otherwise all your marketing efforts will be wasted on low quality traffic and tire kickers that will only result in wasted time and money. Look at the demographics of the site you want to advertise on; take into consideration age, sex, status, and location of the visitors. This will help you to tailor your ads to the interests of potential leads and customers. Alexa is a good tool for find the demographics of a website.

4) If you’re promoting a CPA offer with a media buy you need to make sure you have multiple alternatives. Not only should you split test them to see which converts best, you should also have one ready if you’re winning offer goes down. If you own the entire back-end to your offer, you want to split test several different pricing structures. If you have any customer retention data, consider that when setting your price points.

5) Creatives – For performance marketers, click through rate is the saving grace. This is what bumps down the competition and gets the cheap traffic for solid ROIs. Go in with at least 10-20 different creatives and see what yields the highest. Split test different borders, different colors, new calls to action, etc. There is ALWAYS room for CTR improvement.

Generally speaking, media buying (if bought on a flat-rate) can be extremely profitable. The advantages of this method are that you have direct relationships with several high-traffic website owners. You can start on a relatively small budget, and you’ve effectively cut out the middle man (the ad networks). Once you have a few placements running, it can be a very stable source of traffic since you’re not competing with other affiliates and have diversified your risk.

Basic Tips for Contextual Advertising

Contexual targeting is to match automatic placements to websites by keywords. Compared to direct audience targeting, it is an alternative way to be a cheaper but wider traffic finder for Internet marketers.

Its algorithm is by scanning the content of the page with a javascript code preset within the visited webpage. The ad network system chooses the best matching ad to display.

The primary rule of this game is keywords. Keywords help you target specific content that interests specific audiences. Let me explain its advantage over direct audience targeting of self-served social networks.

Imagine there’s a new visitor approaching the world of advertising to the niche of this type. He is curious but refrains to say anything about himself. This is just the customer with most potential that every merchant tries to catch his attention. Although 90% of them do not reveal themselves to the social network, the content they browse sells them out.

In this way, you’re able to reach groups of new visitors that other targeting algorithms fail time and time again.

But there’s another problem - it’s less efficient, which we have to admit. There comes how to carry out optimization - negative keywords.

A negative keyword is to filter those webpages that contain keywords you bid but not the one you want. For example, you are to target men who are interested in finding a girlfriend from Thailand. Normally you bid “Thai” ”girl” “single”, but it may list out webpages you do not want to be included - such as if the merchant disallows adult traffic, you will have to find if any of such keywords triggering webpages that cost your budget. And add category the keywords as negative.

Like run network management, it’s similar to managing the websites that ads deliver to.

Like display ad management, the ad converts better if its style fits the destination website.

So with these above, it should be clear to you what is contextual advertising. Find a contextual ad network today to convert your creative mind to money!

How to Promote Dating Offers Without Facebook

It’s been quite a while since Facebook phased out affiliate marketers promoting dating ads.

If you try to submit a dating ad on Facebook, you might get a rejection saying:
“Reason(s): It looks like you submitted an ad for a dating service through one of our self-service advertising tools.
Unfortunately, ads for dating sites and apps are only allowed from approved advertisers at this time.
If you’ve read the guidelines in the Help Center and think your ad follows the rules and should have been approved, please let us know.

If you’d like to advertise your dating service on Facebook, please follow this link to learn more.

If you would like to become an approved advertiser, an application form may be available from February 15, 2014. If you have any questions about this policy or feel that your ad is compliant and was incorrectly disapproved, please contact us.”
Not only will dating ads be rejected, but anyone caught running them will have their accounts banned.
Why would Facebook do this?
The ads were becoming too risque (cleavage, half naked pictures) and were damaging user experience a lot. According to my source, dating ads were being reported at many times the rate of any other niche. Not only were the ads bad, but some were actually sending users to casual dating offers (sex sites).

What Facebook allows Dating Advertisers to use

What affiliates were actually using

Facebook’s all about a high click-through rate and it was pretty much a race to see who could get the most scandalous ads through.
Analysis With every situation, there are winners and losers. Here’s a quick analysis:

The Winners:

• Mainstream Dating Advertisers – Less competition to deal with. They will also have better branding now since dirty images aren’t allowed.
• Facebook – This will improve the overall experience for users.
• PlentyofFish – If you want to promote mainstream dating now, PlentyofFish is one of the few viable choices left. I’m sure there will be a surge of affiliates signing up soon.
• White-listed affiliates – Facebook is still allowing certain affiliates to promote on the platform. These people will have the advantage of an even higher barriers to entry for their competitors.
• Facebook affiliates in general – There’s plenty of other niches to make money on such as gaming. Click costs will go down since you don’t have to compete against boob ads.

