Pay per Click Advertising – Opening Profit Doors!

I’m a big believer in investing in my business to look for growth opportunities. This includes investing in market research and testing advertising channels or methods. I’ve been doing it for years.. I did it before I even had an online business or before I went full-time online in 2005.

In my previous offline businesses (which included insurance agencies, remodeling and painting businesses) in order to find customers or clients, I tested a wide range of advertising methods. These included ads in local papers (big and small), yellow pages, various lead systems offline and online, flyers and more!

When I found something that worked, I tested layout, size, copy.. words. Depending on the time of the year and season my copy would change to target different segments of the markets. Over time as my businesses developed I would focus my advertising to target segments for other reasons.

We are essentially doing the same things online. As Campaign Blasters (PPC Advertisers and Affiliate Marketers) we have our method of driving traffic. We find quality merchants, products and bring them to their markets using PPC.

Sometimes it’s a flop.. sometimes we have some limited success.. other times we find great SUCCESS. We get to the successes by taking action and testing, testing and testing. You can ‘think’ something will work. You can be ‘told’ something will work. But true learning comes from diving in, taking a chance and testing…

Those campaigns that do well we’ll attempt to expand that success. We spend more to get more out. We test our copy and target our markets better. We cut costs through things like negative keyword research, bid management and improving Quality Scores in various ways. We seek out more segments or adjust to focus on segments that can make us more money (through keyword research, analysis, tracking etc).

When we find a winning campaigns, our job has only begun. That’s Opened the profit door for us. We got our foot in there.. we open it further until we can slip into the profit room and scale our efforts.

I don’t put limits on what tools and devices one uses to expand their discovered winners. It can be just through PPC efforts or even expanding into the realm of SEO and beyond.

But the technique we use is to open the door using PPC.. investing in market research. Ultimately THAT is what we teach here in the Blast Membership. We teach you how to test markets, merchants and products using PPC. And then using that profit intelligence how to launch and expand further into those markets.

It’s a great thing to commit to building out websites or networks of sites in a niche market when you already are making money in that niche and have successful keywords to scale.

And as I said some flop.. the GREAT thing about being an affiliate marketer is that it costs us little to test a market. We didn’t invest in the development of the product, their website.. nada. We invested in a little advertising to see if we could make some money.

So we move on..

And we focus on the winners. We forget about the losers.. we were just testing; we don’t dwell on them.

If you are going to expend energy, expend it on winners or taking more action in new markets or with new merchants.. those things you have control over and care about. Forget about the rest.

As Affiliates (and especially Blasters) we have flexibility, can adapt and turn on a dime. Something doesn’t work.. we do our best to make it work and then just move. We’re off to testing or working on something else. We are diversified enough in that our risk is more spread out.

PPC is a powerful tool to hunt for profitable markets.. you aren’t investing thousands, sometimes 100s of thousands, in a franchise or some over-hyped opportunity. You are simply investing in the research, through advertising, that can help you wedge yourself into new markets. We make money first which tells us there is profit potential. And then, only then, commit more time, money and resources.

-Matt Levenhagen

Google Adwords: Suspensions & Warnings.. a Necessary Evil

I hate nothing more than to see advertisers get hurt. Having 100s of members with Adwords accounts, I’m in a unique position to see how it really affects the small, medium to large advertisers. Because we have all of them in the Blast Membership..

And I’ve seen this play out many times over the years. I’ve been running this membership since the end of 2005.

I’ve always teached my members to focus on Quality. It’s hard-wired into my training. Quality Merchants.. and building Quality Campaigns overall. But still, some fall into the trap of testing merchants or strategies that in the end hurt them.

Not always intentionally. Sometimes it’s just a novice or beginner mistake; but it happens to a ’small’ percentage. A majority of members are just fine after the changes I’ll talk about next here.. but a small percentage have been hurt and will need to shift their focus, improve their business and/or focus more on other PPC Engines (Yahoo, MSN).

This last week Google made another major sweeping move to clean up their SERPs. And it’s not been pretty for those that use specific strategies, have certain account histories or have a record of poor quality landing pages (either their own or the merchants they are promoting).

And it’s not just Affiliates; merchants have been hit this last week as well. If you hear or read that Google hates affiliates, that’s a myth. They don’t. They don’t even hate affiliates that send traffic direct to merchant (that’s not inherently a bad thing.. that’s just someone driving traffic for a merchant that’s ok with that).

