Only Four Hours

Historically I have wasted countless Friday evenings looking for a software solution that fit’s me exactly.

There are some products or services that require you to invest countless hours installing, configuring, studying and testing – only to finally learn, weeks later that the solution has significant limitations.

I’ve had these experiences with; Accounting programs, time management solutions, photo-editors, PPC-tools, website builders and many more.

This week I’ve been hunting for a program that would track my website ranking for various keywords and discovered Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) by Caphyon.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

It took me over three years to be able to get myself a US personal bank account, a business account and perhaps the holy grail of the industry – a decent US merchant account that charges reasonable rates.

I’m English and not once needed to set foot in the USA to get any of this setup. In total I don’t think I spent more than $500.

For those of you needing a similar setup, keep reading.

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Popularity: 34% [?]

The Blitzkreig Method is a system of tools and techniques to increase the effectiveness of your landing pages.

I learnt these from the DirtyCPA training videos and they comprise of the following tools and ideas …

• Link Cloaking


Make sure you have a system whereby your affiliate link is not obvious to your visitor. You want to prevent them from seeing you’re likely to be making money from the link and to discourage other affiliate marketers from finding the affiliate offer you’re directing to.

• Geo-IP


Dynamic IP scripts will automatically insert the visitors location into your text. Use it to make your landing page look like your offer is perfectly suited to your users location.

• Exit Hover


If a visitor moves their mouse close to their browsers back button, set a banner to display a message, warning or last-ditch offer to discourage them from leaving.

• Exit Pop


If your visitor still wishes to leave, force an unblockable pop-up at them as your last attempt to hook them.

• Scarcity


Use a date-insertion script to suggest that the offer will end shortly. Do everything you can to encourage the visitor to act immediately before it’s too late.

• Coupons


This is pretty self-explanatory and you can use this with the scarcity principle. Speak to your affiliate manager to see if any coupons are available.

Popularity: 81% [?]

A “Johnson box” is literally just a border around the edge of a picture. Many people suggest that it improves click-through-rates with adverts that use images.

This is something you might consider doing with Facebook ads as, the higher CTR you can generate the lower your per-click costs will be.

Popularity: 38% [?]

I’ve been previewing a CPA marketing course called ‘DirtyCPA‘ today and here is, in a nutshell, their advice for advertising on Facebook.

1. View the ads board daily to get an idea of what ads are being displayed regularly
2. Use OfferVault to locate the same offer and join the affiliate program that offers it
3. Copy the ads images and ad copy – although the course suggests using ’similar’ ad copy and contacting your affiliate manager for similar images (however I doubt that’s what happens in reality).
4. Use Google Campaign Manager or Quantcast to locate the demographic information of the website’s visitors to use when constructing your Facebook Ad.

Actually this really is nothing but common-sense and theoretically it’s likely to work. What’s kind of shocked me though is that this really is so stupidly obvious I’m surprised I’ve not just set aside a day to do exactly this.

I could reel out a few ‘inspired’ ads each day and stand a pretty good chance of identifying at least a handful of profitable campaigns.

I think the main reason I’ve not done this before is because, deep down, I don’t like the idea of copying other peoples work. I certainly wouldn’t appreciate other people doing it to me and I kind of view this as cheating.

You’ll hear ‘gurus’ pay lip-service to creating your own ads, providing value to customers, keeping things ethical, working outside of the box etc. but I’m pretty sure that a lot of these twenty-something-year-old marketers who are doing well for themselves have trodden over customers and competitors along the way. Let’s face it, this isn’t a business you’ll go to heaven for.

I recently opened a new Facebook account specifically for my business. I’ll explain why in a different post but one benefit of doing this was that my Business Facebook account is set for the USA (rather than Thailand where I’m currently living). This lets me see all the adverts that are targeted to the US market.

Popularity: 28% [?]

If you try to add an image to your Facebook ad with Facebook and you find that it isn’t displaying, then my solution might help.

I’ve no idea why this works but thankfully it does.

If you are using Firefox then upgrade to the latest version, select the private browsing option, unselect it and then try again.

This seems to have fixed the problem for me and I’m now submitting a few hundred ads again.

Popularity: 26% [?]

I did such a poor job creating my own landing page today that I gave up and bought some.

It would be great if I was skilled in web design but I’m not and, for now I’d prefer to save time, buy a range of landing page templates and modify them than to bother trying something from scratch.

I picked up two template packs today from LPDesigner today which i’ll be using for the next few months.

Popularity: 24% [?]

I was going hell-for-leather to promote a high-paying offer yesterday.

I spent most of the day building a mini-site to do this.

Only after I finished did I decided to actually test how a visitor would complete their application form. Usually I’d only check that the site works and that perhaps the first page of the submissions worked correctly.

I tested the site three times.

The first time I was directed to an acai berry promotion which was NOT what I was planning to market.

The second time the first page submission worked fine but instead of taking me to page two of the offer I was taken to page 2 of an acai better promotion instead.

The third time, the offer worked fine.

I noticed that the website also changed slightly too. By the end of the day a ‘money back guarantee’ image was pasted onto the bottom of the site so obviously the webmaster was playing around.

I’d have been very upset had I began a PPC campaign on this site yesterday as, without going through these three checks I’d have had no idea why my traffic wasn’t converting.

I’m going to make sure every time I’m getting fewer conversions that expected I’ll go through the site myself and get as far as the order button.

Popularity: 30% [?]

There are a lot of PPC marketers who refuse to get involved with SEO, and there are as many SEO marketers who refuse to get involved with PPC.

Everybody has their reasons, some people believe that SEO work is boring and takes too long (I certainly agree with this), others believe that PPC costs mount up too fast and that SEO provides free traffic once it gets going.

Personally I know all arguments are valid but, despite dedicating most of my time to PPC right now, I need to do some SEO work too.

Here’s a few reasons why SEO should not be overlooked…

1. I want my Plug and Save business to be making $6,000 profit per month. I’m a long way from this figure right now and most of this is because I just don’t have enough visitors to my site. By focusing on SEO I hope to triple the number of targeted visitors to Plug and Save so that, even I ever run out of money to run PPC campaigns, I can at least live a comfortable life.
2. Some niches are banned on pay-per-click sources. These include most rebill offers, tobacco-related products, recreational drugs etc. These are also highly lucrative markets so it’s worth marketing these offers any way possible.
3. There really are some fantastic SEO programs out there that take a lot of the tedium out of SEO.
4. I’m able to compete in markets where many PPC marketers are being lax.
5. I like the occasional change of focus
6. I can do both. If i’m combinnig free traffic with paid traffic to my campaigns then I can make more money for less risk
7. I have more experience in SEO than PPC

Today I’m going to investigate SEO software to identify which ones will make my SEO work the least painful, and the most productive.

Popularity: 25% [?]

I was doing some research into a dating site before and took a look at their homepage.

As you can see, their site is currently experiencing some technical issues that are likely to discourage or prevent members signing up.

I discovered this problem early and there was no harm done, but what would have happened if I’d have launched a campaign and paid money to send people here?

Some of the affiliate networks I’m working with make it hard, if not impossible to view our own landing pages. Sometimes we need to use a VPN or proxy.

This error above is worrying because it’s not a site-critical problem. It may take hours for the site admin to even notice there’s a problem. I’ve therefore decided that the first step to take before un-pausing or beginning any campaign is to double-check the landing page.

I also plan on adding my site links to the fantastic free website monitoring service UptimeDog to be alerted if my links ever go down.

Popularity: 23% [?]