The Losers:

• Affiliate Networks – Most networks have dating as a part of their portfolio and revenues will definitely go down. However I don’t think it’ll be that drastic since most networks are diverse with adult and other niches.
• Newbie Affiliates – Many guys had their first profitable campaign through Facebook Dating. This change takes away one of the tried and true ways for a newbie to break into the game.
• Adult Advertisers – Facebook traffic’s always been of higher quality than porntube traffic since affiliates could filter out the audience by age.
• Facebook Dating Affiliates – The best route is to try and get another vertical working, or see if you can get whitelisted by an advertiser.

Then, how to do?
Overall we don’t see this affecting the industry too much.
Facebook’s been a pain in the end of 2013 as far as banning accounts and retro-disapproving ads, and they’re going to keep making things worse for affiliates. If Zuckerberg had his way then Facebook would have no affiliates, and the only advertisers would be big brands / local mom and pop shops.
Can you really blame affiliates? The nature of being an affiliate is to push the edge. Every CTR and conversion increase means more money in our pockets. When we’re all competing against each other, then some of us are going to cross the line.Affiliate marketing is survival of the fittest at its best – the smart ones will find a way to adapt.

How to avoid readers’ unsubscribing in email marketing

Are you faced with continuous unsubscribing on the way in your email marketing? Are you still thinking hard of the reasons? Then go on with your reading, you will find that the answers are actually no secret at all.

According a survey done by HubSpot, here are the major reasons why people unsubscribe from emails:

54% said emails were sent too frequently
49% found the content to be repetitive or boring over time
47% received too many emails and decided to downsize
25% found the content irrelevant
24% preferred to search for information on their own
22% signed up for a one-time offer

13% say their circumstances have changed (moved, married, changed jobs, etc.)
8% switched to another company that provided better information
6% found an alternative way to obtain the same information (via blogs, Facebook, etc.)

The survey may not be 100% accurate to all industries and the scale of the survey might have been limited, but we still can summarize from these results some dos and don’ts.

1. Control your frequency of sending emails

Some people may be interested in your content, but they may well lose interest in reading your emails when you send them too many and too frequently. The best practice is to send readers only one or two emails a month.

2. Good timing is important

What is the best time of a day to send emails? It turned out to be lunch time (noon or 1pm). This is easy to understand. People tend to relax at lunch time and they also have time to read your emails while having or waiting for their lunch. Mondays are agreed to be the worst day among a week to send mass mails. Most studies reveal that Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best choices of the week.

3. Make sure that your email is well designed

Wise email marketers keep their emails short and concise. In order to catch subscribers’ attention, you may use GIFs, videos, etc. A very important part of the design is to make your call-to-action button very visible and attractive, so as to lure subscribers to the site(s) you are promoting.

4. Send emails only to subscribers who may well be interested

The content and subject of an email is also important to readers. It is necessary and important to segment the list you have in hand. If available, analyze as much data of the subscriber as you can. In a word, you need to make sure the right message is sent to the right person.

5. Avoid your emails ending up in the spam folder

To make sure your emails go into readers’ inboxes, you need to avoid spam trigger words and phrases. Here are the top 100 spam trigger words and phrases: http://www.leadformix.com/blog/2013/09/top-100-spam-trigger-words-and-phrases-to-avoid/. A wise step is to do a test before sending out mass emails.

6 Mistakes New Affiliates Should Avoid

1. Overemphasizing on selling

Affiliate is supposed to be selling, isn’t it? The answer is “yes” but “no”. When many new affiliates first started, their impulse is to fill their site pages with “Get it Here” banners or alike, wishing visitors click on it and lead to a commission. But the real problem is, they don’t know what their visitors’ real needs.

People want to hear from other people when making a decision to buy a product or not — that’s why the reviews on Amazon products are so powerful. Take QpidAffiliate for an example, if your wording is more like reviews of a male member who enjoys our superior services than a salesperson enthusiastically shouting “Join Now”, you will be more rewarding. So, emphasize on biased reviews rather than sheer and pointless selling of particular products, you are making more sales indeed.