They hate what a percentage of affiliates do to make money.. their landing pages, their complete lack of focus on Quality.. thin affiliates sites and strategies. Redundant, useless or unnecessary content prior to sending traffic to the merchant.

I’m just going to basically re-post something I posted in my private forum here in the Blast Membership.. you can imagine we have a lengthy thread on this. I couldn’t reword or say this better.

It’s always been this way though.. it’s not that they don’t give a **** about their ‘advertisers’. After doing Search Marketing for 6+ years, this is how I see their philosophy.

Improve the SERPs and they will keep coming and their users will keep growing. Make that the #1 priority. Advertisers will get hurt.. but many more will benefit. It’s the same way with Organic Search.

You don’t actually think if you focus on Free traffic you’ll be safe from algo changes do you?

They’ve had this policy for years and that’s why they are still a billion dollar company and crush their competitors!

See all the people saying it’s the end of Google or I’m never advertising with them ever again in the public forums (and here I guess..)? They say, there’s always yahoo and msn?

That’s a broken record.. I can’t count how many times in the past that’s been said by those in public forums because of major changes, shifts in the algo or quality score. Yet Google is stronger than ever and their user base is as devoted.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, but the reality is, the advertiser benefits from their focus on the user. That’s why we have so much traffic to tap into with Google. That’s why those of us that do stick in there and figure it out do so well.

It’s fact: The End User IS more important than us.. and we should appreciate that because that translates to the majority of us making more money.

If they just let advertisers do whatever they wanted, in the end their competition would exploit that.. or they would loose their base of users.

They are in the business of creating the best user experience and making search pure and the best it can be so they and we make more money.

People give Google a hard time for saying they ‘Do No Evil’; that it’s a total lie.. For some reason they think that has anything to do with changing their algo and QS to benefit the user which of course will hurt some advertisers along the way.

Understand the above is just my opinion based on my observations and having been a Search Marketer for 6+ years and an Adwords Advertiser since early 2004… and having coached a whole lot of people in the last 4 years.

In 6 months, a year.. Google will still be on top and there will be still advertisers making a lot of money; including affiliates..

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BUT.. I WILL LEAVE YOU WITH THIS.

You’ve heard the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”

There are 3 things you can do right now to secure your profits and business.

#1

As Blasters, we aren’t limited to just Google. Many of our members do heavy PPC advertising with Yahoo and some with MSN; I have campaigns in both engines as well. That’s smart.. taking your profitable campaigns and testing them there or focusing Blasting (launching campaigns) at those engines (including things you know Google doesn’t like).

#2

Also, personally, I consider myself a Search Marketer. Part of that is I did SEO and focused on free, organic traffic long before I did PPC; and still do. So it’s bred into me. But it’s not difficult to expand your piece of the pie by expanding profitable PPC campaigns into the realm of Organic Search.

#3

Use better strategies with Google and your other PPC Engines.. like list building or developing Authority Sites and Networks. Set yourself apart.. model the affiliates that are successful and improve on what they are doing. Bring Value and Quality to the table; give people a reason to love your site or to find it useful.

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So these are very concrete and smart things you can do to protect yourself.

The reason I stand today (along with many of my friends and members) while I’ve seen many, many advertisers lose everything and give up, is because I live this approach. I’m not dependent on one traffic source or even one niche.

Some things to think about.

-Matt Levenhagen

Matt’s Adwords and Affiliate Marketing Talk (Earn1KaDay Summit)

If you don’t know, I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the first (possibility annual) Earn1KaDay IM Summit. The Earn1KaDay Membership is run my Dennis Becker and some partners.  Dennis is a good friend..  I’ve known him for a bunch of years.. in fact, he was a member of my first membership before he even had his own membership!

And he managed to put together an awesome event!

There was an incredible lineup of speakers including:

• Willie Crawford
• Ron Davies
• Matt Levenhagen (me!)
• Jaime Mintun
• Brian McElroy
• Matt and John Rhodes
• Gene Pimentel
• Tom Brownsword
• Steve Goltiao
• Craig Beckta
• Michael Gunn
• Gregg Gillies
• Dennis Becker

You’ll probably recognize at least a few of those names.  Some you won’t, but every one of those speaking are highly successful in their area of focus and had a lot of great, great information to share.  This wasn’t your typical pitch fest.  There was a ton of great content!

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