How to Use PPC in Affiliate Marketing

PPC is an effective tactic in maximizing your profits in affiliate marketing for its flexibility in budget control, market control and channel control. Google Adwords is the top PPC platform for its high accuracy and details. But no campaigns could be accurate and effective without constant monitoring and modifying. And beforehand, a PPC strategy is required.

Step 1: Knowing your market

Not everything sells well over the Internet. Any product or services that require a high level of trust, or high levels of “touch” - a car, for example - may be difficult to sell online. What types of products or services sell well over mail order? What products or services are telemarketable? Chances are these products and services will sell well over the Internet, too.

Besides, you need to know the specific market (don’t tell me you want to sell to all over the world), understanding if your products or services are sellable there or not.

Step 2: Sketch Out your PPC Campaigns

• Keyword Research

With it being the smallest unit in your PPC campaigns, you need to attach great importance to keyword research and selection. Employ some keyword researching tools, like Google AdWords Keyword Planner, to expand your base and gain ad group ideas. With Google Trends, you could easily find out what keywords are hit among your market. Put together lists of keywords your potential audience is likely to use to find your products or services and place them in small, tightly focused ad-groups.

Please pay close attention to the type of query, namely, exact match, phrase match, broad match. Each has its own purpose, with broad match being the widest way of chance for receiving clicks and conversions, and exact match the most accurate way of getting conversions from the most sincere customers, but you may be missing great opportunities.

FYI, Negative Keyword could stop search engines from showing your ads on certain search terms that are irrelevant to your products or services, which are always used alongside with keywords.
 

• Commit to your Ad Creatives

Ad Creatives are tiny little themes of your ad groups. There are text ad, image ad, video ad, etc. Mind you! There are only 25 to 40+ characters in text ad depending on various PPC platforms. Character limits is one great feature of it. With that said, you need to stand out your USPs (Unite Selling Point) in your creatives. Always include more than one creative per ad group and test out the better one.

There are some other tips in writing text ads:
 

    -Write an appealing headline (use an active verb, where possible).

    -Include keywords in your text.

    -Try to use a URL that contains the keyword.

   -The landing page must closely match what you want to sell and use similar words or phrases (your landing page selection, design, wording count).

    -Capital letters stand out more. Use them where permitted.

• Build your Ad Groups and Ad Campaigns

Sort keywords of same product or service and their correspondent ad creative together, this is your ad group. With various ad groups of the same market or same series together, you actually build your ad campaign. With various campaigns together, you are creating a powerful account and can get more exposure (and competition maybe). Budget permitted, you could do affiliate marketing with PPC 24/7 and wait for fruitful conversions!

Step 3: A/B Test Your Campaigns

No platforms are perfect, even Google AdWords; no campaigns are permanently effective, even if it’s built by the most seasoned marketer. Optimization is time-and-energy-consuming work. Split test or A/B test is a way to test out if your optimization is workable or not; it is a must for every marketer. Always do split tests or A/B tests and develop for the better ones, and do it constantly - you will find your campaign more effective and profitable.

Closing Remarks

PPC is perfect for every affiliate marketer. If you are new to it, learn it; if you are exploring it, explore more! There are no limits in PPC. The secret of it lies in how well you harness it and how well you understand the market.

10 Paid Traffic Sources to Recommend in 2015

Paid traffic is the quickest way to send traffic. When it comes to targeting management, it’s so effective and very easy to optimize. If you’re new to this part, you may start with a small budget to start with platforms like 7search to learn how media buy works. Anyway, when QpidAffiliate’s offers focuses on the international dating niche, you should skip the chance to try every platform but start with some of those that have been proven to work.

To help you on this, I’d like to list 10 paid traffic sources that our affiliates have been working with. Even though we’re not going to endorse them and encourage you to spoil your budgets with them, at least they’re worth your attention and consideration.

1.    PlentyOfFish Ads
2.    Facebook Ads
3.    Google AdWords

4.    Bing Ads

5.    TrafficVance

6.    LeadImpact

7.    50onRed

8.    BuySellAds

9.    DirectCPV 

10.    InfoLinks

So set up your media buy plan and make your traffic today!

P.S. Qpid Affiliate does not need adult traffic. Remember to discard these sources though they’re excellent ad networks: JuicyAds/ExoClick/AdultModa/TrafficJunkcy/AdXpansion...

Where Media-Buyers Can Get Traffic Source for Dating

With competition of Internet products and services becoming increasingly intense, product and service providers launch affiliate marketing campaigns because of their cost performance. They recruit qualified affiliates to drive traffic, among which media-buyers could be the main force. Media-buyers have to take their sole discretion to buy traffic and take all risks to balance cost and gain. As a niche market, media buying for dating offers might be different from the mass market. If you just go into some high volume media buying without focus, it is less likely to increase the conversion rate. Herein, we would like to give some tips about what aspects media-buyers could take into consideration when driving traffic for dating offers.

1.Social Network. Social networks are the easiest and best way to drive traffic, more likely to drive the young or middle-aged users. Social networks, especially the worldwide ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, Flirchi, etc, possess a large number of users, which mean abundant viewers’ impressions and huge potential leads. In normal case, buying traffic on famous social networks work better if media-buyers’ budgets allow.

2.Dating directory and review. They collect and give various dating related website lists for visitors. On the one hand, the intended visitors are supposed to be interested targets. Traffic on the Dating Directory could be considered relatively high quality. On the other hand, competition between dating websites on the dating directory is fierce. Media-buyers should pay more attention to provide more attractive promoting materials (banners/text) in order to stand out. Visit some of them to have a brief look: nichedatingdirectory.com, wowaylove.com, datingcastle.com, datesites.com etc.

3.Dating Tips Website or Blogs. Dating tips websites or blogs normally run as emotional communication between writers and readers. Readers tend to act as fans of the website, thus more easily accept the suggested dating website links by the editors. You could just keep your eyes on those who have more followers or fans. It could be better if you could cooperate with them to recommend your ads. In this way their followers would become more interested in your ads without feeling being pushed to do this.

4.Other dating websites. Different dating sites have different focuses on their regions, supply different services, show and attract different members and users. Their website contents may supplement each other. Based on this, media-buyers could cooperate with these dating websites even when they are also operating dating offers. Take Qpid Affiliate’s sites as an example, which focus on international dating and building bridges for cross-nation relationship. So those dating websites focusing on regional dating could be one of the media-buyers’ choices. Just spend some time to search and sort them out. Plentyoffish, as a popular dating website, is also mostly mentioned and referred.

5.Video ads. Various videos are about live show dating. This is also a channel which media-buyers can place ads and get the banner noticed.

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.