2. Too Many

If you join any and every affiliate program you came across, you are actually doing nothing.  You will be too busy to manage a thousand offers, so drop some, or they will be unmanageable. Choose your affiliate programs wisely and don’t overload yourself. Just focus on the right ones.

3. Not Testing

No matter how many offers you have, the first thing is to test them accordingly and respectively. This is kind of boring but it is worth to do so. If you do not test the offers, you will never know whether they are marketable or not.

4. Not Tracking

Some new affiliates, for some technical or other reasons, do not value tracking too much. But the fact is, you make a sale, you not only need to know how much you have earned, you also need to know WHERE the sale came from, and probably what caused the buying decision. Yielding commission is cool, but knowing where and how you made that commission is what makes you better grow and scale that particular campaign. Conclusion: Tracking is really, really something!

Sure, there are some third party tracking platforms out there for you to choose. In QpidAffiliate, we allow installation of third party tracking code, so you can better monitor and eventually evaluate your traffic.

5.Not comparing

If you are working blindly over every offer, you are probably ending up being fruitless. Since you have tracking codes installed in various offers across various advertisers, the next thing you have to do is to make a comparison. You will know what to do next.

6. Being Distracted Too Often

It is common that when you are working on one thing when something fancy comes through and attracts you immediately. Then you go and chase that new thing and leave the old one rotted.

Put your focus on few things rather than chasing several things at a time. Just ignore what distracts you from your campaign at hand. One thing done is worth than a hundred thing undone.


Affiliate marketing is a huge, developing yet flourishing business that requires self-motivation, determination and focus. The market is huge, but with limited time and energy, we have to put most of our concentration on the elite ones. Avoid the mistakes that lead to fertile work, you will be better able to grow your business.

Should You Use the Postback URL or Conversion Pixel?

Affiliate conversion tracking is perhaps the most important aspect of being a successful affiliate marketer. However, the problem is, 95% of affiliates don't do it. Here's the truth: If you cannot identify where your sales are coming from, you will never be able to focus your time and money on making even more commissions. If you do not realize the importance of tracking, you definitely have not given enough attention to the affiliate marketing.
There are various tracking software in the market now, while how to track these leads? Should you use the postback URL or conversion pixel?


What is Postback URL?
Server postbacks allow for server-to-server communication. Once set up, this allows the network’s server to communicate with your tracking server by way of a postback url. The postback url acts as a vessel in which the advertiser can send to the converted subID back to your server resulting in a tracked conversion. However, your postback url (when placed into a network’s offer) needs to be properly appended with a dynamic token assigned by the network so that the network’s server knows what value to send back after a conversion. The purpose of a token is to dynamically insert the conversion subID from the network’s log into the url you provided back to your server. Without this token, the network doesn’t know where to place the conversion subID and cannot properly communicate with your server.

What is Conversion Pixel?
The conversion pixel is almost the same as postback URL, while they are a little different during work. Both pixels and Postback will notify your server when a conversion happens. However, the only difference is that pixel is usually in the form of iframe or image pixel. It means when the page loads your iframe or image, which usually places on conversion page, then a conversion is tracked.


How Tracking Helps You Make More Money?
· At the most basic level, tracking helps you find out your return on investment and where money is best spent.
· It helps you discover what keywords, ad groups and campaigns are most profitable.
· It allows you to test new ads and conversion pages more effectively and more quickly.
· It lets you find out how much each visitor is costing you.
· It helps you discover any leaks in your landing page or website.

How to Choose?
If you use the Global Postback URL, you can set up for all the offers on the network you have chosen by copying and pasting once only. So if you are running a lot of offers, you can choose the Postback URL. Generally speaking, the software of Postback URL is more expensive than the Pixel Tracking software. Therefore, if you are a fresh hand with limited budget and want to make more budget on tracking the traffic sources in various ways to check the reports in detail, we suggest that you can choose pixel tracking.
However, we always recommend using the postback URL option as opposed to the img or script pixel option as it's safer and far more accurate.

