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

“I Definitely Need to Learn How to Do More Traffic Generating…”

@AuthorMissMae on Twitter said she needed to work on Traffic Generation. She mentioned she was trying some gimmicks that weren’t working for here. This was my response:

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My *Traffic Generation* Advice: I personally stay away from gimmicks and “swarms”.. haven’t tried what you are doing, but I don’t need to because what I do works already.. keeps me busy.

My advice is to stick to time tested methods.. These areas are what I spend most of my time on:

1) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which includes link building.. (develop optimized content, utilize platforms like blogs)

2) Pay Per Click (PPC), Placement… Adwords, MSN, Yahoo.

3) Social Media.. as you are. Which includes driving traffic direct to your content pages and offers… and building relationships that can in themselves, indirectly, drive traffic (JVs etc).

2 of those don’t have to cost you much money; just time..

Gimmicks either don’t work, drive terrible, untargeted traffic or are short lived; these other methods will sustain you long term and when implemented properly can generate a lot of targeted traffic long term.

Also.. I haven’t seen your sites, but work on how you are monetizing them and focusing your traffic to pages that are ready to receive and convert traffic. Improve your conversion processes and funnel; test, test, test!

I’ll leave you with this, you can have all the traffic in the world, but if it isn’t targeted and you don’t have a good process to convert that traffic or a good offer, then it’s worthless.

All traffic is not created equal.. the same traffic can react differently depending on the landing pages they land on.

HTH!

-Matt Levenhagen

P.S. We cover the PPC here in the Blast Membership (geared towards testing markets with affiliate programs). If you want more training in these other areas like SEO and social media, we cover those areas at Xtreme Profits!

P.S.S. If you have a question about PPC that you’d like to throw at me on Twitter, follow me! And ask! My account here: Matt Levenhagen on Twitter Note though, I won’t promise I’ll be able to answer every question; I am a busy guy. My thinking is a few a week max?.. or more depending on their complexity.