Mobile Affiliate Marketing: Challenges & Opportunities

Why Mobile

Mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our daily lives. More people than ever are living their lives on multiple screens. More actions will be done through multiple screens. Smartphone penetration has risen to 56% of the population in US in 2013 and these smartphone owners are becoming increasingly reliant on their devices. 67% access the Internet every day on their smartphone and most never leave home without it. It is expected that mobile local search volume will surpass desktop local search for the first time in 2015. The implication is clear: Marketers that make mobile a central part of their strategy will benefit from the opportunity to engage constantly with their consumers. 
 

Why Mobile Marketing
Mobile marketing is becoming increasingly significant as it can reach mobile users 24/7 (if you want) with various ad formats, including search, banner, rich media and location-based message. The escalating trend provides an excellent opportunity for you to market yourself and maximize your profitable online sales and number of leads.

New Challenges & Opportunities

The adoption of mobile is fast in the affiliate marketing sector. It opens a new door to affiliates and affiliate networks, and eCommerce businesses looking to invest in affiliate marketing. There are plenty of mobile offers of various categories.Still, there are plenty of companies developing technology to help push this forward, wanting a share in the mobile market.

The real challenge for advertisers is making sure the right message is given to the right user. How they are consuming media is a key factor, and this is where affiliate networks come into play. With their own targeting technology and large, relatively precise audience bases, they might walk easier in this mobile path. Mobile has also opened up opportunities for completely new affiliates that didn’t exist a few years ago, though. They survive the ever-competing market by buying mobile advertising space mostly in apps and mobile games as apps overwhelmed mobile sites.

The potential of mobile is right in front of us. In 2013, the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) reported that 57% of top 100 advertisers are now mobile-optimized, and the figure is rapidly rising. Mind you! Some affiliates build apps specifically for merchants. If a merchant doesn’t already have an app where users can shop, these affiliates will build one based on the affiliate product feed. There’s always ways to go.

Conclusions

The mobile market is very competitive, and it is only going to get more so. Thought there’s still existing problem in mobile affiliate markets like mobile tracking (which is technologically more difficult than PC does), as mobile market grows, we have to work hard to remain competitive. The technologies and methodologies will undoubtedly continue to advance and improve day by day. Mobile market’s growth is roaring, and we will surely see abundant evidence of that in the near future.

6 Tips to Build an Opt-in Email List for Email Marketing

Building a quality email list is perhaps the most important thing you need to do as an email marketer. This list should be permission-based and only contain subscribers who want to hear from you out of their willingness. But how to build one? Here are some tips to follow when building an opt-in email list:

1. Place an Opt-in Form to your Blog/Website

For instance, you may put an opt-in form to the sidebar of your blog/website. You may also create an opt-in slider on your homepage or even develop an opt-in page on your main menu.

2. Use Opt-in Form Pop-ups 

If properly adopted, pop-ups will attract readers attention. If they are interested, you will get the email addresses you want. 

3. Keep Your Opt-in Form Concise

Your opt-in form should only include essential information you need from readers. In fact, user-friendly forms only include email address, and name of users at most. 

4. Make Your Opt-in Form Attractive and Interactive

The headline should capture readers’ attention immediately and tell them exactly what they get by signing up for your emails. The body should include words that make readers to take action. Keep your opt-in form interactive is also one way to grow your list.

5. Offer Appropriate Incentives

Make subscribers believe that they may have something back, after they give you their email addresses. This can be free software, free E-book, product discount, coupon, etc. However, you need to avoid too-good-too-be-true incentives, for this will easily leaves a bad impression on readers. 

6. Make Sure Readers Know Your Privacy Policy

If you want to let readers feel safe about information they submitted, you need to clearly inform them that you won’t reveal their information to a third party. To make the policy visible, you may put a line directly under the subscription.

Skills You Need In Affiliate Marketing

Most of you who are in affiliate marketing may know that it is not always easy to make huge amount of commissions from the beginning. Super affiliate marketers spent years building up their brand and relationships with their fellow visitors. Therefore, you should never think that you can get rich overnight and never trust anyone who tell you that you can make thousands of USD by doing nothing. Be realistic!

Payouts will not come into your pocket if you just sit here staring at the monitor, but here are some skills you need to improve your affiliate marketing performance.

1. Choose the right promotional materials

One of the key steps of promoting affiliate is to choose the right promotional materials. For QpidAffiliate, there are four types of materials for your selection: text links, banners, articles and email templates for email marketing. Every material has its own advantages and disadvantages. You can work with our affiliate manager or split-test which materials are the well-converted ones.

Keep constant commination with your affiliate manager, let him/her update you on any new materials, new promotions, special offers or something, the new ones are usually more attractive to the visitors.

2. Convince your visitors to click on your affiliate links

This seems to be the most challenging skill and even professional webmasters sometimes get stuck with CTR. But there’s one thing in common: Relativity. The more relative between your site and the affiliate product, the higher the CTR may yield. Plus, you can put the right promotional materials in a more relative page. For instance, the page about travel may be better than the one about children’s food in promoting QpidAffiliate. But it does not always apply. You will not know what it will turn out unless you try.

3. Choose the right positions to place links

When you have selected the right promotional materials, now it is time to think about where to place these materials to get most exposed to your visitors and generate high payouts. The above-the-fold theory seems always right but sometimes, you should try to put at place where your visitors can read and attracted by your contents and materials. Different combination of page contents, positions and kinds of materials sometimes make a distinctive difference.

4. Your own creativities and approaches that count

You can get your first payouts in a short time and it will be doubled or tripled or even much higher in the near future. Nothing is impossible. Learn from other experienced affiliate markets and get your own formula. There’s always a way to produce your own creativities and figure out your own approaches in affiliate marketing. Mind you! Do not always copy others’ experience. With that being said, I mean that you can copy someone’s experience as a beginner, but with your determination and exploration, your beaten track’s there.

Please do remember that, in QpidAffiliate, your own creativities are upon our approval before it comes into service.

You cannot build a house out of nowhere, some rules are meant to be followed, some skills are meant to be adjusted. In affiliate marketing, there are no set ways to be successful. If you wish to enjoy high payouts, try, in multiple ways, to use the right materials in the right positions to target the right audience to maximize your commissions.

Five Great Tips On Promoting Dating Offers and Get Your Pay Bumps

The gap between profitability and hopelessness has become so thin that you are royally shooting yourself in the balls if you are not fighting for every last conversion.

A common problem I see with affiliate sales funnels is a lack of understanding for the substantial of dating offers. Then how to start to become a profitable and sucessful affiliate in this industry, and not to get kicked off from a good dating offer, is there any tips?

Here are some you could try!

Tips 1: Start with niche dating.

If you are starting in dating vertical I suggest you to start with niche dating offers like single parent meet, foreign meet , senior meet. In QpidAffiliate, those offers are all foreign meet and targeted a higher age group, which cover two niches.

Tips 2: Try social media.

If you don't have your own sites. For traffic source I recommend you to start with some social media, like, facebook, pof, twitter, or other newly popular ones in your targeted regions, because of so deep targeting criteria. If you decide to start on a social media platform, don't forget to check their blogs to get some directions.

Tip 3: Get familiar with the dating sites you are promoting.

                  

In some case, you can create your own landing page to develop your own angle to get the user engaged, but don’t create a false promise. Sure, telling the user they’re 100x more likely to get a  beauty's response on charmingdate.com might get a better conversion rate, but they’ll probably never return if that doesn’t happen. As this website is a truly matchmaking international online dating one. Your goal should be to get conversions and create value for both the advertiser and the user. Once you figure that out you’ll have all your affiliate managers hitting you up for more volume. At this time, better conversion rate+better payout = profitable and that’s not a false promise.

Tip 4: Prepare your leads.

                         

You shall include detailed directions on the landing page of what to the customer needs to do to be a good customer. For example, go into their Email and Opt In or whatever additional instruction will ensure a higher quality customer to the advertiser. A short Video on the Landing Page or directions on what to do after they have already signed in lead to engagement beyond just the signup which ultimately leads to the advertiser having more of a chance and getting revenue from them. You should inform your customers how to be better customers.

Tip 5: The right demographic targeting.

Every affiliate should be vitally concerned about the adcopy and the demographic targeting; obviously younger demographics yield less because there is less money. So if your advertiser give you the offer targeted 30+, they have already tell you that what kind of demographics they wanted. But also adcopies that are non-relative or suggest the consumer will get something ‘free’ or even allude to it in anyway reduces quality drastically.

All in all, you should remeber: Publishers that effectively target the highest quality traffic for the advertiser are more likely to receive higher payouts and the ability to remain on the campaign for the longevity of the offer, be the one!